First, the Greeks discovered theoretical atheism, which “can be seen to be one of the most important events in the history of religion” [W. Burkert]. Second, the Greeks invented the term atheos. […] Third, Greeks and Romans, pagans and Christians, soon discovered the utility of the term “atheist” as a means to label opponents. The invention of atheism would open a new road to intellectual freedom, but also enabled people to label opponents in a new way. Progress rarely comes without a cost (2007, p.22)

This is really interesting. If we broaden the picture to include India, we can see that “one of the most important events in the history of religion” occurred in more than one place in the history of religions and that this applies also to terminology. By contrast, the use of “atheist” as an offensive label is not shared by Indian thinkers, who rather used in a polemical sense the label nāstika. This nicely frees the concept of atheism from its polemical bias in a South Asian context.

These categories should not be allowed to mask the complexity and variety of positions that atheists can hold, for a given individual can take different atheistic positions with respect to different concepts of God. Thus, a person might maintain that there is good reason to suppose that anthropomorphic gods such as Zeus do not exist and therefore be a positive atheist with respect to Zeus and similar gods. However, he or she could, for example, be only a negative atheist with respect to Paul Tillich’s God. In addition, people can and often do hold different atheistic positions with respect to different conceptions of a theistic God. For example, someone could be a positive atheist with respect to Aquinas’ God and only a negative atheist with repsect to St. Teresa’s God. (Martin 2007, p. 2)

Martin does not discuss the case of a person convinced that there is, for instance, no Zeus while they believe in the Christian God, possibly because he considers this just a case of inner-antagonism among theists. The phenomenon might be, however, more interesting than that, since it might have rather to do with a belief in a completely different kind of god. This is particularly evident in the case of Indian atheists who might be positive atheists regarding Īśvara or devatās, but then believe in brahman or in a personal god.

[R]eligion is by nature not only divisive, but divisive in a way which elevates some people above others. It is not too fancicul, I think, to see how the centuries of religious tradition in Western society made possible the kind of distinction between the superior Aryans and the inferior others which Nazism required. (Baggini, Atheism, 2003, p. 86)

If Baggini is right, any thought implying distinctions (such as Plato’s utopian Republic) would lead to this kind of effect. And supporters of Christianity could claim that they were the ones who said that we are all children of God… Again, I am led to think that putting the history of atheism in a wider context, e.g., taking India and China into the picture would help enhancing the debate.

Kumārila also targets the belief in a Lord akin to the one defended by rational theology, both in Europe and in South Asia, again because this leads to contradictions. Kumārila explains that there is no need of such a Lord in order to explain the creation of the world, since there is no need to adduce further evidence in order to justify the world as it is now (i.e., existing), whereas one would need to adduce a strong external evidence to justify everything contradicting the world as we know it. Therefore, the continuous presence of the world becomes the default status and the theist has the burden of the proof and needs to be able to establish independently of his religious belief that there has been a time when the world did not exist. Similarly, Kumārila shows that the idea of a Lord who is at the same time all-mighty and benevolent is self-contradictory, since if the Lord where really all-might, he would avoid evil, and if he tolerates it, then he is cruel. If one says that evil is due to karman or other causes, Kumārila continues, then this shows that there is no need to add the Lord at all as a further cause and that everything can be explained just on the basis of karman or any other cause.

Are Kumārila’s criticisms also targeted at the idea of an impersonal and non-dual brahman? Kumārila does not explicitly address the issue of the possible distinction between one and the other target. However, a few scant hints may help readers. In a fragment from his lost Bṛhaṭṭīkā preserved in the work of a Buddhist opponent (the Tattvasaṅgraha), Kumārila speaks of deities as being vedadeha, i.e., ‘embodied in the Veda’ (so Yoshimizu 2008, fn. 78). In a verse of the TV, he says that they are ṛgvedādisamūheṣu […] pratiṣṭhitāḥ, i.e., ‘who reside in the Ṛgveda and all other [Vedic scriptures]’ (Yoshimizu 2007b, p. 221). Does this mean that Kumārila was accepting a conception of deities inhabiting the Vedas? I discussed the idea with a colleague who just said that the verses must be interpolated.

What do readers think? Was there local atheism in ancient India?

See also Yoshimizu’s comment to my post on Bhavanātha.

This transformation occurred in parallel within the Mīmāṃsā school itself and within the theist Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta school, which since its beginnings with Rāmānuja (11th c) came gradually closer to Mīmāṃsā until, in the 14th c., its great proponent Veṅkaṭanātha declared Viśişṭādvaita Vedānta and Mīmāṃsā to be a single school (aikaśāstrya).

Who are the key authors of this transition from global to local atheism and towards a reconceptualised theism? The answer is not completely clear, especially because it requires a close examination of both schools. Within Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, one witnesses a gradual, though not linear, progression towards Mīmāṃsā and towards a more bhagavat-like conception of God from Rāmānuja to Ātreya Rāmānuja and culminating in Veṅkaṭanātha. Within Mīmāṃsā, there might be an important distinction between the Bhāṭṭa and the Prābhākara subschool. Within the first, Pārthasārathi (11–12th c. CE) appears to have been a global atheist, for instance when he comments upon the opening of Kumārila’s Ślokavārttika. The Prābhākara school might have been more inclined to move towards theism. The main figure here could have been the Prābhākara author Bhavanātha, whose Nayaviveka has been repeatedly commented upon in South India and seems to have been extremely influential at the beginning of the second millennium CE. It is in fact quoted and discussed by Veṅkaṭanātha and by later authors (like Rāmānujācārya) who recognise him as a theist. Moreover, Bhavanātha’s theistic move could be part of the reasons for the great significance of Prābhākara philosophy in (South) India at the beginning of the second millennium, as attested by Gaṅgeśa’s Tattvacintāmaṇi, a game-changing work of the Nyāya school, composed in the 13th c. CE. The Nayaviveka is a commentary on the Mīmāṃsā Sūtra. While discussing the inference to the existence of a Lord (īśvara), Bhavanātha concludes:

evam īśvare paroktam eva anumānaṃ nirastam, na tv īśvaro ‘pi.

In this way I have refuted the inference to the existence of the Lord said by other scholars, but I have not refuted the Lord Himself. (NV, tarkapāda, end of sambandhākṣepaparihāra)

Do readers know other theistic passages in the Nayaviveka?

However, as soon as one encounters Buddhism, one is faced with the alternative: Either Buddhism is a religion (in which case, one would need to update one’s definition of religion) or it is a philososophy (in which case, one would need to update one’s definition of philosophy).

A similar case regards categories such as “Atheism”. Atheism as it is common nowadays is a relatively recent phenomenon in the Euro-American world, so much that one risks to postulate that it is a result of the Enlightenment, of Positivism, of the success of Science etc. A glance at South Asia shows that this is not the only way atheism can find its place in the history of philosophy. As shown by Larry McCrea, atheism might have been the rule rather than the exception in South Asian philosophy until the end of the first millennium. This also means that the later shift towards theism has a completely different flavour, insofar as it comes out of a different background.

I am especially intrigued by the moment in which this turn took place, with thinkers composing theistic texts and/or reinterpreting their texts and traditions in a theistic way. A typical example is the adoption and adaptation of Mīmāṃsā (originally an atheist philosophy) within theist Vedānta in the first centuries of the second millennium CE. I have already discussed about the various steps of this incorporation by Rāmānuja and Veṅkaṭanātha. What remains fascinating is

1. how Mīmāṃsā was rebuilt through this encounter, with its atheism reconfigurated as negation of a given form of theos, but not of any form whatsoever.
2. how Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta was challenged to produce a sustainable version of theism.

To elaborate: Theism in South Asia needed to grow in an environment in which atheist objections where the norm. It had, therefore, to inoculate itself with possible answers to these objections and to rethink an idea of the divine which could resist these attacks.

How could this phenomenon be studied? As usual with South Asian philosophy, many of the fundamental texts have never been edited and remain in manuscript form. Of the ones which have been edited, only a tiny minority has been translated. Of these translations, only a minority can be understood on its own right and independently of the Sanskrit (or Maṇipravāḷa) original. Still less common are works elaborating on the theology entailed in these texts (among the exceptions let me name Carman, Clooney, Mumme and Oberhammer; Ram-Prasad’s Divine Self especially focuses on Rāmānuja’s different concept of God). In short, texts need to be edited, translated, studied, compared with each other and read keeping in sight the goal of understanding the phenomenon of the convergence of theism and atheism.

Why at all should it be studied? The Mīmāṃsā author Kumārila Bhaṭṭa writes that without a purpose, even a foolish does not act, and in fact Sanskrit authors regularly announce at the beginning of their treatises the proximate and remote purpose of their works. In the present case, the proximate cause is the desire to understand the interactions between atheism and theism by looking at them from an unexpected perspective and to throw light on a fundamental chapter in the history of South Asian philosophy.