Flourens declares “Our enemy is God. Hatred of God is the beginning of wisdom. If mankind would make true progress, it must be on the basis of atheism.” Bradlaugh maintained against Holyoake that he would fight until men respected the name “atheist.” The answer to dogmatic atheism, that it implies infinite knowledge, has been well stated in John Foster’s Essays, and restated by Chalmers in his Natural Theology, and its force is recognized in Holyoake’s careful qualification of the sense in which secularism accepts atheism, “always explaining the term atheist to mean ‘not seeing God’ visually or inferentially, never suffering it to be taken for anti-theism, that is, hating God, denying God—as hating implies personal knowledge as the ground of dislike, and denying implies infinite knowledge as the ground of disproof.” But dogmatic atheism is rare compared with the sceptical type, which is identical with agnosticism (q.v.) in so far as it denies the capacity of the mind of man to form any conception of God, but is different from it in so far as the agnostic merely holds his judgment in suspense, though, in practice, agnosticism is apt to result in an attitude towards religion which is hardly distinguishable from a passive and unaggressive atheism. The third or critical type may be illustrated by A Candid Examination of Theism by “Physicus” (G. J. Romanes), in which the writer endeavours to establish the weakness of the proofs for the existence of God, and to substitute for theism Spencer’s physical explanation of the universe, and yet admits how unsatisfying to himself the new position is. “When at times I think, as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of existence as now I find it—at such times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature is susceptible.”
Atheism has to meet the protest of the heart as well as the argument of the mind of mankind. It must be judged not only by theoretical but by practical arguments, in its relations either to the individual or to a society. Voltaire himself, speaking as a practical man rather than as a metaphysician, declared that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent one; and if the analysis is only carried far enough it will be found that those who deny the existence of God (in a conventional sense) are all the time setting up something in the nature of deity by way of an ideal of their own, while fighting over the meaning of a word or its conventional misapplication.
ATHELM (d. 923), English churchman, is said to have been a monk of Glastonbury before his elevation in 909 to the see of Wells, of which he was the first occupant. In 914 he became archbishop of Canterbury.
ATHELNEY, a slight eminence of small extent in the low level tract about the junction of the rivers Tone and Parrett in Somersetshire, England. It was formerly isolated by marshes and accessible only by boat or artificial causeway, and under these conditions it gained its historical fame as the retreat of King Alfred in 878–879 when he was unable to withstand the incursions of the Danes. After regaining his throne he founded a monastery here in gratitude for the retreat afforded him by the island; no traces of it exist above ground, but remains have been excavated. There was also found here, in 1693, the celebrated Alfred jewel, bearing his name, and preserved in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. An inscribed pillar commemorating the king was set up in 1801. The name of Athelney signifies the Isle of Princes (A.S. Æthelingaea). Athelney is a railway station on a branch of the Great Western line.
ATHENA (the Attic form of the Homeric Athene, also called Athenaia, Pallas Athene, Pallas), one of the most important goddesses in Greek mythology. With Zeus and Apollo, she forms a triad which represents the embodiment of all divine power. No satisfactory derivation of the name Athena has been given[1]; Pallas, at first an epithet, but after Pindar used by itself, may possibly be connected with παλλακή (“maiden”). Athena has been variously described as the pure aether, the storm-cloud, the dawn, the twilight; but there is little evidence that she was regarded as representing any of the physical powers of nature, and it is better to endeavour to form an idea of her character and attributes from a consideration of her cult-epithets and ritual. According to the legend, her father Zeus swallowed his wife Metis (“counsel”), when pregnant with Athena, since he had been warned that his children by her might prove stronger than himself and dethrone him. Hephaestus (or Prometheus) subsequently split open his head with a hatchet, and Athena sprang forth fully armed, uttering a loud shout of victory (Hesiod, Theogony, 886; Pindar, Olympia, vii. 35). In Crete she was said to have issued from a cloud burst asunder by Zeus. According to Roscher, the manner of her birth represents the storm-cloud split by lightning; Farnell (Cults of the Greek States, i. p. 285) sees in it an indication that, as the daughter of Metis, Athena was already invested with a mental and moral character, and explains the swallowing of Metis (for which compare the story of Cronus and his children) by the desire to attribute an extraordinary birth to one in whom masculine traits predominated. In another account (as Τριτογένεια) she is the daughter of the river Triton, to which various localities were assigned, and wherever there was a river (or lake) of that name, the inhabitants claimed that she was born there. It is probable that the name originated in Boeotia (C. O. Müller, Geschichten hellenischer Stämme, i. pp. 351-357; but see Macan on Herodotus, iv. 180), whence it was conveyed by colonists to Cyrene and thence to Libya, where there was a river Triton. Here some local divinity, a daughter of Poseidon, connected with the water and also of a warlike character, was identified by the colonists with their own Athena. In any case, it is fairly certain that Tritogeneia means “water-born,” although an old interpretation derived it from τριτώ, a supposed Boeotian word meaning “head,” which further points to the name having originated in Boeotia. Roscher suggests that the localization of her birthplace in the extreme west points to the western sea, the home of cloud and storm.
In Homer Athena already appears as the goddess of counsel, of war, of female arts and industries, and the protectress of Greek cities, this last aspect of her character being the most important and pronounced. Hence she is called πολιάς, πολιοῦχος, in many Greek states, and is frequently associated with Ζεὺς πολιεύς. The most celebrated festival of the city-goddess was the Panathenaea at Athens and other places. Other titles of kindred meaning are ἀρχηγέτις (“founder”) and παναχαἶς, the protectress of the Achaean league. At Athens she presided over the phratries or clans, and was known as ἀπατουρία and φρατρία, and sacrifice was offered to her at the festival Apaturia. The title μήτηρ, given her by the inhabitants of Elis, whose women, according to the legend, she had blessed with abundance of children, seems at variance with the generally-recognized conception of her as παρθένος; but μήτηρ may bear the same meaning as κουροτρόφος, the fosterer of the young, in harmony with her aspect as protectress of civic and family life. At Alalcomenae, near the Tritonian lake in Boeotia, she was ἀλαλκομενηἶς (“defender”). Her temple, which was pillaged by Sulla, contained an ivory image, which was said to have fallen from heaven. The inhabitants claimed that the goddess was born there and brought up by a local hero Alalcomeneus. Her images, called Palladia, which guarded the heights (cf. her epithets ἀκρία, κραναία), represented her with shield uplifted, brandishing her spear to keep off the foe. The cult of Athena Itonia, whose earliest seat appears to have, been amongst the Thessalians, who used her name as a battle-cry, made its way to Coronea in Boeotia, where her sanctuary was the seat of the Pamboeotian confederacy. The meaning of Itonia is obscure: Dümmler connects it with ἰτεῶνες, the “willow-beds” on the banks of the river Coralios (the river
- ↑ O. Gruppe (Griechische Mythologie, ii. p. 1194) thinks that it probably means “without mother’s milk,” either in an active or in a passive sense “not giving suck,” or “unsuckled,” in her character as the virgin goddess, or as springing from the head of Zeus. In support of this view he refers to Hesychius (θήνιον γάλα) and a passage in Athenagoras (Legatio pro Christianis, 17), where it is stated that Athena was sometimes called Ἀθηλᾶ or Ἀθήλη. For Pallas, he prefers the old etymology from πάλλω (to “shake”), rather in the sense of “earth-shaker” than “lance-brandisher.”
