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by Edward Jayne
June 29, 2004

My purpose is to offer a secular history of western civilization that chronicles the emergence of freethought in ancient Greece and its advancement in later centuries. I want to demonstrate how our intellectual tradition is rooted in this unique history and how few of its accomplishments would otherwise have been possible. I also want to show how freethought advanced upon itself energized by six or eight periods of intense secular achievement that were interrupted by periods of stultification that have gradually dwindled since the Middle Ages. The historic model I am proposing unavoidably begins with the achievement of ancient Greece, whose impact lasted perhaps eight hundred years, followed by a thousand-year reaction utterly dominated by Christian sacerdocracy. Then came the Italian Renaissance followed by almost a hundred fifty years of turmoil now identified as the Reformation, and then the French Enlightenment followed by just a few decades of conservative adjustment inspired by Metternichean diplomacy buttressed by German metaphysics. Freethought came alive once again in the late nineteenth century inspired by Darwinism, and today there seems to be a compromise between a large majority of believers and a small intellectually advanced coterie of freethinkers ignore each other as well as possible.

Of utmost importance was the initial breakthrough of secular inquiry at the end of the sixth century, B.C., when Thales and his many successors proposed theories of materialism without providing any role to the Homeric gods. Next came skepticism (described as Sophism) promoted by Protagoras, Socrates, and others to challenge the validity of all received truths based on traditional authority. Plato thereupon reinvented Socrates in order to devise a metaphysics that could justify religion on a more sophisticated basis, and Aristotle initiated scientific inquiry that substituted empirical categories for Plato's theory of ideal forms. Aristotle's approach also reduced anthropomorphic deity to the abstract status of an "unmoved mover" and raised the possibility of an infinite universe both in space and time.

Here most orthodox histories of Greek philosophy draw to a close, but Aristotle's successor Strato took the next essential step when he refined science as a methodology dependent on experiments, thus limiting truth to what could be demonstrated by empirical evidence and thereby totally eliminating the concept of God. The so-called Academic skeptics, Arcesilaus and Carneades, similarly emphasized epoche as sustained inquiry, respectively featuring common sense and a systematic use of probability. In contrast to Aristotle, who might be described as a radical deist, both Strato and Carneades were outright atheists. The cumulative impact of this extraordinary surge in philosophical speculation from Thales in the sixth century, B.C., to Carneades in the second century, B.C., has been substantial throughout the entire history of western civilization, for minus its invention of empirical analysis western civilization would never have occurred. Science and scientific technology would not have been possible at the levels we take for granted today, our democratic institutions would not have happened, and literature and the arts would be limited to orthodox religious themes and incantations.

I concede that Christianity also played an important role, but try to show how its primary benefit consisted of impeding secular advances so these could be accommodated by the public at large with relatively little discomfort. This retrogressive mission has been best exemplified by the rejection of heliocentric theory, Lyell's geology, and Darwinism as well as parliamentary democracy and both universal suffrage and the emancipation from slavery until these causes had gained overwhelming general acceptance. Today abortion, assisted suicide, and stem cell research are at stake, and it seems the most basic issue of all is yet to be decided, whether a personal god exists who is able to answer prayers as well as granting pious believers an immortal soul and the prospects of a joyous afterlife. For most freethinkers today this smacks of Santa Claus in the sky, but religious believers cling to the hope, and their pious expectation necessarily continues to cloud their acceptance of new ideas.

On the other hand, religious belief has reigned unchallenged throughout most of the rest of the world, and the relative deficiencies to be observed in non-western societies can primarily be traced to its exclusive authority. Stagnation and economic decline have become insurmountable problems, and non-western societies have sunk into unprecedented poverty at the same time as advanced industrial states have substantially benefitted from western civilization's scientific revolution. This contrast has not been accidental. As a general rule, the more secularized a society, the better its standard of living and the more impressive its intellectual contribution. China, India, and medieval Arab civilization provide exceptions to prove the rule in the history of secularism, since all three benefitted from early secular traditions. However, they also endured periods of intense orthodox reaction sufficient to prevent the recurrence of freethought. Today's secular advances in Japan, China and India may be attributed to their ability to absorb the assumptions of western secularism over the past hundred fifty years. As a result they stand an excellent chance of gaining full parity with western civilization in the relatively near future.

In contrast, Arab society continues to resist the secular perspective and accordingly declines into collective poverty. As yet it has no adequate answer to Bernard Lewis's question declared by the title of his book What went wrong? (Oxford, 2002), and it continues to sink into further levels of poverty and victimization by western nations without the prospect of recovery. Not that Lewis himself fully understands the issue, as would be suggested by his attribution of western secularism to the separation of religious and political authority imposed by Christianity (p. 96). Indeed, this separation has been essential, but it cannot be forgotten that the Vatican fought tooth and nail to dominate monarchy throughout the Dark and Middle Ages. It was only the success of parliamentary democracy in England that encouraged the political theories of Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau, thereby inspiring the full separation of church and state beginning with both the American and French revolutions.

In western civilization alone has secular inquiry thrived on a sustained basis over a period of two thousand five hundred years, with extended periods of dormancy followed by gradually enlarging periods of recovery that picked up where earlier advances in secular achievement had fallen off. In ancient Greco-Roman civilization, a variety of Near Eastern religions led by Mithraism and the worship of Serapis filled the void once skepticism had totally discredited polytheistic belief, at least among the educated classes as illustrated by the views of Cicero, Lucretius, Pliny, Seneca, and Plutarch, among many others. By the early fourth century Christianity took the lead in becoming Rome's official religion, and one of its primary objectives was to eradicate skepticism and all other vestiges of secular inquiry. It pursued this agenda with remarkable success for at least a thousand years through the Dark and Middle Ages. Secularism nevertheless renewed itself in a succession of as many as five renaissances (literally rebirths), at least the first three of which took inspiration from secular assumptions explained and debated in ancient texts that survived Christian censorship. First came Arab civilization from the ninth through the eleventh centuries, followed by the relatively brief Ockhamite movement at the turn of the fourteenth century. Then came the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that was brought to a close by the Reformation's period of extraordinary religious excesses on the part of both Protestants and Catholics. The fourth recovery, identified with the French Enlightenment, lasted from the mid-seventeenth century through the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, when it was supplanted by German metaphysics and Metternich's effort to defend monarchy.

The most recent recovery began with Darwinism in the mid-nineteenth century, then declined resulting from the two World Wars and Cold War against "godless" communism that dominated the twentieth century. Nevertheless, most advanced industrial nations today remain highly secularized as a matter of course. The single most important exception turns out to be the United States, but its current revival of fundamentalist Christianity would suggest a retrogressive trough preliminary to even further advances, perhaps within the next few decades as might be suggested by the cyclical pattern suggested above.

Christian-biased histories of western civilization have been remarkably successful in obscuring this relatively transparent cyclical dialectic between secularism and religious belief dominant since the time of Christ. Their purpose has been to identify our intellectual history exclusively with the advance of Christianity, and for the most part they have done this by ignoring or willfully misinterpreting all exceptions that might suggest a more complicated history than the orthodox story they have sanctified. For example they disregard such figures as Strato, Carneades, Pomponazzi, Bruno, d'Holbach, and Huxley, and they completely whitewash the secular contribution of such figures as Montaigne, Bacon, Voltaire, Hume, and Matthew Arnold, as well as neglecting to tell of such atrocities as the murder of Hypatia, or the massacre at Beziers, or the procedures brought into play with the Inquisition, or the reactionary role of the Catholic Church as a pillar of conservatism into the mid-twentieth century, when Hitler betrayed his August, 1933, Concordat with the Vatican. Of course much of the information provided by orthodox Christian historians is useful, but their overall perspective is tendentious, and the reader must incessantly check their versions of history against those of historians less susceptible to the Christian predisposition.

My own approach is unapologetically secular--hence no less tendentious, but from a more inclusive perspective. As much as possible I limit my sources to secular texts all but forgotten today, and my intention is both to summarize their information and to clarify the few historic connections whose importance they seem to have overlooked. The model of western tradition I am suggesting is at least implicit in their writings, but I try to formulate it with better clarity as an inclusive paradigm and with additional information whenever it seems useful to take into account the many exceptions that present themselves. Among the most important of these neglected historians have been John W. Draper, author of The Intellectual Development of Europe, 2 vols. (Harper & Brothers, 1861--rev. 1875) and History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (Appleton, 1874); J.B. Bury, author of A History of Freedom of Thought (Henry Holt, 1913); J.M. Robertson, author of A History of Freethought, 2. vols. (C.A. Watt, 1915, repr. 1936), and A History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (Dawsons, 1929, repr. 1969); and much of Joseph McCabe, especially A Rationalist Encyclopedia (Watts, 1948), his useful summary of his lifetime research.

Other secular historians I have consulted include H.T. Buckle, W.E.H. Lecky, Henry Charles Lea, Leslie Stephen, Andrew White, Theodor Gomperz, A.W. Benn, Preserved Smith, Harry Elmer Barnes, Homer Smith, Bertrand Russell, Alan Charles Kors, and, last but not least, Will and Ariel Durant, whose eleven-volume history, The Story of Wrestern Civilization, (Simon and Schuster, 1935-75), treats most of the issues and episodes which are crucial to a secular explanation but neglected by orthodox Christian historians. The reference works tolerant of the secular perspective that I have found useful include Paul Edwards' The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 vols., (Macmillan, 1967), Gordon Stein's The Encyclopedia of Unbelief (Prometheus, 1985), James Haught's 2000 Years of Disbelief (Prometheus, 1996), Warren Allen Smith's Who's Who in Hell (Barricade, 2000), and the eleventh edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica (Cambridge, 1910), which usually benefitted from its use of authors sympathetic to the topics they discussed.

My overarching intention is to describe western civilization as a whole--in other words as an organic process of secular achievement beginning in ancient Greece and, contrary to the warning of Spengler and others, as yet with no end in sight. Particular hegemonic societies might endure decline and fall, as illustrated by the examples of ancient Rome and the modern empires of France and England respectively terminated by the Napoleonic wars and the two World Wars in the first half of the twentieth century. However, our civilization in its entirety seems more resilient, far too flexible to be brought to an end by any particular catastrophe short of nuclear holocaust or the onslaught of new epidemic diseases totally impervious to medical remedy. Christianity can be granted its important role as an inhibitive influence that first came into play after a lag of five centuries, but our cultural tradition's essential impetus at the very beginning--and in fact even today--has been the pursuit of honest and adequate answers free of orthodox constraint.

I go so far as to view western civilization as the fourth great "secular miracle." The first of these miracles is necessarily existence itself, since non-existence makes better sense (and for God even more than the universe itself). The second and third secular miracles have been the origin of life and human intelligence, both of which can be explained on an evolutionary basis. And to these I add western civilization as nature's fourth extraordinary manifestation, since, like the other three, it just might never have happened. No other civilization has survived into the twentieth century, and there were several historic occasions since the Age of Pericles during which the secular impetus of western civilization might have been terminated by circumstances no less oppressive than those that brought to an end the civilizations of China, India, and the medieval Arab world. This would have been a catastrophe of major proportions. Lacking the products of western civilization, the entire world's population would be mired in primitive feudal circumstances nobody wants to endure today. Granted, western civilization has created major problems at every level of human endeavor, but it also possesses the wealth and ingenuity to cope with these problems once the retrogressive practices of greed, chauvinism, and traditional religious dogma have been effectively neutralized. In any case, the genie is out of the bottle, and only the genie can make it right.