History of Modern Atheism

In this section

Contents
17th Century History
18th Century History
19th Century History
20th Century History

Introduction: the Difficulty with Histories of Atheism

There are many accounts of the history of atheism, but they disagree substantially over its beginnings and its main protagonists.[1] Part of the explanation for this is that many of these accounts - for example, Fritz Mauthner's Atheism and its History in the West [Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande] (1922-24), and Michael Hunter and David Wootton's Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (1992), to name just two prominent ones, work with too broad a definition of atheism, which besides strict negation of God's existence also covers various forms of religious criticism, heterodoxy and nonconformity. As the German contemporary scholar of atheism Winfried Schroeder points out, a 'history of atheism' can often in fact amount to something more like a history of various religious departures from orthodoxy than of atheism in any strict sense.[2] Schroeder notes that in Hunter and Wootton’s view the church critic Paolo Sarpi, the deist Jean Bodin, the Jewish questioner of the authority of the Torah and the immortality of the soul Uriel da Costa and the strictly atheistic clandestine text Theophrastus redivivus are all lumped together under the broad catch-all term 'atheism.’ In fact only the latter text has a clear claim to being described as atheistic.[3] However, Hunter and Wootton's fusing of the history of atheism with the history of certain forms of heterodoxy can gives the impression that there has been a continuous history of atheism from the Reformation (or earlier) to the Enlightenment, a thesis which is open to question.

By contrast, Lucien Febvre's Le probleme de l'incroyance au XVIe siecle (1942), and Paul Oskar Kristeller's The Myth of Renaissance Atheism and the French Tradition of Free-Thought (1968) employ a narrower (and more modern) definition of atheism that more strictly distinguishes blasphemy, heresy and anticlericalism from direct questioning of God's existence. [4] They conclude that there is no good evidence for atheism (in this stricter sense) prior to the seventeenth century. According to these historians, accusations of atheism in the sixteenth century and earlier amount to nothing more than an indication that the accuser was in some respect or other hostile to the position of the accused, not that there was any genuine atheism around.[5]

Depending on the history of atheism consulted, the interested reader can come away either with the impression that contemporary atheism has a long lineage stretching back through the atheists of the French Enlightenment, the Paduan Averroists of the sixteenth century, the middle ages and back to antiquity; or that it appears surprisingly late in history, no earlier than the mid seventeenth century.

In one respect historians defending their employment of a broader definition of atheism obviously have a point. Strict philosophical atheism (in the narrow sense of the denial of God's existence) did not come from nowhere, and as Schroeder has noted, a range of heterodox strategies employed by deists and pantheists from radical biblical criticism, religious comparativism, the undermining of Christian revelation and the establishment of natural religion can be identified as important factors determining atheism's first appearance. However, these cannot be identified with atheism, even if they prepare the way for it.

These differences between accounts often have ideological bases. It is tempting for sympathisers of atheism to lend greater legitimacy to their position by appealing to a long lineage of atheistic thinkers stretching back to antiquity. Conversely, it is equally tempting for religious apologists to stress the exceptional nature of atheism in human history and present it as an anomaly.

The historians employing a narrower definition of atheism have it in their favour that at most only a 'practical' as opposed to a philosophical atheism seems to have existed prior to the seventeenth century. It is sometimes objected by historians who favour the 'broader' definition that this usage is justified by the fact that the modern definition of atheism is anachronistically applied to past societies, since they did not have such a definition themselves. However, this seems mistaken; as Schroeder points out, past societies did have synonyms for the narrower (modern) definition of atheism as negation of God's existence - variously expressed as 'atheismus kat'exochen', 'atheismus consummatus', or 'atheisme A la rigueur' - so had atheism in the narrower sense existed, it could have been identified as such.[6] It therefore seems reasonable with Febvre, Kristeller, and Schroeder to prefer the employment of the narrower definition of atheism by historians, and accept the consequence of this, namely, that atheism in the strict sense as captured by the modern definitions (i.e., denial of God's existence) is not encountered in the West prior to the seventeenth century.

A further difficulty which besets histories of atheism is the problem of crypto-atheists. It can reasonably be assumed that there were atheists who disguised their convictions in the seventeenth century and perhaps earlier, and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Spinoza (1632-77), and (in the eighteenth century) Hume (1711-76) are commonly assimilated into the ranks of the atheists. However, it is questionable whether one can increase the number of early modern atheists by going beyond the explicit documents of philosophical atheism to include early modern writers whose atheism is inferred by historians reading 'between the lines' of their surviving works.[7] Unless they left documentary proof of their crypto-atheism, such as in the case of the posthumous manifesto of Meslier (1729), the attribution of atheism in uncertain cases must always remain dubious.[8]

For the purposes of understanding the immediate context of the 'New Atheists' the difficult question of the existence of a premodern atheism and of crypto-atheists can be set aside, since the context that matters is that of modern atheism. However, the difficulties of constructing a history of atheism, and the ideological interests which play a role here must constantly be kept in view.

References

Berman, David. A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell. London: Croom Helm, 1988.
Hunter, Michael, and David Wootton, eds. Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Mauthner, Fritz. Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte Im Abendlande. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1920-23.
Schroeder, Winfried. Ursprunge des Atheismus: Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik- und Religionskritik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Tubingen: Frommann- Holzboog, 1998.

Bibliography

Footnotes

[1]↑ See for example Winfried Schroeder, Ursprunge des Atheismus: Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik- und Religionskritik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Tubingen: Frommann-Holzboog, 1998), 15.
[2]↑ Ibid.
[3]↑ Ibid., 22.
[4]↑ Ibid., 16.
[5]↑ Ibid.
[6]↑ Ibid., 27.
[7]↑ Ibid., 38. See also Berman's treatment of the problem of crypto-atheism in David Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell (London: Croom Helm, 1988).
[8]↑ Schroeder, Atheismus, 37.

Top of Page