Читать книгу Unbelievers - Alec Ryrie - Страница 12

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.