It is not in dispute (the word itself shows it in all languages) that atheism is essentially a negation, that it signifies the foregoing of a spiritual idea and therefore the precedence of such an idea, and that it is not the creative act of an unimpaired formative power. But what is it that it denies? In what way? And who is the denier?

Atheism, rightly understood, is the necessary expression of a spirituality that has accomplished itself and exhausted its religious possibilities, and is declining into the inorganic. It is entirely compatible with a living wistful desire for real religiousness[[511]]—therein resembling Romanticism, which likewise would recall that which has irrevocably gone, namely, the Culture—and it may quite well be in a man as a creation of his feeling without his being aware of it, without its ever interfering with the habits of his thought or challenging his convictions. We can understand this if we can see what it was that made the devout Haydn call Beethoven an atheist after he had heard some of his music. Atheism comes not with the evening of the Culture but with the dawn of the Civilization. It belongs to the great city, to the “educated man” of the great city who acquires mechanistically what his forefathers the creators of the Culture had lived organically. In respect of the Classical feeling of God, Aristotle is an atheist unawares. The Hellenistic-Roman Stoicism is atheistic like the Socialism of Western and the Buddhism of Indian modernity, reverently though they may and do use the word “God.”

But, if this late form of world-feeling and world-image which preludes our “second religiousness” is universally a negation of the religious in us, the structure of it is different in each of the Civilizations. There is no religiousness that is without an atheistic opposition belonging uniquely to itself and directed uniquely against itself. Men continue to experience the outer world that extends around them as a cosmos of well-ordered bodies or a world-cavern or efficient space, as the case may be, but they no longer livingly experience the sacred causality in it. They only learn to know it in a profane causality that is, or is desired to be, inclusively mechanical.[[512]] There are atheisms of Classical, Arabian and Western kinds and these differ from one another in meaning and in matter. Nietzsche formulated the dynamic atheism on the basis that “God is dead,” and a Classical philosopher would have expressed the static and Euclidean by saying that the “gods who dwell in the holy places are dead,” the one indicating that boundless space has, the other that countless bodies have, become godless. But dead space and dead things are the “facts” of physics. The atheist is unable to experience any difference between the Nature-picture of physics and that of religion. Language, with a fine feeling, distinguishes wisdom and intelligence—the early and the late, the rural and the megalopolitan conditions of the soul. Intelligence even sounds atheistic. No one would describe Heraclitus or Meister Eckart as an intelligence, but Socrates and Rousseau were intelligent and not “wise” men. There is something root-less in the word. It is only from the standpoint of the Stoic and of the Socialist, of the typical irreligious man, that want of intelligence is a matter for contempt.

The spiritual in every living Culture is religious, has religion, whether it be conscious of it or not. That it exists, becomes, develops, fulfils itself, is its religion. It is not open to a spirituality to be irreligious; at most it can play with the idea of irreligion as Medicean Florentines did. But the megalopolitan is irreligious; this is part of his being, a mark of his historical position. Bitterly as he may feel the inner emptiness and poverty, earnestly as he may long to be religious, it is out of his power to be so. All religiousness in the Megalopolis rests upon self-deception. The degree of piety of which a period is capable is revealed in its attitude towards[towards] toleration. One tolerates, either because the form-language appears to be expressing something of that which in one’s own lived experience is felt as divine, or else because that experience no longer contains anything so felt.

What we moderns have called “Toleration” in the Classical world[[513]] is an expression of the contrary of atheism. Plurality of numina and cults is inherent in the conception of Classical religion, and it was not toleration but the self-evident expression of antique piety that allowed validity to them all. Conversely, anyone who demanded exceptions showed himself ipso facto as godless. Christians and Jews counted, and necessarily counted, as atheists in the eyes of anyone whose world-picture was an aggregate of individual bodies; and when in Imperial times they ceased to be regarded in this light, the old Classical god-feeling had itself come to an end. On the other hand, respect for the form of the local cult whatever this might be, for images of the gods, for sacrifices and festivals was always expected, and anyone who mocked or profaned them very soon learned the limits of Classical toleration—witness the scandal of the Mutilation of the Hermae at Athens and trials for the desecration of the Eleusinian mysteries, that is, impious travestying of the sensuous element. But to the Faustian soul (again we see opposition of space and body, of conquest and acceptance of presence) dogma and not visible ritual constitutes the essence. What is regarded as godless is opposition to doctrine. Here begins the spatial-spiritual conception of heresy. A Faustian religion by its very nature cannot allow any freedom of conscience; it would be in contradiction with its space-invasive dynamic. Even free thinking itself is no exception to the rule. After the stake, the guillotine; after the burning of the books, their suppression; after the power of the pulpit, the power of the Press. Amongst us there is no faith without leanings to an Inquisition of some sort. Expressed in appropriate electrodynamic imagery, the field of force of a conviction adjusts all the minds within it according to its own intensity. Failure to do so means absence of conviction—in ecclesiastical language, ungodliness. For the Apollinian soul, on the contrary, it was contempt of the cult—ἀσέβεια in the literal sense—that was ungodly, and here its religion admitted no freedom of attitude. In both cases there was a line drawn between the toleration demanded by the god-feeling and that forbidden by it.

Now, here the Late-Classical philosophy of Sophist-Stoic speculation (as distinct from the general Stoic disposition) was in opposition to religious feeling. And accordingly we find the people of Athens—that Athens which could build altars to “unknown gods”—persecuting as pitilessly as the Spanish Inquisition. We have only to review the list of Classical thinkers and historical personages who were sacrificed to the integrity of the cult. Socrates and Diagoras were executed for ἀσέβεια; Anaxagoras, Protagoras, Aristotle, Alcibiades only saved themselves by flight. The number of executions for cult-impiety, in Athens alone and during the few decades of the Peloponnesian War, ran into hundreds. After the condemnation of Protagoras, a house-to-house search was made for the destruction of his writings. In Rome, acts of this sort began (so far as history enables us to trace them) in 181 B.C. when the Senate ordered the public burning of the Pythagorean “Books of Numa.”[[514]] This was followed by an uninterrupted series of expulsions, both of individual philosophers and of whole schools, and later by executions and by public burnings of books regarded as subversive of religion. For instance, in the time of Cæsar alone, the places of worship of Isis were five times destroyed by order of the Consuls, and Tiberius had her image thrown into the Tiber. The refusal to perform sacrifice before the image of the Emperor was made a penal offence. All these were measures against “atheism,” in the Classical sense of the word, manifested in theoretical or practical contempt of the visible cult. Unless we can put our Western feeling of these matters out of action we shall never penetrate into the essence of the world-image that underlay the Classical attitude to them. Poets and philosophers might spin myths and transform god-figures as much as they pleased. The dogmatic interpretation of the sensuous data was everyone’s liberty. The histories of the gods could be made fun of in Satyric drama and comedy—even that did not impugn their Euclidean existence. But the statue of the god, the cult, the plastic embodiment of piety—it was not permitted to any man to touch these. It was not out of hypocrisy that the fine minds of the earlier Empire, who had ceased to take a myth of any kind seriously, punctiliously conformed to the public cults and, above all, to the cult—deeply real for all classes—of the Emperor. And, on the other hand, the poets and thinkers of the mature Faustian Culture were at liberty “not to go to Church,” to avoid Confession, to stay at home on procession-days and (in Protestant surroundings) to live without any relations with the church whatever. But they were not free to touch points of dogma, for that would have been dangerous within any confession and any sect, including, once more and expressly, free-thought. The Roman Stoic, who without faith in the mythology piously observed the ritual forms, has his counterpart in those men of the Age of Enlightenment, like Lessing and Goethe, who disregarded the rites of the Church but never doubted the “fundamental truths of faith.”

XII

If we turn back from Nature-feeling become form to Nature-knowledge become system, we know God or the gods as the origin of the images by which the intellect seeks to make the world-around comprehensible to itself. Goethe once remarked (to Riemer): “The Reason is as old as the World; even the child has reason. But it is not applied in all times in the same way or to the same objects. The earlier centuries had their ideas in intuitions of the fancy, but ours bring them into notions. The great views of Life were brought into shapes, into Gods; to-day they are brought into notions. Then the productive force was greater, now the destructive force or art of separation.” The strong religiousness of Newton’s mechanics[[515]] and the almost complete atheism of the formulations of modern dynamics are of like colour, positive and negative of the same primary feeling. A physical system of necessity has all the characters of the soul to whose world-form it belongs. The Deism of the Baroque belongs with its dynamics and its analytical geometry; its three basic principles, God, Freedom and Immortality, are in the language of mechanics the principles of inertia (Galileo), least action (D’Alembert) and the conservation of energy (J. R. Mayer).

That which nowadays we call quite generally physics is in reality an artifact of the Baroque. At this stage the reader will not feel it as paradoxical to associate the mode of representation which rests on the assumption of distant forces and the (wholly un-Classical and anything but naïve) idea of action-at-a-distance, attraction and repulsion of masses, specially with the Jesuit style of architecture founded by Vignola, and to call it accordingly the Jesuit style of physics; and I would likewise call the Infinitesimal Calculus, which of necessity came into being just when and where it did, the Jesuit style of mathematic. Within this style, a working hypothesis that deepens the technique of experimentation is “correct”; for Loyola’s concern, like Newton’s, was not description of Nature but method.

Western physics is by its inward form dogmatic and not ritualistic (kultisch). Its content is the dogma of Force as identical with space and distance, the theory of the mechanical Act (as against the mechanical Posture) in space. Consequently its tendency is persistently to overcome the apparent. Beginning with a still quite Apollinian-sensuous classification of physics into the physics of the eye (optics), of the ear (acoustics) and of the skin-sense (heat), it by degrees eliminated all sense-impressions and replaced them by abstract systems of relations; thus, under the influence of ideas concerning dynamical motion in an æther, radiant heat is nowadays dealt with under the heading of “optics,” a word which has ceased to have anything to do with the eye.