UNBELIEVERS

An Emotional History of Doubt

Alec Ryrie

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Alec Ryrie 2019

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Alec Ryrie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008299811

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008299835

Version: 2019-09-23

Dedication

for Victoria, my believer

Epigraph

‘Most of us, I suspect … make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.’

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

1. An Age of Suspicion

Impostors, Drunkards and Flat-Earthers

The Fool’s Heart

Physicians, ‘Naturians’ and ‘Nulla Fidians’

From Ancient to Modern

2. The Reformation and the Battle for Credulity

Calvin and the Epicures

Between Superstition and Impiety

‘Doubt Wisely’: From Innocence to Experience

3. The Atheist’s Comedy

Incest, Thunder and Wishful Thinking

Shaking Off the Yoke

The Good Atheist

4. The Puritan Atheist

‘The Monster of the Creation’

Horrid Temptations

Fear of Flying

5. Seeking and Losing Faith

‘It’s a Great Matter to Believe there is a God’

The Spiritualists’ Progress

Farther Up and Farther In

Seeking a Rock to Build On

6. The Abolition of God

The Three Impostors

From Then to Now, I: Anger

From Then to Now, II: Anxiety

From Jesus to Hitler

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

About the Author

Also by Alec Ryrie

About the Publisher

Introduction

Two friends, Christian and Hopeful, are travelling in search of Heaven. On the road, they meet a man named Atheist. When they tell him about their quest, he erupts into ‘a very great Laughter’: ‘I laugh to see what ignorant persons you are, to take upon you so tedious a Journey … There is no such place as you Dream of.’[1]

In John Bunyan’s fable, the travellers stop their ears to these siren words and continue on their way. But as Bunyan knew all too well, Atheist’s defiance was in fact dangerously compelling. The thought he gave voice to was already haunting the historically Christian cultures of Europe and North America when he wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress in the 1670s, and has done so ever since. Perhaps you disagree with Atheist, but you are certainly familiar with the point he was making. Or perhaps you think he spoke the plain and self-evident truth.

This book is about one of the most momentous changes in modern history: the appearance in the once-Christian West of post-religious societies.[2] This is not a total transformation (at least, not yet). Europe and especially North America still have a great many believers, who still have a powerful public voice, and Western culture is steeped in Christianity’s cultural residue. But in every Western society a rapidly rising share of the population, and especially of young people, claims to have no religion. Even in the assertively pious United States, in 2007 this was true of an unprecedented 16 per cent of adults. By 2014 that share had risen to 23 per cent (that is, around 55 million people), including well over a third of those born since 1980.[3] In many of the regional, educational and political subcultures that make up the modern United States, open and unapologetic unbelief is now the norm: something that has never been true before the current generation. In Europe, the share of adults who profess no religion now ranges from a sixth (in Italy and Ireland), to around a quarter (Britain, France, Germany), to well over 40 per cent (Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands). Other studies put the figures even higher. A 2015 survey had 43 per cent of British adults claiming no religion, a figure rising to 70 per cent of those under 24.[4] And on both sides of the Atlantic, many of those who do still claim a Christian identity do so only nominally or residually, their daily lives largely undisturbed by their professed religion.

‘Why,’ the philosopher Charles Taylor asks, ‘was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?’[5] Many of those who (like Taylor himself) continue to believe are conscious of swimming against a cultural tide. Over a century ago, Friedrich Nietzsche notoriously claimed that ‘God is dead … and we have killed him’. In large and growing parts of Western society, that shocking claim has turned into a self-evident truth.

As a historian, my question is: so, who killed him, when, and how? The usual answer is: philosophers, scientists and intellectuals; during the Enlightenment and scientific revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and by means of a frontal assault. In the 1660s, so the story goes, Baruch Spinoza first showed that a world without God could be philosophically coherent. In the eighteenth century there was a double assault: polemicists such as Voltaire and Thomas Paine openly attacked the Church’s moral authority, and philosophers as varied as David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau constructed systems which, whether or not we classify them as strictly atheist, left Christianity far behind. God became, as Pierre-Simon Laplace supposedly told Napoleon in 1802, a redundant hypothesis. Nineteenth-century philosophers such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Arthur Schopenhauer found the case against religion to be almost self-evident. By the time Charles Darwin provided an explanation for the origins of life without reference to God in 1859, the work was virtually completed. All that the wider culture has done since then is catch up.[6]

I wrote this book because I am not satisfied with that stereotypical account. The timescale, the suspects and the nature of the murder are all wrong. Telling the story a different way not only changes our sense of history; it casts our current moment of pell-mell secularisation in a different light.

To take the simplest problem first: the death-by-philosophy narrative is a poor fit with the actual chronology of Western secularisation. Were the religious revivals of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or the apparent Christian resurgence across the West in the 1950s, simply religion’s death throes? Was the sudden collapse of the West’s religious cultures in the 1960s merely the shattering of a husk after centuries of patient hollowing-out?[7] Even if you can explain away this chronological mismatch, the conventional starting point is plainly wrong. If atheism only became a live possibility in the 1660s, how could Bunyan, who was nobody’s intellectual elitist, depict such an assertive and recognisable ‘Atheist’ in the 1670s? How could it be said in the 1620s that there were fifty thousand atheists in Paris, or in the 1590s that ‘there is no Sect now in England so scattered as Atheism’? How could a preacher in Florence in 1305 warn that the question ‘how can it be that God exists?’ was being ‘put by madmen every day’?[8]

These early testimonies to unbelief are often dismissed on the grounds that they lacked philosophical sophistication. If you are only interested in the history of ‘atheism’ as a system of ideas, then that is the end of the matter, and this book is not for you. What interests me is that unbelief clearly existed in practice (in some form, at some level) before it existed in theory. In which case, we have not only been looking at the wrong centuries, but profiling the wrong suspects. Intellectuals and philosophers may think they make the weather, but they are more often driven by it. People who read and write books, like you and me, have a persistent tendency to overestimate the power of ideas. Some of us may occasionally change our beliefs and our lives as the result of a chain of conscious reasoning, but not very often or very honestly. Our own age has forcibly reminded us that intellectual elites often struggle to bring their societies with them. Their default role is to tag along, explaining with perfect hindsight why things inevitably turned out as they did.

The conventional story has it that philosophers attacked religion and people therefore stopped believing. But what if people stopped believing and then found they needed arguments to justify their unbelief? ‘The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing,’ cautioned Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century’s shrewdest wrestler with doubt.[9] Apart from a heroic or cold-hearted few, most of us make our lives’ great choices – beliefs, values, identities, purposes – intuitively, with our whole selves, embedded as we are in our social and historical contexts, usually unable to articulate why we have done it, often not even aware we have done it. If we have the inclination, we might then assemble rationalisations for our choices: rationalisations which may be true, but in a meagre, post hoc way.[10]

My point, simply, is that it is not only religious belief which is chosen for such instinctive, inarticulate, intuitive reasons. So is unbelief. In which case, the crucial juncture in the history of atheism is the period before the philosophers made it intellectually respectable: when the raw dough began to bubble with unexplained energy, making it urgent that intellectuals discover ways to bake, slice and package it. It is no great surprise that Enlightenment thinkers could develop atheistic philosophies. Anyone who needs a philosophy badly enough will find one, and as we will see, arguments against God and against Christianity’s core doctrines were nothing new in the mid-seventeenth century. The question is not, where did these criticisms come from, but, why did some people start to find them compelling?[11] To answer that question, we do not need an intellectual or philosophical history of atheism: we need an emotional history.

I do not mean to imply that the intellect and emotions are opposites, or that emotion is irrational. The notion that ‘head’ and ‘heart’ are opposites is a seventeenth-century canard that we are still struggling to shrug off. My gripe is with what one outstanding recent historian calls the ‘intellectualist fallacy’: ‘a tendency to privilege the clean logic of ideas above the raw fuel of human experience among the forces of historical change’.[12] The term ‘emotion’ here does not refer only to spontaneous or involuntary passions. Indeed, it includes (but is not exhausted by) the conscious intellect. We may not be able to govern our emotions fully, but we curate and manage them, and we learn them from the culture around us as well as discovering them within ourselves. It is in this sense that they can be said to have a history.[13]

Pursuing that history gives this book an hourglass shape. We begin in the broad acres of Europe’s medieval ‘age of faith’, before closing in on the so-called ‘early modern’ period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, in particular, on the Protestant world during the Reformation. We then concentrate even more tightly on what I see as the subject’s crux: the early and mid-seventeenth century in Protestant north-western Europe. Only in the final chapter do we broaden out again, to see, after that crisis, how unbelief broke cover and emerged into the open in philosophical dress. Beneath that dress, I argue, its emotional shape has remained remarkably consistent down to the present.

The book tells two interwoven emotional stories of unbelief: stories of anger and of anxiety. Anger is the more obvious of the two: grudges nurtured against an all-embracing Christian society, against the Church in particular and often also against the God who oversaw it all. The unbelief of anxiety was a quite different experience: the unsettling, reluctant inability to keep a firm grip on doctrines that people were convinced, with their conscious minds, were true. On their own, neither of these perennial emotions threatened Christendom. If anything, they were part of the moral equilibrium and self-renewal of a thriving Christian society. What made them dangerous was the Protestant Reformation, which deliberately turned angry unbelief into a weapon of mass theological destruction, and in the process stirred up anxious unbelief like never before. The result was a strange convergence of the two emotional streams. Anger became increasingly righteous in tone: ‘atheists’ were universally assumed to be monsters of depravity, but angry unbelief turned into a moral revolt and began to find its own, distinct ethics. Meanwhile, as anxious unbelievers found that everything they tried to grapple with turned to mist and shadows, some of them despaired of finding doctrinal certainties and fastened their grip onto ethical certainties instead. So the angry and the anxious found themselves allying against traditional Christianity, opposing it not principally on intellectual grounds but on moral ones.

The emotional history of Western atheism, then, is not a story of an external assault on Christianity. It is a story of Christians and post-Christians attacking from within, and doing so from the moral high ground. When some of them reached the point of wanting to abandon or abolish God, it was not because of their intellectual rationalisations, but because their ethics and even their theology demanded it. As the sociologist Peter Berger has observed, ‘historically speaking, Christianity has been its own gravedigger’.[14] This is not chiefly because it generates intellectual critiques of itself. Rather, it generates moral critiques of itself: an operation so successful that, in parts of the Western world, the patient now seems in real danger of death. Whether the story will end that way, or whether Christianity will find that what does not kill it makes it stronger, remains to be seen. My point is simply that the history of unbelief follows a dynamic established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This dynamic is not separate from the history of belief. It is part of it.

Or so this book will argue. For now, listen to that battle-hardened pastor John Bunyan, who filled his book not with straw men and caricatures, but with acute warnings of the real temptations that awaited his readers. His ‘Atheist’, with his mocking insults, seems at first to represent angry unbelief at its crudest, but there is more to him than that. He goes on to tell the travellers that, twenty years ago, he himself heard tell of the city of God and set out on a pilgrimage to find it. Only bitter experience convinced him the search was fruitless. His tragedy is not his unbelief, but his faith. ‘Had I not, when at home, believed, I had not come thus far to seek.’ If there was a Heaven, he warns the younger travellers, he would have found it. ‘I have gone to seek it further than you.’ So now he is headed wearily home, ‘and will seek to refresh myself with the things that I then cast away, for hopes of that, which I now see, is not’.[15] His unbelief is a direct result of the anxious searching that once defined his faith. It has left him with a moral imperative: to save believers from themselves.

So far I have been tossing around words like ‘atheist’ and ‘unbeliever’ as if their meanings are obvious and equivalent, which they are not. Before we go any further it is as well to be clear what we are talking about.

Nowadays ‘atheism’ simply means the claim that there is no God. The word has included this ‘hard’ or philosophical sense from its beginnings, but only as part of a much wider range of meaning, which we might do well to recover. The Greek word ἄθεος (atheos) means, literally, without God or gods. It was a term of abuse, applied in ancient times to people like Socrates, condemned for his supposed rejection or neglect of socially established religious norms. Early Christians, who would not acknowledge the Graeco-Roman gods, were sometimes also called ἄθεοι, a charge they indignantly denied. But the word atheos was scarcely ever used in Latin in ancient times. When the Greek word was translated into Latin, impius, ‘impious’, was usually felt to be the nearest synonym. The word ἄθεοι occurs only once in the Bible, where it was translated into Latin as sine Deo, ‘without God’. Only with the rediscovery of Greek in the Christian West during the Renaissance did the word come into widespread use – transliterated into Latin as atheos in the early sixteenth century, and then very quickly spreading into European vernaculars: Italian ateo, German Atheist, French athée.[16] It arrived late in English, via French, in 1553.[17] Its range of meaning was still much wider than ‘hard’ atheism. In the 1540s the English scholar John Cheke wrote a Latin treatise in which he lambasted

those who … live as if God were altogether without care of them; and who neither consider with themselves, nor care whether there be a God or no, or whether he has any Administration or Foresight of human Affairs … The Scriptures mark them out under several Titles, but it is most agreeable to our present purpose to call them ἄθεοι.[18]

We might question whether such people are atheists or if the nineteenth-century term ‘agnostic’ would fit better, but the point is that Cheke was not talking about metaphysics at all. His targets were, as we might say, the godless, regardless of what beliefs they formally professed. This was the standard usage until the eighteenth century and even beyond. As well as ‘contemplative’ or ‘speculative’ atheists – philosophical deniers of God – there were ‘practical’ atheists, who claim to believe but live as though they do not. As the seventeenth-century essayist Thomas Fuller put it, the ‘practical’ atheist is not someone who ‘thinks there is no God’, but someone who ‘thinks not there is a God’.[19]

All this made atheist a usefully elastic term of abuse. It was like the word fascist in modern, everyday use: a word with a broad but not limitless range of meanings, whose use typically marks the moment when an argument descends into name-calling.[20] Sometimes atheist was plainly stretched too far – preachers who claimed that all sinners were atheists, or that disputing one specific Christian doctrine was tantamount to atheism, were playing polemical games rather than advancing serious definitions.[21] Even so, this broad sense of the word is more useful than the narrow modern one, for it takes us away from the abstractions of metaphysical definitions into the everyday reality of how religious cultures thrive, decay or dissolve.

My subject in this book, then, extends beyond ‘contemplative’ atheism into the penumbras of doubt and unbelief. As a point of metaphysics, whether or not you believe there is a deity is interesting. But in itself it has no more consequences than whether or not you believe there are other universes parallel to our own. As John Gray puts it, someone with ‘no use for the idea of God … [is] in truth an atheist’, whatever such a person claims to believe or disbelieve.[22] ‘Practical atheist’ remains a sensible term for those whose formal belief in God has no tangible effect on their lives – who observe no religious practices, adhere to no specifically religious ethics, and participate in no avowedly religious community. Our subject is not only those who abandon religious beliefs and change their lives as a result, but also those who abandon religious living and whose residual religious beliefs consequently wither.

In other words, I make no apology for using words – ‘atheist’, ‘sceptic’, ‘unbeliever’ – which describe what people are not. Our subject is a disappearance: the evaporation of a once very widespread religious culture. Those curmudgeonly terms are inadequate to describe what, if anything, has taken its place, but that will have to wait until we have a clearer idea of how the disappearance happened. The mystery we are addressing is how believers became unbelievers: and if the word unbelief sounds like it still has belief at its core, well, I think it does.

Before we embark for the Middle Ages, some readers may have suspicions about the book’s scope, and about its agenda.

The book’s scope is unashamedly Eurocentric and Christian-centric, with a couple of small but important supporting roles played by European Judaism. Within that frame, it focuses disproportionately on the Protestant world and in particular on England, which is almost the exclusive focus of a couple of crucial chapters. This partly reflects my own historical specialism, but is also because, for reasons that I hope will become clear, I think the Protestant and English material is distinctively important as well as rich.

If this all feels parochial, that is because the phenomenon we are considering –Western secularism – is a parochial one. It is an offshoot of European Christendom, and in particular (so I will argue) of the Protestant world. In global terms, it is a counter-current, even an aberration. The dominant religious story of the past two centuries is surely the spread of Christianity and of Islam around the globe, a race in which those two hares have so far outpaced the secular tortoise that it takes a considerable act of faith to believe it might one day catch up. It is true that Western secularism has spread across the planet along with various other Western cultural exports, but there are relatively few countries beyond the North Atlantic region where it has really put down roots: Uruguay, perhaps, or the ‘Anglosphere’ outposts of Australia and New Zealand. There are certainly many other modern countries, such as Turkey, India or China, where the ‘secular’ is a potent social or political force, but these ‘secularisms’ are not at all Western in flavour. And in most of the world, including many of those countries, ‘religion’ in its many forms is going from strength to strength. The once-widespread assumption that Euro-American secularisation represented the probable future of humanity as a whole now looks much more like an expression of cultural imperialism than a level-headed forecast. So I am in no sense claiming to write a history of a universal or global phenomenon, but of a specific and local one – important in its own context, to be sure, especially for those of us who live in its homelands, but one that neither foreshadows any kind of global destiny nor is inscribed indelibly into Western culture itself.

As to my agenda: I am a historian of religion, and am myself a believer (and, in the interests of full disclosure, a licensed lay minister in the Church of England). When such a person starts writing about unbelief, it is fair to suspect a hatchet job. I hope that is not what I have done.

Of course, no one can be objective on this subject. We were born into this world and we’re going to die here; we all have a stake in this and are forced to make our wager. My own position is that I am a believer with a soft spot for atheism. I abandoned my youthful atheism for reasons that seem to me sufficient and necessary, but I still respect it. Like many of the characters in my story, I find an honest atheism much more honourable and powerful than the religion of many of my fellow believers. I hope readers will find that I have treated unbelievers with due respect – if not always with kid gloves. This is one reason why, throughout the book, I write about what ‘you’ or ‘we’ might have experienced as a medieval or early modern believer or unbeliever, rather than using the easy, distancing impassivity of pronouns like ‘one’ or ‘they’. I think it is worth the imaginative effort of trying to put ourselves in their place.

In writing an emotional history of atheism, I am not arguing that atheism is irrational. I am arguing that human beings are irrational; or rather, that we are not calculating machines, and that our ‘choices’ about what we believe or disbelieve are made intuitively, with our whole selves, not with impersonal logic.[23]

Happily, since I am convinced that arguments as such have precious little bearing on either belief or unbelief, there is no danger of a book such as this converting anyone to or from anything. Nor, of course, is that its aim. My hope is instead that believers and atheists alike might understand better how unbelief has gone from feeling intuitively impossible to feeling, to many people, intuitively obvious; and how, during the long and fractious marriage between faith and doubt, both partners have shaped each other more than they might like to admit. ‘If you want to understand atheism and religion,’ says the steely atheist John Gray, ‘you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites.’[24] My purpose is merely to remind both parties how long their fates have been intertwined and how much they owe to one another, not least so they might be willing to talk and to listen to one another again.

So to atheist readers, my message is: please appreciate that unbelief is, like almost everything else human beings do, very often intuitive, non-rational and the product of historically specific circumstances. If that were not so, it would be fragile indeed. And to believers, my message is: please understand that atheism and doubt are serious. They have real emotional power and moral force, and they have flourished and are flourishing for very good reasons. The fact that those reasons are often deeply rooted in religion itself makes them all the more powerful, and means that the chasms separating us are narrower than we like to imagine.

It only remains to add that, in what follows, all translations are my own unless otherwise indicated; and that in quotations, spelling, punctuation and occasionally usage have been modernised for comprehensibility.

1
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]

So we have anger with God, hatred for priests, rejection of transubstantiation, scepticism about life after death. What does it all add up to? Medieval inquisitors, who liked their heresies neatly classified, had a ready label to hand: Epicureanism. The ancient philosopher Epicurus, whose name is now associated with pleasure-seeking, was notorious in the Middle Ages both for his mortalism and for his strictly naturalistic account of the universe. If the gods existed in this worldview, they were little more than a curiosity. Dante put heretics in the sixth circle of Hell, but he named only one actual sect: the Epicureans, ‘who with the body make the spirit die’, and who are therefore condemned to lie for ever in opened tombs, unwillingly immortal. (Emperor Frederick II was among them.) Dante singled the Epicureans out, one near-contemporary reader claimed, because they are ‘a sect which seems to have more followers than others’.[17]

In fact there is no evidence that this was a ‘sect’ with ‘followers’ at all. Frederick II, Jacopo Fiammenghi and Thomas Tailour did not all belong to some hidden, counter-cultural tradition. Most of the unbelieving voices we can recover sound as if they were isolated individuals working matters out for themselves, using everyday analogies. To take a slippery example: we do not need to believe the wild accusations of heresy flung at Pope Boniface VIII by his enemies in 1303 to recognise the kind of picture that was being painted. The pope supposedly mocked any notion of resurrection in bluntly rationalistic terms, telling believers to go and look at a graveyard: ‘When is your grandmother coming back to tell us about the other world?’ Were all the bones of the dead seriously going to be gathered for the general resurrection? Pointing to the bird on his dinner plate, he allegedly told his companion, ‘you have no more soul than this capon’.[18] Whether dreamed up by the pope himself or by an imaginative accuser, none of these claims suggest intellectual influences. Some insights – that the world is flat, that dead is dead, that bread is bread – simply thrust themselves onto the mind with or without a tradition behind them.[19] Medieval Europeans respected inherited authority, but they could also think for themselves. The conundrum that our lives feel as if they mean something, while the world looks as if it means nothing, confronted them as it confronts us all. Like us all, they found their own solutions as best they could.

The plainest sign of this is that, together with unbelievers and garden-variety heretics, inquisitors regularly dredged up self-taught individuals who spanned the range from idiosyncratic through eccentric to insane. The Italian who argued in 1275 that our bodies cannot be made by God, since death would not otherwise extinguish our senses, claimed to have deduced this and other weird doctrines ‘from his own cogitations’.[20] English bishops hunting Lollards came across individuals whose claims – that Heaven is below the earth, that the Virgin Mary belonged to the Holy Trinity while Christ did not, that Christ had had eighteen apostles – do not reflect any known theological system. A later generation of churchmen enjoyed shocking one another with tales of the man who ‘thought Christ was the Sun, that shineth in the firmament; and the Holy Ghost was the Moon’, or the one who believed his soul was ‘a great bone in his body, and … after he was dead, … if he had done well, he should be put into a pleasant green meadow’.[21] These people are witnesses to an eternal truth: you don’t need to know what you’re talking about in order to have an opinion.

By now we have strayed into a different mood. Mortalism and wilder speculations were not usually fired by anger, but by anxiety, that meeting point of curiosity and fear. What happens to us after we die is a subject worth being anxious about. In the late 1160s, King Amalric of Jerusalem – a corpulent, studious prince who was no friend of the Church’s privileges – fell ill. He summoned William, the archbishop of Tyre, to ask a question that William thought ‘hardly admitted of discussion’: ‘whether … there was any way of proving by reliable and authoritative evidence that there was a future resurrection?’ The shocked archbishop insisted that Christ’s teaching was all the evidence needed, but Amalric asked ‘whether this can be proved to one who doubts these things and does not accept the doctrine of Christ and believe in a future resurrection’. William claimed to have settled the royal conscience with only a few words. Perhaps: but the episode suggests that doubt could surface literally anywhere in medieval Christendom, especially when a brush with illness or danger made fine words about immortality sound flimsy.[22]

King Amalric’s scepticism may have pained his archbishop, but it did not deeply alarm him. Anxieties of this kind – shallow-rooted, always springing up afresh – were a perennial feature of medieval Christendom, but not a serious threat to it. Perhaps they were mere weeds, a tolerable and inescapable problem that could never be permanently eradicated but could be managed. Perhaps they were even a necessary part of the ecosystem, helping the true faith to stay limber. There was no reason to suspect that these medieval doubters were the start of anything. A few weeds were not about to uproot the tree of faith. But when fresh doubts did begin to sprout, they did not do so in virgin soil in which no seed of unbelief had ever been sown.

Physicians, ‘Naturians’ and ‘Nulla Fidians’

If the bishop at King Amalric’s sickbed tried to preserve him in the faith, the same may not have been true of his physicians. To summon medical help was to enter a notoriously sceptical world, a nest of paganism at the heart of Christendom.

Medieval and early modern medicine owed virtually nothing to Christianity. It drew partly on Islamic and, especially, Jewish sources: whether ailing Christians might put themselves in the hands of Jewish doctors was a long-standing dilemma, in which niceties of conscience were usually overwhelmed by practical urgency. Beneath it all, however, Europe’s medical tradition looked to Galen, the great Greek physician of the second century, ‘the most heathenish of all writers’, who did not believe in an immortal soul and whose towering authority Christianity struggled either to undermine or to co-opt.[23]

Even apart from this dangerous inheritance, physicians’ vocation was in inevitable tension with Christianity. They were in the business of changing fate, not submitting to it. They were interested in natural causes of illness, which could be treated, not supernatural ones, against which they were powerless. And they had a vested interest in persuading patients that their methods were more effective than any priest’s rituals. In the twelfth century, it was already said that physicians tended to place ‘undue emphasis upon nature, in … opposition to faith’. In the thirteenth century ‘damned and false men’ were arguing that the Bible ‘speaks falsely’ by describing epilepsy as demonic possession.[24] The fourteenth-century Italian physician Peter of Abano claimed that supposed resurrections were merely natural resuscitations of people who were not in fact dead, and indeed that ‘there is an infirmity which can keep a man insensible for three days and nights, so that he appears dead’. Perhaps Christ had merely passed out and then recovered? Peter died before these remarks could catch up with him, but he was posthumously burned for heresy just in case he was right.[25] In 1497 another physician was tried in Bologna on charges of dismissing Christ’s miracles as natural phenomena. ‘It’s simply not possible’, a Venetian physician supposedly said in 1575 of the miracles worked by his professional rivals in the Church: ‘it’s all an invention of the priests to get more money’.[26] Unbelief, admitted the seventeenth-century English doctor Sir Thomas Browne, was ‘the general scandal of my profession’.[27]

How widespread this sort of thing really was is impossible to say. What is clear is that, running right through the medieval and early modern periods and beyond, there was a well-established stereotype: the sceptical, amoral and self-serving physician, a colleague to the deceitful, amoral and self-serving lawyer and the hypocritical, amoral and self-serving priest. It is already there in Chaucer, whose physician’s studies were ‘but little on the Bible’. A seventeenth-century proverb had it that ‘where there are three physicians, there are two atheists’.[28] Stereotypes of this kind may be unfair or ill-founded, but they take on a life of their own. Sometimes people who grow weary of labouring under hostile assumptions decide they may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

Medics’ supposed atheism was of a specific kind. They were described as ‘naturians’, often ‘mere’ or ‘sole’ naturians. ‘The disease incident to your profession’, one preacher told physicians, is ‘even to be half Atheists, and that by ascribing so much to natural and second causes, and too little to God’. What made it worse was that their patients might be tempted into similar unbelief, placing their hopes for recovery in a doctor’s skill rather than God’s mercy.[29] The more expert the physician, the more likely that his expertise would blind him to the larger truth, and that he would, as the great physician-philosopher Robert Burton warned, ‘attribute all to natural causes’.[30]

In the 1560s, the English physician William Bullein penned a vivid fictional portrait of this kind of unbelief. Antonius, a wealthy merchant, consults Medicus, his physician, frankly admitting that he would spend his entire fortune to save his life, and recalling that in his ‘last great Fever’ he had paid Medicus handsomely. Already we are some way from the Christian ideal, in which the sick submit to God’s will and devote themselves to prayer and charity. But Medicus, knowing on which side his bread is buttered, praises Antonius’ attitude, and supports it by quoting an obscure biblical verse: ‘Honour the Physician, with the honour that is due unto him.’[31] Antonius, amused, points out that Medicus has left out the rest of the verse, which attributes all true healing to God. Lest he seem like a Bible-basher, he hastily adds that he only recognises the verse because he recently chanced to hear it being read when he and his bailiffs were in a church, lying in wait to ambush a pair of bankrupts. Medicus is unabashed at being caught out. ‘I care not, for I meddle with no Scripture matters, but to serve my turn.’ And he points out that, if either of them were to take heed of preachers quoting awkward Bible verses, they could hardly ply their trades as they do. Antonius happily agrees: the Bible is full of ridiculous principles that would bring all normal human society to a standstill, such as ‘the Ten Commandments, etcetera’. If we are really going to be damned for everyday profanity and hating our enemies, ‘then I warrant you, Hell is well furnished’.[32]

So far this is mere impiety, but now matters take a new turn. ‘I think that we two are of one religion,’ Medicus says, conspiratorially. Antonius is nonplussed: ‘I know not mine own religion’, so how can it be the same as someone else’s? Medicus now asks him to check that no one else can overhear them: secrets are about to be spoken. When he is certain that they are alone, he says to Antonius: ‘Hark in your ear sir, I am neither Catholic, Papist, Protestant, nor Anabaptist.’ Antonius asks, ‘What do you honour? The sun, the moon, or the stars?’ None of them, says Medicus. ‘To be plain, I am a Nulla fidian’: a person of no faith. (The newly coined English word atheist was not yet in widespread use.) ‘There are many of our sect’, he adds. And then comes the truly remarkable feature of this exchange. Having heard what ought to be the most shocking religious confession imaginable, Antonius is almost disappointed. He had apparently been hoping for something more novel. ‘Oh. One who says in his heart there is no God. Well, we differ very little in this point.’ He takes his prescription and leaves Medicus to his next patient.[33]

This was satirical fiction, the work of an author who was himself an ardent believer, and ought not to be taken too literally. Still, this much is plain. Physicians were the heirs to medieval Europe’s most robustly secular intellectual tradition. And while they might accept God’s role in human health and sickness, they could do nothing about it and so inevitably tended to ignore it. Whatever their own beliefs, their vocation led them to neglect God, and to do so at a moment when a patient might otherwise be rediscovering the urgency of faith.

So the physician’s consulting room can join the alehouse and gaming table on our list of secularised spaces. Since learned medicine was a tiny world, the preserve of a handful of university-educated doctors and those wealthy enough to be able to afford their services, this is perhaps not very important. Moreover, for all medieval and early modern medicine’s self-importance, it was very often useless and frequently worse, which did not increase its moral authority. Even the staunchest atheist might have been wiser to trust in God’s mercy than to submit to a medieval physician.

Nevertheless, medical secularism could be corrosive, for even in the Middle Ages medicine always held the potential for innovation and scepticism. Patients had an irritating tendency to be more interested in whether a treatment worked than in whether it had good scholarly credentials. When the medical establishment despised experimenters as ‘empirics’ and froze them out of the academy, this merely spurred them on. It is no coincidence that the most notorious Christian dissident of the sixteenth century, Miguel Servetus, who denied the doctrines of the Trinity and of original sin, was also a physician who pioneered theories of the circulation of blood. In the following century, Sir Thomas Browne peered over the edge of unbelief with a coolly critical eye, and used his professional skills to ask searching questions of his religion. The method for determining virginity provided in the book of Deuteronomy, ‘I find … is very fallible’. He suggested that the supposed miracle by which Moses defended the Israelites from snakebite was ‘but an Egyptian trick’; that the fire Elijah had called down from Heaven could be explained chemically; that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was due to ‘Asphaltic and Bituminous’ materials in the water rather than to the people’s sin. This kind of thinking was by no means a slippery slope to atheism – Browne’s case proves that, as we will see – but nor was it a path to simple faith.[34]

In the late 1650s, a Parisian priest named Paul Beurrier visited an aged physician in his parish, whose name he gave only as Basin. This man had travelled widely in Europe, in Turkey and in the East Indies, and had studied with Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Indian Brahmins. In the end, he concluded that ‘all religions were only dreams, and political institutions used by rulers to use the deception of religion and the fear of Divinity to procure their subjects’ submission’. He returned to Paris, ‘determined to live and to die in philosophy’. Beurrier, the kind of priest who enjoys a challenge, visited Basin several times, and Basin eventually laid out for him what he called ‘my philosopher’s religion’. He accepted the existence of a distant, impersonal God who ‘did not involve himself in our affairs, as being beneath him’, but he insisted: ‘First, that the Christian religion is the greatest of all fables; second, that the Bible is the oldest of all fictions; third, that the greatest of all deceivers and impostors is Jesus Christ.’

Basin’s profession was no incidental part of his identity. Early in their acquaintance, Beurrier remarked platitudinously that Basin surely wished to live and die a good Christian. Basin indignantly denied it: ‘I am a physician and philosopher. I have no other religion than to be a philosopher, and wish to die a philosopher, as I have lived.’

Basin is not the only shockingly frank character in Beurrier’s memoirs, and the story seems to have lost nothing in the telling.[35] But with its suggestion that Christian and physician were incompatible alternatives, it implies that the medical world was one of those reservoirs in which unbelief lay dormant throughout the Middle Ages – until stirred into life by what Basin called ‘philosophy’. That brings us out of this medical byway into the cultural upheaval that defined the modern age.

From Ancient to Modern

Medieval Europe was Christian to its bones; but it also venerated the ancient world, which had only latterly embraced Christianity, and some of whose greatest minds had rejected religion of any kind. Medieval theology’s central scholarly project was to reconcile the Christian and Graeco-Roman intellectual legacies. In its own terms, this project was impressively successful, but no sooner was the battle won in the thirteenth century than an unexpected new front opened up. The brash new movement that arose in the city-states of northern Italy was not trying to cause religious trouble. This ‘Renaissance’, as we now call it, was a cultural and a political project. A series of scrappy, turbulent and remarkably wealthy miniature republics were trying to stabilise themselves and to protect their independence from one another, and from the twin threats of the papacy to the south and the Holy Roman Empire to the north.

In an era when hereditary monarchy was the norm, republican city-states were a novelty, but there was an obvious precedent: the pagan republics of ancient Greece and Rome. Italians who studied those examples quickly found that their political lifeblood had been oratory, rhetoric and the art of persuasion. So what we call the Renaissance began as an attempt to recover the eloquence of the age of Cicero, to scale once again the heights of Latin as it had been used in the classical era, in order to rebuild Rome’s glories in Florence, Pisa and Siena.

These pioneers of the Renaissance venerated the ancient world at least as much as any other medieval scholars, but they used that veneration in a new way. Instead of humbly seeing themselves as heirs of an unbroken tradition, charged with preserving, transmitting and (perhaps, cautiously) interpreting it, they came to suspect that during the long ages separating themselves from the ancients, corruptions had crept in. The everyday Latin of the medieval Church and university seemed barbarous and uncouth next to the elegance of the ancient rhetors. At the start, this modest philological observation seemed innocent of religious implications. Yet they had started using the ancient, pagan past as a yardstick with which to measure the more recent, Christian past.

These scholars described their field as studia humanitatis: the study of human authorities, as opposed to divinity. From this they are nowadays often called ‘humanists’. The word is misleading – they were, as we would now say, students of the humanities, rather than ‘humanists’ in the modern, atheistic sense – but the implications are not entirely wrong. It is partly that Christianity could not be completely insulated from the new critical methods these scholars were developing. The Bible is an ancient text, and Renaissance scholarship began to raise awkward questions about whether it had been translated and interpreted correctly; whether its text, as generally accepted, was accurate; even whether a correct translation or an accurate text would ever be possible.

For the moment, this was not much more than a whisper of unease, although it would build into an insistent din over the centuries ahead.[36] A more immediate threat came directly from the attempt to bring classical values into the late medieval world, a project which unmistakably gave Renaissance humanism a certain secular flavour. The challenge this posed to Christian orthodoxy was latent, slow-burning and eminently avoidable. But it was there.

In 1417, the Florentine scholar and manuscript hunter Gianfrancesco Poggio Bracciolini discovered the lost text of Lucretius’ Of the Nature of Things. This epic poem from the first century BCE is the best surviving summary of Epicurean philosophy, but that was not why fifteenth-century Italians copied and re-copied it so avidly. It was rather that, in an age hungry for the best Latin style, Lucretius was hard to beat. Like modern film critics watching The Birth of a Nation or The Triumph of the Will, Lucretius’ Renaissance readers admired him despite his ideas, not because of them. He was so eloquent that even the authors of anti-atheist tracts could not resist quoting his aphorisms.[37] And so Epicureanism, which for centuries had been an imagined poison, began to seep into Europe’s groundwater for real.

In 1431 Lorenzo Valla, a pioneer of biblical criticism and a bitter rival of Poggio, wrote On Pleasure, a dialogue between a Stoic, an Epicurean and a Christian. Naturally the Christian had the last word, but the Epicurean had by far the most lines and, readers generally agree, the greatest share of the author’s sympathies.[38] By the end of the century, some Italians were no longer simply playing with Epicureanism. In 1482 the brilliant, unorthodox theologian and magician Marsilio Ficino claimed that sufferers from melancholy, whose bodily humours were ‘cold, dry, and black’ and whose spirits were therefore ‘doubtful and mistrusting’, were drawn to Lucretius and to unbelief. Ficino’s suggested regime to alleviate this malady has more than a whiff of self-medication.[39] In 1517 the city of Florence banned the reading of Lucretius in schools, worried by the unhealthy interest he was generating.

Lucretius was only one face of a larger problem. Even the Renaissance humanists’ most revered political mentor, Cicero, had written a treatise, Of the Nature of the Gods, that almost persuaded a young French student into what he called ‘atheism’. When an English poet in the 1570s wrote a dialogue between a believer and an atheist, he lifted his atheist’s arguments wholesale from Cicero.[40] Equally dangerous ideas could be found in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, one of medieval Europe’s best-known classical works and one of the first to find print publication, in 1469. Pliny – now better known for having been killed by his own reckless curiosity during the eruption of Vesuvius at Pompeii – was a Stoic, not an Epicurean, but he too professed a wearied ignorance about whether there were any gods, and mocked the notion ‘that the sovereign power and deity, whatsoever it is, should have regard of mankind’. He dismissed any notions of life beyond death or of a soul as ‘fantastical, foolish, and childish’, called the idea of divine omnipotence ridiculous, and directed his readers’ attention instead to ‘the power of Nature’, saying, ‘it is she, and nothing else, which we call God’. His book was read with particular attention by physicians.[41]

Still, we should not overestimate the impact of these ideas. It was not news to late medieval Europeans that most ancient writers were not Christians. When Lucretius, Cicero and Pliny dismissed pagan religion, good Christians were happy to agree, simply regretting that those virtuous men had not had the opportunity to take the final step of faith in Christ. When the daring Mantuan philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi argued in 1516 that Pliny and Aristotle had been mortalists, he provoked furious controversy and accusations of heresy – but there is no good reason to doubt his insistence that, regardless of what Aristotle might have thought, he himself believed the Church’s doctrine.[42] The actual idea of mortalism was blandly familiar, not disturbingly novel. The same is true of anti-providentialism: the argument that the world is governed simply by nature (Pliny) or by chance (Lucretius), so that God becomes an abstract curiosity, unable to answer prayers or work miracles. This is, the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt has argued, the idea which gave birth to the Renaissance and to the modern world. It is true enough that amid the chaotic opportunities of fifteenth-century Italy, anti-providentialism had a certain appeal.[43] But it was hardly new. The French builder accused in 1273 of saying he would only trust God and the Virgin Mary if he received bankable guarantees from them, and of insisting that his career was founded on hard work, not God’s favour, had not been reading the ancients.[44] The notion that God does not hear prayers and either does not or cannot act is quite capable of suggesting itself to people who are unfamiliar with Lucretius. Anyone who has ever had a heartfelt or desperate prayer rebuffed can hardly avoid the thought. If all Europeans before the Renaissance had truly believed in divine providence, the words that sprang instinctively to gamblers’ lips would have been prayers, not blasphemies.

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.

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