Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

Between Superstition and Impiety

The Protestant Reformers saw their movement as – among other things – a crusade against ‘superstition’. That immensely useful word was applied to any false or misconceived religious practice: religion which was ‘zealous without knowledge, and too solicitous about that which is not necessary’. Since classical times, superstition has had an opposite: impiety, or atheism.[7] So this was the unwelcome choice set before Christians in the Reformation age. If your balance on the knife edge of true religion wavered, and you were forced to fall either to superstition or impiety, which way would you go? Your answer to that question more or less determined whether you chose Catholicism or Protestantism. Catholics might loathe superstition: Thomas More’s Utopia included a diatribe against it. Yet More was, as his friend Erasmus said, so ‘addicted’ to piety that he would in the end rather be superstitious than impious.[8] Better to eat the religious diet put in front of you, however questionable, than to turn up your nose and risk starvation. By contrast, Protestants preferred to be ‘famished’ rather than ‘devour the pestiferous dung of papistry’. The old religion was so rotten with superstitious error that they would risk a measure of unbelief in order to be rid of it. As one Catholic put it, not unfairly: ‘a Catholic may commonly become sooner Superstitious, than a Protestant; And a Protestant sooner become an Atheist, than a Catholic’.[9]

Naturally Protestants denied it, insisting they were steering a narrow course midway between the opposing dangers. But the undertow consistently pulled them in one direction, and occasionally they admitted it. Francis Bacon – a tricksy, saturnine Protestant, certainly no religious zealot, but no atheist either – argued in 1612 that atheism was better than superstition. ‘It were better to have no Opinion of God at all; than such an Opinion, as is unworthy of him.’ He justified this with a lawyer’s technicality – that ignorance is better than slander – but also with a disconcerting claim: the historical record, he reckoned, showed that atheism was less likely to lead to public calamities than superstition.[10] Plenty of Protestants who would wince at such frankness nevertheless agreed. Better to brave the dangerous wilderness of unbelief than to return to Rome’s dungeon of superstition. That was how Henry More, a subtle English Protestant theologian of the mid-seventeenth century, explained the growth of atheism in his own times. In the Reformation, he argued, God had graciously permitted ‘a more large release from Superstition … a freer perusal of matters of Religion, than in former Ages’. The devil, however, had spotted an opportunity ‘to carry men captive out of one dark prison into another, out of Superstition into Atheism itself’. The smashing of the ‘external frame of godliness’, which had kept medieval Europeans in ‘blind obedience’, meant that many of them now simply gave in to their unrestrained sinfulness: ‘Being emboldened by the tottering and falling of what they took for Religion before, they will gladly … conclude that there is as well no God as no Religion.’[11] More saw opposing this kind of atheism as his life’s work. There was, however, one solution he would never consider: to rebuild the prison.

As Catholics pointed out, this was not some incidental side effect of the Protestant Reformation. It was integral to it. The Protestants mounted frontal assaults on long-accepted Christian doctrines: transubstantiation, the authority of the pope, the value of relics. They did not merely argue that Catholic doctrine was incorrect, but mercilessly mocked anyone gullible enough to believe the ridiculous lies with which priests feathered their nests. So when, for example, a Catholic missionary was exposed as defending forged miracles on the grounds that ‘godly credulity doth much good, for the furthering of the Catholic cause’, it played directly into the Protestants’ narrative.[12] The problem was that to mock ‘godly credulity’ was to play with fire. Protestants were still Christians. Indeed, they preached the supreme value of faith. They derided credulity, but had no wish to foster incredulity.

This problem – how do you reject some beliefs while still embracing others? – is an old one for Christians. Traditionally the solution involves carefully chosen acts of defiant credulity: avowing your belief in the unbelievable specifically because it is unbelievable, because that is how you show that your faith has transcended reason. Orthodoxy means submitting yourself – including your faithless, sceptical mind – to the teaching of the Church; heresy literally means ‘choice’, the choice to follow your own wayward thoughts. To be orthodox, then, was to defy those thoughts and obey instead. Among mystics, it was a pious discipline; the third-century theologian Tertullian famously claimed to believe in Christ’s incarnation ‘because it is absurd’. Among religious polemicists, this can degenerate into a kind of pious eating contest, in which the contestant who can swallow the most implausible claim wins. The result is that religious opponents may find themselves arguing simultaneously both that their beliefs are reasonable, true and self-evident, and also that those beliefs are mysteries which surpass reason and are inaccessible except through faith. For in Christian terms, that is itself one of the most powerful logical proofs that a doctrine is true.

It is important to be clear that this approach is not anti-rational. If it looks so to us, that is because – and this will be a crucial element of our entire story – we understand reason differently from our forebears. Since the eighteenth century, we have thought of reason as a method: the application of logic to solving problems, a steady, prosaic and scientific process. To medieval and early modern minds, reason was not a method but a power of perception: almost a sixth sense. For example: how do you know that 1 + 1 = 2? Modern philosophy has struggled mightily with that question, but the pre-modern view is that the question is unanswerable. You simply know intuitively that it is so, and the (God-given) faculty of intuition which provides that knowledge is called reason. If you possess that faculty, then 1 + 1 = 2 is self-evidently true. If your reason is defective, or absent, you will not be able to see it; in which case, there is no persuading you. Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century mathematician and mystic who sat at the fulcrum of these two views of reason, distinguished between the ‘mathematical’ and the ‘intuitive’ mind. There are uncontested truths, he argued, which the mathematical mind cannot prove, such as ‘knowledge of first principles, like space, time, motion, number’.[13] To accept such truths is an act of reason, but not a process of logical deduction. It is much more like a leap of faith.

In which case, the most important thing reason has to teach us is that reason itself is fallible. Since reason is a power to perceive truths that lie outside us, there is in fact nothing more rational than to submit your reason humbly to those authorities that are set above it. The word for that is faith. To defy those authorities in the name of reason is to do violence to reason itself. So if there is any apparent conflict between our frail and fallible rationality and the certainties of the true faith, it stands to reason that reason should give way. In its own way, this principle still holds. Many of us, in the modern world, might struggle to refute a flat-earther armed with jargon and ingenious technicalities. But we trust that there are astronomers who can, and are content to submit our reason to their authority.

The Protestant Reformation, by using reason as a battering ram against the papacy, destabilised this entire structure. Catholics quickly became convinced that their enemies were decaying ‘from faithful believing, to carnal reasoning’.[14] And so, as well as fighting fire with fire, and defending their doctrines as logical and rational, Catholics emphasised that the Protestants were guilty of something much worse than honest mistakes about theology. They were revealing themselves to be incredulous – and therefore, in Christian terms, self-evidently wrong. At the heart of the Reformation struggles was a battle for credulity.

The chief arena of this battle was that perennial lightning rod for scepticism, the doctrine of transubstantiation. Protestants were bitterly split among themselves over what to make of the sacrament of the Eucharist. Martin Luther continued to insist that Christ’s body was physically present in the bread and wine, while Calvinist and Reformed Protestants talked of a spiritual or even merely a symbolic presence. But they were united in rejecting transubstantiation, and many of their arguments against it boiled down to claiming that it was impossible, ridiculous, or an offence against reason. To call something impossible, however, was to say that God could not do it – which sounded blasphemous. Catholics worked hard to turn this into a dispute over whether God had the power to perform the miracle of transubstantiation. It was strikingly rare for Protestants to give what might seem the obvious rejoinder: that God could do it but there was no reason to believe he actually did.[15]

In the mid-1540s, as Calvin was waking up to the threat of Protestant-accented scepticism, a group of English Catholics laid out a defence of transubstantiation, asserting not only that it was reasonable but also that it transcended rationality and credibility, ‘surmounting incomparably all wit and reason of man … The more that [a doubter] by reason, ransacketh and searcheth for reason, in those things that passeth reason … into the further doubt he falleth’.[16] These Catholics did not disapprove of reason, but of carnal reason: doubting, disbelieving, self-based and so self-limiting. Richard Smith, the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, argued that in the doctrine of the Mass,

there be many things that appear strange … unto carnal reason … Unless we believe we shall not understand … Unless we be humble and low in our own sight, and think ourselves unworthy, and unable to know or to be made privy to such high mysteries and secret things, the said mysteries and secret things shall be hid from us.[17]

The most formidable of these writers, Bishop Stephen Gardiner, argued that even to ask how the miracle of transubstantiation was performed was ‘a token of incredulity’. He pointedly praised the apostles who, when Christ spoke about his body being eaten, had ‘needed no further explanation to understand it, but faith to believe it’. Like many others, Gardiner contrasted those apostles with another set of biblical characters: the Capernaites, who, when Christ claimed to be the bread of life, asked incredulously how this man could give them his flesh to eat.[18] The Capernaites became a favourite symbol for carnality: a lumpish species of error distinguished by its failure to lift its eyes above the human and the mundane.

What made this charge so effective was that it was so nearly true. Protestant attacks on the Mass really did have a whiff of incredulity about them. They tended to meet Catholic theology’s philosophical precision not with counter-arguments, but with derision. How can Christ’s body be in so many places at once? With all those Masses celebrated daily, surely Christ’s body must be the size of a mountain? – as if those thoughts had never occurred to Thomas Aquinas. They used scoffing hypothetical cases: if a mouse happens to eat a consecrated Host, does it receive Christ? If someone is seasick after receiving the sacrament, does he vomit his Saviour half-digested onto the deck?[19] According to one Protestant, Catholics are ‘not ashamed to swear, that … they eat [Christ] up raw, and swallow down into their guts every member and parcel of him: and last of all, that they convey him into the place where they bestow the residue of all that which they haue devoured’.[20] That is not an argument; it is a gag reflex. And it proved his opponents’ point.

The shrewd, deeply sceptical but equally deeply Catholic French essayist Michel de Montaigne believed that the Protestants’ reckless scorn had started a fire that swept quickly out of control among the common people:

Once you have put into their hands the foolhardiness of despising and criticizing opinions … and once you have thrown into the balance of doubt and uncertainty any articles of their religion, they soon cast all the rest of their beliefs into similar uncertainty. They had no more authority for them, no more foundation, than for those you have just undermined … They then take it upon themselves to accept nothing on which they have not pronounced their own approval, subjecting it to their individual assent.[21]

Before long, rueful Protestants were agreeing. The devil, it was said, whispered in believers’ ears: ‘You thought that this and that was a truth, but you see now it comes to be debated, it proves but a shadow, and so are other things you believe, if once they were sifted and debated.’ In one imagined debate between an atheist and a Protestant, the atheist mocked the Protestant for appealing to long-standing tradition. ‘The Church of Rome being ancienter … why then are you not of it, if you will go for long received opinions?’[22]

Nor was it all just rumours. Noël Journet was a soldier-turned-schoolmaster who converted to Protestantism in the late 1570s, only to be expelled from the French Protestant church for circulating handwritten tracts which ridiculed the Bible’s supposed contradictions as ‘fables … dreams and lies’. He proposed to replace Christianity with a ‘strange religion of which one never speaks’. This, Catholic pamphleteers warned after Journet was put to death, was where Protestantism led. Geoffroy Vallée, another Frenchman executed for being somewhere between religiously eccentric and insane, also claimed that most doubters had first ‘passed through Protestantism’.[23] The same trajectory was visible in attacks on Protestant orthodoxy in England in the next century. Right-thinking Protestants were outraged when radical dissidents claimed there was no such place as Hell. The radicals replied that Catholics had said the same when Purgatory had been questioned a century before. And while orthodox Protestants might have distinguished sharply between burning popish service-books (good) and burning Bibles (bad), it is no surprise that zealots in the heat of the moment might not have known when to stop. Likewise, when you were used to deriding transubstantiation as idolatry, it did not sound too outlandish to say that ‘the flesh of Christ, and Letter of Scripture, were the two great Idols of Antichrist’. Protestants had worked long and hard to train their people to beware of the devil masquerading as an angel of light. They could hardly claim innocence when the same principle was turned back on them.[24] The Reformation’s lesson, it seems, was summed up in a newly coined proverb: ‘He that deceives me once, it’s his fault, but if twice, it’s my fault.’[25]

For all these reasons, Catholics naturally concluded that unbelief was a peculiarly Protestant problem. Protestants were quick to disabuse them. The shrewd and unorthodox Protestant polemicist William Chillingworth, who had spent a brief and unhappy stint as a convert to Catholicism, blamed the rise of unbelief squarely on the Catholics. What else could they expect when they imposed tyrannical discipline, forged miracles, promulgated ‘weak and silly Ceremonies and ridiculous observances’, and demanded that Christians accept doctrines – such as transubstantiation – which are ‘in human reason impossible’? The inevitable result was ‘secret contempt and scorn … and consequently Atheism and impiety’. Suppress reason too harshly, and it will eventually revolt.[26]

Even if we dismiss that as a partisan case, the battle for credulity was an arms race. Catholics and Protestants were forced to parry one another blow for blow. So Protestants were almost as quick as Catholics were to deploy accusations of incredulity, insisting piously that God wanted ‘not a curious head, but a credulous and plaine heart’, and lambasting Catholics’ supposed use of ‘blind and foolish’ reason as ‘the sole judge and norm of faith’.[27] Some even tried to turn the tables on transubstantiation, claiming that the doctrine was so lumpish and carnal that it amounted to atheism.[28] On his deathbed in 1551, John Redman, a giant of theology at Cambridge University whose long-standing Catholicism was now crumbling into doubt, wrestled openly with this subject: in his case, with more anxiety than anger. When asked to affirm his faith in transubstantiation, he replied that the doctrine as usually formulated ‘was too gross, and could not well be excused from the opinion of the Capernaites’, who had thought that the sacrament was a form of cannibalism. His Catholic friends, anxious to prove his orthodoxy, rephrased the question more delicately. Did he agree that Christ’s body was received in the mouth?

He paused and did hold his peace a little space, and shortly after he spoke, saying: ‘I will not say so; I cannot tell; it is a hard question. But, surely,’ saith he, ‘we receive Christ in our soul by faith. When you speak of it other ways, it soundeth grossly, and savoureth of the Capernaites.’[29]

From a Catholic perspective, his faith was seeping away. From a Protestant one, he was at last seeing beyond crude, faithless literalism to the deeper, spiritual reality. It was the distinction, as George Herbert put it, between looking at glass or looking through it. Herbert, perhaps orthodox Protestantism’s finest poet, was uncharacteristically blunt on the question of transubstantiation. Christ, he wrote, came ‘to abolish Sin, not Wheat / … Flesh … cannot turn to soul. / Bodies and Minds are different Spheres’.[30] That cannot is the heart of the matter. To Catholic ears it is incredulity, binding God’s omnipotence in the weak chains of human reason. To Protestants it is an insistence that the Catholic doctrine fundamentally misunderstands Christ’s sacrifice and drags him down to the filth of humanity.

Protestants were just as ready as Catholics to claim that it was in fact their doctrine which transcended reason and could only be approached through faith. A bestselling early seventeenth-century book of sermons laid out the Calvinist doctrine of Christ’s spiritual presence in the sacrament, adding: ‘Unbelief cannot see how this should be effected: and therefore ignorant unbelieving Papists have invented a carnal manner of eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ.’ Another bestselling handbook of sacramental devotion began with a diatribe against over-rationalisation that could have been lifted directly from a Catholic writer, insisting that to enquire into the manner of Christ’s spiritual presence is to be ‘overwitted in seeking or doubting’, leads into ‘a labyrinth of doubts’, and fosters incredulity and (of course) the error of the Capernaites.[31]

This was more than just knockabout fun. The accusation of incredulity was an invaluable way of explaining why your arguments had failed to persuade the other side. It was not because they were idiots who could not follow a line of reasoning. It was because they were fools, who were saying in their hearts that there is no God – even if they did not realise the fact. Your dispute was therefore not fundamentally about doctrine or interpretation. It was about your opponents’ carnal inability to see the ravishing spiritual vision which was before your own eyes. Defined that way, you could lay claim to an effortless superiority while simultaneously closing down any possibility of further argument. And so the pursuit of ever more authentic faith generated constant accusations of unbelief.

If Protestants diagnosed Catholics as incredulous, Catholics were quick to mock Protestant credulity when they had the chance. In one case, the fire consuming a Protestant martyr smoked a pair of pigeons out of their nest, so that they flew over the stake. The dying man saw them and cried out that the Holy Spirit had descended as a dove. His Catholic denouncers were quick to ask: ‘What blasphemy is this, such opinionative fools to believe or credit such fancies?’ It is part of true faith to know when not to believe.[32]

Such Catholic attacks focused on one issue above all. Protestants took their stand on the Bible, which naturally raised the question of how they knew that the Bible was in fact the inspired Word of God. Protestants were surprisingly reluctant to address this issue directly. This is not because their convictions on the subject were shaky, but because their position depended ultimately, not on arguments, but on faith: an intuitive recognition of God’s Word which, like reason itself, was in the end incommunicable.[33] To claim that you accept the Bible because the Holy Spirit tells you to is to accuse anyone who disagrees with you of not receiving that divine message, and so of unbelief. Catholics were quick to return the compliment.

In the hands of Catholic polemicists like the French Jesuit François Veron, the argument was brutally effective. So, the Holy Spirit teaches you that the Bible is the word of God? Does this inner conviction extend equally to all sixty-six books of the Old and New Testament? To every chapter and verse of them? And to nothing else? Does the Spirit then guide your understanding of it? If so, why do so many other readers interpret it differently? If not, how can it be that the Spirit authorises Scripture but leaves it opaque? And what about the textual glitches and variations between different manuscripts of the Bible? Which is the inspired version? How can you be sure? Has the Spirit told you that too? The purpose of this Catholic argument was of course not to dismiss the Bible, but to prove that the Bible’s authority ultimately derived from the Church, and therefore that all Christians ought to submit themselves to that Church rather than to their own judgement or sense of inner inspiration. But it was much easier to demolish Protestants’ claims about the Bible than to establish Catholic ones in their place. Protestants were not wrong to worry that this supposedly pro-Catholic argument in fact tended to ‘the overthrow of all Religion’.[34]