Dan Snow's History Hit - The History of Unbelief

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

Dan delves into the history of unbelief - or rather, past people who didn't believe in God(s). He talks to Professor Tim Whitmarsh about Greek atheists (and indeed, about the creation of the term 'atheist'), and to Professor John Arnold about those who eschewed religious doctrine in the medieval era.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On this episode of the podcast, we're looking about the history of unbelief. We've talked recently about the history of Christianity with Tom Holland. We've talked about the history of Sikhism with Priya Atwal. Now we are looking at the history of unbelief, of humanism, atheism, whatever you want to call it. We made this in conjunction with the University of Kent. They have got an understanding unbelief program. We've talked to a number of historians, as you'll hear, who have looked into people who did not believe in a deity through various periods of history. Also working with the University of Kent is Sanderson Jones, the larger-than-life apostle of unbelief. He has produced a series of films through his Lifefulness Project. So if you search

Lifefulness Project online, you'll see a number of films that he's produced, which talk about what unbelief means today. So we've got the past, the present, a little bit of future here. If you want to go and watch hundreds of history documentaries, listen to hundreds of podcasts, then you can do so at History Hit TV. You just go to historyhit.tv, use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, and you get a month for free. And then you get your second month for just one pound, euro, or dollar. That nudges you towards Christmas. I'm afraid it does, at which point you can take advantage of another special offer we'll no doubt be releasing in the build-up to Christmas. But don't tell anyone I told you that. Then you get to enjoy the Netflix for History, the world's best history channel. Check it out. No aliens. You're going to love it.

But in the meantime, everyone, here is a history of unbelief. Enjoy. The word atheism and the word atheist are in root Greek words. What they mean, though, in the Greek world is rather different to what we mean now. We tend to think of an atheist as somebody who disbelieves in all supernatural activity. The word emerges in Greek in the 5th century BCE, usually in poetic context to describe people that are abandoned by the gods. So if you think about the heroes of Greek tragedy who are suffering terribly, they will say, I am forsaken by the gods. And that word is athios, the Greek word athios. Now over time in the 5th century, the word develops a philosophical connotation marking people who actively disbelieve in the existence of gods.

What did atheism look like in ancient Greece and Rome? in the existence of gods. What did atheism look like in ancient Greece and Rome? What the Greeks obsess about is the proper performance of ritual in the right time, at the right place, using the right sacrificial animals. When that goes wrong, then the gods can get terribly angry and there are lots of stories in tragedy and in Homer and so forth of things going wrong ritually and that having an effect on the populace. What we don't find so much, at least until relatively late in Greek culture,

is the idea that religion is all about the beliefs that one has in the head. So in a sense, whether you believe in a god or not doesn't really matter. What matters is whether you perform the ritual action. We have one very precious inscription from the fourth century about a healing cult, a healing cult devoted to Asclepius. And there was a man who was said to have gone to this cult and not believed in the efficacy of the god in question. What we're told is that the god punished him with physical infirmity. And he realized as a result of this punishment that he had committed an error by not believing it, by mocking the efficacy of the god. So he recanted and he said, I'm now a believer.

And the god accepted that apology, but gave him the name Apistos, which in Greek means disbeliever. So for the rest of his life, whether he actually had to use this name in his family context and to buy fish and so forth, we don't really know. But he was certainly given this label, Apisos, the disbeliever by the gods. So instances like this tell us that behind, if you like, the ritual practice, there was actually a certain amount of preoccupation with having the right belief systems vis-a-vis the gods. Are there any famous examples of Greek atheism? One of the most important contexts for developing the history of atheism, developing our understanding of the history of atheism, is 5th century Athens. It's the biggest city in the Mediterranean at the time, arguably the biggest city in the world. So it became a honeypot, attracting all of the intellectuals from the Greek-speaking world to this place, which was not just rich, but also democratic.

That's to say it valued innovative ideas. It valued freedom of speech. So it was a wonderful place for intellectuals to gather. And these intellectuals brought new ideas, including scepticism about divinity. A little bit later, a chap called Socrates, the most famous philosopher in human history, developed himself a new way of thinking about philosophy. And this was based on ethics, on thinking on you yourself, what are the right ways, what are the most moral ways to behave in the world? Now, because he was an ethical philosopher, he set himself at odds, if you like, with the majority opinion. And he did this quite deliberately. He would describe himself as a gadfly, a stinging little insect who would annoy people and irritate people.

He was a form of ancient provocateur, if you like. The technique that he involved, that he used to do this, was to interrogate them on minute points. So if you say, I know what a god is, he would say, do you really? them on minute points. So if you say, I know what a god is, he would say, do you really? What this meant was that his position in relation to conventional views of all kind, including religion, tended to be very hostile, if you like, that he tended to interrogate people, although he was friendly with it and he claimed to be doing good to the people, he did necessarily set himself at odds with established religion. Unfortunately, Athens at this time, from the 430s onwards, was also going through a long, drawn-out war with the Spartans,

the war that we call the Peloponnesian War. And this created all sorts of pressures and anxieties on society. And as a result, intellectuals in this period, particularly the free-thinking intellectuals coming up with heterodox ideas about the gods, often seemed to get it in the neck. These people became scapegoats for Athens's general anxiety about the downward trend of progress in the Peloponnesian War. So in 399 BCE, Socrates was summoned to trial,

and he was asked to defend himself on the charge of introducing new gods to the city, not believing in the gods of the city, if that's the right translation of the Greek, it's a very difficult phrase, and corrupting the young. Now rather than defending himself in the conventional manner, Socrates argued that what he was doing, he didn't deny the charges, he said what he was doing was actually a positive benefit for the city. And he said, rather than any punishment, I deserve to be rewarded by the city. Now, this was the ultimate act of provocation, if you like. And this meant that he got the full

force of the law thrown at him, the death penalty. Are there any examples of Greeks who said that they didn't believe? If you'd asked most ancient Greeks who is the most famous atheist, the Greek word atheos, they would probably have said Epicurus. Epicurus, who flourished some 100 years after Socrates, developed or at least borrowed and enhanced a materialist philosophy. And this materialist philosophy was based around the idea that there is nothing in the world other than atoms, that's the origin of the modern word atom, indivisible small elements of matter, and void. And that if you have that physical system, that understanding of the world, as composed of these two elements, then you can explain absolutely everything in the world. Now, Epicurus, curiously,

didn't deny the existence of gods. He denied the existence of an afterlife. He denied the existence of a non-material spirit. But he said that it would be insane to disbelieve in the gods. But we don't have strong evidence for what he actually thought about the gods. His physical system seems not to accommodate the possibility of the existence of gods. Where would they live? What would they be made of? How would they survive? Epicurus thinks that material things can never survive permanently. They always have bonds in them that will dissolve over time. So how do immortal, eternal gods exist in this world? As I say, in our evidence base at the moment,

we don't really have answers to that question. So how do we explain this curious paradox of someone who is a materialist, a radical materialist, but somehow obsesses with the idea that you must have gods in your world? And there are different ways of doing this. You can say that maybe the gods are simply an idea that we have to have in our heads for moral reasons. We have to aspire to the excellence of a deity.

They might have existence in that sense. Or alternatively, what we might see here is the trap, if you like, that was set by the trial of Socrates. After Socrates had been executed for a form of disbelief in the trap, if you like, that was set by the trial of Socrates. After Socrates had been executed for a form of disbelief in the gods, it was extremely dangerous for philosophers operating in Athens. And remember that Epicurus is operating in Athens a mere century later. It was extremely dangerous for people in his position to express unusual, unconventional ideas about the gods. So if you like, his obsession with the idea that there were gods might have been a bit of a protective buffer against

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Were there any Greeks that were famous among their contemporaries that were well recognised as being atheists? One of my favourite characters from classical antiquity is a satirist called Lucian, who lived in the 2nd century AD. He was an extraordinarily multifarious writer. He wrote early works of science fiction, describing journeys to the moon and so forth. But his position on the world was that he was a satirist.

He was an outsider looking in, mocking, satirising the customs of humanity and in particular the customs of the Greeks. He was a Syrian by birth, so by cultural identity, an outsider to the Greek world, but also a very talented writer of Greek. So when he became a famous writer and toured around the Greek world, he made it his mission to note and to ridicule the practices of the Greek world, including, for example, funeral customs. He said, why on earth do people mourn the dead?

What good is it going to do? The dead are dead. They're gone. They can't hear you. He also mocked sacrifices. Why is it that we sacrifice animals and then burn the bones and the fat for the gods? That's a ludicrous idea. The idea that the gods would actually find that remotely flattering is absolutely insane. We are doing it really, and it's true actually, Lucian was right in this, we're doing it really to create meat to feed human beings. It's nothing to do with gods.

He also said that's a very strange sort of contractual system that we have with the gods if we sacrifice it. If the idea is that rather than doing good things in your life, you get the gods' favour by, in a sense, buying them off with sort of transactions with them, because a sacrifice is a sort of gift to the gods. That would provide a very odd view of religiosity. So Lucian, as I say, is one of our best sources for thinking about an outsider's perspective on the ludicrousness of Greek religion. And he was widely read and loved by peers in his time. It was only really later under the Christians that Lucian was mocked as an atheist and in the 17th century the Catholic Church tried to ban the works of Lucian. So it turns out that people in ancient Greece and Rome, which were a time of many, many gods,

could be just as sceptical as some of us still are today. The Middle Ages, by contrast, as some of us still are today. The Middle Ages, by contrast, feels like a time when religion was in the ascendant. Crusades, inquisitions, the political and legal power of the church gives us the impression that everyone had to be a believer. I talked to Professor John Arnold to see if this was the case. John, were there atheists in the Middle Ages? It's very unlikely that anyone in the middle ages was an atheist in the sense that we think of today that is not believing in god and there certainly wasn't any intellectual movement of atheism in the way that we think about it more broadly but there were definitely people in the middle ages who didn't believe all the things that they were

supposed to believe and there were people christians who believed differently from the line taught by the church. So whilst we don't have atheists, we definitely have people who are unbelievers and the Latin word infidelita, unfaithfully, unbelieving, is definitely used sometimes to describe people by authorities. So what exactly did a non-believer in the Middle Ages not believe in? Probably actually the widest category, although the loosest one, is then people much more like you and me, that is ordinary people

who are supposed to believe in Catholicism in the way the church wants, but whose faith is not as accurate in all respects, whose practices don't live up to the norm, who don't believe in a number of the rather key tenets to Catholicism, even if they still think of themselves as Christian. So it's useful, I think, for us to think about unbelief as encompassing that much wider range of individuals who are just not doing it fully or properly or up to the mark as authorities might want them to. As far back as the 11th century is a book of miracles relating to a saint called Izan in southwest France and there's a little image narrated in the book of miracles about Izan's relics are being paraded by the bishop

and monks from one place to another and lots of people are coming and celebrating and so on. There are two peasants working in the fields, a husband and a wife, and the wife says, oh look at that, that's fantastic, We should go and join in. This is, you know, amazing. And the husband says, get back to your work. It's just some old bones that they've gathered together, venerated by stupid people. A little moment of unbelief. He's then punished, of course. He starts sort of shaking all over and then comes to a realisation he was wrong. But we catch a glimpse of people not believing in these moments of punishment. And in many, many miracle collections,

you have examples of this, of people dismissing it out of hand before the saint comes and puts them right. So not breathing in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is a hard tenet of faith. It's hard to experience, to believe other than your senses tell you. And this is something that a lot of Catholic writers in the period, the pastoral writers who are trying to advise the priest of the laity, they recognise that. They say, you know, this is going to be difficult. You have to

let God give you a chance and think about it. It's also something that they're very keen that people don't discuss. So there's a very strong injunction, you know, don't go around chatting about this, just believe, just hang on there and believe. We can see that it's something that a lot of people struggle with for obvious reasons. It is demanding. It's what faith is made of. But then also we have particular examples of people not believing in it. We have, I mean, a number of heretical sects don't believe that the priest can turn Christ's body into, sorry, the bread into Christ's body. There's a recurrent phrase used around Europe,

which is if Christ's body was as big as a mountain, it would have been eaten up by now, because every time the priests make it in the mass and consume it, a little bit more is chipped away. You get particular people saying they don't believe. There's a trial from 15th century England where a chap called Thomas Broughton admits that for 15 years every time he goes to mass and he sees the Eucharist being elevated by the priest he sat

there silently just thinking it's just a piece of bread but stayed quiet because he didn't want to be noted by his neighbours. There's evidence of other people in a similar situation giggling when it's said and clearly they're sort clearly they're seeing it in this way. And there's a very famous story, which goes all the way back to Gregory the Great, of a housewife who gets the giggles when in the mass the priest said, here is the body of Christ. She said, you tell me that piece of bread, just like I made at home, is the body of Christ? And the bishop says, yes, that's what you're supposed to believe. And she's like, ah, come off it. And then the body body the Eucharist turns into a finger and so then she believes and that story circulates around and around uh Western Christendom and you

can say well there's a story about belief this is about people believing but it is clearly also a story about not believing and recognising that people will continue to not believe unless the Eucharist turns into a finger every time somebody makes it. So what effect did going back and looking at all these texts talking about non-belief in the Greek and Roman world have on non-belief in the Middle Ages? One of the things they're most challenged by is the idea that they find in some of the writings that the soul might not be eternal and destined for salvation but the soul might simply end with the body, that when you die, that's it. That's obviously a bit challenging in Christian belief, that rather removes quite a large amount of what Christianity is about. So we certainly see in the 13th century

a number of theologians worrying away at this issue. It's not something that they think that lots of people out there hold as a belief, but they can just see it's intellectually very unnerving. It's a piece of unbelief that frightens them in its potential. So for example, there's a bishop of Marseille called Benedict of Alignon, who in the middle of the 13th century writes a massive treatise defending the faith from all kinds of different possible errors and providing responses that if you imagine a priest or a bishop confronted with an error, he knows what to say to combat it.

The thing he talks at greatest length about in this treatise is this idea of the soul dying with the body, because I think he sees it undermines all of the rest of the edifice. Interestingly, we do find in the early 14th century, in the 15th century, a very few moments captured in trial records when people have been questioned for other things, a very few moments in which ordinary people hold exactly that belief. Almost certainly not because they've read Aristotle or Averroes or the rest of it, but because they have observed the world around them

and they just don't think that that anything is there after death so for example there's a woman called Jacqueline who lives in the south of France in the early 14th century she has sat with a neighbor's child who is on its deathbed and she's there to comfort the child as the child sadly is dying and she reports that she looked very very closely at the moment of death to see what happened and all that happened was that there was a last breath and she says I think the soul is just breath and then it's just gone I cannot see that anything else was there. There's a 15th century English chap Thomas Taylor who's tried for the heresy of Lollardy but he doesn't

really seem to be a normal Lollard that's a particular kind of heresy in late medieval England he says amongst other things that he thinks that the body that the soul dies with the body that it's it's simply snuffed out like one snuffs out a candle when life has gone that's it so we get these little moments in which people are holding these beliefs, but as I say, probably because of what they experience in the world around them, which for a few people, for a few ordinary people, leaves them to think this probably is just it. There is no afterlife. There is no heaven and hell. There is a witness in a 15th century Spanish case who was quoted as saying something like, there's no heaven and hell. They just make it up to get money out of us. All that there is in life is a good meal, a warm fire and a nice

girlfriend. That's all you need to worry about. You hear a lot about heretics in the Middle Ages. So what's the difference between a heretic and a non-believer? So heresy for Western Catholicism is not simply a belief that diverges from what the church says, but one which is publicly proclaimed and stubbornly defended. So you can go around thinking stuff in your head if you don't tell it to anybody else. Obviously nobody's going to know that there's an issue there, but the church isn't very bothered about that. If you go around the marketplace saying, I believe there are two gods, one of them's a bad god, one of them's a good god. And when confronted by a bishop, he says, that's not right. You say, no, no, it's true. Then you're a heretic.

So it's the publicness and the challenge to authority that makes it a heresy. What did the church do to combat unbelief? So Inquisition is a legal process in which specialists, usually mendicant friars, come and interrogate people who are suspected of heresy, ask them about what they've done, ask them about their beliefs, and try to eradicate those who are unbelieving. Eradicate occasionally means sending them to their death at the stake. It more often means confronting them with a severe punishment until they say, all right, okay, I believe properly after all and behave myself. So inquisition is a powerful tool,

but it's important to understand in the Middle Ages, it's not a kind of blanket process. They don't have a standing police force. So inquisition, I keep saying, I keep not saying the inquisition, because that's not really the case. Inquisition is a legal tool that gets used in certain times and places when you think there's a problem. Professor John Arne, thank you very much indeed. Hi everyone, it's me Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts, and give us a five-star rating and a review.

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