Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

One particular medieval notion, however, does seem to have been given new force by the Renaissance: the festering suspicion, not that religion is an error, but that it is a trick. The Vatican Library contains a manuscript copy of Lucretius’ poem made, apparently in 1497, by a young Florentine scholar whose name would soon become a synonym for atheism: Niccolò Machiavelli. Unlike most Renaissance readers, Machiavelli’s comments on Lucretius pass swiftly over literary, historical and ethical matters, concentrating instead on his materialism and especially his doctrine of chance.[45]

Machiavelli was no Epicurean. In his mature career he showed no discernible interest in doctrine or metaphysics at all. A friend said of him that he ‘finds it difficult to believe the things that should be believed’. When he was appointed to choose a Lenten preacher for Florence in 1521, another friend found the idea laughable, saying that if Machiavelli turned pious it would be proof of senility. Neither of the two surviving versions of Machiavelli’s will made any provision for his soul, and he deleted the word soul from a draft preface to one of his books.[46] His interests were strictly in politics and practical ethics. What made his treatment of religion so shocking was not a new idea, but a new way of applying a very old one.

Machiavelli’s 1517 Discourses on Livy, a splendidly Renaissance distillation of the political lessons of ancient Rome for his own times, includes a substantial section on religion and politics. This begins innocently enough, with the commonplace observation that religion is ‘the instrument necessary above all others for the maintenance of a civilized state’, and that a wise ruler ought always to uphold religion and encourage piety. Most medieval Christians would have agreed, believing this to be one of the God-given benefits of true religion. Lucretius, by contrast, had deplored how politicians used religion to manipulate the people’s fears. Machiavelli agreed with Lucretius’ analysis, but with one crucial difference: he thought manipulation was a good thing. He praised an early Roman king for faking divine authority for his laws: how else would they ever have been accepted? ‘The times were so impregnated with a religious spirit and the men with whom he had to deal so stupid’ – two facts that he plainly believed went together. He recommended that governments should encourage religion ‘even though they be convinced that it is quite fallacious’. He added a breathtakingly cynical story about a Roman general preparing for battle who cast auguries to boost morale. Awkwardly, the auguries warned against an attack. So, with the chief priest’s connivance, the general lied, telling his men that the results were favourable. When rumours of the true result nevertheless leaked out, the general publicly blamed the hapless priest for spreading subversion, and sent him to the front of the attack. The priest was killed early in the battle, allowing the general to declare that this was divine vengeance for his lies; he proceeded to win his victory.[47] Low cunning like this is as old as war and politics, but no one had ever earnestly described it as praiseworthy before.

By contrast, in Machiavelli’s first and most infamous book, The Prince (1513), religion is notable chiefly by its absence. In this utterly pragmatic, amoral worldview, popes and bishops are political players like any other. Machiavelli not only dismissed Christian ethics as nonsense for simpletons; he apparently despised Jesus Christ himself. He was not so foolhardy as to say so explicitly, and indeed avoided naming Christ at all. But how else are we to read his praise of Moses, who as an ‘armed prophet’ had compelled obedience, and who was therefore vastly superior to the (unnamed) ‘unarmed prophets … who must use persuasion … They always come to grief, having achieved nothing’. His statement that ‘a prince must have no other object or thought, nor acquire skill in anything, except war’ is hardly an endorsement of the Prince of Peace.[48]

Was any of this actually dangerous? Even if we take the cynicism of The Prince at face value, Machiavelli was not openly trying to subvert Christianity. By his own theory, in fact, rulers ought to encourage it. Perhaps the contradiction lay in writing any of this down, rather than whispering it in a ruler’s ear – but then, Machiavelli was a less successful politician in practice than in theory. The point remains: arguing that a political or intellectual elite should be above religion is not, in itself, a threat to religion. At most it creates another secularised space. Alongside the alehouse, the gaming table and the consulting room, we now have the council chamber. But as long as the theory underpinning the council chamber’s religious cynicism requires the rest of the population to be trained in religious enthusiasm, that theory’s impact will be self-limiting. Ruling elites who secretly disdain the ideology they formally proclaim tend not to endure very long, not least because they usually insist that their wives, children and servants adhere sincerely to that ideology. So, in the end, if they avoid collapsing into internecine quarrels, they are replaced by true believers.

Unless their cynicism leaks out into the wider populace. Machiavelli wrote that Italy in his own time had ‘lost all devotion and all religion’ and become ‘irreligious and perverse’. He described this as a ‘debt’ Italians owed to the Renaissance papacy, whose open corruption had destroyed their faith. He meant it ironically, but it is hard not to hear a note of appreciation. If the purpose of religion was to build a strong state, then – as Machiavelli saw it – Christianity was not a very good religion. Ideally it ought to be replaced with something more muscular and (to be plain) more manly.[49] In this Machiavelli belongs to a strand of anti-Christian thought stretching back to the Emperor Julian and forward to Edward Gibbon and Friedrich Nietzsche: a strand which despises Christianity for its otherworldliness, its cherishing of weakness and its tendency to pacifism.

In the intellectual history of atheism, this strand of thought is decisively important. In the social, political and emotional history of unbelief, it is peripheral. Far from renouncing Christianity’s distinctive ethic of mercy, most modern atheism has redoubled it. Even Nietzsche was far more governed by Christian-style ethics than he liked to admit.[50] The only serious attempt to put this strand of anti-Christian thought into practice is twentieth-century fascism, which ended by pulling the house down on itself and everyone around. Machiavelli’s unbelief was genuinely shocking, but – for that very reason – it was a dead end: a position that was prevented by its own inner logic from building any kind of mass following. So does it matter to our story at all?

Perhaps only for this reason: Machiavelli gave new voice to an old, corrosive thought, and so gave new fuel to the unbelief of anger. He was (naturally) eventually credited with having written Of the Three Impostors, and it is almost true. The Prince is a real book, but it is also an imaginary one, indeed a much-imagined one: whispered about in fascinated horror more than it was read. The power of Machiavelli’s writing even now is not that it tells us anything new, but that it tells us what we have always suspected, bluntly and without qualm or apology. The hunch that religion was a political trick played by the powerful was as old as politics itself. But now that hunch had a name. The play The Jew of Malta, written in 1589–90 by the English dramatist Christopher Marlowe, opens with a prologue to the audience by a speaker who identifies himself as ‘Machiavel’, and explains:

Albeit the world think Machevill is dead,

Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps …

Though some speak openly against my books,

Yet will they read me …

I count Religion but a childish Toy,

And hold there is no sin but Ignorance.

Marlowe himself was accused of claiming that ‘the first beginning of Religion was only to keep men in awe’.[51] Machiavelli’s contribution was to say out loud what others had long whispered, breathing new confidence into the long-standing suspicion that religion was all a giant trick. When the sixteenth century’s religious crises broke, this began to matter.

In the meantime, some of those who were enthralled by the Renaissance’s ancient novelties acquired a reputation for unbelief, sometimes justified, often not. Perhaps Étienne Dolet really did deny the immortality of the soul – the charge for which he was burned to death in Paris in 1546. What we know for certain is that his view of the question was almost wholly pagan. The true immortal, he wrote in 1538, is one to whom ‘for all future time life after death has been gained by his reputation … renowned either by military glory or by literary reputation’. This was the immortality he himself sought, adding:

What indeed has death been able to accomplish as yet against Themistocles, Epaminondas, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Caesar, Pompey, the Scipios, Demosthenes, Isocrates, Lysias, Homer, Pindar, Aristophanes, Cicero, Sallust, Plautus, Terence, Virgil, Ovid?

This was the company for which Dolet longed, not dreary Christian saints. He was so immersed in classicism that he had lost his moorings in his own century. It was like the Italian friar who told inquisitors in 1550 that there was no soul and that Christ was merely human, adding that he put more faith in Ovid than in the Bible. (As if to confirm his affinity with all things Graeco-Roman, he added that ‘he would rather worship a pretty little boy in the flesh than God’.)[52] At the very least, the Renaissance ensured that anyone searching for unbelief knew where to look. In the mid-seventeenth century, an unknown French scholar put together a hefty compilation of extracts from ancient and Renaissance writers which argue that there is no God and no soul, and that religion is a political device. This document appears to have been a wholly private project: unpublished and, as far as we know, unread until its modern rediscovery.[53] Its contents might once have been disconcerting. By the mid-seventeenth century, they were banal.

This compilation’s most insidious claim was that the truly wise had always known that religion was a lie. This condescending conspiracy theory was perhaps the Renaissance’s most important, direct contribution to unbelief. When the radical Italian theologian Lelio Sozzini wrote in 1549 that ‘most of my friends are so well educated they can scarcely believe God exists’, he was joking, but the joke depends on the stereotype of the learned unbeliever who is too sophisticated for faith.[54] North of the Alps, the association between Italians and atheism became proverbial. ‘Italy’, wrote the Englishman Richard Harvey in 1590, ‘hath been noted to breed up infinite Atheists.’ If his own countrymen were tempted by doubt, they were liable to be called Italianate.[55] The pungently nationalistic English scholar Roger Ascham admitted that he had only been to Italy once, for nine days, but it was enough to convince him that the ‘special point that is to be learned in Italy’ was ‘first, to think ill of all true Religion, and at last to think nothing of God himself’. The very word atheist, Ascham lamented, was unknown in England ‘until some Englishman took pains to fetch that devilish opinion out of Italy’.[56]

For all the nationalistic tub-thumping, there is no mistaking the undercurrent of concern. The old unbelief of anger had acquired a new mood of cosmopolitan, satirical scorn. The rumoured covens of mocking atheists gathering in sixteenth-century cities, calling themselves ‘the damned crew’, are probably as imaginary as Of the Three Impostors, but like that phantom book, they matter. Believers began to hear knowing laughter at the back of their minds, ‘turning things that are serious into mockery’.[57] Faith felt simple; doubt, sophisticated. In the 1580s, Jacques du Perron, a French royal servant and future cardinal, presented an argument for the existence of God to King Henry III’s court, as a formal exercise and an entertainment. Basking in his audience’s applause, he was foolish enough to add that, if they wanted, he could present the opposite case as well. The king, who already had quite enough problems with religious extremists, was furious, but there is no reason to think that du Perron was a secret atheist. He explained, backpedalling frantically, that he was merely hoping ‘to demonstrate his wit’ – and nothing was wittier than a knowing flirtation with atheism.[58] That flirtation did not, in itself, significantly threaten Europe’s long marriage to the old faith. Only if the marriage itself ran into trouble might it become dangerous.

The cynicism and mockery of Renaissance humanists did not mark the start of a high road to modern atheism, any more than the anger of medieval blasphemers or the professional disdain of learned physicians. Self-limiting and by definition marginal, these atheisms were irritants, in equilibrium with the faith rather than destabilising it. If the Renaissance contained a serious threat to Christendom, it was of a subtler kind.

Machiavelli’s open fascination with Lucretius’ doctrine of chance was very unusual. Most Renaissance scholars treated Lucretius the way medieval theologians had treated Aristotle: they took what they could use and left the rest. The historian Ada Palmer has recently examined all fifty-two extant fifteenth-century manuscripts of Lucretius’ poem. Machiavelli’s is quite unlike any of the others. The sections of the poem which deny the immortality of the soul and assert that the world is governed by chance were sedulously ignored by most fifteenth-century commentators. More than 90 per cent of the notes Palmer has found comment either on Lucretius’ style and language, or on incidental historical information in the poem. Most of the rest focus on Lucretius’ moral philosophy or medical opinions. Aside from Machiavelli’s, only five of the manuscripts pay more than the most passing attention to Lucretius’ dangerous ideas, one of them only briefly, the other four in order firmly to mark them as errors.[59] Most Renaissance readers believed, or wanted to believe, that Epicureanism could be house-trained.

It did not quite work. Renaissance scholars were keen to learn from the ancients’ exemplary lives as well as their exemplary Latin (indeed, they were convinced the two were connected). Surely – so the argument went – Christians should be spurred to new heights of righteousness by the shameful thought that these mere pagans had outstripped them in virtue? It was an innocent rhetorical ploy, its double edge quite unintended. Christianity was, in this view, simply the consummation of all that was best about ancient philosophy. The greatest of the Renaissance’s house-trainers, the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus, included in his Colloquies a self-styled Epicurean who claimed that ‘there are no people more Epicurean than godly Christians’: for Epicureans held that the purpose of human life is the pursuit of happiness, and as everyone knows, true happiness is to be found in virtue. It was an over-tidy view of Epicureanism – Lucretius’ work has rather more sex in it than Erasmus’ – but also a singular view of Christianity. Erasmus united Renaissance philosophy with his homeland’s tradition of practical devotion, and a dash of German mysticism, to conclude that the heart of Christianity was its ethics. Christian theology conventionally emphasises that human sin is pervasive and that sinners must be saved by God’s grace. Erasmus, who was suspicious of too much theology, wanted his readers to strive not to be sinners at all. Christians had traditionally thrown themselves on Jesus Christ’s mercy, as their Saviour. Now they were being urged to imitate him, as their exemplar.[60]

So far, this was no more than a shift of emphasis. Erasmus remained a faithful, if provocative, Catholic Christian. But the implications were unsettling. If Christianity was supremely about ethics, and if ancient pagans had been outstandingly virtuous, did that mean unbelievers could achieve true godliness? Christ might be the ideal example, but did that mean he was necessarily essential? Could reason and the God-given natural law implanted in every human soul not bring us to the same destination? In which case, should Christians concentrate less on the devotional and sacramental life of the Church and more on cultivating the kinds of virtues which pagans and Christians might share? Erasmus and his colleagues were in no sense trying to ask such provocative questions. They were trying to purify Christianity, not undermine it. That is what, in the centuries to come, would make their approach so dangerous.

2

The Reformation and the Battle for Credulity

‘“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”’

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

‘The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.’

Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

There is a well-established view that the credit, or blame, for modern unbelief lies with the Protestant Reformation, a view most recently laid out in Brad Gregory’s 2012 book The Unintended Reformation. The argument goes something like this. Martin Luther’s defiance of the pope from 1517 onwards ended up shattering Western Christendom into rival parties, each of which regarded the others’ errors as intolerable. As they dug their trenches and pounded each other with polemical and then with literal artillery, they tore up the religious landscape that they were fighting over until it could no longer be recognised. With all sides condemning each other’s false beliefs, it was hard to prevent civilians caught in the crossfire from reaching the conclusion none of the combatants wanted: what if they are all wrong? As battles subsided into exhausted ceasefires, armed truces and frozen conflicts, ordinary people and their governments began systematically to evade those conflicts and the terrible destruction they could cause by confining ‘religion’ to a private sphere and creating a new ‘secular’ public space. People who could not agree about religion could at least work around it, and discovered that they did not particularly miss it. And so religion was confined to quarters, like a once-formidable relative sent to a nursing home: spoken of with respect, paid a ritual visit occasionally, its debts honoured, but not allowed out in public where it might cause distress or embarrassment. In truth – though it would be crass to say so out loud – it was simply kept ticking over until it died a natural death.[1]

It is a powerful story with a lot of truth in it. But the world it explains is not quite the world we have. It does not explain why European Christianity endured for so many centuries after the Reformation; nor why, in our own times, a religiously fractured society like the United States is so much less secular than relatively homogeneous ones like Norway or France. Above all, it mistakes the part that unbelief played in the Reformation itself. Unbelievers did not merely play supporting roles, as battlefield medics or architects of postwar reconstruction. Unbelief was a part of the action from the beginning, and its role in the conflict was decisive. It was not a by-product of the Reformation conflicts. It was a weapon in them.

Calvin and the Epicures

In 1542 John Calvin, the French Protestant leader in exile in Geneva, received an unwelcome letter from a friend in Paris. The French capital, Antoine Fumée warned Calvin, was being overrun by ‘Epicureans’, whose doctrines were spreading like a cancer. Fumée’s description of these wild-living unbelievers is suspiciously vague. There are no names, dates or places. It is not clear how much of this is eyewitness testimony and how much rumour. He did claim to have spoken to some such people, describing their ‘charming words’ and how they ‘sedulously avoid trouble’. Their typical opening gambit was to ‘annul faith in the New Testament’, suggesting that Plato’s works were wiser and more learned than the Gospels, even though no one considered him to be God. As conversation progressed, their attacks on the Bible would become progressively more barbed. A particular butt for their ‘impudence’, apparently, was the Song of Songs: the Old Testament book of love poetry which Jews and Christians have always taken as an allegory of God’s love for humanity, but which for these scoffers was shamelessly indecent, a mockery of the notion of Holy Scripture. The fact that their own lives were far more debauched did not trouble them.[2]

Perhaps this was just another rumour of sophisticated Renaissance atheists. Some of these Epicureans’ supposed talking points were lifted almost verbatim from Machiavelli.[3] But the reason this was unnerving to Calvin was that they also seemed to be familiar with Protestant doctrine. As Europe’s religious divisions widened, people were starting to fall through the cracks.

Calvin did not respond immediately, but a few years later he was confronted with a case he could not ignore. On 27 June 1547, an anonymous death threat was left in the pulpit of Calvin’s church in Geneva. In a city seething with religio-political tensions, this was a serious matter. An informant traced the threat to one Jacques Gruet, an impoverished former cathedral canon and serial troublemaker from a once-grand Genevan family. Gruet’s house was searched. Among his papers was a tract in his own hand in which, as Calvin summarised it, ‘the whole of Scripture is laughed at, Christ aspersed, the immortality of the soul called a dream and a fable, and finally the whole matter of religion torn in pieces’.

Gruet denied holding any of these views, but eventually, under torture, he confessed to having left the note threatening Calvin – and also to having corresponded with Étienne Dolet, who had been executed for mortalism in Paris the previous year. Gruet was executed for sedition, blasphemy and atheism on 26 July. Any disquiet about this summary process was silenced two years later, when a much longer book in Gruet’s hand was discovered hidden in the rafters of his old house, ‘full of … detestable blasphemies against the power, honor and essence of God’. On Calvin’s advice, the book was solemnly and publicly burned.[4]

Much of the content of Gruet’s documents – so far as we can reconstruct them – was simply the medieval unbelief of anger brought to boiling point. ‘God is nothing … Men are like beasts.’ The soul, or any afterlife, are ‘things invented by the fancy of men’: ‘I believe that when man is dead there is no hope of life.’ Jesus Christ was not God’s son, but ‘a fool who wanted to claim glory for himself’, and who deserved his fate. Gruet ridiculed divine providence: ‘it is absurd: do not you see that all prosper, Turks as much as Christians? … Everything that has been written about the power of God is falsehood, fantasy and dream’. All religion was a human fabrication.

But there is a new note to the rage that seethes through these texts. Much of it settled on Calvin himself, one of whose books Gruet had filled with furious annotations. An (undelivered) letter to Calvin praised him with vitriolic irony as ‘greater than God’, and urged him to ‘reject the doctrine of Christ and say … that you have found by the Scriptures that it is not he who was the Messiah, but yourself. Then you will have an immortal name, as you desire.’

Gruet was not the only person to be alienated by Calvin’s fierce self-belief, but his grudge against the reformer gave his religious criticism a new focus. Like Fumée’s Epicureans, Gruet’s most consistent target was the Protestants’ most prized asset: the Bible. He ridiculed the Creation story: how could anyone know, ‘since there was nobody there at the time?’ The authors of the New Testament were ‘marauders, scoundrels, apostates’. The Bible as a whole contained ‘nothing but lies’ and taught ‘false and mad doctrine … All the Scripture is false and wicked and … there is less sense than in Aesop’s fables’.[5]