Nevertheless, Aristotle is one of the philosophers about whose faith in the gods of popular religion well-founded doubts may be raised. Like Plato, he acknowledged the divinity of the heavenly bodies on the ground that they must have a soul since they had independent motion. Further, he has a kind of supreme god who, himself unmoved, is the cause of all movement, and whose constituent quality is reason. As regards the gods of popular belief, in his Ethics and his Politics he assumes public worship to be a necessary constituent of the life of the individual and the community. He gave no grounds for this assumption—on the contrary, he expressly declared that it was a question which ought not to be discussed at all: he who stirs up doubts whether honour should be paid to the gods is in need not of teaching but of punishment. (That he himself took part in worship is evident from his will.) Further, in his ethical works he used the conceptions of the gods almost in the same way as we have assumed that Socrates did, i.e. as the ethical ideal and determining the limits of the human. He never entered upon any elaborate criticism of the lower elements of popular religion such as Plato gave. So far everything is in admirable order. But if we look more closely at things there is nevertheless nearly always a little “but” in Aristotle's utterances about the gods. Where he operates with popular notions he prefers to speak hypothetically or to refer to what is generally assumed; or he is content to use only definitions which will also agree with his [pg 085] own philosophical conception of God. But he goes further; in a few places in his writings there are utterances which it seems can only be interpreted as a radical denial of the popular religion. The most important of them deserves to be quoted in extenso:
“A tradition has been handed down from the ancients and from the most primitive times, and left to later ages in the form of myth, that these substances (i.e. sky and heavenly bodies) are gods and that the divine embraces all nature. The rest consists in legendary additions intended to impress the multitude and serve the purposes of legislation and the common weal; for these gods are said to have human shape or resemble certain other beings (animals), and they say other things which follow from this and are of a similar kind to those already mentioned. But if we disregard all this and restrict ourselves to the first point, that they thought that the first substances were gods, we must acknowledge that it is a divinely inspired saying. And as, in all probability, every art and science has been discovered many times, as far as it is possible, and has perished again, so these notions, too, may have been preserved till now as relics of those times. To this extent only can we have any idea of the opinion which was held by our fathers and has come down from the beginning of things.”
The last sentences, expressing Aristotle's idea of a life-cycle and periods of civilisation which repeat themselves, have only been included in the quotation for the sake of completeness. If we disregard them, the passage plainly enough states the view that the [pg 086] only element of truth in the traditional notions about the gods was the divinity of the sky and the heavenly bodies; the rest is myth. Aristotle has nowhere else expressed himself with such distinctness and in such length, but then the passage in question has a place of its own. It comes in his Metaphysics directly after the exposition of his philosophical conception of God—a position marked by profound earnestness and as it were irradiated by a quiet inner fervour. We feel that we are here approaching the sanctum sanctorum of the thinker. In this connexion, and only here, he wished for once to state his opinion about the religion of his time without reserve. What he says here is a precise formulation of the result arrived at by the best Greek thinkers as regards the religion of the Greek people. It was not, they thought, pure fabrication. It contained an element of truth of the greatest value. But most of it consisted of human inventions without any reality behind them.
A point of view like that of Aristotle would, I suppose, hardly have been called atheism among the ancients, if only because the heavenly bodies were acknowledged as divine. But according to our definition it is atheism. The “sky”-gods of Aristotle have nothing in common with the gods of popular belief, not even their names, for Aristotle never names them. And the rest, the whole crowd of Greek anthropomorphic gods, exist only in the human imagination.
Aristotle's successors offer little of interest to our inquiry. Theophrastus was charged with impiety, but the charge broke down completely. [pg 087] His theological standpoint was certainly the same as Aristotle's. Of Strato, the most independent of the Peripatetics, we know that in his view of nature he laid greater stress on the material causes than Aristotle did, and so arrived at a different conception of the supreme deity. Aristotle had severed the deity from Nature and placed it outside the latter as an incorporeal being whose chief determining factor was reason. In Strato's view the deity was identical with Nature and, like the latter, was without consciousness; consciousness was only found in organic nature. Consequently we cannot suppose him to have believed in the divinity of the heavenly bodies in Aristotle's sense, though no direct statement on this subject has come down to us. About his attitude towards popular belief we hear nothing. A denial of the popular gods is not necessarily implied in Strato's theory, but seems reasonable in itself and is further rendered probable by the fact that all writers seem to take it for granted that Strato knew no god other than the whole of Nature.
We designated Socratic philosophy, in its relation to popular belief, as a reaction against the radical free-thought of the sophistic movement. It may seem peculiar that with Aristotle it develops into a view which we can only describe as atheism. There is, however, an important difference between the standpoints of the sophists and of Aristotle. Radical as the latter is at bottom, it is not, however, openly opposed to popular belief—on the contrary, to any one who did not examine it more closely it must have had the appearance of accepting popular [pg 088] belief. The very assumption that the heavenly bodies were divine would contribute to that effect; this, as we have seen, was a point on which the popular view laid great stress. If we add to this that Aristotle never made the existence of the popular gods matter of debate; that he expressly acknowledged the established worship; and that he consistently made use of certain fundamental notions of popular belief in his philosophy—we can hardly avoid the conclusion that, notwithstanding his personal emancipation from the existing religion, he is a true representative of the Socratic reaction against sophistic. But we see, too, that there is a reservation in this reaction. In continuity with earlier Greek thought on religion, it proceeded from the absolute definitions of the divine offered by popular belief, but when criticising anthropomorphism on this basis it did not after all avoid falling out with popular belief. How far each philosopher went in his antagonism was a matter of discretion, as also was the means chosen to reconcile the philosophical with the popular view. The theology of the Socratic schools thus suffered from a certain half-heartedness; in the main it has the character of a compromise. It would not give up the popular notions of the gods, and yet they were continually getting in the way. This dualism governs the whole of the succeeding Greek philosophy.
Chapter VI
During the three or four centuries which passed between the downfall of free Hellas and the beginning of the Roman Empire, great social and political changes took place in the ancient world, involving also vital changes in religion. The chief phenomenon in this field, the invasion of foreign, especially oriental, religions into Hellas, does not come within the scope of this investigation. On the one hand, it is an expression of dissatisfaction with the old gods; on the other, the intrusion of new gods would contribute to the ousting of the old ones. There is no question of atheism here; it is only a change within polytheism. But apart from this change there is evidence that the old faith had lost its hold on men's minds to no inconsiderable extent. Here, too, there is hardly any question of atheism properly speaking, but as a background to the—not very numerous—evidences of such atheism in our period, we cannot well ignore the decline of the popular faith. Our investigation is rendered difficult on this point, and generally within this period, by the lack of direct evidence. Of the rich Hellenistic literature almost everything has been lost, and we are restricted to reports and fragments.