Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

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An Age of Suspicion

‘The bastard! He doesn’t exist!’

Samuel Beckett, Endgame

Impostors, Drunkards and Flat-Earthers

Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Sicily, Germany, Italy and Jerusalem, was perhaps the most powerful ruler of the Middle Ages. According to Pope Gregory IX, he was also an unbeliever. In 1239 the pope accused Frederick of calling Moses, Jesus Christ and Muhammad ‘charlatans’ and ‘deceivers’ who had fooled the entire world, of scoffing at the notion ‘that a virgin could give birth to the God who created nature’, and of maintaining that ‘one should accept as truth only that which is proved by force of reason’. The pope and the emperor were bitter and long-standing enemies, and these charges were certainly exaggerated, but it is true that Frederick had a voraciously curious mind. He had been asking his favourite scholars some alarming questions. Where is God? Where are Heaven, Hell and Purgatory? What is beyond Heaven? What is the soul? Is it immortal? If so, why do the dead never return?[1]

Rumour had it that one of those scholars, Pietro della Vigna, had not only suggested to Frederick that Moses, Christ and Muhammad were frauds, but had written a book arguing the case: Of the Three Impostors. There is in fact no evidence that this book ever existed. Yet it became notorious purely on the basis of that wickedly alluring title. For nearly five centuries dreadful tales of it were whispered. Della Vigna’s name was eventually forgotten, but his imaginary book was not. Almost every unnerving or scandalous figure of the next few centuries was at some point credited with having written Of the Three Impostors – Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli, Miguel Servetus, Giordano Bruno and many more. Scholars, eccentrics and troublemakers hunted for copies. A scandalous Swedish princess offered a bounty for it. It was easy enough to meet someone who had met someone who had once seen the book, but not to get any closer. Finally, in the early eighteenth century, enterprising French atheists actually wrote a book to go with the fearsome title. Inevitably, the result was an anticlimax.[2]

If we want to understand unbelief in the Middle Ages, the supposed Age of Faith, Of the Three Impostors is a good place to start. Like the book, medieval unbelief existed in the imagination rather than in any fully articulated form. It was a rumour, not a manifesto; an inarticulate suspicion, not a philosophical programme. Its vagueness was what made it powerful.

It is sometimes said that atheism in pre-modern times was simply impossible. This claim, supposedly made by the great French literary historian Lucien Febvre, is now routinely dismissed by historians of atheism. But Febvre’s point was subtler than that. He was well aware that medieval and sixteenth-century Europeans frequently attacked religion, sometimes in scabrous terms, and that they readily accused one another of unbelief. His point was simply that, like Of the Three Impostors, these attacks and accusations had no substance. They were simply imaginings of what atheism might be. As such, Febvre concluded with magnificently Gallic disdain, unbelief of this kind ‘did not matter, historically speaking … It hardly deserves to be discussed, any more than the sneers of the drunkard in the tavern who guffaws when he is told the earth is moving, under him and with him, at such a speed that it cannot even be felt’.[3]

It is an intriguing comparison. Before we leave the tavern in search of some more genteel atheists, we should let the drunkard have his say.

How do we, in the early twenty-first century, know that Febvre’s drunkard is wrong and that the earth is indeed moving? Very few of us have the astronomical skill to determine the question for ourselves. We believe it because learned authority tells us it is true; because it is an important part of a wider web of knowledge we have about the world around us; and because we have seen very persuasive pictures explaining it. And yet, like Febvre’s drunkard, we sometimes struggle to hold on to the fact. We say that the sun ‘rises’ even though we know it does no such thing. We treat the ground beneath our feet as if it were stationary. It feels stationary. For most practical purposes, it might as well be.

To wonder nowadays whether the earth really is moving, and whether five centuries’ worth of accumulated astronomy is a hoax, you do not need to be a drunkard or a fool. You need to be independent-minded and self-confident. You need to be suspicious: ready to believe you are being lied to. And it helps if you are not very well educated. If you are woven too tightly into our civilisation’s web of knowledge, you will not be able to kick against it. To see this at work, I recommend visiting the websites of modern flat-earther organisations – which, in their stubborn refusal to be hoodwinked by the intellectual consensus of their age, are the closest thing our own world has to medieval atheists.[4] Of course, whether you are a modern flat-earther or a medieval atheist, the lack of deep engagement with the dominant intellectual systems of your age which makes your doubts possible also blunts their power. You may have some slogans and some hunches, but you will be unable to refute astronomers who come at you with their orbits and laws of motion, or theologians wielding essences and ontologies. You can only reply with the perennial mulish wisdom of the sceptic who is told to admire the stitching on the emperor’s clothes: I just don’t see it.

Independent-minded, suspicious and uneducated people were in plentiful supply in medieval Europe. It is no coincidence that the original story of the emperor’s new clothes dates back to fourteenth-century Spain. Raw and inarticulate as this scepticism was, it should not be ignored. It set the tone both for the more dangerous unbelief that was to follow, and for the way Christian society would respond.

The Fool’s Heart

Medieval Europeans did not have the word ‘atheism’, but they understood the idea well enough. When the founder of medieval theology, Anselm of Canterbury, wrote his famous ‘ontological’ proof that there is a God in the 1070s, it was a devotional exercise in using reason to praise God, not a serious attempt to persuade actual sceptics. Still, he imagined and tried to reply to the counter-arguments which a sceptic would make. The scholarly method he was pioneering required him to do it. Medieval theologians built up their schemes of knowledge by systematically examining all possible objections to them. The greatest of those theologians, Thomas Aquinas, whose proofs of God were less dreamlike than Anselm’s, did not merely conjure up an opponent as a debating foil. Imagining what an atheist’s arguments might be, he affirmed that it is perfectly possible to think that there is no God.[5] But there is little sign of these scarecrows coming to life and turning into real doubters.

Anselm called his imagined sceptic ‘the fool’. This was not a gratuitous insult. It was a deliberate allusion to a rather different stereotype of unbelief. Twice in the book of Psalms we read, ‘The fool says in his heart, “There is no God”’. This biblical ‘fool’ is not a simpleton, but a villain who refuses to believe so that he can do vile deeds, untroubled by fears of divine justice.[6] That is obviously a grossly unfair caricature. But to judge by the cases of people accused of unbelief before medieval church courts, it was at least partly correct.

In 1273 a merchant named Durandus de Rufficiaco de Olmeira was hauled before officials of the bishop of Rodez, in southern France. He confessed to telling a friend that profit was better than virtue. When the friend teased him, saying that he did not care for his soul, he replied, ‘Do you think there is any soul in the body other than the blood?’ As a young man, he said, he used to cross himself piously, but it never did him any good, nor had his fortune suffered when he stopped. He also admitted to having scorned the miracle of transubstantiation, in which the sacramental bread is transformed into Christ’s body. ‘Even if the body of Christ were large as a mountain, it would long ago have been eaten up by priests.’ Likewise, in 1299, Uguzzone dei Tattalisina, a notoriously tight-fisted moneylender from Bologna, was accused of dismissing the Bible as a mere fiction. He allegedly told Mass-goers that they might as well venerate their dinner as the consecrated bread; claimed that the True Cross, Christendom’s most venerated relic, was just a piece of a bench; and said that ‘there is no other world than this’. Another Mass-mocking moneylender from the same city was more explicit in denying that there was any afterlife or resurrection. When challenged on the point, he retorted, ‘When did you see the dead return to us?’[7]

The courts do not seem to have found these cases of unbelief especially surprising. These men were grasping, stone-hearted money-grubbers, so it made theological sense that they should have no faith. When Nicholas, the abbot of Pasignano, was accused before the Italian Inquisition in 1351 of various acts of fraud and extortion, including threats to castrate anyone who dared testify against him, it was positively a relief to discover that he also believed that it was better to be rich than to be in holy orders, or that he treated the liturgy with contempt.[8] It hardly mattered whether these people lived wicked lives because they had abandoned their faith, or had abandoned their faith in order to live wicked lives. Either way, angry and contemptuous unbelievers of this kind did not threaten the religious world around them. They reinforced it.

The same was true of an even angrier species of ‘unbelief’: blasphemy. In 1526 a servant boy in Toledo was hauled before the Spanish Inquisition after multiple witnesses reported him for saying ‘I deny God and Our Fucking Lady, the whore of the cuckolded arsehole’. Unusually inventive, but not unique. Blasphemy was by far the most common offence brought before the Inquisition: typically words uttered during a quarrel, in a tavern or at a gaming table. Crying out ‘I deny God and the bastard of his lineage’, as one Juan de la Calle did during a bad losing streak, might get you into trouble, but it was not a serious atheist’s manifesto. Thomas Aquinas argued that such blasphemies were sinful, but not heretical: mere insults to God, arising from a momentary, almost involuntary eruption of rage. And what more potent way to insult God than to deny him altogether? Like another common medieval oath – cursing your own parents – this was about shock and macho posturing. It was playing Russian roulette with your own soul, to show that, since you were plainly not afraid of God, you were not afraid of anything. Another Spaniard, Juan Gutierrez, was accused in 1516 of saying ‘God is nothing’. In the cold light of day before the tribunal, he admitted the charge, but maintained plaintively that he had of course not meant it. He had simply been ‘fired up by anger and passion and dismay’. He had, he said, lashed out at God much as he might have said to a neighbour in a quarrel, ‘Go on, you’re nothing!’ Most inquisitors were content to accept this kind of excuse. Even when blasphemy was too serious to go unpunished, the penalties – the pillory, cutting off the ears – were typically designed to humiliate. These people were not seriously arguing that there is no God. They were just showing off.[9]

Blasphemers insulted God but did not forget him. If they were angry with him, that was simply a recognition of his power. If you believe in an omnipotent God, everything is his fault. The irony, as pious commentators observed, was how constantly God’s name was on blasphemers’ lips. But this did not make their defiance trivial. Blasphemy had the effect of scent-marking places – alehouses, gambling dens, brothels, barracks, ships – where different rules applied, and where a degree of demonstrative impiety was expected or even rewarded. In the centuries to come, these irreligious spaces would serve as reservoirs of angry, scornful or contemptuous unbelief, from which it could seep out into the wider culture. It is no coincidence that these were all thoroughly male-dominated spaces. Blasphemy was, the lawyers agreed, a gender-specific crime. Women, it was said, blasphemed less than and differently from men. They typically complained to God of their suffering, challenged his justice or cursed their own births.[10]

Even if you did not mean it when you defied God, your words had consequences. If God did not strike you down for your wickedness, you might reach for the dread words more readily next time – or go further, since blasphemy depends on shock value and is therefore liable to runaway inflation. You might find yourself asking in your heart: is there really a God? Even to try out the feel of the words on your tongue was to peer over the edge of a cliff. Perhaps you were only trying to scare yourself, or others, and had no intention of actually leaping off. But you had looked, you had imagined, and felt a thrill that was more than fear. If the time ever came to jump – or if the cliff ever began to crumble beneath you – you would not be entirely unready.

Losing your temper with God might feel good, but it did not achieve very much. A more practical and dangerous target for anger was his self-appointed representatives on earth. The case of Isambardus de Sancto Antonio, in thirteenth-century southern France, ought never to have come to anything. All that had happened was that, when a preacher introduced his sermon by promising to ‘say a few words about God’, Isambardus said audibly, ‘the fewer the better’. If he had apologised to the court, nothing more would have happened. But he refused, and instead launched into a series of tart remarks about how priests invented ceremonies to extort money from the people. Likewise the Montauban peasant who claimed in 1276 that he would not confess his sins to a priest even if he had sex with every woman in the village. He was no more making a theological argument than he was eyeing up his neighbours; he was simply railing against one of the most widely resented pinch points of priestly control over lay people. Another Spaniard was accused before the Inquisition in the late fifteenth century for saying, ‘I swear to God that this hell and paradise is nothing more than a way of frightening us, like people saying to children “the bogeyman will get you”’. This is resentment at being manipulated, not speculation about the fate of the dead.[11]

I do not mean that these incidents were trivial: quite the reverse. Amateur theological speculation was a minority activity in the Middle Ages, but resentment of priests was a sport for all. Historians disagree over how widespread ‘anticlericalism’ was in medieval Europe, but everyday life certainly offered plenty of potential points of friction between priests and common people: from the gathering of tithes, fees and offerings, to the imposition of tedious moral and ritual constraints. Any priest who found himself at odds with an awkward parishioner might naturally fall back on his authority as God’s representative, forcing the parishioner either to give way, or to enlarge his quarrel to include God. A dispute over a few pence or an illicit pat of butter in Lent could very quickly escalate into something much more serious.

In practice, one issue above all tended to trigger these escalations: the medieval clergy’s most visible and most outrageous claim to spiritual authority. In the Mass, every priest presided at a daily miracle, in which bread and wine were wholly but undetectably transformed into the literal substance of Christ’s body and blood. The reason the Western Church formally defined this doctrine of transubstantiation in 1215 was that dissident groups were questioning it. Thereafter the sacrament of unity became a shibboleth, dividing those who could and could not embrace this hard teaching. Transubstantiation made sense in Aristotelian philosophical terms, but it was always counterintuitive, and only became more so as philosophy moved on during the later Middle Ages. Hence the procession of medieval miracle stories in which unbelievers suddenly saw the ritual at the altar as it ‘truly’ was: a broken human body, a blood-filled chalice. In the stories, these visions were typically judgements on unbelief rather than rewards for faith. In the earliest and best known of them, Pope Gregory the Great prayed for the gory truth to be shown to a woman who laughed at the thought that bread she herself had baked could be Christ’s body. Invariably, these doubters begged for the dreadful vision to be hidden from them again.

The Church, in other words, did not downplay the difficulty of believing in the sacrament. It revelled in it. The reason Christ’s body looked, felt and tasted like bread, according to the encyclopaedic medieval theologian Peter Lombard, was ‘so that faith may obtain its merit’. Believing was meant to be hard. Stories of bloody visions did not settle doubts so much as tease hearers with a certainty they could not have, rubbing their noses in the incongruous and glorious truth that their incredulous hearts were commanded to embrace.[12] Denials of this miracle were not unthinkable: they were necessary. Every Doubting Thomas story needs a sceptic.

Doubting transubstantiation was hardly exclusive to atheists. It was a point on which Jews, Muslims and Christian dissidents of various kinds could all agree. The Inquisition’s chief purpose was to hunt for heretics, not unbelievers. Yet their dragnets did not discriminate. Some of their catch were not members of any organised or coherent heretical group, but seemed to represent distinctive, sceptical traditions – or simply to be speaking for themselves. When the bishop of Worcester interrogated a heresy suspect named Thomas Semer in 1448, for example, he was looking for so-called Lollards, members of an English sect who disparaged priests’ status and traditional ceremonies. It quickly became clear, however, that Semer was something different. He not only denied transubstantiation, as the Lollards did, but dismissed the Mass entirely as an empty ritual. He rejected the Bible – which Lollards venerated – as a cynical tool of social control: ‘a set of prescriptions for human behaviour of human devising to keep the peace’. He claimed that Jesus Christ was simply the natural son of Mary and Joseph. At a second interrogation, Semer claimed that paganism was better than Christianity, and that everyday life proved that the devil was stronger than God. Unlike most Lollards, he persisted in his denials until he was executed by burning.[13] What we cannot know is to what extent this kind of scepticism was an ever-present feature of medieval religion’s sea floor, only stirred up by trawling inquisitors; and to what extent it specifically flourished in those corners of the ocean which were filled with heretical variety and therefore attracted the inquisitors’ attention.

Another of Semer’s shocking denials provides an important clue: he rejected any notion of the soul, of Heaven or of Hell. Wherever we find serious unbelief in medieval or early modern Europe, we find this ‘mortalist’ claim – that dead means dead, end of story. Mortalism is entirely compatible with belief in a God, but it was more than just an attack on a specific Christian (and Jewish, and Muslim)[14] doctrine. Medieval and early modern Christianity was intensely focused on salvation, the last judgement and the state of the dead. Strip that out, and while you might still have a rather abstract God, you have precious little religion. In theory, mortalism is not atheism. In practice, it might as well be.

So we find, for example, Jacopo Fiammenghi, an elderly Italian monk whose decades of debauchery, fraud and intimidation finally caught up with him in 1299. Witnesses accused him of saying that ‘there was not another world, neither heaven nor hell, but only this world’. When asked about his soul, anima, he replied, ‘a peach has an anima’ – the same word meant the fruit’s stone. An Englishman named Thomas Tailour confessed in 1491 to believing ‘that when a man or woman dieth in body, then [he] also dieth in soul; for as the light of a candle is put out … so the soul is quenched by the death of the body’.[15] A slightly later preacher’s anecdote picked up the same vivid image. In this story, a believer and an ‘atheist’ fall to arguing over the nature of the soul:

The Atheist said: I will show you what it is. So he caused a candle to be lighted and brought to the table; he blew it out, and said: your soul is no more than the flame of that candle … It is blown out, and so shall it be with your soul when you die.

Medieval churchmen certainly believed that mortalism was enough of a problem to need regular denunciation.[16]