by Tim Whitmarsh
4 Dec 2015
product of the modern age, but rather reaches back to early Western
intellectual tradition in the ancient Greek world.
The author questions the roots of free thinking, attributing it back
to the scepticism movement in ancient Greece, when heretics argued that
history should be perceived as a result of human action rather than
divine intervention.
Whitmarsh, in Battling the Gods, covers about 1,000 years of tension
between Olympism, orthodoxy and heresy, ending with the imposition of
Christianity on the Roman Empire in AD313.
He journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, explaining how Greek
science and secularism broadly challenged faith and caused disbelief in
the gods, prior to the European Enlightenment.
By providing astute commentary, the author explores the ideas of
individuals that devised theories of the cosmos based on matter.
"They developed mathematical tools that could be applied to the world
around them, and tried to understand that world in material terms,"
Whitmarsh says.
"Their scepticism left a rich legacy of literature, philosophy and
science, and was defended by great writers like Epicurus, Lucretius,
Cicero and Lucian."
of the Homeric poems and Christianity's establishment as Rome's state
religion in the fourth century AD.
As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and
power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought
to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to
individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism.
In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the
label 'atheist' was used now to demonise anyone who merely disagreed
with the orthodoxy - and so it would remain for centuries.
As the 21st century shapes up into a time of mass information, it is
also, paradoxically, a time of collective amnesia concerning the tangled
histories of religions.
Greeks had the intellectual space within which to exercise reason in
pursuing ontological and normative questions, setting the foundations of
philosophy and later, science.
Whitmarsh proves Greek religion functioned mainly as an expression of
civic engagement, both at the local level of the city-states, each of
which had its own favoured divinities and rites, and at the broader
level of greater Hellenicity.
Source: Amazon, New York Times
