A Brief History of Monotheism in Greece

In the 2004 Battlestar Galactica, the humans of the Twelve Colonies pray to Zeus, Athena and Apollo, the Lords of Kobol, while the Cylons, the machines they built themselves and that nearly wiped them out, believe in a single God. Ronald D. Moore, who reinvented the show, framed the contrast as a statement about the intolerance of today's monotheisms. Chris Klassen, who studies contemporary religion, took issue in 2008 with an idea that circulates well beyond science fiction: many gods are supposedly pluralistic and friendly; the one god, jealous and violent.

There's another, older story that runs in the opposite direction. In the 19th century it was taken for granted that humanity had climbed a ladder, moving from many gods to one, the way one moves from childhood to adulthood. Both stories share the assumption that there's a sharp border between one god and many. The Greeks, who lent the names of their gods to Kobol, crossed it all the time.

A word born as an insult

“Monotheism” is a younger word than Don Quixote. As far as we know, it was first used by the English theologian Henry More in 1660. More was arguing against those who claimed that the pagans had, deep down, believed in a single nameless god, and he replied that this god was nothing but the world: to make the world a god is to make no god at all, so “this monotheism of the pagans” was an atheism as crude as their polytheism. So the word was born to describe pagans, and to discredit them (Maurizio Bettini tells this story in In Praise of Polytheism). Only around 1830 did Friedrich Schleiermacher turn it into the identity badge of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and ever since we've talked about monotheistic religions as if the label had always been there.

Both stories share the assumption that there's a sharp border between one god and many. The Greeks, who lent the names of their gods to Kobol, crossed it all the time.

“Polytheism” has a similar origin: the first to speak of polytheía was Philo of Alexandria, a first-century Jew who needed a name for other people's religion. The Greeks never defined themselves as polytheists because, as Robert Parker notes, nobody was offering them an alternative. Nor did they have an exact equivalent for “religion” or “belief.” Writing a history of monotheism in Greece forces us, then, to use a word they didn't have to describe something they did many times over: conceive of one god above all, without ceasing to honor the rest.

If oxen had hands

The closest thing to a common theology the Greeks had were the poems of Homer and Hesiod, which, according to Herodotus, set down the genealogy of the gods, their roles and even their looks. And those gods get angry, lie, seduce and come to blows.

In the late sixth century BC, a wandering poet, Xenophanes of Colophon, wrote: “Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods everything that is shameful and blameworthy among men: theft, adultery and deceiving one another.” He also proposed a thought experiment: if oxen, horses or lions had hands and could draw, horses would paint gods shaped like horses, and oxen, gods shaped like oxen. The Ethiopians, he added, say their gods are snub-nosed and black; the Thracians, that theirs have pale eyes and red hair. Against all that he spoke of “one god, greatest among gods and men, in no way like mortals, neither in body nor in thought,” who, without moving from his place, shakes all things, effortlessly, with his mind.

Many read this as the West's first monotheism. The line, however, has a catch that Walter Burkert pointed out: Xenophanes' god is the greatest among gods. One is the greatest, and precisely for that reason isn't alone. H. S. Versnel describes this Greek way of thinking as a two-track procedure, one that lets you affirm the unity of the divine in one register and keep honoring many gods in another, without feeling any contradiction.

Tragedy works on the same frequency. In Aeschylus' Agamemnon, the chorus invokes: “Zeus, whoever he may be, if it pleases him to be called so, by this name I address him.” Heraclitus of Ephesus put it enigmatically: “The one, the only wise thing, is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus.” And so the problem started to lie in the names.

Vortex is king

In fifth-century Athens, Anaxagoras claimed the sun was a red-hot stone and, according to tradition, ended up charged with impiety. Protagoras, according to the surviving fragments of his lost text On the Gods, opened with this sentence: “Concerning the gods, I cannot know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what form they have; many things prevent it, the obscurity of the matter and the shortness of human life.” In the Sisyphus, a drama attributed to Critias (the most ruthless of the Thirty Tyrants, though some credit it to the tragedian Euripides), a character explains that a clever man invented the gods, as a surveillance system with eyes in the sky, so that wrongdoers would fear being seen even when acting in secret.

In 423 BC, Aristophanes staged his comedy The Clouds, starring a Socrates who studies the sky while hanging in a basket and teaches a debt-ridden neighbor that Zeus doesn't exist, and the neighbor concludes: Vortex is king, having kicked him out. Twenty-four years later, in 399, Athens put Socrates on trial for not recognizing the gods the city itself recognized, introducing other, new divinities and corrupting the youth. He was found guilty and sentenced to death.

This episode complicates the moral of Battlestar Galactica. The Athens that condemned Socrates was polytheistic, with no creed or sacred text, and yet it was perfectly clear on which gods belonged to the city (and which wouldn't be let in). Tolerance didn't come factory-installed with the number of gods.

Many by convention, one by nature

After Socrates' death, those who had been his friends and disciples took center stage. The Socratics (Plato and Xenophon, but also Antisthenes, Euclid of Megara, Aristippus, Aeschines and others of whom fragments and testimonies remain) inherited a problem from their teacher, who sometimes spoke of “the god,” in the singular, and also had a daimonion, a divine sign only he could hear. In Plato's Apology, he himself says the charge of introducing new divinities referred to his daimonion, a divine sign that sometimes stopped him from doing things like preparing his defense for the trial.

The Athens that condemned Socrates was polytheistic, with no creed or sacred text, and yet it was perfectly clear on which gods belonged to the city. Tolerance didn't come factory-installed with the number of gods.

Xenophon, philosopher, historian and commander, has Socrates say, in his Memorabilia, that the other gods give us their blessings without showing themselves, and the same goes for “the one who orders and holds together the whole cosmos”: he is seen doing the greatest things, but while he manages them, he is invisible. There are gods, plural, but there is one who orders the whole. Plato, for his part, uses the word theología (the earliest record we have of the term) in the Republic, when Socrates criticizes the poets' stories and looks for guidelines on how to speak about the gods. In the Timaeus, which picks up the city of the Republic, a divine craftsman appears, the demiurge, “maker and father of this universe,” who then hands off the making of mortal beings to younger gods.

One of the most extreme cases was Antisthenes, another first-generation Socratic, whom ancient tradition made the founder of Cynicism. The historian of philosophy Michael Frede couldn't see how to deny that Antisthenes was a pagan monotheist, by whatever criterion you like. According to Philodemus and Cicero, Antisthenes held that “by convention there are many gods; by nature, only one.” Nómos (convention) is what humans establish; phýsis (nature), what things are. In other words, the city's gods fall on the side of what's agreed upon, but his idea of god, moreover, “resembles nothing,” and so no one can know it from an image. One anecdote has it that when a wandering priest of Cybele asked him for alms, he answered: “I don't support the mother of the gods: the gods do.”

Euclid of Megara, the Socratic who started the Megarian school, claimed that the good is one, though it's called by many names: sometimes prudence, sometimes god, sometimes intelligence. And among the heirs of Aristippus (founder of the Cyrenaic school) came Theodorus, whom tradition nicknamed “the Atheist” because he denied the gods. In the wake of a single teacher, one of the earliest expressions of monotheism, the defense of civic worship and atheism all coexist. Claudia Mársico, one of the leading figures in Socratic studies, suggests reading the insistence on unity as a pattern shared by the Socratics rather than as an Antisthenes quirk. Along the same lines, we can think of the Socratic circle as the lab where the structure was assembled that centuries later would be recognized as monotheism: a first divinity from which the others derive.

Let there be one lord

Aristotle closed the most theological book of the Metaphysics with a line from the Iliad in which Odysseus shouts at the soldiers who want to go home: “The rule of many is not good; let there be one lord.” In that same book he acknowledges that the ancestors had already handed down that the first substances are gods, and that the rest, gods in human or animal form, was added later “in the form of myth,” to persuade the masses and for the convenience of the laws (or customs), something that may remind us of Antisthenes.

After Alexander, with the Greek world now enormous, the two-track approach became almost common sense. The Stoics (the same ones now circulating as a productivity manual in Silicon Valley) called the reason pervading the universe Zeus, and Cleanthes opened his hymn invoking him as “the one of many names.” In the second century AD, the orator Maximus of Tyre held that across the whole earth there is a single doctrine: that there is one god, king and father of all, and many gods, children of the god, who rule alongside him. “The Greek says this, and the barbarian says it too.”

Away with the atheists!

Christians entered this story as defendants. For the pagans, the atheists were the Christians, who refused to honor the gods of the city and of the emperor. In the mid-second century, in Smyrna, the proconsul offered the elderly bishop Polycarp his life if he would shout “Away with the atheists!” Polycarp looked at the crowd filling the stadium, gestured toward it with his hand and said: “Away with the atheists!” Around the same time, Justin Martyr wrote that those who lived according to the lógos were Christians, even if they were considered atheists, “as among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus.” Socrates, condemned for not recognizing the gods of Athens, was for Justin a Christian before Christ.

For the pagans, the atheists were the Christians, who refused to honor the gods of the city and of the emperor.

Much of what we know about the god of Xenophanes and that of Antisthenes reached us because Clement of Alexandria quoted them, around the year 200, to show Christians that the Greeks' own wise men had already glimpsed the one god. The Christian apologists were the great anthologists of Greek monotheism, but they also drew the border. The god of the philosophers never demanded that anyone abandon the others; the god of Jews and Christians did. Jan Assmann called that split between true and false gods the “Mosaic distinction,” and that's what separates Greek monotheism from the Jewish and Christian kinds.

God doesn't like that name

It's hard to find, in any living religion, a monotheism without intermediaries. Just think of Argentine folk Catholicism, with its official saints and its not-so-official ones, like the Difunta Correa or Gauchito Gil, who get asked for very specific things. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, imagined in The Silmarillion a single creator, Eru Ilúvatar, surrounded by the Valar, whom, as he put it, men have often called gods. In the final scene of Battlestar Galactica, the versions of Six and Baltar that exist only inside the characters' heads walk through New York talking about God's plan, and he corrects her: "You know it doesn't like that name." Aeschylus and Antisthenes would have agreed. From Xenophanes to the Socratics, the Greeks who thought about a single god left us a suspicion: that the divine is one, and that no name quite fits it.