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The Νόσος of Declaring That Gods Do Not Exist in Plato's Laws. Isolated Cases Or Groups of Ἄθεοι?

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The Νόσος of Declaring That Gods Do Not Exist in Plato's Laws. Isolated Cases Or Groups of Ἄθεοι? T he Νόσος of Declaring that Gods do not Exist in Plato’s Laws. Isolated Cases or Groups of Ἄθεοι? L a νόσος de declarar que los dioses no existen en las Leyes de Platón. ¿Casos aislados o grupos de ἄθεοι? Ramón Soneira Martínez University Of Erfurt [email protected] Abstract Resumen D enying the existence of God or gods is L a negación de la existencia de Dios o de a common modern phenomenon in differ- los dioses es un fenómeno moderno presente ent places and religious contexts. This paper en diferentes lugares y contextos religiosos. explores the possibility of its applicability in En las últimas décadas, hemos podido ob- antiquity. The last decades have witnessed servar como el estudio del ateísmo en la anti- considerable growth in the study of atheism güedad ha crecido enormemente ampliando in antiquity. Analysis of atheistic positions los límites históricos de las posiciones irreli- https://doi.org/10.20318/arys.2020.5515- Arys, 18, 2020 [309-343] issn 1575-166x 310 Ramón Soneira Martínez in ancient societies, especially in Classical giosas. Los trabajos sobre las ideas ateas en Athens, has foregrounded new develop- las sociedades pretéritas, especialmente en ment in the study of unbelief. The term “un- la Atenas clásica, han consolidado el estudio belief” has been defined as a broad category de la increencia como fenómeno histórico. to study the diverse irreligious positions El término “increencia” ha sido definido not merely as the opposite of religion but as como una categoría amplia para estudiar las part of the religious field. This conceptual- posiciones irreligiosas no únicamente como isation allows us to understand religion and opuestas a la religión sino como parte del unbelief as two intermingled phenomena. campo religioso. Esta conceptualización del In recent studies on Plato’s Laws, schol- término permite entender la religión y la in- ars have identified atheistic groups within creencia como dos fenómenos entremezcla- Athenian society. This paper aims to apply dos. Estudios recientes sobre las Leyes de recent analytical frameworks on religious Platón han propuesto la existencia de grupos “individuation” in ancient religions to un- de ateos en la Atenas clásica. Debido al incre- derstand the role of unbelief in religious mento en el interés del estudio del ateísmo individualisation in Athens during the last en la sociedad ateniense, el presente trabajo decades of the 5th cent. and the first half of propone la aplicación de los estudios teóri- the 4th cent. BCE. cos sobre la “individuación” religiosa en las religiones antiguas con el fin de analizar el papel de la increencia en los procesos de in- dividualización religiosa en Atenas durante la segunda mitad del siglo V y las primeras décadas del siglo IV a.C. keywords palabras clave Atheism; Laws; Self-World Relation; Pla- Ateísmo; increencia; Leyes; Platón; rela- to; Unbelief. ción yo-mundo. Fecha de recepción: 31/05/2020 Fecha de aceptación: 25/08/2020 Arys, 18, 2020 [309-343] issn 1575-166x T he Νόσος of Declaring that Gods do not Exist in Plato’s Laws 311 1. Introduction The study of “atheism” has become a central debate within the field of religious stud- ies. The analysis of the diverse forms of criticising the idea of the gods or divinities has produced important research in the last several decades. One of the reasons for the development of new studies about the doubt or the denial of the existence of dei- ties is the complexity of atheistic positions. Recent studies have attempted to classify atheistic ideas by employing different subcategories.E xamples of that sort include the distinction between broad and narrow atheism;1 negative and positive atheism;2 pilgrim and tourist atheism;3 and global and local atheism,4 among several others.5 This huge variety of atheistic positions and subcategories that appear to be far from clear has generated a desire for a new analytic category, which would allow for a deep understanding of the different behaviours and philosophical arguments involved in criticising religious ideas and practices. The term “unbelief” is one of the most recent proposals.6 Unbelief is not con- ceptualised as the opposite of religious belief since such opposition would not em- brace the complexity of the term. The concept must be comprehended as a category 1. Rowe, 1979. 2. Martin, 1990, pp. 463-464; 2007, pp. 1-3. 3. Hashemi, 2016. 4. Diller, 2016. 5. On the historical and philosophical uses of the term “atheism”, see Bullivant, 2013, pp. 11-21 and Alexander, 2020. 6. Conrad, 2018. Arys, 18, 2020 [309-343] issn 1575-166x 312 Ramón Soneira Martínez that includes different irreligious positions. For instance, atheism, agnosticism, de- conversion, blasphemy or heterodoxy are amongst the irreligious positions from which the concept can be understood. These thoughts and behaviours can be reli- gious, non-religious or, even, anti-religious depending on the historical and religious context in which they are developed. The broad analytical scope of the term allows us to fully comprehend a plethora of atheistic positions as part of religious ideas such as “religious atheism” (also known as “spiritualities without God”)7 or “atheistic re- ligions”.8 Unbelief as an “umbrella term” allows for broader “conceptual flexibility”9 and does not predetermine the religious background of the targeted individual or group. Lastly, unbelief must be historically contextualised. If terms such as “belief”, “religion”, “faith”, or “God” have a specific historical development,10 all the behaviours and arguments concerning the critique of religious ideas or practices depend on the historical context in which they develop. Therefore, being an atheist inB ritain during the 19th cent.11 is highly different from being an atheist in Baghdad during the 9th cent..12 The term “unbelief” has been applied in the study of modern phenomena re- lated to the theory of secularism and non-religious positions, especially in sociology. In A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor uses unbelief not as the opposite of religious beliefs, but as a category used to understand how people developed their own “ways of living” depending on their religious beliefs or lack thereof. In other words, the analysis of unbelief as an open-ended and lived condition rather than a closed system of ideas in order to understand the “lived experience” of the individuals involved.13 The openness of “unbelief” has been recently proven in the field surveys. The re- search programme Understanding Unbelief at the University of Kent goes into the lived experience of unbelievers in different religious contexts. The results obtained show not only the variety of atheisms but also the strong connections between the 7. Billington, 2002; Schellenberg, 2017; Heehs, 2018. 8. Martin, 2007, pp. 221-229. 9. Conrad, 2018, p. 1. 10. There is massive literature about the methodologies and definitions of the different religious ele- ments. However, I would like to highlight the problematics mentioned in Asad, 1993; Fitzgerald, 2000; McCutcheon, 2003; Díez de Velasco Abellán, 2005; Jensen, 2014; Nongbri, 2015; Stausberg and Engler, 2017. Concerning the notion of “religion” in antiquity, see Barton and Boyarin, 2016, pp. 1-10 and Roubekas, 2019. 11. Rectenwald, 2016. 12. Stroumsa, 1999. 13. Taylor, 2007, pp. 4-20. Arys, 18, 2020 [309-343] issn 1575-166x T he Νόσος of Declaring that Gods do not Exist in Plato’s Laws 313 religious sphere and the irreligious positions.14 Both believers and unbelievers design a connection with the world, a self-world relation, that differs in how each person emphasises the “religious sphere” of their lived experience.15 The diverse relation of the individuals to the religious sphere must be comprehended as a dialectic between unbelief and religious beliefs. The “religious field” (champ religieux)16 is shaped in re- lation not only to the institution that holds “religious capital”, but also to transgressive movements such as “heresies” or “intellectual criticism”. Therefore, the “habitus” of believers and unbelievers is formed by the gradual tensions between religious ideas and the criticism of them. At this point, the next questions are mandatory: Are these conceptualisations of unbelief and the methodology of studying atheism useful to analyse atheistic po- sitions in antiquity? Did this relation between unbelief and religious ideas exist in the ancient world? To answer these questions, this paper proposes to apply the term “unbelief” to comprehend the development of “atheism” in Classical Athens.17 Recent studies from different scholars have shown the existence of atheistic positions in an- tiquity.18 However, this paper is not only focused on examining the atheistic positions in Classical Athens but also on reflecting on the socio-political ramifications of these arguments from the perspective of a “methodological individualism”.19 Moreover, the idea is to include the critique of traditional religious ideas (de-traditionalisation)20 in the formation of worldviews and the relations of individuals to the world. Looking at ancient socio-religious practices through the prism of “Lived Religion”21 allows us to see religion and unbelief as two sides of the same coin, two intermingled phenomena. The aim of this paper is thus to apply the aforementioned theoretical framework on Classical Athens, and to reflect on the possible existence of groups of ἄθεοι then. Recent scholarly work on the topic of ancient atheism has focused on Plato’s Laws in their assessment of how popular analysis of atheistic ideas really was in the Athenian 14. I would like to point out here one of the last publications of the programme Understanding Unbe- lief: Atheists and agnostics around the world (Bullivant et al., 2019). 15. Rosa, 2016. 16. Bourdieu, 1971. 17. About the applicability of “atheism” as a historical concept, see Soneira Martínez, 2018a, pp. 34-35 and Roubekas, 2014.
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