ATHEISM is a term of varying application and significance (Gr. a6Eos, "denying God," "godless," hence disbelief in or denial of God). Its meaning is dependent upon the particular type of "Theism" with which at the moment it is being contrasted.
Yet, as we should expect, there is some connecting link binding these various meanings together; and, for the most part, the con nection is pretty easily shown. It is no mere accident that the same word "God" is used of the gods of Polytheism ; of the god of Aristotle's Metaphysics (the unmoved Mover—not Creator— of the eternal heavens; a Being living, eternal, good; Who is Him self His own sole object of knowledge; Who produces motion passively by being loved, Met. Io72a-3a; 1074'-5a; cf. Dante, Paradiso xxiv., 130-2) ; of the Persons of the Christian Trinity; of the impersonal Absolute of modern philosophy (which unites within it all reality and all values). It is in the conception of "goodness" that the connecting link is found. Religion may in its origin be something very different from morality. It may be true (see R. Otto's The Idea of the Holy, Eng. trans., pp. 6, 14, 15) that "religious awe" "first begins to stir in the feeling of some thing uncanny, eerie or weird" ; and the lines between "fear," "dread," "awe" and "reverence" may be hard to draw. Yet it dawns early upon the religious mind that the only worthy object of dread is that which is entitled to moral reverence (Isa. VIII. 13). The atheist therefore is conceived as the man who denies or despises what he ought not only to fear but to respect. It is intelligible, then, that the early Christians should be called "athe ists" by their persecutors. The Christians denied, after all, many more gods than they acknowledged. The Pagan was morally of fended at this wholesale rejection of familiar loyalties. It is equally intelligible that the Christians should retort the phrase (Martyriurn S. Polycarpi, c. iii. c. ix.) on those who "blasphemed that worthy name by which they were called." For behind this sharp division of opinion lay a very real community of moral standard. Paganism had enough connection with morality to make it quite natural that Plato (Politicos 3o8 E) should speak of "godlessness" side by side with "insolence" and "injustice," and should contrast it with what leads to virtue (cf. Sophocles Oed. Rex., 861; Xenophon Mem., IV., 4).
Thus the profound saying of Feuerbach—"He alone is the true atheist to whom the predicates of the Divine Being, for example, love, wisdom and justice, are nothing; not he to whom merely the subject of these predicates is nothing" (Essence of Christianity trans., Evans, p. 21)—only brings to light what is implicit in the common usage. It is the explicit recognition of this truth which is characteristically modern. We are disposed to recognize to-day that a truly religious frame of mind (as the Kantian "awe of duty," such a "reverence" for the moral law as makes Kant "humble him self" before it) and further even an attitude of worship towards Christ (as is implied when Baudelaire speaks of Jesus as Des Dieux le plus incontestable: Les Flews du Mal cxxviii.), are compatible with a denial, or at least a doubt, of the ordinary theistic beliefs.
Yet even though we take Feuerbach's saying as giving the key to the true meaning of "Atheism" and so regard religion even in its humbler forms as a craving for the good (Odyssey III., 48), we must recognize that, side by side with the reverence for the Good as an Ideal—for the Divine "predicates"—there grows up in religion a belief in the realization of this ideal in the Universe, and commonly in its realization in a personal Being. So closely are these two elements connected that for many minds the re jection of the latter seems equivalent to a rejection of the former. In order to avoid this, and similar confusions, we must continue to recognize a variety of meanings for our term.
Thus Atheism might be defined (I) as a denial that there is any one supreme object of reverence; (2) as a denial that this object of reverence is also the all-inclusive reality ("Belief in a finite God," it has been said, "is not Theism") ; (3) as a denial that there is any one all-inclusive reality at all. (For Hegel the atheist is the "pluralist" who acknowledges no ultimate unity. Spinoza, he says, is no atheist but an "acosmist." Of Hegel's principle, that "the Truth is the Whole" yet is also "essentially a result" to which the earlier stages of its development are vital, it is only the second half with which Spinoza seems to Hegel to be out of sympathy. See Logic of Hegel, Wallace's trans., pp. 275, 105, io6; Phenomenology, Baillie's trans., p. 1 7) ; (4) as a denial that the power which rules the world is worthy of our trust ; (5) as a denial that this power is a Being with whom we may hold personal com munion. (See C. C. J. Webb's Gifford Lectures.) Many modern philosophies might be described as atheistic in one or other of these senses; comparatively few as atheistic in all. (See THEISM,