Premodern Non-Believers Part 1 Can Ancient People Reject Modern Thoughts? So far in this course, we've only been looking at phenomena that we today would possibly categorize as religion, and specifically as world religions. But what about people who we would categorize as non-religious? Well, first we have to ask, what do we mean by non-religious? We have a number of terms in use today in modern English that all roughly mean not religious, and they each function a little bit differently.
First, we have terms that survive from the ancient world that are still somehow in use today. We have atheism. From the Greek for godlessness, believing that there is no god or gods, that the divine does not exist in any sense of the term existing. Then we have skepticism, literally from the Greek for searching out, but used to mean thinking about something with doubt.
So in regards to religion, a skeptic would be someone who doubts the truth of a religion or religious claim. We also have non-belief, unbelief, or disbelief, which are usually applied to religion in the sense of a strong negation. While a skeptic presumably doubts a religious thought's truth, a non-believer or unbeliever claims that it is certainly not correct. And we also have a fair number of living English terms that come from the European Middle Ages and the modern period.
There's the more medieval, Infidelity. An infidel is someone who doesn't stand by a cause or belief. Someone lacking fidelity to something.
So in the case of religion, this would be someone who doesn't hold certain religious thought or practice a certain religious observance for some reason or another. We have secularism too. Now this one can be used in a number of ways in English today. It can be someone who adheres to a strong differentiation between religion and non-religion. So one that holds that religious activities and beliefs should not affect facets of life that we would consider not religious, the secular.
In this sense, even a person who is actively a member of a religion can be a secularist if they think that religion has no business enforcing itself on the larger public. So, A Christian who does not think that their personal religious commitments should have any bearing on non-Christians could be called a Christian secularist. But what we're more concerned with here in this discussion is secularism in the sense of not practicing a religion oneself. We saw this previously in the example of secular Judaism, where people who were ethnically Jewish didn't hold any beliefs or practices that one could consider Jewish.
Then we have humanism. Humanism literally just means a worldview, which gives human thought and experience pride of place over non-human thoughts and experiences. So looking at the world through human eyes, as opposed to, say, through God's point of view. Again, this can be applied to religious people.
who think that religion must be approached with the assumption that human experience must always be presupposed, even if we're talking about something that's not human, like the divine. The people who coined this term were actually medieval Italian Catholic Christians, who thought that it was impossible to see beyond the human. So these Christian humanists in the Middle Ages thought that we can't know God in God's self. We can only know what God is like to a human being. being, a particular person who has a particular historical situation.
That is, we can't really know God. We can only know what it is to have a human experience of God. But these days, humanism usually implies a human-centered vision of the world that we would consider not religious.
So for clarity, many today would qualify themselves with the term secular, so secular humanism. A slightly more nebulous category we have today is free thought. A free thinker, on the most literal level, is just anyone who claims that their thoughts are not confined by inherited belief systems. They think for themselves, and to hell with traditional ways of thinking. Built into this, of course, is the assumption that others do not think freely.
Again, free thinking is often used as a byword for non-religious thinking, although perhaps it can be used even more generally to include a rejection of any thought which is believed to be based on an authority claim, like a customary thought, or a received opinion. Free thought or free thinker can be a little bit tricky to apply, though, because few people would think of themselves as enslaved thinkers or conformists. So, like humanism, a religious person might well consider themselves a free thinker, just as much as a non-religious person would.
The phrases critical thinker, and hence critical thought, work the same way. We have similar issues with the word rationalism, which is also used as just another way of saying non-religious thought. Rationalism is the claim that the entire world works in a particular, fixed, regular way, and that the way the world works can be somehow understood by the human mind, the reason.
And because the world works in a regular way, The mind can predict how it's going to work. But like humanism or free thought, religious actors can and often do claim to be rational or practice rationalism. There are long traditions of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic rationalisms. And we could easily apply the term rationalism to certain tendencies in other religions as well.
While all these terms are fairly common today, and few people would question what they actually mean, It's a bit harder to apply such terms to people living outside of the modern period, and especially those beyond the Western world. All of these words, as moderns use them, all presuppose something, religion. To be not religious means you have to at least have a notion of religion in the first place.
To reject a category as false means that you at least know what the category is. As we now know full well, religion is a relatively recent development in the Western world, coming out of Protestant Christianity specifically, and the echoes of that history remain embedded within the term religion. So rational, free, critical or humanist thought means opposed to religious thought.
And notice how all of these words give priority to belief and thought. Not so much to community or ethics or practice. Well, this is coming out of the presupposition of religion as understood after the Protestant Reformation. So if someone like Martin Luther gave absolute priority to faith in God as religion, then an atheist gives absolute priority to the denial of such a thought. Still, the thought comes first.
Whether one defines herself as a Christian or as an atheist, She's still defining herself by what she thinks, and much less so by what she practices or by her community. And so we're left with a problem. While it's easy enough to find a non-religious person today, especially in the Western world, how can we find such people in the past? How can we find people who rejected religion when the very notion of religion didn't exist?
Well, strictly speaking, we can't. But what we can find in the past are people who thought that the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of their cultures were not real, or did not properly reflect reality. Fair warning, though.
We'll never encounter proper non-religious people in the distant past. Like looking for religion in the ancient world, which is just us today making a mental construction using our own categories. Finding ancient people.
who reject a thought that only we ourselves hold might be a fool's errand. It means we have to define people in ways that they would never define themselves. So with those warnings noted, let's zero in on two geographical regions that we visited before, and look for phenomena that could possibly be considered irreligious in some sense. Part 2. Non-belief in the ancient subcontinent. Two of the world's religions that we've spoken about previously came out of the Indian subcontinent, Hinduism and Buddhism.
Even though both of these labels come from modernity, and colonialism specifically, we can see traces of activity in people that we would call Hindus or Buddhists that we might also call irreligious, such as atheistic. humanistic or skeptical tendencies. But it isn't clear if there's a way to express such thoughts without forcing people into foreign categories and groups.
For example, both Hindus and Buddhists have a notion of Dharma, how the universe works, and therefore how we humans are supposed to work, our duty, or how we're supposed to think, our opinions. And likewise, both Hindus and Buddhists have notions of Adharma, living out of harmony with our duty or holding the wrong opinions. But this term Adharma is expressly pejorative.
No one would call their own actions or beliefs Adharmic and conclude that was a good thing. But we can definitely see glimmers of the modern notions of irreligion in ancient India. Religious development, in any form it takes, has to come out of some kind of doubt in one's practices or beliefs.
So, for instance, Siddhartha and the Buddhists who came after him broke with the caste system, and so that can suggest to us that the early Buddhists thought the caste system itself was at least problematic, if not entirely false. And applying new hermeneutics within one's own tradition can imply a kind of irreligion too. The Upanishadic sages read the Vedas in such a way that the original Vedic sages themselves never would have. So much that few Hindus today would even claim to be trying to practice Vedic religion. So this can be something like irreligion too, even if Hindus and Buddhists wouldn't normally explain these phenomena that way.
And we can also apply the modern notion of atheism here. Many forms of Hinduism and Buddhism reject the existence of gods in any material sense, or will claim that the gods are functionally irrelevant to human concerns. You can, for example, live a fully Buddhist life, trying to follow the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, meditating and maybe even joining the Sangha as a monk or a nun, and not necessarily give too much credence to any divine beings. Many Buddhists do believe in gods, or at least in Arhat's Bodhisattvas and Lamas who have godlike features, but many others do not.
But again, this still doesn't really graft well onto what we mean by atheism today. When we talk about atheism, we most directly understand that it's not only just not believing in any gods, but not believing in anything supernatural at all. But Buddhist practice, in the ancient world at least, strongly demands belief in samsara, reincarnation in some form, and nirvana, enlightenment.
And we probably wouldn't call these atheistic thoughts today. There are other atheistic trends that we can note too, but again, it's never quite atheism as we mean it either. In Hinduism, there are two schools of thought that are considered astika, that is, affirming the Vedas in some way, but which can also possibly be called atheistic.
The Samkhya school claims that there are only two substances that exist in the whole universe, Prakriti, matter, and Prusha, consciousness, and everything in the universe can be explained. by the interaction of different forms of matter and consciousness. Living beings, for example, including humans, are those beings where both of these substances overlap. We are the coincidence of matter and consciousness in a fixed way.
God or the gods aren't needed to explain us or anything else in the world. All possible phenomena can somehow be addressed by noting how different kinds of matter and consciousness meet, clash, blend, and combine. That is to say, karma, the actions of all possible beings, and the effects of all possible actions.
explains everything. An adherent of the Samkhya could still think that God or the gods exist within the field of karma, that the gods themselves are composed of matter and consciousness, and therefore puja and other Hindu rituals still make sense. But they would reject the notion that there is some divine being outside of or beyond karma who's pulling all the strings of the cosmos from some transcendent reality.
Another Hindu school that can also be considered astika, affirming the Vedas, but which could be labeled as humanistic and maybe atheistic in some sense, is the Mimamsa school, literally the critical school. The Mimamsa think that we can be critical of the reality of the gods, or whether such gods have any influence on human life. Indeed, we have to ask these kinds of questions. We have to ask what is real, because that is the only way we can know what is good for human thriving. Mimamsa is a humanism.
The center of every concern and question has to be the human, because that's what we are, and the only thing that we could possibly know for certain. If there are gods, but we can't know about them or be affected by them, well then the gods are irrelevant. But we're human.
And therefore, we can conclude for ourselves that humans are relevant. So the priority of all questions has to be, what does the following thing mean to a living, present human being, like I myself am? So a human could conclude that there are no gods in any sense.
Or they could conclude that they exist, but they're inconsequential to human affairs. So we don't really have to be concerned with the gods. Contentment, Priti, is the only goal worth having, because any other goal that does not create human contentment is not significant to us.
While that priority to human thriving can lead many of the followers of Mimamsa Hinduism to conclude that the gods are of no importance to us, whether they're real or not, it doesn't lead them to reject the practices and ethics of the Vedas either. In fact, Quite the contrary. Dharma, practiced as morality, ritual, and custom, the Vedic way of life, is something that assuredly creates human contentment, because it creates order, law, and purpose in society and in ourselves.
So even when the Mimamsa are atheistic, they're not at all irreligious. But there are ancient Indian traditions that both reject the Vedic canon, as Buddhism usually does, and absolutely rejects the authority of the devas, the gods. The most famous and long-lived of these is the religion that we call Jainism.
Appearing in the historical record around the same time as Buddhism, the teacher Mahavira also taught people to meditate as the principal means of obtaining knowledge and truth. as the Buddha did. His followers, the Jains, the Victorious Ones, thought the universe needed no creator, sustainer, or destroyer deity.
Things just worked as they worked without some outside force making them do anything. There's still karma and dharma. And although the gods exist, they aren't creators and they aren't sustainers of us.
They aren't essential to human concerns, and therefore, there's no need to worship them or ask for their help. Instead, like the Mimamsa school of Hinduism, the Jains turn their focus directly to the material world, because to them, that's what's most obviously real and significant. Most especially, this leads Jains to cultivate compassion for all living beings by rejecting violence in any form.
rejecting any claims to absolute truth, and rejecting attachment to the material world. The most noteworthy expression of this is the Jain aversion to harming any living being, other humans, through violence or theft, or animals. Jains are always vegetarians in some form, many even wearing face masks or walking with brooms in front of them to prevent breathing in or stepping on some insect or microorganism by accident. But Jains, like Buddhists in the Hindu schools of the Samkhya and the Mimamsa, are still considered religious by typical modern standards.
So, we're left with the question here of whether or not we can find irreligion in ancient India, or if we're just looking for a phenomena that in some way doubts or rejects other phenomena that we would call religion, even if those doubts themselves are religious. Part 3. Non-belief in the ancient Mediterranean. Over in the ancient Mediterranean basin, that ocean of paganisms that served as the backdrop for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, we can see other people who likewise foreshadow modern expressions of irreligion. But like in the subcontinent, these ancient Mediterranean critiques of religion are never quite as quite like modern atheism or secularism either. Most of these kinds of thought that we would consider to be atheistic or humanistic are what the ancients themselves would have called philosophy.
Naturally, we still use this word philosophy today, and for us, the word doesn't necessarily mean anything about one's religious belonging. There is Christian, Islamic, and Jewish philosophy, just as there is atheist philosophy. or philosophical skepticism.
But in the ancient world, when philosophy as a thought first appeared, there was built into it a certain negation of some thoughts and activities that we might call religious. To do philosophy means to love wisdom, to pursue truth wherever it may be found, in the gods or anywhere else. The foundational assumption of philosophy is that there is a fixed, regular way the world works. And therefore, human observation of the world's patterns can expose the truth to us. That is, philosophers are by definition rationalists.
But again, like in ancient India, most ancient philosophies would still seem rather religion-like to us now. The ultimate philosopher, Socrates, claimed to philosophize because he was inhabited by a personal god, a daemon. His student, Plato, was critical of Greek mythology, but it wasn't because he didn't think the gods existed, but rather because the way the stories depicted the gods made them too human to serve as moral exemplars. But are there actual ancient atheists? Well, yes and no.
For example, the group most often referred to as atheists in the ancient Mediterranean were the Christians. Now that strikes us today as more than a little odd, because presumably Christians are by definition not atheists, just as atheists are by definition not Christian. But remember, that's only us moderns with our particular notion of religion. We consider atheism, the mental denial of God's existence, to be the rejection of another belief, the mental affirmation of God's existence. But ancient people had no notion of religion, so they wouldn't have given nearly as much priority to personal belief.
Sure, the ancient Greek word atheism literally meant no-godism, but what the Greeks were talking about was much more about what one did. than what one would thought. An atheist was someone who didn't worship the gods properly. They didn't have the correct cultic practice.
So Christians certainly believed in the existence of at least one god, but they didn't worship the gods of the Roman Empire. The Christians didn't participate in the mysteries of the Roman gods, even though they lived under those gods. And therefore, They were the enemies of the political and social order.
So, while a Christian today isn't likely to think of themselves as being an atheist, a second century Christian, who also certainly believed in a god, was the very definition of an atheist. The problem is that we're giving too much priority to the notion of belief when we talk about the ancient past. It's a side effect of our modern concept of religion.
So when we look at ancient texts and we see discussions of belief or faith, we interpret that as a mental assent to a claim. But ancient people usually didn't think that way. in the Mediterranean or in the subcontinent or almost anywhere else.
So when we see writings like the books of the Bible or the Quran, and those books tell us to have faith in God, they aren't saying believe that God exists, but rather trust in God and God's power and understanding. It's more like when we say to each other, I have faith in you or I believe in you. If I believe in you, that doesn't primarily refer to my belief that you exist, but rather, I trust that you will do something or act in a certain way. It's much more about practice than it is about belief.
Take a look at the opening of Psalm 14. The fool says in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt. Their deeds are vile.
There is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on all humankind to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned away. All have become corrupt.
There is no one who does good, not even one. We could read this passage as a dismissal of atheism, saying that God doesn't exist. But that's not what the psalmist here is concerned with. A foolish person acts as if God does not exist.
That is, they behave as if God isn't there. And so they are wicked and corrupt. He doesn't seek God, meaning practice the morality and rituals demanded of him.
The text isn't even really entertaining the idea that God might not exist, or even that someone might personally claim to believe that. No one says there is no God, but rather some people act as if there is not. That is, they only say it in their hearts.
So it isn't about believing in God the way that you believe a scientific argument is correct or not, but rather, do people trust that God demands certain activities and ethics from you? Generally, when we see atheism in our sense of the term in the ancient world, it appears like this. in an anecdotal reference to a hypothetical person, or in a disparaging third-hand account. For the most famous example of this, Diagoras of Melios, we are told, tried to discourage people from participating in the mystery cult of Eleusis, or that he destroyed a wooden statue of Heracles to make firewood to cook his turnips, or that he openly declared that the gods didn't exist. While this sounds like atheism to us, what they really are are folk tales.
We know nothing about Diagoras except what other people who didn't like him wrote about him. And all they wrote about him was that he disrespected the gods somehow. So again, like in the case of the Romans calling Christians atheists, or the Psalms mocking people who act like atheists, pagans like Diagoras are only propped up as atheists to prove some point or another. We have no evidence that he is what we would call an atheist. In fact, we don't really have any direct evidence of him at all, really.
So can we see ancient atheistic philosophers in the sense of people who themselves deny any and every god even exists, and not just because they don't like a particular god or a certain cultic practice? Again, only sort of. The philosopher Epicurus argued that the entirety of the universe was controlled by material forces alone.
There was nothing non-material that existed, so no souls acting independently of bodies, and no transcendent divine beings moving us all around against our wills. Souls and gods existed, but they, like us, were bound by the laws of the physical universe. So there was no reason to think that they would, or even that they could, overturn the normal functions of the world, for themselves or on our behalf.
Likewise, for the Epicureans, there couldn't be any kind of afterlife, as once our material forms broke down, there was no possibility of the further existence for our souls. Everything is material, including us. So prayer, or trust in the gods or in spirits, was useless. They're restrained by the physical laws of the universe. Or, at best, they're indifferent to our concerns, because All they can do is follow natural processes themselves.
So either the gods aren't really gods at all, or if they are, they're useless. And so the Epicureans argued instead that we should try our best to become indifferent to pain and to seek personal tranquility. That's the best we can do.
So again, it's sort of like a humanism. And what was the evidence that this path to personal tranquility and the avoidance of pain worked? Well, the gods. For the Epicureans, the gods were indifferent to us, but not because they were evil, but because they were content. They couldn't change anything about the material world, but they didn't need to either.
They didn't have to change the world, because they were happy with the way things were. So we should try to be like them, indifferent to pain. and seeking our own fulfillment. There are many other examples of ancient thinkers in India, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere in the ancient world who doubt what we would normally today identify as religion. But they don't clearly fall into modern categories like atheism or secular humanism either.
Until you have a notion of religion, you can't properly find a notion like not religion. So that's the big takeaway here. Atheism, secularism, free thought, and all the other labels that we use today are restricted to particular cultures at particular times. They, like religion, appear at first glance to be about belief, but they're also about ritual, morality, and society. And so if we want to locate non-religious phenomena as we would understand it, we're going to have to skip ahead a little bit until modernity arrives with its particular notion called religion.
For class, ask yourself, how can we talk about irreligion? What are its modern labels? And why don't they work when we're talking about the ancient past?
What kinds of irreligion can we possibly detect in the ancient subcontinent? What kinds of irreligion can we possibly detect in the ancient Mediterranean?