Battling the Gods : Atheism in the Ancient World - Tim Whitmarsh

L'idée globale de Battling the Gods : Atheism in the Ancient World (2015) de Tim Whitmarsh est de démontrer que l'athéisme n'est certainement pas une création moderne, mais au contraire une position qui existe sous des formes diverses depuis les débuts de l'antiquité grecque. L'auteur divise son bouquin de façon chronologique, commençant par la Grèce archaïque, puis l’Athènes classique, la période Hellénistique, et enfin Rome. Le début de ces parties offre un court aperçu historique, et le reste du texte est essentiellement une exploration des diverses positions plus ou moins athées. On passe beaucoup de temps avec les classiques : les pré-socratiques, les quatre principales écoles de philosophie (Cynisme, Stoïcisme, Épicurisme, Scepticisme), les sophistes, les auteurs de théâtre, Cicéron... Il cite beaucoup Lucrèce notamment. C'est un peu un best of avec l'optique de retirer de tout ça ce qui touche à l'athéisme. Mais il y a aussi les portraits de personnages plus obscurs, et un peu comme chez Diogène Laërce, on se sent une agréable complicité avec ces penseurs originaux et leurs idées tantôt farfelues, tantôt d'une percutante modernité.

Déjà, l’étymologie d'athée : a, le manque, theos, la divinité, dieu. Et du coup, le mot a un sens négatif. Étymologiquement, l'athée est défini par sa non-appartenance à un groupe (supposé être la norme ?).

Pourquoi s'intéresser à l'hitoire ancienne de l'athéisme ? « If religious belief is treated as deep and ancient and disbelief as recent, then atheism can readily be dismissed as faddish and inconsequential. »

La partie sur la Grèce archaïque est certainement la plus intéressante. J'aime cette description de la religion grecque (si l'on peut parler d'une religion) :

The Greeks devoted an extraordinary amount of energy to keeping the gods happy. But there were close limits to the power of human clerics. The job of priests was to sacrifice, not to pronounce on ethical or spiritual issues. The idea of a Greek priest or priestess using his or her influence to sway public debates on (for example) the definition of marriage or the treatment of the poor was unthinkable. Priesthood was a role within the community, not a spiritual calling. There was no formal religious training, there were no convents or seminaries. Some positions were hereditary, others were short-term and awarded by the state. The holding of other offices was not excluded. A priesthood was simply one of a number of civic jobs that a successful (which usually meant privileged) citizen could expect to hold.

En plus de ce caractère banal du religieux, il n'y avait pas d'absolu. A propos de l'Illiade, sans doute le texte de l'époque le plus proche des livres sacrés des monothéismes :

There was nothing heretical about undermining the Homeric text, since it was not sacred scripture. To call Homer a liar might be seen as foolish, unpersuasive, silly, or sophistic, but it was not a religious crime.
In fact, the nonscriptural nature of Greek epic had a significant effect on the development of logical thought. As a sophisticated, literate culture emerged, Greek thinkers became skeptical toward the more fantastical constructions of the epic poets and, stimulated by the desire to find new ways of talking about the world, built around the idea of naturalistic plausibility. This could not have happened had they been constrained by a belief in the god-given truth of scripture.

Le théomachie, c'est le combat entre l'homme et les dieux. Or, s'élever contre les dieux n'était pas hérétique :

The widespread nature of these myths suggests that Greeks thought that it was in the nature of humans to envy divine prerogative. Rebelling against the gods seems to be expected of us. What the stories tell us about, as well as the gods’ jealous guarding of their privileges, is humans’ deeply ingrained desire to shrug off the shackles of mortality, to approach godliness.
Let us be clear on this point. In ancient Greece, the idea of humans encroaching on the gods’ territory was not inherently blasphemous. It was expected that certain charismatic individuals came closer than most of us to divinity.

Au contraire, s'élever contre les dieux était un peu comme s'élever tout court  :

Jealousy of divine privilege was not “sinful”: early Greece had only a weak idea of what was “sinful” because there were no god-sent commandments to break. (The Greek translators of the Bible had to adapt a rare word, alitērios, to express this fundamentally alien idea.) Rather, stories of theomachy explored the perfectly natural tendency of humans to yearn to better themselves, to procure for themselves a happier life, a life that they associated with divinity. If theomachy was “wrong,” that was not because it contravened any heaven-sent rule book but because it was (at least in myth) a horrible misjudgment of the odds.

Et en conclusion à tout ça, la dominance du christianisme qui, par l'imposition d'un absolu, enterre pendant longtemps l'idée d'athéisme :

The arrival of Catholic Christianity—Christianity conjoined with imperial power—meant the end of ancient atheism in the West. Once it had been established that the paradigm of true versus false religion was the only one that mattered, there was nowhere to place atheism on the mental map. Cosmological and philosophical debate remained intense, of course, but it was unthinkable outside of the framework of Christian monotheism. Individuals surely experienced doubt and disbelief, just as they always have in all cultures, but they were invisible to dominant society and so have left no trace in the historical record. It is this blind spot that has sustained the illusion that disbelief outside of the post-Enlightenment West is unthinkable. The apparent rise of atheism in the last two centuries, however, is not a historical anomaly; viewed from the longer perspective of ancient history, what is anomalous is the global dominance of monotheistic religions and the resultant inability to acknowledge the existence of disbelievers.