Atheism

ATHEISM. - Theory that denies the existence of a personal God.

I. NOTION, DIVISION AND POSSIBILITY

The term was in vogue during the Renaissance to indicate the attitude of one who does not admit the existence of the Divinity, but the definition is already found in Clement of Alexandria: ἄθεος μὲν γὰρ ὁ μὴ νομίζωσεν εἶναι θεῶν (Strom., VII, 1, 4, 3). It is practical a. when one lives without acknowledging God, "as if" God did not exist, or without concerning oneself with his existence and organizing one's private and public life prescinding from the existence of any absolute principle that transcends the values of the individual and of the human species. It is theoretical a. when one directly or indirectly brings one's judgment to bear on the non-existence of the Divinity. Those who are completely ignorant of God deny him "indirectly" (negative a.), those who are incapable of forming a judgment about him, or who affirm that the problem does not interest them (indifferentism). They deny him "directly" (positive a.) above all when they set about demolishing the foundations of the proofs for the existence of God, of the necessity of religion and of worship and of all that is necessarily connected with these (Providence, immortality of the soul, moral sanction...). It is called sceptical a. if it insists on the invincibility of doubt, and becomes agnostic a. when undemonstrability is said or recognized to be absolute, whether on the part of the object or of the subject. It is positive theoretical a. when one proclaims oneself certain and persuaded of the non-existence of God, when one demolishes and undermines as erroneous and groundless the proofs adduced for his existence, and claims that a true demonstration of it has not been given thus far nor ever can be given.

But from the theological and metaphysical point of view, there also fall under a. all those philosophies and religions that make of God a concept conflicting with the exigency of his Nature: Flint (p. 2, 441, note) preferred to speak here of "antitheism" instead of a. But these conceptions, with the illusion of an acceptance of the divinity, remove one in a certain sense further than a. does from the knowledge of the true God. This traditional scheme of classifying a. cannot, however, be applied in concreto, especially in modern philosophy and culture, except with appropriate cautions, having regard above all to whether there is an affirmation of the Absolute, whatever it may be and however the human mind may be able to reach it.

The possibility of a practical a., at least temporary, seems beyond doubt: the pressure of the concrete problems of life, the boiling of the passions, an indifferent family environment and a secular education can, for a certain period of life, divert man's interest from the problem of God. Not, however, forever: at least for those who live in contact with a society where the posing of the problem, by the very exigencies of competition and of religious and political struggle, seems inevitable. Moreover, what the history of religions attests for peoples can also be said for individuals: first of all the great phenomena of nature with the spectacle of the wonder of their magnificence, and of terror with the overwhelming threat of destruction; then the decisive facts of human existence such as birth and death, and the most anguishing problem of human life, namely that of the suffering of the just man on this earth and of the frequent prosperity of the wicked; all this, sooner or later, must pose to the human conscience the problem of a cause and of a justification, which is the problem of God.

Theoretical a. consequently cannot be an original situation but must be explained as a point of arrival, as the "conclusion" of a determinate rational process that leads back to certain premises: it therefore belongs to the reflective consciousness, proper to philosophy. It is a fact that in every mature civilization there have been decided supporters (who called themselves, and who are therefore supposed to be, "convinced") of theoretical a., both negative and positive; it also emerges that the number of atheists seems to increase in what may be called the "phase of saturation" of a certain form of civilization, such as Stoic and Epicurean philosophy in Greco-Roman civilization, the Enlightenment and idealism in modern civilization, the overbearing dominance of technology and economics in contemporary life. The possibility, therefore, of theoretical a. becomes more or less real and plausible according to whether or not certain environmental and cultural conditions occur, which the theologian must consider case by case: these often, in the concrete fabric of existence, do not seem surmountable except through a special intervention of divine Grace which, according to Catholic doctrine, cannot be lacking to one who sincerely seeks the truth.

The spiritual complications to which modern culture can lead today are such that Catholic authors have not yet succeeded in formulating a judgment on a. in full agreement (cf. P. Descoqs, Schema Theodicaeae, I, Paris 1941, p. 139 ff.): some deny the very possibility of theoretical a. (Blondel, de Lubac), which is nevertheless a fact; others instead admit that a. can be invincible in individual cases (Billot), and there are even those who say that one can lose the Faith without theological fault (K. Adam). Cardinal Billot distinguishes, among adult atheists, the "adulti aetatis" and the "adulti rationis": namely those who lack the minimum light required to form a concept of the true God, and those who in their environment have at their disposal the arguments and the elements for a definitive judgment. Only the a. of the latter is conscious and culpable, not that of the former, among whom Billot includes the idolatrous civilizations and religions of ancient and modern times and the secular and atheistic conceptions of contemporary life.

Despite all these cautions that the problem of a. imposes today, it must in any case be recognized that it has represented in the history of humanity, and still represents today, more an individual attitude than a social conduct, which can also signify protest or liberation of the individual. The claim of materialist and evolutionist ethnology to place at the beginning of history a man without religion, or polytheistic and fetishistic (D. F. Strauss, Der alte und der neue Glaube, ch. 11, § 35), devoid of a true notion and worship of the divinity, has been corrected by the facts; indeed, as is well known, today the situation is found substantially reversed, in the sense that the most primitive forms of religion have turned out to be strictly monotheistic, that polytheism is a phenomenon of degeneration of monotheism, so that the individual positions of a. appear genetically only as forms of reaction to the absurdities and improprieties of polytheistic conceptions and practices. In this sense an ancient doxographer could affirm "all men, without distinction of civilization and language, θεὸς σέβεσθαι καὶ τιμᾶν. οὐδὲν γὰρ ἔθνος ἀνθρώπων ἄθεον (Artemidorus, Oneirokr., 9). And already before him Aristotle: πάντες γὰρ ἄνθρωποι περὶ θεῶν ἔχουσιν ὑπῆλγῃν" (De coelo et mundo, I, 3, 270 b, 5; ed. W. K. C. Guthrie, London 1945). Affirmations taken up again in our own day, on the basis of the inductions of modern ethnology, by G. van der Leeuw: "There exist no peoples without religion. At the beginning of history there is no form of a. Religion is always and everywhere present" (Phänomenologie der Religion, Leipzig 1935, p. 570): because, according to the same author, a. represents in the development of consciousness the "negative moment" that can arise and live only insofar as it presupposes the preceding moment of affirmation, that is, of religion as worship of the divinity who is master of man and of his destiny (cf. L'Homme primitif et la religion, Paris 1940, p. 194 ff.). In this sense Van der Leeuw calls a. "the religion of flight"

before God, or, in Kierkegaardian terminology, of the "anguish of God," when faith is refused in order to fall into the demonic (cf. S. Kierkegaard, Il concetto dell'angoscia, Florence 1946, ch. 4, § 2).

The intimate reason for atheism, as a spiritual-individual attitude, lies in "human freedom" itself: the difficulties, on the one hand, of attaining complete clarity on the problems of the afterlife, of evil and of Providence, and therefore on the ultimate essence of the world and of consciousness, as well as on the capacity of knowledge for transcendence; and, on the other hand, the contradictions among religions, the improprieties of many religious beliefs and practices, and together the demand that every religion advances to embrace and influence the whole life of man, can in fact turn man away from religion and make him reject, along with it, the problem of God as well. On the other hand, it is precisely such a situation (that is, the genesis of atheism "through scandal") that must operate and allow the individual to select, among the various conflicting religions, the one that is true because it gives no scandal. Were it not that, in the real conditions of human civilization, the true religion, and therefore the only conception worthy of God and of man, appears to be assured only by Revelation, which by its nature transcends rational evidence and demands faith. For this reason the definitive victory over the claims of doubt that lead to atheism comes down to Grace and freedom. Hence the interpretation that the Protestant theologian K. Barth has given of atheism appears at the very least simplistic, according to which atheism is a phenomenon of reaction to mysticism: against the mystic who claims to have a direct relationship with God, the ineffable and the unobjectifiable, the atheist proclaims the return of man to himself, to the world of creatures and of history. Atheism would be the negative mysticism or "of nothingness," arising from the opposition to the positive mysticism or "of the whole" (Kirchliche Dogmatik, I, II, 3rd ed., Zurich 1945, p. 344 ff.). Barth, however, does not first of all define the concept of "mysticism," and then he must explain why atheism takes greater hold in countries with a Protestant majority: it is true that "mysticism" is at the antipodes of atheism, but in a sense opposite to that intended by Barth (a theologian of "strict observance" and of anti-pietist inspiration), in that is, mystical union represents in the Christian life the most intimate and apt form (and always "gratuitous") of the union of the soul with God.

II. HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS

1. The philosophies and religions with a naturalistic basis of ancient India, the Samkhya philosophy, Jainism and Buddhism in its original form, that is, before Buddha himself was deified, may be called forms of a. (S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, I, London 1929, p. 329). In the pre-biblical religions, on the other hand, especially those of the Middle East, the divinity embraces everything and relates to man predominantly as an omnipotence of terror and menace that keeps him in continual anguish, driving him even to human sacrifices to placate its wrath: hence the monstrous representation of the gods without number in the religions of the East, which we still see today in the pagan temples of India and China. In the evolved religions the representations of the divinity take on by preference a beneficent and aesthetic aspect, while the origin of evil is referred back to nemesis and to the necessity (ἀνάγνη) of fate (εἰμαρμένη) to which, beginning with Zeus, the gods themselves are subject. But even in the Greco-Roman religion the fragmentation of the divinity invades all the activities of nature and of man down to the most radical particulars (cf. St. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, VII): it is in this degeneration of religions that we must see the stimulus that aroused philosophical reflection and with it at one and the same time a. and the need for a single absolute principle of being.

Among the Jewish people, conscious of possessing in the prophetic magisterium and in the sacred books the truth of the one true God, a. is a supreme act of «folly» (Ps. 14, 1; 53, 1 ff.) and idolatry the greatest sin: a conception taken up again by St. Paul, who sees in the nefarious vices of paganism God's punishment for the sin of idolatry (Rom. 1, 18) and reminds the new converts that formerly they were «without hope and without God (ἔθεσι) in this world» (Eph. 2, 12) and that the Gentiles do not know God (τὰ ἔθνη τὰ μὴ εἰδότα τὸν θεόν; I Thess. 4, 6). Men, however, even in paganism could have risen to God from the creatures in which he had manifested himself, and therefore the sin of idolatry was inexcusable (Rom. 1, 19-20). At the Areopagus (Act. 17, 22-28; cf. 14, 16) the Apostle discovers that a deep aspiration toward the one true God is inherent in the cult of the «unknown God». In Sacred Scripture and from the strictly theological point of view — what in the rest is also confirmed by metaphysical reflection — there is no distinction between a. and idolatrous polytheism: at most a distinction exists between them from the psychological point of view, which, however, in the development of consciousness must disappear.

But even in the Greco-Roman world the greatest crime was that of impiety (ἀσέβεια), which had been the object of severe legislation, especially in Greece, and could entail the death penalty itself. To determine the precise meaning of this offense one may refer to Varro's threefold division of the gods, recalled by St. Augustine (De Civ. Dei, VI, 5): fabulous or mythical, natural or philosophical, and civil, that is, political. The first, the fruit of the imagination of the poet-theologians, was the heritage of the uncultured populace; the third, on the other hand, represented the religion of the State, so that the recognition of its divinities and of their official cult represented the foundation of civil life itself and the first duty of the citizen. «Atheist» was therefore anyone who had contradicted belief in them or had refused to acknowledge their cult, which in ancient society was the only obligatory one. Whoever abounded in belief in and cult of the mythical gods, sowing the world with beneficent and maleficent divinities, was called «superstitious» (δεσίδαμων) with a sense of excess, but not of contempt. The natural religion of the philosophers, founded on the exigency of a single principle and of its transcendence, had a function of critical resolution of the one and the other, especially in those thinkers who did not wish to compromise with vulgar beliefs or with the interests of politics. These philosophers represented, with the energetic affirmation of the transcendence and unity of the divinity, the summit reached by human wisdom outside Revelation, so that St. Augustine could write of these philosophers: «Quidam eorum quaedam magna, quantum divinitus adiuti sunt, invenerunt...» and comes to acknowledge that «si philosophi aliquid invenerunt, quod agendae bonae vitae beataeque adipiscendae satis esse possit; quanto iustus talibus divini honores decernentur?» (De Civ. Dei, II, 7; CSEL, 40, 1, p. 67). But for the superstitious vulgar and for the political schemers they were «atheists»; not rarely struck by the accusation of a., in order to save their lives they had to emigrate (Anaxagoras, Protagoras, Aristotle); it is well known that Socrates, having refused to flee, faced death, trusting in his God, as Plato (Apology) and Xenophon have handed down.

Plato himself in the Laws (X, 885, b ff.) makes known to us a whole legislation on the matter that strikes all those who deny the existence of the gods, providence and the vengeance they take on transgressors of the laws of the State. Whether political preoccupations were at stake or whether it was a religion in the service of politics is inferred from the fact that the ἄθεσι fell under the process of ἀσέβεια not for their personal opinions or doctrines, but only when they propagandized them or publicly outraged the gods of the official religion (Leg., I, 887 c-f). The impiety of the «universal philosophers» consisted in tearing from religion the foundation of the local traditions to which the «city» owed both its history and its fortunes, because therefore those doctrines undermined the foundations of civil justice (Leg., I, 890 a-e). Hence Derenne rightly observes (after Drachman) that, even beneath the political background, it was still religion and the conception of religion that was called into question in the process of ἀσέβεια (Le procès d'impieté..., Liège-Paris 1930, p. 261); but one must also add that it was above all the reaction of philosophy that in the classical age freed man from the narrow confines of his national and racial interests and gave him the whole οἰκουμένη as his homeland, in some way preparing men for the Christian concept of the transcendence of God and of universal brotherhood.

Many lists of "atheists" have been handed down to us: in that of Sextus Empiricus, who distinguishes them from philosophers both theistic and sceptical, there appear Euhemerus, Diagoras of Melos, Prodicus of Ceos, Theodore of Cyrene (called by antonomasia ἄθεος; Cicero, De nat. Deorum, I, 42), Critias, Protagoras, Epicurus... (Adv. Phys., IX, 50 ff.); to these Fabricius adds (from Lysippus Epirota) many others such as Arcagoras, Anaximander, Apolophanes, Aristagoras of Melos, Bion of Borysthenes, Callimachus, Carneades, Gorgias, Hippias of Elis, Leucippus, etc.; certainly Diogenes of Apollonia, Critias, Hippo of Rhegium, and Xenophanes are also to be mentioned. But of most of them it must be said, as Drachman has proved (op. cit., p. 19), that their denial bore not so much on God as on the multiplicity of the gods and on the superstitions of the cult. Nevertheless it appears that "atheists" in the strict sense were not lacking among them (Democritus, Theodore of Cyrene, Protagoras...). Nestle (op. cit., p. 80) recalls Cinesias of Miletus (cf. Plato, Gorgias, 501 e), through whose work a group of impious men (κακοδαιμονισταί) had been formed in Athens who gathered at the new moon to amuse themselves "in mocking the gods and our customs." In Sextus's list too, radical "atheists" appear not to be lacking. In Epicurus's position concerning external respect for the gods, which today is treated by philologists with a certain favour (J. Festugiere, C. Diano); Sextus, in Epicurus's outward observance of the official religion, sees a practical expedient for concealing atheism, because πρὸς τὴν φύσιν τῶν πραγμάτων οὐδαμῶς [εἶναι τοὺς θεοὺς] (cf. also Cicero: "...Epicurum, ne in offensionem Atheniensium caderet, verbis reliquisse deos, re sustulisse" [De nat. Deorum, I, 30]).

In all this matter Sparta and Rome showed themselves more tolerant than Athens, contenting themselves with the external act of worship of the official divinities of the State, without concerning themselves with the opinions of individuals and with the disputes on the subject among philosophers. It was with the Christians that the problem of atheism was raised in Rome, and it had its juridical reality in the decrees that ordered the persecutions.

2. Already in the Hellenistic period, with the fall of the local republics, belief in the native divinities had vanished from the Greek soul, since they had shown themselves incapable of defending the homeland of which they constituted the palladium. Hellenism, however, had left intact the Greek-Roman principle of religion, which always remained a matter of State and a national characteristic: it had only lost the influence on life that the ancient religion had, so that in practice, as we gather from writers from the Augustan age onward, atheism was no longer restricted to the "élite" of philosophers but had passed into the masses who immersed themselves in materialism. With Christianity every ambiguity became impossible: inasmuch as it took up Hebrew monotheism, every form of idolatry was rejected; inasmuch as it taught Redemption in Christ from sin, it demanded asceticism and the renewal of the whole of life, for which the murky — when they were not impious and infamous — practices of the various "mysteries" brought to Rome from Greece and the East could not suffice. When therefore Tacitus indicates the motive of the first persecution under Nero, "haud proinde in crimine incendii quam odio generis humani" (Ann., XV, 44, 3), he expresses the impression that the new religion made even on the minds of the best: namely the abandonment of a whole form of civilization that had brought Rome to empire. Under a similar impression, but with reference to the other sense (that of the mystic "catharsis"), is Apuleius when, making the apology of the mysteries of Isis, he speaks of a woman who, beyond the vices that stain her: "spretis ac calcatis divinis numinibus in vicem certae religionis mentita sacrilega superstitionem dei quem predicant unicum confictis observationibus vacuis" (Metamorph., 9, 4) deceived all men — the last clause seems to show the clear distinction of Christianity from Judaism, which Tacitus still confused. For Apuleius, therefore, the new religion stripped man of the enchantment of the regenerative forces and of the beauties of nature that the pagan religions and cults sanctioned and celebrated. To the convinced pagan, therefore, the Christians must have appeared the worst "atheists."

Except that the Christians, beginning with the Apostolic Fathers and the apologists, have returned the accusation of atheism and energetically retorted the explicit epithet of ἄθεοι upon their adversaries (St. Ignatius, Trall., 3, 2; St. Polycarp, Martyr., chap. 9; Clement of Alexandria, Protrept., II, 23-24). Pagan polytheism is atheism according to Origen (πολύθεοι ὄντες καὶ ἄθεοι; In Ps., 65, 12) and is placed on the same level as "superstition" (δεισιδαιμονία) as a work of the devil (Clement of Alexandria, Protrept., I, 18, 22; II, 13, 5; Gregory of Nazianzus, Or., 25; PG 35, 1220 A), and is branded as ἀθέστης. While Christians, since they worship the one true God, are not atheists: so say the apologists (St. Justin, Ap., I, 5: who glories in being ἄθεος with respect to the pagan gods; cf. Lactantius, De ira Dei, IX, 2; Clement of Alexandria, Strom., VII, 9, 54, 3: οὐκ ἄρα ἄθεος ὁ χριστιανός).

The Jews themselves are called ἄθεοι by St. Gregory of Nazianzus (Or., 2, 37; PG 35, 444) and lumped together with polytheism. The Chaldeans are called atheists by the Fathers (Hippolytus, In Dan., II, 31, 3), as are the Persians, and among the atheist philosophers the first place is held by Epicurus, who by Clement of Alexandria is called ἀθέστητος κατάργων (Protrept., II, 3, 10). The same author, with respect to the pagans, speaks of a double ἀθέστης, that of not knowing the true God (τὸν ὄντος ὄντα), the other of calling gods what is not

(ibid., II, 23, 1). Proclus too speaks of a double ἀθέστης, one of those who deny the existence of the gods, the other of those who deny their providence (ὅσοι τὴν πρόνοιαν ἄρβην ἀνατρέπουσι θεοὺς εἶναι διδόντες; In Plat. Timaeum, ed. E. Diehl, I, 207, 26 ff).

The accusation of atheism, therefore, in the first centuries of the Christian era did not refer so much to the absolute denial of divinity, which has always been rare, as to the perversion (supposed by each of the contending parties of its antagonist) of the concept of God, which in the controversy then amounted to denial. This is so evident that the Fathers treat heretics outright as ἄθεοι: the Arians are called such by St. Maximus the Confessor (Acta: PG 90, 144), and so are the Manichaeans (St. Athanasius, Or. I contra Arianos: PG 26, 124; St. Gregory of Nyssa, Ep. can.: PG 45, 225 C; Cod. Iustin., I, 5, 12, 3). Marcion is called τὸ τῆς ἀθεώτητος στόμα by St. Cyril of Jerusalem (Catech., 6, 16) and ἀθεώτατος par excellence (ibid., 16, 3, 7). Likewise Eunomius is called the author of τῆς ἀθεώτητος αἱρέσεως (Synes. Epist., V) and the deniers of the Holy Spirit (οἱ μὴ δεξάμενοι τὸν Παράκλητον) are called "atheists." And already by St. Ignatius M. the docetists are called ἄθεοι καὶ ἀπίστοι (Trall., 10), and by Clement of Alexandria pagan mythology is wholesale branded as μύθων ἀθέων (Protrept., II, 11, 1).

This brief reference to texts shows, in the writers who use the term ἄθεος, not so much a simple theoretical evaluation in the religious field as, together with it and as its complement, a condemnation of a moral order; and it was a meaning more ethical than dogmatic that the term was bound to evoke both in the classical and in the patristic era. We have confirmation of this in a sentence of Porphyry, epigone of a dying paganism, according to whom "every frivolous life is full of servitude and irreligion and is therefore atheistic (ἄθεος) and without justice (ἄδικος), because in it the spirit is full of irreligion and therefore also of injustice (ἄδικας)": Sent., XL, ed. Mommert, 39, 6.

And it is on this line that Greek and patristic thought invites us to envisage the true essence of atheism. If, first of all, atheism means the direct denial of God, it also consists — and above all — in the admission of a notion of God that annuls him as God and debases him before his majesty. This is the judgment passed by the greatest Greek philosophers on the divinities of popular and state mythology, and such too, by the law of contraries, is their condemnation of Christianity. In the same way — by a necessary retaliation — the Christian doctors, guided by Holy Scripture, judged paganism, and they, strange as it may seem, rightly included heretics as well in the condemnation of atheism. For the concept of God must be carried to its ultimate consequence: in order not to be called atheists, it is not enough to affirm the existence of the "divine" or of the absolute; one must think of it as a subsistent and transcendent person, and at the same time as solicitous for the world and for our miseries. Given, moreover, the fact that God has spoken to man directly (Revelation), his word must be accepted integrally: every "selection" (αἱρέσεις) that man wishes to make is a true sacrilege (ἀθέστης), a true impiety (ἀθεία); it is unquestionably a denial of God, who does not give himself in parts, but always and only integrally, especially when his fullness gives itself to man "unfolded" in the gift of the highest communication, as in Christianity. Today, therefore, whoever does not accept Revelation integrally rejects God as such, because it is only as revealing himself that he is, today, for man.

3. In the light of this criterion the greatest part

of modern philosophy falls under the accusation of atheism, which, however, takes on multiple and new forms compared with earlier epochs. In the Middle Ages the history of atheism is indistinguishable from that of heresies and has no particular face. In the modern age the principal forces that stimulated and sustained the constitution of atheism can be reduced to three: the revival of the forms of ancient philosophy (especially Stoic, Skeptic and Epicurean), the Reformation, and especially the pantheism of the transcendental philosophies. Christian theism is still solid in Descartes and Malebranche; the true position of Locke is doubted, while Bacon's defense is luminous: "... Leves gustus in philosophia movere fortasse ad atheismum sed pleniores haustus ad religionem reducere". (De augmentis scientiarum, in Works, ed. Ellis-Spedding, I, London 1879, p. 436; cf. Medit. sacrae: De atheismo, VII, p. 239 ff.; Essays, ed. Whately, Boston 1871, p. 155 ff.).

There is, first of all, the open and confessed atheism of the materialist and skeptical philosophies, which arose in the Renaissance and reached their greatest proportions in the 16th-18th centuries: to it belong English Deism, the atheists and libertines of France (the "esprits forts") in the 17th century in the time of Descartes, when Fr. Mersenne wrote that in Paris alone there were 50,000 atheists, the Enlightenment of France and Germany (Frederick II of Prussia), the materialism which, with the Encyclopedists, prepared the French Revolution (La Mettrie, d'Holbach and later Cabanis) and the German materialism of the 19th century (Feuerbach, Haeckel, Moleschott, Büchner, Czolbe...). The atheism of Marx's dialectical materialism and of the Marxist direction of "strict observance" (Lenin, Stalin) stands as a profession of faith and the foundation of the new society founded on the Fourth Estate. Marx, following Feuerbach, applied indiscriminately to the Christian religion the criticism made by Democritus and Epicurus of the mythological religion of antiquity: that faith in beings superior to the world is generated in part by an excess of imagination, and in part, and especially, by a utopian longing to escape from the sufferings of earthly life. Old and new Marxist atheism has found an ally, on which it greatly counts, in Darwinian biological evolutionism, regarded as the definitive explanation of the origin of man.

Another Renaissance source of modern atheism, set in order with extreme energy already by Campanella in the Atheismus triumphatus (Paris 1636, but composed in 1607 in Rome; cf. especially the appendix, p. 226 ff.), is Machiavelli, whose amoral and atheistic political conception soon inspired a great part of European politics: moreover, the most insistent accusation made today against Bolshevism, or political Marxism, is precisely that of Machiavellianism.

The most speculative tendency of atheism is undoubtedly the one that goes back to pantheism, which can be divided into two periods: one whose supreme representatives are Bruno and Spinoza, the other which takes up Spinoza within the new concept of truth and reality as subjectivity, inaugurated by Kant and brought to completion precisely in the transcendental philosophies. For Fichte God is reduced to the moral order of the world, for Schelling instead (under the influence of Bruno) to the absolute of nature, for Hegel to the absolute spirit (Geist) that realizes itself in universal history (Weltgeschichte). For Fichte it suffices to recall the Atheismusstreit (1798), in which he was involved for having published in his journal an article by the Kantian Forberg of decidedly atheistic content, and for not having clarified his own position on the matter in a satisfactory way. The Spinozism of Schelling (and not only of the "first" Schelling, the philosopher) was immediately noticed with triumphant joy by Heine in 1834 with the following words: "The doctrine of Spinoza and the Naturphilosophie of Schelling in his best period are substantially one and the same thing" (Deutschland, I). It is enough, moreover, to run through the series of theorems with which, for example, the Philosophie der Kunst (1801) opens, to realize that the great model of Spinoza's Ethica inspires both the form and the content.

On the radical atheism of Spinoza the affirmative judgment of his contemporaries has been taken up concordantly by modern historians of materialism (Fr. A. Lange) and of atheism (Fr. Mauthner, Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte, II, Stuttgart and Berlin 1922-23, sec. XI, p. 346, note), and by the German translator (and editor) of Spinoza, Karl Gebhardt (pref. to the Kurze Abhandlung von Gott, dem Menschen und seinem Glück [Philos. Bibl., 91], Leipzig 1922, p. XVII ff.). The most famous accusation of atheism against Spinoza's thought was advanced by Jacobi in his controversy with Mendelssohn, especially in the Baylage which summarizes the essence of Spinozism in 44 propositions and then advances some doctrinal assessments, the first of which is: "Spinosismus ist Atheismus" (Werke, IV, 1, p. 216). The fundamental argument for a "reduction" of Spinoza's pantheism to atheism is given by the affirmation of the "uniqueness of substance" (Ethica, part 1, prop. 5) and of the cause (ibid., prop. 6) which is identified with God (ibid., prop. 14), and by the affirmation of the "immanence" of substance in its modes, cogitatio and extensio (ibid., propp. 11, 18; ibid. part 5, prop. 30). Therefore Spinoza can say: "Deus sive natura..." and nevertheless maintain the impossibility of atheism: "Nemo potest Deum odio habere" (ibid., part 5, prop. 18). Because in the "metaphysics of identity" there can be no contrast.

Hegel deliberately took upon himself the task of defending Spinoza from Jacobi's accusation. Spinoza, for Hegel, was able to take up again the intuition of the ἐν of the Eleatics and give it its own metaphysical content, that is, «that unity (of opposites) which is the spirit within itself», whereby in philosophy «the Spinozistic being is the essential beginning of philosophizing» (Gesch. d. Philos., III, 2; Italian trans., Florence 1943, p. 109 ff.). Atheism, Hegel observes, is to affirm that God «is not»; Spinoza, on the contrary, affirms the exact opposite, saying that only God truly is and that what is finite, the world, is not: therefore one should speak not of atheism but rather of acosmism: not only does he not deny God, but if anything in him «there is too much of God» (cf. op. cit., p. 135 ff.; v. Encyclopedia, § 50 and the important § 573). Spinoza's merit, on the other hand, lies in having shown that the finite is the unessential and the apparent which must be removed, and thus his substance, like Schelling's absolute afterward, constituted the transitional stages toward the conception of the «True as the whole», which is necessarily «Result» (Philos. der Religion, ed. Lason, XII; Phil. Bibl., LIX, 168 ff.). Hegel's principal argument for defending Spinoza from the accusation of atheism is the fact that he overcame and negated the world of the finite in the uniqueness of substance and that therefore his system can well be called, indeed must be called, Monotheism (op. cit., ed. cit., 197 note: Hegel's italics). Spinoza's defect, on the other hand, was to have stopped at a concept of the absolute as substance «unique, rigid, immobile»; in having left attributes and modes, movement and will, distinct from one another, a distinction of the intellect: in not having reached the absolute as a self-unfolding «process» (op. cit., XIV, 64, 134).

Once, however, the absolute as «process» has been reached — as Hegel succeeded in doing — not only does the accusation of atheism made against pure philosophy fall away, but also the more frequent one of pantheism: because in such a conception the empirical individualities, whether material or of immediate consciousness, do not enter into the absolute at all but belong to the phenomena of immediacy and therefore remain outside the being of truth. And Hegel in the 3rd ed. of the Encyclopedia consoled himself because the accusation of atheism had become rare, chiefly because by then the content and the existence concerning religion had been reduced to a minimum (Encyclopedia, § 71, note). What could also have been true in the Protestant Germany of the nineteenth century, absorbed in politics and commerce, but almost ignorant of the Gospel, as Kierkegaard often observes in his critique of Protestantism. Hegel's atheism, on the other hand, was unmasked and denounced in a practical and convincing form by Feuerbach (Das Wesen des Christenthums, Einleitung). To Feuerbach, a confessed atheist, we owe the explicit accusation: «Protestantism denied God in himself, or God as God» (Prinzipien d. Philos. d. Zukunft, § 3; Italian trans., Turin 1946, p. 71).

Just as the transcendent philosophers developed the atheism implicit in the agnosticism of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, so Schopenhauer drew an atheistic position from the primacy attributed by Kant to practical reason for the affirmation of the transcendent. Up to Kant the dilemma remained: either materialism (dominion of blind chance) or theism (ordering intelligence): after Kant's critique of the proofs of God's existence, the whole supposed reality of the world is reduced to phenomenon, where «order» is therefore reduced to appearance and depends on the a priori forms of the intellect (Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie, ed. Griesbach, I, 649, note). God therefore can never be an «object» of human knowledge, and for Schopenhauer Kantianism constituted «the most serious attack» against theism (Satz vom Grunde, ed. cit., III, 145). Moreover, Schopenhauer further observes, there is no identity at all between religion and theism: Buddhism, like Taoism and Confucianism, are atheistic, and yet one cannot deny that they are religions. Religion is a generic term of which theism as well as atheism are subspecies. And attacking Hegel's hypocrisy (without naming him), Schopenhauer maintains that pantheism is a concept that destroys itself, because it presupposes (as its starting point) the concept of a God distinct from the world and as the essential correlate of the same. If, on the contrary, it is the world that takes on its task, then «pantheism is nothing but a euphemism to cover atheism», where atheism can in truth claim the «ius primi occupantis» (Erläut. z. Kant. Philosophie, ed. cit., IV, 138). Schopenhauer's atheism, on the other hand, is expressed without illusions and hypocrisies, once the ultimate ground of being and the end toward which it tends is constituted by negativity.

From Schopenhauer derives by direct transmission the atheism of the unconscious of Ed. von Hartmann and especially that of the «will to power» of Nietzsche: the cry of Zarathustra «God is dead» (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pref., 2; cf. The Gay Science, III, 125). Nietzsche is an epigone and does no more than note how modern philosophy, by giving primacy and precedence to subjectivity, had to empty itself of God, to consider him non-being, according to the expression of G. Rensi (Apologia dell'a., Rome 1925, p. 13 and passim).

Contemporary left-wing Existentialism also flows into atheism: an explicit and confessed atheism in the relativist phenomenism of N. Abbagnano and of the Frenchmen J.-P. Sartre and A. Camus. «The atheistic existentialism which I represent is more coherent; it declares that if God does not exist there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, and that this being is man. There is therefore no human nature because there is no God to conceive it...: man is nothing other than what he makes of himself» (J.-P. Sartre, L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, Paris 1946, p. 21 ff.). Atheism is implicit in the two German masters Jaspers, for whom God is a limit-concept, and Heidegger, who by placing the «ground» in the «nothing» could not encounter the positive and subsistent absolute which is the principle of theism. The absolute, to which Heidegger's last writings allude, does not yet seem to satisfy any of the attributes of transcendence and personality.

Of expressly atheistic orientation is the philosophy of Hans Vaihinger of the «as if» (Als-ob), which expressly links itself to the interpretation that the atheist Forberg gave of Kant: according to Vaihinger, for Kant the idea of God is a «Fiktion» of reason (Die Philosophie des «Als ob», 6th ed., Berlin 1922, p. 750, note). Atheistic, despite certain appearances of a return to traditional ontology, is the philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann (cf. especially the Ethik): the judgment of existence remains within the sphere of «modality» and affects only the entities of experience.

Italian neo-idealism, guided along different methodological paths by B. Croce and G. Gentile, remained loyal to the atheism of the Hegelian conception (cf. G. Gentile, La mia religione, Florence 1943), fixed on the unique subject and therefore on the real identity of subject and object and of I and God. A typical example may be found in G. Calogero, according to whom God could exist on condition «that he not be the totality and that he not be omniscient and not be omnipotent... and not be the infinite... and not be a person» (cf. Etica, giuridica e politica, Turin 1946, pp. 121, 244 ff.). Hegel's conception still had a residue of the eminence of the divine being, of which there is no longer any trace in his epigones. Almost the only exception is the frank theistic purpose of B. Varisco (Dall'uomo a Dio, Padua 1939), who directed his most mature activity to breaking the chains of subjectivist atheism, in order to establish the consistency of the individual and the authentic transcendence of God.

III. DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH

Atheism, whatever mask conceals it, is condemned by the natural law itself. Wisely, therefore, the Church, rather than turning against atheism in the abstract, has firmly rejected and condemned all philosophical systems that entail the denial of the possibility of knowing God, as well as those that corrupt the true concept of God: a pure Spirit, the first creative cause, free, personal, provident and transcendent. The organic and complete position taken with respect to atheism, which underlies the greater part of the forms of modern thought or to which they necessarily arrive, is found in the Vatican Council. The Constitutio dogmatica de Fide catholica (24 April 1870) devotes ch. 1 (De Deo rerum omnium creatore) to the concept of God and has five canons condemning the most conspicuous errors: the 1st strikes with anathema all who deny the existence of a single God "creator and lord of all things, visible and invisible"; can. 2 against absolute materialism; can. 3 against pantheism in general; can. 4 against the special forms of pantheism (emanatist, evolutionist, idealist); can. 5 against those who do not admit the genuine concept of creation and in particular against the followers of Günther and Hermes (Denz-U, nn. 1801-1805). In ch. 2 (De revelatione) are condemned all who deny the knowability of God from natural effects, together with the deists and the progressists who reject divine revelation (nn. 1086-1809). The modernists are explicitly accused and condemned of atheism by Pascendi (n. 2073); in their doctrine, says the encyclical, atheism drips from every part: "...quam multiplici itinere doctrina modernistarum ad atheismum trahat et ad religionem omnem abolendam" (n. 2109). But all the positions taken by the Church against agnosticism, indifferentism, naturalism, rationalism, liberalism, secret societies and social communism, especially Marxist, through the Pontiffs of this last century, are to be regarded as condemnations of atheism (cf. Denz-U, nn. 1613 ff., 1677-1688 ff., 1701 ff. [Syllabus Pii IX], 1857, 1885). Pius XI in the encyclical against communism declared that "in such a doctrine there is no place for the idea of God, there is no difference between spirit and matter, nor between soul and body" (AAS, 29 [1937], p. 70).

In its judgments on atheism the Church goes to the essence of systems and condemns all those that do not safeguard in its complete integrity the concept of God, because God can be only in one way and because man who lives after the fulfillment of Revelation in Jesus Christ and is in a position to know it, has the obligation to know and accept all that God has made known to man about his nature and his relations with the world and with man. Therefore, although the two orders of nature and grace remain distinct, for man after the coming of Christianity there is only one true concept of God, which consists of two moments, namely of reason and of Revelation. Except that the moment of reason itself cannot be satisfied with any concept of God, nor even with any form of monotheism, but must settle on that which is in harmony with the content of Revelation. For this reason the simple admission or affirmation of a God may not suffice and may arouse suspicion of atheism, when namely one then has such a concept of God as compromises his nature or one of his attributes. To use Kierkegaard's terminology, one may say that as regards the concept of God the "how" coincides with the "what," and so it always is when it is a question of the ultimate determination of any nature and essence.

Fr. Mauthner, an atheist and modern historian of atheism, affirms that "contemporary literature is for the most part atheistic and that, if the sciences of the spirit (Geisteswissenschaften) can still hypocritically preserve some link with theology, the natural sciences stand very far from the Church, and poetry in general is atheistic even where it seeks to revive the dead symbols of theism" (I, pref., p. vi). If one of the factors most responsible for contemporary atheism has undoubtedly been the subjectivism of modern philosophy, one must go further back (Campanella had written: "Omnes haereses ad Atheismum terminantur": Atheismus triumphatus, pref.), to the subjectivism of the Protestant Reformation; Pascendi also alludes to this: "Equidem protestantium error primus hac via gradum iecit" (Denz-U, n. 2109). The religious individualism of the Reformation, as scholars of modern thought of every tendency agree, provided the basis and was the stimulus of speculative subjectivism; it is not surprising therefore that Hegel felt himself and proclaimed himself an authentic Lutheran and a defender of the "true" concept of Revelation and Incarnation.

The Europe of the twentieth century has seen the resurgence of the So-

Societies for atheism: in Germany the "Bund der Atheisten" (1920) of Dr. Zepler, in the United States of America the "American Association for Advancement of Atheism." The most complete organization and the most radical active form atheism has obtained in Russia through the work of Bolshevik Marxism, in which the "élite" of activist elements, both within and abroad, forms the organization of the "godless." The tactic here is a direct consequence of the fundamental idea that comes from Marx himself, according to whom in historical materialism the very controversy of theism and atheism is superseded: granted that all that man is is what he becomes and what he becomes for society; one must arrive at performing a work of absenteeship, of liquidation of the problem itself (cf. the fragment Filosofia e economia politica of 1844: Opere, German ed., III, 125). Therefore the direction of the so-called "god-builders" (Gorki) was rigidly crushed by Lenin. The latter traced for the propaganda of atheism a tactical line of conduct that must know how to camouflage itself according to the diversity of environments. Although between communism and atheism the solidarity is essential, on practical ground and in the period of the conquest of power, the propaganda of atheism according to Lenin must not be done in the abstract by directly combating religious faith, but rather by emptying it little by little (and through the intensification of the "class struggle") of its foundations, that is, by bringing to the consciousness of the masses that belief in God is a principal means of exploitation on the part of the holders of command and of capital (N. Lenin, L'atteggiamento del partito operaio rispetto alla religione, 1909, in M. Raphaël, Zur Erkenntnistheorie der konkreten Dialektik, Paris 1934; reproduced in the appendix to the French trans. N.R.F., Paris n.d., p. 238 f.).

The characteristic of contemporary atheism (outside of communism) is not so much and above all that of tracing back to particular idealist and materialist philosophies or of pressing the progress of science and technology, but rather a phenomenon of spiritual weariness and dilettantism that depends on an ever more fatalistic conception of human events. This mentality is favored at one and the same time by the phase of dissolution of philosophy and by the precariousness of existence which today no longer allows either individuals or nations the security of a civil and political liberty in the traditional sense. And yet, by the inexhaustible capacity for recovery that the spirit has, this tragedy of our earthly situation can be or become the beneficent stimulus that drives man to seek at once, beyond time and every finite claim, the ultimate foundation of his being in the true God, who is not only the abstract Absolute of the philosophers, but the living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and who at the appointed time manifested himself in Christ.

IV. LA MORALE «ATEA»

It is again to modern philosophy that responsibility can be traced for the patronage in the contemporary world of «lay» — that is, atheistic — morality, which excludes any relation between ethics and religion. Here too the most natural step was taken by Kant with the «categorical imperative», which is valid in and of itself and arises a priori within the pure sphere of man as a necessary «form» of his acting. The human act is thus withdrawn not only from the stimuli of individual satisfaction and practical interest, but also from any relation with God and with the future life: only in this way could the categorical imperative secure itself, in its universality for every rational nature, against every empirical, actual volition (W. Windelband, *Einleitung in die Philosophie**, Tübingen 1920, p. 281). The moral a[theism] implicit in Kant becomes an exigency in Hegel, for whom «moral regard» belongs to empirical individuality and vanishes with it; because the whole of spirit, which has its realization in the State, has no other law than that of its own realization. Systematic moral atheism is proclaimed by another epigone of idealism, Stirner, with «The Unique One»; and above all, as is well known, by Nietzsche in the theory of the Übermensch who stands «beyond good and evil» and knows neither law nor scruples, having as his only law his «will to power» (Wille zur Macht), with which he can reduce to a pulp the men of the «herd» (cf. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Ital. trans., Turin 1921, pp. 56, 163 ff.). And although Nietzsche harbored a notable antipathy for Hegel's idealism, the fact remains that twentieth-century Europe has so far been under the combined influence of both ideologies: the Hegelian totalitarianism of the State (or theory of the «ethical State») and the Nietzschean Führermythus, which was able to concentrate that totalitarianism in its own arbitrariness and to attempt the definitive replacement of all morality and religion (cf. H. Pfeil, Der Mensch im Denken der Zeit, Paderborn 1938, p. 44 ff. for Nietzsche; p. 58 ff. for a courageous critique of Nazism).

But the connection, affirmed by Christian philosophy, of ethics and religion is already present in the notion of both, because it is prior to the very nature of man, in whose conscience the one and the other are gathered and set down their respective duties. As Troeltsch says, «atheistic ethics — which annuls all Christian values — gives the impression of a certain melancholy prudence», because «now with it the moral world becomes much more difficult and obscure», something that Nietzsche himself seems to have recognized (E. Troeltsch, Atheistische Ethik und Grundproblem der Ethik, in Gesam. Schr., II, 1913, p. 537 ff.). But against «godless» ethics there has been an energetic reaction from the very camp of idealism, invoking not an abstract, impersonal God, but the «Father» of whom man is a creature and whose image he bears engraved within him, as H. Cohen expressly declares (Die Ethik des reinen Willens, Berlin 1921, p. 407). The same Master of Marburg rightly observes that with the entry of the idea of God into ethics, the principle of ethics is not changed at all. Thus the danger of ethics collapsing into religion is excluded (cf. the introduction with postscript to the 7th ed. of F. A. Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus, n.d., p. 519 ff.).

Catholic ethics too recognizes that man can have a «certain knowledge» of his duties even without knowledge of the true God, and in this the moderate Protestant E. Brunner also agrees (Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, Zurich 1939, p. 16). But the «complete» knowledge of one's duties, and with it the adequate «situation» of the human act, demands knowledge of the ultimate end of these acts and of the first principle of those duties, which is God. In this concrete sense of human existence, moral action presents itself as a preamble and at the same time as a consequence with respect to the authentic religious moment: because there is no true religiosity that does not entail in man a moral obligation, and on the other hand moral obligation in its integral unfolding entails factors and values (the good and the bad conscience, remorse, the despair of the demonic and the heroism of sanctity...), which absolutely demand a theological foundation (cf. Th. Steinbüchel, Die philosophische Grundlegung der Katholischen Sittenlehre, Düsseldorf 1938, p. 221 ff.). An atheistic morality is therefore a «contradictio in adiecto», because it is inevitable, as Dostoevsky had clearly seen (especially in The Demons) and as Nietzsche's epigones have shown (D'Annunzio, National Socialism, etc.), that when one refuses to acknowledge God, one cannot preserve even the natural values of man but falls of necessity into the subhuman and into the systematic practice of private and political violence. Atheistic morality too is the victim of the modern prejudice of man's self-sufficiency and does not accept the paradox perceived even by the best spirits of classical civilization before Christ: that man, precisely in order to remain man, must be «more than man», that is, must acknowledge the divinity and accept its laws. That paradox has its ineffable counterpart in Christianity, where with the Incarnation God, in order to save man, became (in St. Paul's words) less than God, so that even the «definitive» answer to the demand of morality man finds in Revelation.

BIBLI: Letteratum antica sull'a., in A. Franck, s. v. in Dict. de sciences philos. (1883), p. 114 b ff., and in R. Flint, Antitheistic Theories, Edinburgh and London 1880, no. 4, p. 456 ff. — The overall history of atheism was undertaken by an atheist: Fritz Mauthner, Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande, 4 vols., Stuttgart and Berlin 1922-23; a unique work of synthesis, but one that is by now superseded in many points and that, both for its criterion of compilation and for its judgments and evaluations, demands the most substantial reservations: it will at least be useful to keep before one's eyes the entire plan of the work (I: Einleitung, Greco-Roman antiquity). Book I: Teufelsfurcht und Aufklärung im sogenannten Mittelalter (up to and including the Reformation). Book II: Entdeckung der Natur und des Menschen, Luchende Zweifler; Netherlands, England. Book III: Aufklärung in Frankreich und in Deutschland: Die grosse Revolution. Book IV: Die letzten 100 Jahre. Reaktion, Materialismus, Gottlose Mystik. — A. B. Drachman, Atheism in Pagan Antiquity, London 1922 — Position of radical scientistic atheism: F. Le Dantec, L'Athéisme, Italian trans., Milan n.d.; G. Rensi, Apologia dell'a., Rome 1925; E. Derenne, Le procès d'impieté intenté aux philosophes à Athènes au Vᵉ et au IVᵉ siècle avant J. Christ, Liège-Paris 1930 — On materialist atheism: Fr. A. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 2 vols., Italian trans., Milan 1932; A. J. Festugière, L'idéal religieux des Grecs et l'Évangile, Paris 1935; id., Épicure et ses dieux, ibid. 1946; W. Nestle, Griechische Religiosität vom Zeitalter des Perikles bis auf Aristoteles (Sammlung Göschen 1906), Berlin 1933; A. Harnack, Der Vorwurf des Atheismus in den drei ersten Jahrhundert, in Texte und Untersuchungen, XIII, 1, Leipzig 1905; O. Gigon, Der Ursprung der griechischen Philosophie von Hesiod bis Parmenides, Basel 1945; W. Jaeger, The Theology of the early Greek Philosophers, Oxford 1948. — On the "Atheismusstreit" cf.: Fr. Medicus, Einleitung zu J. G. Fichtes Werken, Leipzig 1911, pp. LXXXVII; H. Scholz, Die Religionsphilosophie des Als-ob, in Annalen der Philosophie, 1 (Leipzig 1910), pp. 37-112; E. Hirsch, Die idealistische Philosophie und das Christentum, Gütersloh 1926; X. Léon, Fichte et son temps, I, Paris 1922. On the most recent tendencies, cf. E. Franck, Philosophical Understanding and religious Truth, Oxford 1945; E. S. Brightman, A Philosophy of Religion, New York 1946; I. Hessen, Die Geistesströmungen der Gegenwart, Freiburg im Br. 1937; H. de Lubac, Le drame de l'Humanisme athée, Paris 1945; M. Carrouges, La mystique du surhomme, Paris 1948 (cf. part 1: L'eschatologie de l'athéisme mystique, and part 3: L'avenir de l'athéisme).

Abundant but muddled bibliography in P. Descogs, Praelectiones Theologiae naturalis, 2 vols., Paris 1932-35; Schema Theodiceae, ibid. 1941.

On Marxist atheism: G. Ledit, Le religioni e il comunismo, Milan 1937; G. Manacorda, Il Bolscevismo, Florence 1940; M. Cachin, Science et religion, ibid. 1946.

On existentialist atheism: M. Werner, Der religiöse Gehalt der Existenzphilosophie, Bern-Leipzig 1943; C. Fabro, Problemi dell'Esistenzialismo, Rome 1945; id., Il significato dell'Esistenzialismo, in the vol.: L'Esistenzialismo, Turin-Rome 1947.

Cornelio Fabro

V. ATHEISM AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES

Some scholars have maintained that humanity, before conceiving spirits and deities, passed through a primordial phase marked by the absence of any form of religion, and that some peoples still living today have remained at that stage. The foundations of this hypothesis were laid by the positivist Auguste Comte, who, holding that the development of humanity unfolded in three stages — theological, metaphysical and positive — supposes that the first moment of the theological stage must be characterized by a kind of worship of all things of nature, without these being conceived as pervaded by spirits, or otherwise animated, nor even personified. Despite the schematic character of the system and the complete lack of any documentation, its apriorism enjoyed singular fortune among sociologists and the supporters of progressivist evolutionism. Lubbock, then, broadened the scheme by placing before the aforementioned phase a further period, marked by the absolute absence of any religious sentiment, and therefore also of that indeterminate one postulated by Comte. And as proof he adduced a list of peoples who according to him were completely atheistic, that is, remained at the supposed primordial stage.

But soon eminent ethnologists and anthropologists rose up against such assertions, subjecting the famous list to severe and objective criticism. Thus, for example, the best-known ethnologist of the time, E. B. Tylor, in a study on the beginnings of culture; G. Roskoff, in an inquiry into the religion of the most barbarous peoples; the French anthropologist A. de Quatrefages, in another on the human species; the world-famous linguist Max Müller, a professor at Oxford, in a work that met with great success; and also, among many others, C. P. Tiele, the first holder of the chair of Comparative History of Religions at Leiden in Holland. And although the results of later investigations have not confirmed these authors' theories concerning the origin of religious thought and attitude (animism, naturalism, etc.), they were rightly unanimous in holding unfounded the proofs adduced by Lubbock in support of his supposed atheism of the primitive peoples he cited. And indeed the works from which he had drawn his material could not but lay themselves open to objections, inasmuch as they evidently revealed themselves to be patched together on the basis of too superficial and fleeting contacts with the natives, to the point of falling into frequent contradictions. All the more opportune, therefore, did the criticisms of the opponents appear, tending, more than anything else, to turn to account deeper and more serious research before pronouncing a judgment of such importance.

And rightly so: for when people were no longer content to have single individuals brought over on purpose, perhaps seized by force in the jungle, and to question them hastily even through an interpreter, and when they became convinced that one had to go and live, and for a long time, among the peoples to be studied, in order to observe there with trusting friendship the normal and spontaneous course of the whole of social and spiritual life, the conclusion leaped out clearly to the ethnologist that all the peoples listed by Lubbock too had a religion of their own. Thus, for example, until a few decades ago it was absolutely taken for granted that the Vedda of the island of Ceylon were atheists. Yet in the first decade of the century the Englishman C. G. Seligman, together with his wife, was able to ascertain, precisely among them, a belief in the future life, ancestor worship, and beliefs in greater and lesser spirits, among which Kanda-Yaka holds the first place and is the object of a cult consisting of prayers, first-fruit offerings and sacred dances. Other peoples long vaunted as a classic example of primitive atheism, and for which Lubbock relied on nothing less than the reports of the famous circumnavigator Cook and even of Darwin, were the tribes of the Fuegians: but behold, Father M. Gusinde, in four long exploratory sojourns recounted in three weighty volumes, made unequivocally clear even there the existence of faith and cult in a Supreme Being, and among two of the tribes many texts of fervent and meaningful prayers addressed to him were recorded.

Only one people remained from Lubbock's list, the Kubu of Sumatra, anthropologically and culturally ascribed among the most ancient peoples and held to be atheists: a viewpoint that even today some are slow to abandon. But wrongly so, because Father Schebesta, explorer of the Pygmies of central Africa and southwestern Asia, has become convinced that the Kubu are neither atheists nor of very remote origin. Anthropologically they belong to the same group as the Jakudn of the Malay Peninsula, and are to be considered Proto-Malays with a tendency to mesocephaly, or respectively to dolichocephaly, and not as Pygmies or Pygmoids with a tendency to brachycephaly. Their language is an archaic form of Malay; their economic life is not the initial one of nomadic hunters and gatherers, but the advanced one of sedentary farmers. They are by no means atheists, since their myths demonstrate beliefs in countless spirits of nature, among which there emerges, as among the Jakudn, a female divinity Nenek-Bondo, who at death causes the souls of the wicked (thieves, murderers and adulterers) to fall into a vat of boiling water in order to examine them until, purified, they can migrate to the beyond. All the spirits, moreover, are the object of veneration by means of prayers and generally blood sacrifices: the Kubu, furthermore, practice shamanism, in several respects similar to that of the Jakudn.

In this way Lubbock's list fell irreparably, and ethnology erased from its pages the category of primitive atheists. Yet between 1920 and 1930 G. Tessmann began to assert that the Tschama Indians of the Ucayali, in South America, who moreover did not belong to Lubbock's series, were without any religion whatsoever. But here too, the criticism exercised by well-known ethnologists, especially on Tessmann's method, was so lively and crushing as to demonstrate the non-existence of any scientific basis for his arguments. We shall mention, in this regard, the observations of the Dutch professor A. W. Nieuwenhuis, once a convinced and later a repentant assertor of the atheism of the Kubu, and of the well-known ethnologist K. Th. Preuss, both authors of weighty works on the spiritual culture of the peoples of nature, both eminent and successful explorers, accustomed to long stays among primitive peoples — the first in the Dutch Indies, the other in the same South America. Both note in this regard that Tessmann very probably failed to achieve the aim of his study, and that the religion of his Tschama remained hidden from him, giving as the fundamental reason the fact that Tessmann did not know the language of the natives, with the consequence that he had to use an interpreter and to limit himself to schematic questions. On this point Preuss says that it could not be surprising that Tessmann received obscure or negative answers, because it had happened to him too to lose the right path, until he managed to have his Indians dictate their myths to him in their own language, succeeding only thus in discovering a whole religious world of whose existence he had previously not even caught a glimpse.

Preuss, moreover, emphasizes another circumstance, which certainly must have prevented Tessmann from penetrating and understanding the spiritual life of the Tschama, namely the evident incapacity to enter into intimate spiritual contact with them, that is, to understand and evaluate their mentality. Indeed, Preuss further notes, in the book it is not possible to find any praise for that people, and only irritable resentments and contemptuous judgments, such as, for example, that the monkey that accompanied him would have been far quicker, psychologically, than the average Tschama; that they had barely surpassed the spiritual level of beasts; and that they knew far less about religion than a good dog, etc. And rightly Nieuwenhuis does not fail to add that, in all likelihood, Tessmann in such assertions must have more than anything else reproduced the negative suggestions of the small Peruvian planters, who served him as interpreters, and who, as everyone knows, are not a source to be preferred over thorough research for the delicate knowledge of spiritual culture.

Preuss then does not fail to explain to himself the cause of the misunderstanding into which Tessmann fell, recalling that previously the latter had devoted himself only to Negroes, that is, to peoples far more pliant, submissive and confiding, whereas the new object of his studies proves far more arduous for everyone, because the American Indians are generally much more reserved and distrustful in the face of the foreigner, accustomed to giving brief and evasive answers, adding that in any case the dignity of these characteristic traits undoubtedly places them on a higher level compared with the perspicuous compliance of the Negroes. Tessmann, on the other hand, has been able to do nothing but see in this pure and simple mental dullness, as the lack of understanding that emerges from his work proves. Therefore the conclusions at which the two aforementioned scholars independently arrive agree in recognizing that, if Tessmann was able magnificently to render the particulars of the material culture of the Tschama, the picture he rendered of their spiritual culture, on the other hand, is not to be shared; indeed Preuss unhesitatingly puts a great question mark against it. And yet sound and better ethnological criticism has also done justice to this attempt at vindicating the atheism of primitive peoples.

But even when, in the sure light of more serious and exhaustive investigations, it should have to be admitted that the Tschama really were without religion, this would by no means authorize drawing general negative inferences about the religiosity of primitive peoples, and still less would it constitute a contribution in support of Lubbock's hypothesis. For, besides everything else, it has been very aptly pointed out that the Tschama are no longer a homogeneous and original people, but a mixture of diverse remnants, of uprooted and decimated tribes, whose economic bases, whose social structure and ethical life, now find themselves in complete disintegration because of the many vicissitudes and the long slavery that afflicted them. Probably, therefore, they will present to the observer's eye only faint traces of their original religiosity, that is, abnormal elements of a collapsing whole, which, certainly, could tell us nothing in comparison with the religious spirit of peoples in a normal condition of culture. It would be, in short, a matter of atheism resulting from an extreme phase of degeneration, whereas no form whatsoever of original atheism emerges at all.

Michele Schulien