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Another assailant, Theophile Raynaud, asserts that certain passages in this book suggest, if they do not prove, that Cardan did not set down his real opinions on the subject in hand. Raynaud ends by forbidding the faithful to read any of Cardan's books, and describes him as "Homo nullius religionis ac fidei, et inter clancularios atheos secundi ordinis ævo suo facile princeps."
Atheism and atheist are words formed from Greek roots and with Greek derivative endings. Nevertheless they are not Greek; their formation is not consonant with Greek usage. In Greek they said atheos and atheotes; to these the English words ungodly and ungodliness correspond rather closely.
In exactly the same way as ungodly, atheos was used as an expression of severe censure and moral condemnation; this use is an old one, and the oldest that can be traced. Not till later do we find it employed to denote a certain philosophical creed; we even meet with philosophers bearing atheos as a regular surname.
We know very little of the men in question; but it can hardly be doubted that atheos, as applied to them, implied not only a denial of the gods of popular belief, but a denial of gods in the widest sense of the word, or Atheism as it is nowadays understood. In this case the word is more particularly a philosophical term.
Christianity the Only Real and True Religion. Religion is man's filial relation to, and union with, God. Natural religion is the concreated relation of Adam and Eve in their state of innocence toward their Creator. Fallen man, though he still lives, and moves, and has his being in God, is, in consequence of his sinful nature, atheos, without God, and hence without true and real religion.
In the literature of antiquity we meet with sporadic statements to the effect that certain philosophers bore the epithet atheos as a sort of surname; and in a few of the later authors of antiquity we even find lists of men—almost all of them philosophers—who denied the existence of the gods.
Hippo, who is said to have been a Pythagorean, taught that water and fire were the origin of everything; as to the reason why he earned the nickname atheos, it is said that he taught that Water was the primal cause of all, as well as that he maintained that nothing existed but what could be perceived by the senses. Otherwise we know nothing special of Hippo; Aristotle refers to him as shallow.
It is plainly shown by his instances that it is linguistic observations of this kind which were the starting-point of his theory concerning the origin of the conceptions of the gods. In the accounts of Prodicus it is taken for granted that he denied the existence of the gods, and in later times he is classed as atheos. Nevertheless we have every reason to doubt the correctness of this opinion.
Every convert, on the other hand, won over to Judaism or Christianity was eo ipso an apostate from the Roman religion, an atheos according to the ancient conception. Hence, as soon as such religions began to spread, they constituted a serious danger to the established religion, and the Roman government intervened.
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