Justified True Belief

(●) He taught that everything there is consists of tiny uncuttable bodies moving in empty space, and nothing else at all. + Take a loaf of bread and cut it in half. Cut the half in half. Keep going. Sooner or later, either you reach a piece so small that no knife in the world can divide it, or you do not, and the loaf can be cut forever into smaller and smaller crumbs without ever arriving at anything solid. Democritus said you reach the piece. He called it atomos, Greek for "uncuttable," and he said that these pieces, tumbling and colliding in an emptiness that stretches out forever, are the whole furniture of the universe. Bread, seawater, stars, the smell of roasting meat, the thoughts you are having about this sentence: all of it is atoms in various arrangements, and nothing more. That is why he sits on a Christian apologetics shelf. His answer to the question "what is the world?" is the oldest fully worked-out rival to the one Genesis gives, and it is still the rival. When a modern writer says the universe is matter in motion and nothing besides, he is repeating, with far better instruments, a claim first made in a Greek coastal town four centuries before Christ. Christians had to answer it early, and the answer a third-century bishop of Alexandria gave is one of the first sustained arguments from design in Christian writing. Here is the fact about him worth remembering. He wrote more than any Greek before him, some seventy titles on physics, ethics, geometry, farming, music, painting, medicine, and warfare, and not one of those books survives. Everything Plato published came down whole; of Democritus there remain about three hundred sentences, most of them moral one-liners that later anthologists copied out because they were quotable, plus what his opponents chose to report while arguing with him. The man who got the atom right is known to us mostly through the people who thought he was wrong.

(●) c. 460 BC: He was born at Abdera on the Thracian coast, in a house rich enough to have fed a Persian king. + Abdera was a Greek town on the north coast of the Aegean, in Thrace, well placed for grain and silver and badly placed for staying out of history. In 480 BC the army of Xerxes, king of Persia, came through it on the way to invade Greece. Herodotus reports the Abderite Megacreon advising his neighbours to go to the temples and thank the gods that Xerxes was not in the habit of eating breakfast as well as dinner, since one meal a day for that army had nearly finished the town (Histories VII.120). On the retreat the king came back through Abdera, made a guest-friendship with the citizens, which for a Greek was a formal tie of hospitality binding both households and their children after them, and left them a Persian sword of gold and a gilded tiara (VIII.120). It is into that town, and into one of its wealthiest houses, that Democritus was born a generation later. Diogenes Laertius, the third-century-AD compiler to whom we owe most of what is told about Democritus, says that the family entertained Xerxes and that the king left behind Magi and Chaldaeans, Persian priests and Babylonian sky-watchers, who taught the boy theology and astronomy. It is a fine story and the arithmetic will not carry it, since Xerxes passed through before Democritus was born on any reckoning, so the tutors would have had to settle in Abdera and wait for their pupil to arrive. Diogenes is not a careful witness here. He cannot even settle the father’s name, offering Hegesistratus, Athenocritus and Damasippus in one breath (Lives IX.34). The birth year is a reconstruction rather than a record, and the ancient authorities disagree by about ten years. Apollodorus, whose chronology of the philosophers the later biographers copied, put it in the 80th Olympiad. An Olympiad is the four-year span between one Olympic games and the next, counted from 776 BC, so that figure works out at 460 to 457 BC. Thrasyllus, who catalogued the books four centuries later, put it a decade earlier, in the third year of the 77th Olympiad, making Democritus a year older than Socrates. There is no way to choose between them from the outside. Democritus himself supplied the one piece of evidence that is his own, and it is worth having even though it settles nothing. In the Lesser World-System he wrote that he was a young man when Anaxagoras was old, forty years his junior, and that he compiled the book 730 years after the fall of Troy. The traditional Greek date for that fall is 1184 BC, which puts the writing around 454 BC. None of it lines up cleanly, which is the ordinary condition of Greek chronology. The figure of c. 460 for the birth is the convention, not a measurement.

(●) c. 450 BC: He became the pupil of Leucippus and took over the strangest idea in Greek science. + Leucippus is a shadow. Everyone in antiquity who discussed atoms said he had invented them, one sentence of his survives, and Epicurus, who inherited the whole system two generations later, flatly denied that any philosopher of that name had ever existed. Aristotle had no such doubts and regularly names the two men together, so the safest thing to say is that Democritus learned atomism from a teacher whose life we cannot recover, and then wrote the books that made it a system. The idea answered a problem that had brought Greek physics to a standstill, and the problem is easier to feel than to state. Parmenides of Elea had argued, with a rigour nobody could break, that what is cannot come to be, cannot perish, and cannot even move. The last of those is the strange one. To slide a chair across a floor you need somewhere for the chair to go, a patch that is empty rather than already full; but an empty patch is nothing at all, and nothing is not there to be moved into. Follow that argument where it goes and the changing world you live in, chair and floor and all, turns out to be an illusion. Leucippus took the argument seriously, which is the first thing to notice about him, and then made one outrageous move. He let nothing be something. The void, the empty, is as real as the full, so that being empty is a way of being there. Aristotle puts their position in a sentence that still catches the shock of it: they say "being no more is than non-being, because the solid no more is than the empty" (Metaphysics I.4, Ross’s translation). Grant the void, and the road opens. Parmenides was right that being cannot perish, so let being be an infinity of small hard pieces that never come into being and never pass away, differing from one another in nothing but shape and size. Let those pieces move about in the emptiness, collide, hook together and come apart again. Then nothing is ever created or destroyed, exactly as the logic demanded, and every change anyone has ever watched, a log burning down to ash, a child growing, a body dying, is a rearrangement of things that were there all along.

(●) c. 440 BC: He took his share of the family estate in cash and spent every coin of it travelling. + There were three brothers and three shares. Democritus, according to Diogenes, took the smallest portion, the one that came as money rather than land, because money could be carried. It was reckoned at more than a hundred talents (Lives IX.35 to 36). A talent was six thousand drachmas, and a drachma was about what a skilled workman earned in a day, so a hundred talents is roughly six hundred thousand days of a craftsman’s wages. He spent all of it. Where it went is reported with the usual mixture of record and rumour. Egypt is in every version, where he sat with the priests who did geometry, and so is Persia, where the Chaldaeans were, and so is the Red Sea. Past that the reports begin to compete: some ancient writers add India and the naked sages there, and Ethiopia besides, and other ancient writers doubt the whole itinerary. Hippolytus, writing as a Christian bishop in the third century AD and no admirer of the man, repeats the fuller version and has him "conferring with many gymnosophists among the Indians, and with priests in Egypt, and with astrologers and magi in Babylon" (Refutation of All Heresies I.11, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation). Gymnosophist is only the Greek for naked wise man, which is what a Greek traveller made of a holy man sitting in the sun with nothing on. What is certain underneath all of it is that he came home with no money and a reputation for having been everywhere. That mattered more than it sounds. Abdera had a law, Diogenes says, that a man who ran through his inheritance forfeited burial in his native soil. Democritus had run through his inheritance. The law would come back to him at the end of his life, and the way he answered it is the one scene from that life that anybody remembered.

(●) c. 430 BC: He visited Athens, and by his own account nobody there had heard of him. + "I came to Athens and no one knew me." Diogenes quotes the sentence as Democritus’ own (Lives IX.36), and it is the only glimpse we get of him in the city that was, at that moment, the most crowded philosophical place on earth. Socrates was in the marketplace stopping men to ask them what they meant. Protagoras, who came from Abdera too, was the highest-paid teacher in Greece. Democritus walked around unrecognised, and the tone of the remark suggests he was not wounded by it. Athens returned the indifference and then some. Plato wrote roughly thirty dialogues, ranged over every school of thought he could find, and never once names Democritus. Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, passed on a story that Plato "wished to burn all the writings of Democritus that he could collect, but that Amyclas and Clinias the Pythagoreans prevented him, saying that there was no advantage in doing so, for already the books were widely circulated" (Lives IX.40). It is a story rather than a record, told by a man with a taste for gossip about Plato, and it should be held loosely. What it does show is that ancient readers noticed the silence and looked for a reason. Aristotle broke the silence with a compliment that has outlasted the quarrel. Reviewing everyone who had tried to explain how things grow and change, he wrote that "a similar criticism applies to all our predecessors with the single exception of Democritus. Not one of them penetrated below the surface or made a thorough examination of a single one of the problems. Democritus, however, does seem not only to have thought carefully about all the problems, but also to be distinguished from the outset by his method" (On Generation and Corruption I.2, Joachim’s translation). Aristotle disagreed with nearly every conclusion. He thought the method was the best anyone had.

(●) c. 420 BC: He wrote on nearly every subject a Greek could write about, and a later scholar counted the books in thirteen sets of four. + Thrasyllus, a scholar of the first century AD who had done the same tidying job on Plato, arranged the works of Democritus into tetralogies, which simply means groups of four, and Diogenes copied out the whole list (Lives IX.45 to 49). Running an eye down it is the fastest way to see the size of the man. Two sets of four are given to ethics, and four more to physics, headed by the Great World-System and the Lesser World-System. Three sets are mathematical, taking in a book on irrational lines and another on the length of the year, and two more go to music and literature, one of those being a study of which letters sound beautiful and which do not. Two sets cover the practical arts: farming, painting, tactics, and fighting in armour. Loose among them, fitting no set of four, sit books on the causes of thunder, of seeds and of animals, and one titled simply Concerning the Magnet. He was, in other words, the first Greek to try to give a natural cause for everything he could find, and the range is not a scattering of hobbies. If the world is atoms, then farming and painting and the pull of a lodestone are all atomic questions, and a complete philosopher owes an account of each. Aristotle wanted causes for everything too, which is a good part of why he respected a man whose conclusions he rejected. The prose was admired as well. Cicero, no friend of the doctrine, records that some readers thought the writing so vivid it deserved to be called poetry even though it stayed out of verse (Orator 67). Not a line of that prose survives intact. And one tetralogy carries a footnote in Diogenes worth keeping: the Great World-System, the flagship of the whole corpus, was assigned by Theophrastus and his school to Leucippus instead. Theophrastus took over Aristotle’s school after him and wrote the first history of what earlier Greek thinkers had said about nature, so his opinion is not one to wave away. Even the biggest book on the list, then, has a question mark over whose it is.

(●) c. 380 BC: His own town paid to hear him read aloud, and later ages remembered him laughing. + The law about squandered inheritances still stood, and an old man with no money faced burial outside his own ground. So he called the townsmen together and read them the Great World-System. Diogenes reports that they gave him five hundred talents for it, put up bronze statues of him, and buried him at public expense when the time came (Lives IX.39). Demetrius, another of the writers Diogenes was working from, tells it differently a few lines later: the reading was done by his relatives rather than by the old man himself, and the sum was a hundred talents (IX.40). Figures like those are the sort that grow in the telling, and a hundred talents is roughly the fortune he had already spent. The scene is worth having anyway: a whole town sitting through a book about atoms because the alternative was letting the man be carried out past the boundary stones. The other thing posterity kept was the laughing. Seneca reports the pairing that became a fixture of European painting: "Heraclitus, whenever he came out of doors and beheld around him such a number of men who were living wretchedly, nay, rather perishing wretchedly, used to weep... Democritus, on the other hand, is said never to have appeared in public without laughing; so little did men’s serious occupations appear serious to him" (On Anger II.10, Stewart’s translation). Hippolytus, six centuries after Democritus and no admirer, put it more bluntly: "This philosopher turned all things into ridicule, as if all the concerns of humanity were deserving of laughter" (Refutation of All Heresies I.11). A famous later story has the people of Abdera writing to the physician Hippocrates to come and cure their philosopher’s madness, and Hippocrates arriving to find him cutting open animals to look for the seat of melancholy, entirely sane, and the townsmen the ones needing treatment. It is a good story and it is fiction, a set of letters composed centuries after both men were dead.

(●) c. 370 BC: He died very old, and within a few centuries not one of his books was left. + The ancient reports of his age run from ninety to a hundred and nine, and Diogenes tells a domestic story about the end of it. His sister was distressed that he might die during the Thesmophoria, the women’s festival, and so keep her from her duties at it. He had hot loaves brought and lived on their steam until the three festival days were past: "by applying these to his nostrils he contrived to outlive the festival; and as soon as the three festival days were passed he let his life go from him without pain, having then, according to Hipparchus, attained his one hundred and ninth year" (Lives IX.43). A man who held that death is simply the scattering of atoms would presumably have enjoyed being credited with holding his own together for three days out of consideration for his sister. Then the books went, and the way they went is worth understanding, because there was nothing dramatic about it. Epicurus took the system over around 300 BC, changed it where it suited him by giving the atoms a small unpredictable swerve to make room for free will, and was notably ungenerous about where he had got it. Lucretius put the Epicurean version into Latin verse in the first century BC, and that poem survived. The originals did not. Nobody burned them; they simply stopped being copied, which is how almost everything ancient perishes. What is left is a rubble of quotations. Aristotle and his successors report the physics in the course of refuting it. Sextus Empiricus preserves the sentences on knowledge. Stobaeus, a fifth-century-AD anthologist with an eye for a good maxim, copied out most of the moral sayings, and scholars still argue about how many of those were really his, since a batch of them circulated under the name "Democrates." Diels and Kranz gathered the whole harvest, some three hundred numbered fragments, in the collection that scholars still cite.

What He Taught

(T1) Everything that exists is atoms and empty space, and the differences between things are differences of shape, order and position. + Look at the letters on this line. There are only a couple of dozen shapes available, and yet they make grocery lists, wills, love letters and lies. Three things can vary: which shapes you use, what order you put them in, and which way round you turn them. Aristotle says that this was exactly Democritus’ picture of matter, and puts it in letters: "A differs from N in shape, AN from NA in order, M from W in position" (Metaphysics I.4, Ross’s translation). Iron and water and skin are made of the same alphabet, spelled differently. Two words carry the whole doctrine. An atomos is a body too small to see and too solid to cut; it has a size and a shape and nothing else, no colour, no taste, no warmth. The void is the emptiness the atoms move through, and Democritus insisted it is genuinely there, not merely a gap in the account. Hippolytus, reporting him in order to refute him, uses the pair of terms the atomists used: "plenitude and vacuum, denominating plenitude entity, and vacuum nonentity" (Refutation I.11), the full and the empty, what is and what is not. Follow those two words out and the consequences arrive quickly. Nothing is ever really created or destroyed, only assembled and taken apart, so that the burning of a log and the death of a man are the same kind of event, pieces coming loose from each other. There is no top or bottom to the universe and no edge to it. And because atoms and void alike go on forever, this world cannot be the only one: Hippolytus preserves the doctrine that the worlds are countless and unequal, some larger than ours, some with no sun or moon at all, and "that some worlds are destitute of animals and plants, and every species of moisture." That last clause was written down as an absurdity. It reads now like a survey report.

(Q) "By convention sweet is sweet, by convention bitter is bitter, by convention hot is hot, by convention cold is cold, by convention color is color. But in reality there are atoms and the void." + Source: Democritus, fragment 9 (Diels), preserved by Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians VII.135 (Bakewell’s translation). The Greek word behind "by convention" is nomos, the word for law and custom, the same root as in "autonomy." Sweetness is not a property honey has; it is what happens when certain shapes meet a tongue, and the agreement among tongues is what makes the word usable. The atoms themselves are colourless and tasteless. Sextus, a sceptical philosopher writing some six centuries later, quoted the line because he thought it conceded his own case (T4).

(T2) Nothing happens by chance and nothing happens for a purpose: everything happens by necessity. + Roll a die across a table and it comes up four. Nobody thinks the four was uncaused. The throw, the spin, the felt, the edge of the table and the weight of the ivory settled it entirely, and "chance" is just the name for the fact that you were not able to track all that. Democritus applied that thought to everything without exception. Atoms collide because of where they were and how fast they were going. A whirl forms, the heavier pieces gather in the middle, a world takes shape, and every step of it was fixed by the step before. Diogenes summarises the doctrine in a line and puts the whirl at the centre of it. The Greek word is dinē, which English translators render as the vortex: "All things happen by virtue of necessity, the vortex being the cause of the creation of all things" (Lives IX.45). Here is the part that is easy to get backwards. Aristotle complains that the atomists made the heavens by chance, and Democritus says the opposite, that nothing is by chance. They are not contradicting each other, because they are using the word for two different things. Democritus means that nothing happens without a cause. Aristotle means that nothing in the atomists’ world happens for a reason. Both are right about the system, and it is Aristotle’s complaint that carries the weight. An eye is not for seeing on this account; certain atoms fell together in a way that happens to see, and there is no aim anywhere in the story, only pushing. This is where the road forks, and it forks early. A Christian reader will want to say that necessity and purpose are not rivals, and that a world can run on regular causes precisely because Someone means it to. Democritus had no room for the second half of that sentence. He had thrown out the gods with the poets who invented them, and what was left to do the arranging was the whirl.

(Q) "Men have made an idol of luck as an excuse for their own thoughtlessness. Luck seldom measures swords with wisdom. Most things in life quick wit and sharp vision can set right." + Source: Democritus, fragment 119 (Diels), from the opening of his Suggestions, preserved by Dionysius of Alexandria and quoted by Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel XIV.27 (Bakewell’s translation). Fortune, for a Greek, was a goddess with temples. Democritus says she is a figure men carve to cover their own carelessness, and that most of what gets blamed on her would yield to attention. The sentence survives only because a Christian bishop copied it out while arguing that the atomists had made a goddess of chance themselves (†2).

(T3) The soul is made of atoms like everything else, so death is a scattering and there is nothing under the ground to fear. + Stand in a dim room with one shaft of sunlight coming through a gap in the shutters and watch the dust turn over in the beam. Democritus said the soul is made of atoms like those, the roundest and smallest and quickest kind, the same sort that make fire, threaded all through the body and set into every limb. They are what makes a body move. Breathing keeps them topped up, which is why living stops when breathing does, and at death the round atoms disperse into the air like everything else that is not held together. There is no separate substance here, no immortal part, no judgment waiting. He thought the stories about punishment below the earth were something men had made under the pressure of fear, and one of his fragments says so directly, that men invent tales about the time after death because they will not face the plain dissolution of a mortal nature (fragment 297). His account of the gods runs on the same lines: he explained belief in them by films of atoms, thin images shed by large living beings, which enter us in sleep and in vision. Augustine, summarising him some eight hundred years later, reports that he "thought that the gods were images which emanated from solid bodies, but were not solid themselves" (Letter 118.27). Two things should be said plainly about that. It is the earliest surviving attempt in the West to explain religion rather than to have one, and every later attempt of the same kind is downstream of it. And it is also the point at which the whole system has to give the deepest and steadiest human intuitions the lie: that a person is not merely a heap, that the dead are owed something, that a life can be answered for. Democritus knew he was denying all of it, and he went on denying it into extreme old age.

(Q) "Those which are spherical in shape constitute fire and soul, these atoms being like the so-called motes which are seen in the sunbeams that enter through doorways." + Source: Aristotle, On the Soul I.2, 404a (Wallace’s translation), reporting the doctrine of Democritus. His own books on the soul are lost, so on this subject the words are his opponent’s. Aristotle is being scrupulous rather than hostile: he explains the reasoning as well as the claim, that round things move most easily and slip through everything else, and that whatever moves the body must itself be in motion. The image of the dust in the doorway is the kind of thing Democritus was good at, an ordinary sight doing the work of an argument.

(T4) The senses cannot reach the truth, because what they report is not what is there. + Honey tastes sweet to you and bitter to a man with jaundice. Bath water feels hot to a cold hand and cool to a hot one. The Greeks had noticed such things for a century and mostly used them to argue that nobody can know anything. Democritus did something more interesting with them. If the atoms have only shape and size, then sweetness and heat and redness are not out in the world at all; they are what happens when certain shapes strike a body like yours. The world is real, the honey is real, the sweetness is a meeting. Modern philosophy calls this the distinction between primary and secondary qualities: shape, size and motion belong to the thing, while colour, taste, sound and warmth belong to the encounter between the thing and a perceiver. Galileo and Locke made it famous in the seventeenth century, and the line runs back to Democritus. He divided knowing to match: there is a "genuine" way of knowing and an "obscure" one, and sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are all in the obscure class, useful until the question gets small, and then the mind has to take over (fragment 11). He also saw the trap in his own position, which is a mark of a serious thinker. The only evidence anyone has for atoms comes through the senses he has just demoted. In one of his fragments the senses answer the mind that has dismissed them, and tell it that they are its only source of evidence, so that in overthrowing them it throws itself down too (fragment 125). He never resolved it. Neither has anyone else, quite.

(Q) "Verily we know nothing. Truth is buried deep." + Source: Democritus, fragment 117 (Diels), preserved by Diogenes Laertius, Lives IX.72 (Bakewell’s translation). Diogenes, who quotes it while listing philosophers the sceptics claimed as ancestors, renders the second half with the Greek proverb intact: "Of a truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well" (Hicks’s translation). A well is not a locked box. You can reach what is in it; you have to go a long way down, and you will not get there by leaning over the rim and looking.

(T5) The aim of a whole life is cheerfulness: a mind steady, unafraid, and not busy about too many things. + Most of what survives of Democritus is not physics at all but advice, the homely kind an old man gives across a table, and the advice circles one word. Euthymia means, literally, good spirits, and he used it for a settled evenness of mind, a soul that is not thrown about. Diogenes is careful to record that he did not mean pleasure: "the end of action is tranquillity, which is not identical with pleasure," but a condition in which the soul "continues calm and strong, undisturbed by any fear or superstition" (Lives IX.45). The practical counsel is homely and rather good. Do not take on more than you can carry, and turn down the promotion that would stretch you past your measure. Beware appetite, because the pleasures of the table are short and the wanting comes straight back. And here is his cure for envy, which is worth the price of the whole collection: stop measuring your life against the people who have more, and measure it against the people who have less, "vividly bring to mind their sufferings," and the ache to have what others have loses its grip (fragment 191). A Christian reader will find much of this familiar and then feel the floor change. Paul also learned to be content in any circumstance, and gives two sentences to it that Democritus could not have written: "I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:12-13). The Greek word and the apostle’s word describe a similar steadiness. One of them is a technique for managing a soul that is on its own. The other has somebody in it.

(Q) "He who intends to enjoy life should not be busy about many things, and in what he does should not undertake what exceeds his natural capacity." + Source: Democritus, fragment 3 (Diels), preserved by Stobaeus, Anthology IV.39.25 (Bakewell’s translation). The fragment goes on: a man should hold himself in hand so that "even when fortune comes his way, and is apparently ready to lead him on to higher things, he should put her aside and not o’erreach his powers. For a being of moderate size is safer than one that bulks too big." Plutarch knew the opening clause and set it at the head of his essay on peace of mind in order to quarrel with it, since a calm bought at the price of doing nothing seemed to him to cost far too much (On Tranquillity of Mind 465c).

(Q) "Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly." + Source: Democritus, fragment 175 (Diels), from the sayings preserved in the anthology of Stobaeus (Bakewell’s translation). It is a strange sentence to find in the mouth of a man whose gods were films of atoms, and it is not clear how literally he meant it. Read as it stands, it says that everything good comes down from above and everything ruinous is our own doing, which is close to what a Christian reader has been taught to say: "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change" (James 1:17). Sentences like this one are why the church, when it finally sat down to deal with the atomists, found the argument harder than it looked.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The fathers met his system through Epicurus, and preserved a good deal of it while refuting it. + By the time Christian writers began arguing with Greek philosophy, atomism had been Epicurean for four hundred years and more, and the name attached to it in ordinary speech was Epicurus rather than Democritus. That is why the fathers usually take the two together, and why what they say about Democritus tends to arrive inside a chapter aimed at somebody else. Hippolytus of Rome opened his Refutation of All Heresies with a survey of the philosophers, on the theory that Christian heresies were pagan philosophy in disguise, and gave Democritus a careful paragraph: the full and the empty, the countless worlds of unequal size, worlds still forming in one quarter of space while others break up in another, worlds without sun or moon, worlds with nothing living in them (I.11). He was collecting ammunition. He ended up as one of our better sources for what Democritus actually held. Augustine was less patient, and interestingly so. In a long letter to a young man who wanted help with philosophical questions for the sake of appearing learned, he uses Democritus as his example of knowledge not worth having: "For how much better would it be that I should never have heard the name of Democritus, than that I should now with sorrow ponder the fact that a man was highly esteemed in his own age who thought that the gods were images which emanated from solid bodies, but were not solid themselves" (Letter 118.27, in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation). He then reports, accurately, that Democritus differed from Epicurus by allowing "in the concourse of atoms a certain vital and breathing power" (118.28). The complaint is not that the physics is difficult. It is that a man had spent his life on it and come out with gods made of peeling films, and that a boy was proposing to memorise this in order to impress people.

(†) Dionysius of Alexandria wrote the first sustained Christian answer to the atoms, and it is why one of Democritus’ own sentences survives. + Dionysius of Alexandria, who led the church there in the middle of the third century and had been trained in Greek philosophy before his conversion, wrote a work called On Nature against the atomists. It is lost, but Eusebius thought so well of it that he copied long stretches into his Preparation for the Gospel, and those stretches are among the fullest arguments from design left to us by the early church. Dionysius states the position fairly first, names Democritus and Epicurus, and even records where they differed: Epicurus supposed the atoms "to be all most minute and consequently imperceptible, while Democritus held that there were also some among them of a very large size" (XIV.23, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation of the surviving pieces of On Nature). Then he takes it apart with a series of homely examples, and the method is the one William Paley would use with a watch fifteen centuries later. A cloak, he says, "cannot be made without the weaver, as if the warp could be set aright and the woof could be entwined with it by their own spontaneous action." When a house or a city goes up, no stone puts itself on the foundation and none climbs to the upper courses, but "the builder carefully disposes the skilfully prepared stones in their proper positions." And "when a ship is built, the keel does not lay itself, neither does the mast erect itself." What random forces do to a cloak, a house and a ship is not build them but scatter them, and the scattering is what he says the atomists have actually described (XIV.24). Then the sting: who can endure to hear such talk of "those unregulated atoms, than which even the spider, that plies its proper craft of itself, is gifted with more sagacity?" There is an irony in that line whether or not Dionysius intended it. Democritus had written that men learned weaving by watching the spider (fragment 154). He goes on with a phrase worth the whole essay, imagining the atoms recognising their own kin and portioning out the sky between them like colonists dividing a coast: "truly we have here a most marvellous democracy of atoms, wherein friends welcome and embrace friends, and all are eager to sojourn together in one domicile" (XIV.25). And in the course of pressing the argument he quotes Democritus twice, which is why we still have the sentence about men making an idol of luck, and the report that he would rather find one true cause than be given the kingdom of Persia (XIV.27). The man who set out to refute him is a reason he can still be read.

(†) When atomism came back in the seventeenth century, it came back in Christian hands and with a Maker attached. + For most of the Middle Ages the atom was a defeated idea, kept alive chiefly as the thing Aristotle had argued against. Then, quite suddenly, it was everywhere again, and the men who brought it back were not unbelievers. Francis Bacon, hunting for a method that would actually get somewhere, praised the atomists for taking nature apart instead of talking about it in general terms: "it is better to dissect than abstract nature: such was the method employed by the school of Democritus, which made greater progress in penetrating nature than the rest" (Novum Organum I.51, Wood’s translation). Pierre Gassendi, a Catholic priest and provost of the cathedral at Digne, spent much of his life rehabilitating Epicurean atomism for Christian readers, and he did it by changing exactly the points the fathers had objected to: the atoms are finite in number, not infinite; they were created rather than eternal; and they are ordered by providence, which is God’s continuing care and government of what he has made, rather than by a whirl. Robert Boyle, a devout layman who left money in his will for lectures defending the faith, made the corpuscle, his own careful word for a very small particle of matter, the working assumption of chemistry. Isaac Newton stated the settlement in a sentence at the end of the Opticks: "It seems probable to me that God, in the beginning, formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportions to space, as most conduced to the end for which He formed them" (Query 31). Every physical word in that sentence is Democritus. The first six words and the last four are not, and they are what made the theory usable by men who also believed that "in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17). The atom, in other words, entered modern science baptised.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a world nobody made, a soul that scatters, and a life with nothing to answer to. + The credit is real (†1 through †3), and so is the ledger that runs the other way. Four things he taught cannot be reconciled with the Christian account, and it does him no honour to blur them. - The world. Democritus’ atoms and void were always there, made by nobody, answerable to nothing. Scripture puts the visible on the far side of a line the atoms cannot cross: "By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible" (Hebrews 11:3). And the making is not a single push long ago, since he "upholds the universe by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:3). - Purpose. He was right that events have causes and wrong that causes are all there is. On his account no arrangement of atoms was ever aimed at, so the eye is not for seeing and a life is not for anything. Scripture puts intention underneath even the events we file under luck: "The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord" (Proverbs 16:33). - The soul. Death, for him, is dispersal, and the fear of judgment is a story men told themselves. Scripture says the appointment is kept: "And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27), and what is promised on the far side is not escape from matter but its remaking, "What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable" (1 Corinthians 15:42). When Paul reached that point in front of an Athenian audience, some of them mocked (Acts 17:32), and the mockery is the exact distance between the two views. - Cheerfulness. His euthymia is a fine discipline and it is a solitary one: hold your appetites down, keep your ambitions inside your measure, compare yourself with those who fare worse. It is what a man can manage on his own, and it is offered to those steady enough to manage it. What Paul describes is contentment received, in any circumstance, from someone (Philippians 4:12-13). None of that makes him a fool, and the church has never been able to treat him as one. He was reaching for a real thing and got a good deal of it, which is what Paul says happens: God’s "invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Romans 1:20). Democritus read the things that have been made with more patience than anyone before him. He got the pieces right, and left out the one thing that would have told him why there were pieces at all.