How the Reformation Trained Us to be Sceptics

last time we were hunting that elusive Beast the medieval atheist but now as we come into the 16th century our quarry is starting to break cover this is the century when Western Christendom is unity is shattered by the Protestant Reformation and the age of religious division and war that it triggered it's also the age when the word atheist came into common usage in in most Western European languages and most histories of atheism recognize that this is at least a part of the story but what part here's one way to tell that story Martin Luther defies the Pope and the result is that Western Christendom splits into rival parties each of them regard to the others errors as intolerable and so they dig their trenches and they pound each other with their artillery first polemical and their literal and they tear up the religious landscape that they're trying to control until it can't be recognized anymore all sides condemn one another for their false beliefs and it's hard to prevent the civilians who are caught up in the crossfire from reaching the conclusion that none of the combatants want them to what if everybody's wrong as the baffles subside into exhausted ceasefires and frozen conflicts ordinary people and their governments begin systematically trying to avoid those conflicts and the terrible destruction that they can cause by confining what they now call religion to a private sphere and creating a new secular public space people who can't agree about religion can at least work around it and eventually discover that they didn't particularly miss it and so religion gets confined to quarters like a once formidable relative sent to a nursing home spoken of with respect paid a ritual visit occasionally honored its debts but not allowed out in public where it might cause distress or embarrassment and in truth although it would be crass to say so out loud it's simply kept ticking over until it dies in natural death now that's a powerful story and there's a fair bit of truth in it but you'll notice that the world it explains is not quite the world that we have it doesn't explain why European Christianity endured so strongly for so many centuries after the Reformation nor does it explain why in our own times a religiously fractured society like the United States is so much less a secular than relatively homogeneous ones like say Norway or France above all I think this mistakes the part that unbelief played in the Reformation itself unbelievers won't cast merely in supporting roles as battlefield medics or the architects of post-war reconstruction they're a decisive part of the action from the beginning the proximate reformers saw their movement as amongst other things our crusade against what they called superstition that immensely useful word was applied to any false or miss conceived or misdirected religious practice and since classical times the word superstition had had an opposite which depending on which language you were using was either in piety or atheism so this was the unwelcome choice set before Christians in the Reformation era if the balance that you were holding on the knife edge of True Religion wavered you are forced to fall either towards superstition or towards impiety which way would you prefer to go I think your answer to that question pretty much determines whether you ended up as a Protestant or as a catholic catholics might loathe superstition but if it came to it they would as Thomas More said rather be superstitious than in pious better to eat the religious diet that's put in front of you however questionable than to turn your nose up at it and risk starvation by contrast Protestants became Protestants because it was better to be famished than to devour what they called the pestiferous dung of Papists tree superstition was so appalling that they would risk flirting with unbelief in order to be rid of it as one Catholic put it I think not unfairly a Catholic may commonly become sooner superstitious than a Protestant and a Protestant sooner become an atheist than a Catholic now of course Protestants denied it they said that they were steering the the middle course between opposing dangers but the undertow did pull them one way lesson so how henri mooré hit is a subtle moderate English Protestant of the mid 17th century listen to how he explains the growth of atheism in his own time in the Reformation he argued God had graciously permitted a more large release from superstition a freer perusal of matters of religion than in former ages but the devil had spotted an opportunity in this advance to carry men captive out of one dark prison into another out of superstition into atheism itself the Smashing of this external frame of godliness the cage which had kept medieval Europeans in blind obedience meant that many of them now simply gave in to their unrestrained sinfulness being emboldened by the tottering and falling of what they took for religion before they will gladly conclude that there is as well no God has no religion now Henry Moore saw opposing this kind of atheism as his life's work the one solution he was never willing to consider was rebuilding the prison as Catholics pointed out this was not some regrettable side effect of the Protestant Reformation it was integral to it the Protestants whole business was to mount frontal assaults on long accepted Christian doctrines mercilessly mocking anyone who was gullible enough to believe the ridiculous lies spewed out by the priests of Antichrist but these Protestants are still Christians Christians committed to preaching the supreme value of faith and so they derive credulity but they've no wish to foster incredulity either this problem how do you reject some beliefs while still embracing others is of course an old one for Christians traditionally the solution involves carefully chosen acts of defiant credulity you believe the unbelievable because it is unbelievable that's how you show that your faith has transcended reason the early church father Tertullian said that he believed in Christ's incarnation because it is absurd this can turn into a kind of pious eating contest in which the contestant who can swallow the most implausible claim is the winner and so you can find yourself arguing simultaneously that your beliefs are reasonable and logical and also that they are mysteries which surpass reason and are inaccessible except through faith because of course in Christian terms that is itself powerful proof that those beliefs are true I think it's important to be clear this is not anti rational if it looks so to us that's because we have a different sense of what reason is from these folks since the 18th century we've thought of reason chiefly as a method the application of logic to solving problems steady prosaic scientific to medieval or early modern minds reason wasn't a method it was a power of perception an intuition how do you know for example that one plus one is two on the pre-modern view the answer is simply that you intuitively know it is so the god-given Faculty of intuition which provides that knowledge is called reason if your reason is defective or absent then you will not be able to see it and if you can't see it there is no persuading you Blaise Pascal the brilliant 17th century mathematician philosopher and Catholic mystic who really sits at the fulcrum of these two views of reason Pascal distinguished between what he called the mathematical mind and the intuitive mind he said that there are uncontested truths that the mathematical mind can't prove like knowledge of first principles like space time motion and number accepting these truths he said isn't a process of logical deduction it's much more like a leap of faith in that case reason teaches us that reason is fallible because reason is a power to perceive truths that lie outside yourself there's therefore nothing more reasonable than to submit your reason to authorities that are set above it and the word for doing that is faith to defy those authorities in the name of reason is to do violence to reason itself so if there's any apparent conflict between our frail and fallible rationality and the certainties of the true faith it stands to reason that reason should give way now the proximate affirmation uses reason as a battering ram against this entire structure alarmed catholics were quick to warn that their enemies were decaying from faithful believing to carnal reason and so as well as defending their doctrines as logical and rational which they did Catholics emphasizes the Protestants were guilty of something much worse than making mistakes about theology they were revealing themselves to be incredulous and therefore of course self-evidently wrong this battle over credulity is fought above all in one arena the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation the long-established claim that when a priest consecrates bread and wine during the mass it is wholly physically but undetectably transformed into the literal human flesh and blood of Jesus Christ of course Protestants reject this but most Protestant arguments against transubstantiation boil down to claiming that it's impossible or that it's ridiculous and to call something impossible is to say that God can't do it and that can sound blasphemous in the mid 15:40 is a group of English Catholics laid out a defense of transubstantiation they assert that it's reasonable but also as one of them put it that it transcended rationality and credibility surmounting incomparably all wit and reason of man the more that a doubter by Reason ransack a--this grand sakkath and search ahthe for reason in those things that pass its reason into the further doubt he falleth so this is not an argument that disapproves of reason it disapproves of carnal reason doubting self based and therefore self limiting the Regis professor of divinity at Oxford argued that in the doctrine of the Mass there be many things that appear strange unto carnal reason unless we believe we shall not understand unless we think ourselves unworthy and and unable to know such high mysteries and secret things the said mysteries and secret things shall be hid from us the most formidable of these writers Bishop Stephen Gardner argued that even to ask how the miracle of transubstantiation was performed was a token of incredulity and he pointedly praised Christ's apostles who when Christ had spoken about his body being eaten had needed no further explanation to understand it but faith to believe it the reason that the Protestants couldn't understand it wasn't because they were stupid it was because they were faithless what made this argument so effective was that it was so nearly true props and attacks on the mass really do have a whiff of incredulity about them they tend to meet that Catholics philosophical precision not with counter arguments but with derision how could Christ's body be in so many places at once with all those masses celebrated every day surely Christ's body must be the size of a mountain by now as if Thomas Aquinas has never thought of that they used scoffing hypothetical cases you know if somebody is seasick after receiving the sacrament does that mean that he vomits his Savior up half-digested onto the ship's deck according to one Protestant Catholics are not ashamed to swear that they eat Christ up roll and swallow down into their guts every member and parcel of him and last of all that they convey him into the place where they bestow the residue of all that which they have devoured this is not an argument it's a gag reflex and it proves his opponents point the sly French essayist Michel de Montaigne who will be hearing more of believed that the Protestants reckless scorn had started a fire that swept swiftly out of control among the common people he said once you've put into their hands into the hands of commoners the fool hardiness of despising and criticizing opinions and once you've thrown into the balance of doubt and uncertainty any articles of their religion they soon cast all the rest of their beliefs into similar uncertainty they had no more authority for them no more foundation than for those you've just undermined then they take it upon themselves to accept nothing on which they've not pronounced their own approval subjecting it to their own individual assent it is not long before rueful Protestant observers are agreeing saying that the devil is whispering into believers ears you thought that this or that was a truth but you see now it comes to be debated it proves but a shadow so are other things you believe if once they were sifted and debated there are well documented stories of individuals who went from the old church to Protestantism and then beyond to more radical skepticism but in case Catholics are inclined to be smug this isn't a uniquely Protestant problem in this battle over credulity and incredulity Catholics and Protestants matched and parried one another blow-for-blow Protestants are just as quick as Catholics are to wield accusations of incredulity they insist piously that that God wanted not a curious head but a credulous and plain heart they lambaste the way that Catholics supposedly are using blind and foolish reason they even tried to turn the tables on transubstantiation claiming that that doctrine is so lumpish and carnal that it's a kind of atheism on his deathbed in 1551 John Redman a giant of theology at Cambridge University whose long-standing Catholicism was crumbling into doubt in the last year of his life Redman wrestled openly with this subject anxious friends at his deathbed asked him to affirm his faith in the traditional doctrine but he replied that the way it was normally formulated was too gross and sounded uncomfortably like cannibalism his questioner was rephrased the question more delicately did he agree that Christ's body was received in the mouth they asked him he paused and did hold his peace a little space and shortly after he spoke saying I will not say so I cannot tell it is a hard question but surely said he we received Christ in our soul by faith when you speak of it other ways it sounded grossly now if you're a Catholic here's a man whose faith is seeping away if you're a Protestant here's somebody who is seeing beyond the crude faithfulness literalism to a deeper spiritual reality it's the distinction as George Herbert would put it the next century between looking at glass or looking through it Herbert who is maybe Orthodox Protestant isms finest poet is uncharacteristically blunt on the question of transubstantiation in an unpublished poem he wrote that Christ came to abolish sin not wheat flesh cannot turn to soul bodies and minds are different spheres I think that cannot is the heart of the matter to Catholic ears that's incredulity that is binding God's omnipotence in the the weak chains of human reason whereas to Protestants that's an insistence that the Catholic doctrine fundamentally misunderstands Christ's sacrifice and drags him down to the filth of humanity this accusation of incredulity is an invaluable way of explaining why your arguments have not won the other side over it's not because they are idiots who can't follow an argument it's because they are fools who say in their heart that there is no God even if they don't admit that to themselves so your dispute then isn't really about doctrine or interpretation it is about your opponents carnal inability to see the ravishing spiritual vision that's before your own eyes and once you've defined an argument that way you can lay claim to an F superiority and simultaneously closed down any possibility of further argument and therefore pursuits of ever more authentic faith generate constant accusations of unbelief so Protestants mocked Catholics as credulous Catholics scorned Protestants as incredulous Protestants lambasted Catholics as incredulous and naturally enough completing the square Catholics derided Protestant credulity when they had the chance here the focus was the Bible the fundamental source of religious authority for Protestants and the question is how can you know that the Bible is in fact the inspired Word of God Providence had lots of answers to this but most of them in the end came down to a matter of faith they claimed that the Bible's Authority was self-evident in the sense that the Holy Spirit convinces you as you read that it's true and of course if the Holy Spirit doesn't convince you of this well clearly you are an outcast unbeliever whom God has rejected Catholics make hay with this the argument goes something like this so the Holy Spirit teaches you that the Bible is the Word of God does that inner conviction extend equally to all 66 books of the older New Testament to every chapter and verse of them to nothing else does the Spirit then guide your understanding of it if so why do other readers understand it differently if not how can it be that the Spirit auto eyes is Scripture but lets people misinterpret it what do you do about the textual glitches and variations between different manuscripts which one of them is the inspired version how can you be sure has the spirit told you that to the purpose of this Catholic argument was of course not to dismiss the Bible but to prove that the Bible's Authority ultimately derived from the Church and all Christians should submit to the church but it turns out to be much easier to demolish claims about the Bible than to establish a Catholic alternative in their place now all's fair and religious polemic we shouldn't take outraged accusations of underneath too seriously but I think this much is true this battle for credulity was a high-wire act to attack your opponent's doctrines as nonsensical and an affront to reason while defending your own as incomprehensible and transcending reason is an exhilarating and dangerous rhetorical achievement all sides in the Reformation we're encouraging open-hearted faith and corrosive skepticism at the same time they are teaching believers simultaneously to doubt and to loathe doubting scepticism isn't the opposite of faith in this world this is a necessary part of it now in all of these debates have been talking about so far Catholics and Protestants tend to write about each other as if there are different species but of course the reality is much more frightening than that they're the same people and they are liable to convert from one side to the other every Protestant of the first generation had been raised a Catholic the battle lines hardened after that but conversions in all directions continued the Reformation offered believers a religious choice most people did not want such a thing stuck to the faith in which they'd been raised but even that is a choice of a kind believers are being forced to sit in judgment over their own beliefs and in a world where they've been brought up to assume that submission is what true faith does and choosing is what heretics do that's profoundly disturbing in 1565 a French Protestant preacher called Piaf la described some alarming people whom he'd met in a southern French city probably Leon since he said the abuses of false religion were demonstrated to them of course since that they judge both the true and the false in the same way and despise them both as if all was merely the dreams and the reveries of the human mind these people as he describes it have a clear hierarchy of truth Catholics they dismiss as blind Protestants those of the Reformed Church are one-eyed and they themselves who've left all such errors behind our den AZ then I'm not sure how one pronounces that word anyway it has a double meaning it the surface meaning is educated or enlightened but it also carries the sense of deflowered or sexually experienced very French these people are serial conducts their education in unbelief consists of the multiple religions that they've passed through and they have attained some enlightenment at the cost of their religious virginity they can't go back even if they had wanted to the day's account is a picture of how the Reformation is a journey from innocence to experience it implies that there's battle over credulity and incredulity is ultimately fought not between competing religious parties but within individuals I want to spend most of the rest of this lecture looking at three contrasting individuals one French to English who show how that battle could play out Frenchmen of course is Michel de Montaigne writing his essays in genteel retirement in the middle of the French religious wars condemning those on both sides who are quick to claim that their killing in God's name now Montaigne for all his avowed Catholicism has a persistent reputation for atheism it's true that his essays are for the most part astonishingly secular occasionally he cites the Bible but much less than he does ancient pagan writers occasionally he mentions God but in the same way that he does fate or nature that they're all treated as metaphorical abstractions his essay titles to philosophize is to learn how to die does say in passing that death is the origin of another life but its main thrust is that we should take comfort in the finality of death do you not know he imagines nature saying to those who fear death do you not know that in real death there will be no second you living to lament your death and standing by your corpse you will not desire the life which now you so much lament death doesn't concern you dead or alive alive because you are dead because you're no more so this is somebody whose Catholicism is not exactly simple and straightforward he admitted that as a young man he'd been drawn to Protestantism liard he said by an ambition to share in the hazards and hardships attendant upon that fresh young enterprise it was exciting many years later some friends were convinced that he still was a Protestant deep down inside and he indignantly denied it although he admitted at times he did find some Catholic practices rather odd or rather empathy he made fun of his fellow believers he found it ridiculous for example that Catholic armies treated victory as vindication from God but refused to see defeat as vindication for their enemies in one of his most famous essays on the cannibals he argued that the supposedly savage peoples of the Americas were in truth no more barbaric than European Christians torturing and burning heretics he said isn't obviously nobler than cooking and eating people and he added a jaw-dropping comment which is I think is too easily missed there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him since eating living people was not commonplace in 16th century France Mon 10 can only have been referring to the Catholic Mass a Catholic who can say this is to put it mildly capable of impressive imaginative detachment from his own beliefs now we know that Montagnes intellectual guiding star was the second century Greek sexless empirica snooze works had recently been rediscovered and who is the most powerful ancient advocate of philosophical skepticism the doctrine that all knowledge is uncertain Montaigne had drunk very deeply of this it became a rule for him not to believe too rashly not to disbelieve too easily and above all not to rely on that fine brain of yours there is a plague on man he stated his opinion that he knows something if we search for certainty on any subject he warned we will at length discover that it's impossible to find two opinions which are exactly alike not only in different men but in the same men at different times no truth is ever definitively established this might sound like a shortcut to atheism but that's not how it played out philosophical skepticism of this kind makes God unknowable of course but it also makes the material world and everything else that we think we know equally unknowable it is so sweeping in its dismissal that in the end it's neither very practical nor very dangerous Pascal in the next century was impatient with it he argued that yes when we are awake we can't prove that we are not dreaming logically but nevertheless we know that we're not the fact that we can't make that proof merely demonstrates the weakness of our reason it doesn't demonstrate the uncertainty of all knowledge with a little bit of nimble footwork you could finesse skepticism into an argument for Christian orthodoxy not against this and Montaigne showed exactly how to do it this is this outward once you've accepted that your own reason is what he calls a two-handled pot that you can grab either from the right or from the left you could make it do anything you're forced to look beyond it whether you find a doctrine credible or incredible is beside the point it's madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities we need to look outside ourselves and from Montaigne that meant looking to the holy teachings of the church Catholic apostolic and Roman in which I die and in which I was born nor could he embrace its teachings with reservations and with doubts we must he said either totally submit to the authority of our ecclesiastical polity or else totally release ourselves from it the very fact that he is so beset with doubts shows why he must submit his own feeble reason to the eternal certainties of the Catholic faith once revealed to the Apostles and maintained faithfully in France for over a thousand years our religion he explained didn't come to us through reasoned arguments or from our own intelligence it came to us from outside authority by Commandments that being so weakness of judgment helps us more than strength blindness more than clarity of vision so skepticism in this case does not beget atheism it's the solvent of any kind of pretension to knowledge and therefore it's the necessary beginning of true faith well up to a point this gambit fidei ism as the philosophers call it doesn't actually answer doubts it just bypasses them and as our second character shows that comes with a cost William Chillingworth was an intense young student in Oxford in the 1620s given he said to sleeping too little and thinking too much he too discovered sexist and paratus skepticism went to his head by degrees a friend recalled he grew confident of thing and a skeptic in the greatest mysteries of faith in 1629 this these mounting anxieties turned into a crisis and he converted to Catholicism he travelled to an exile Seminary in France and this is a bold decision for an Englishman to take it's likely consequence his lifelong exile he later recalled that he did it in a desperate search for certainty Catholic arguments had made him doubt that there was any sure or reliable truth to be found in Protestantism and so he sought certainty in the bosom of the Church of Rome and it doesn't work within months he's back home the reality of 17th century Catholic life turns out to be shockingly different from the sort of idealized universal church he'd imagined but he does not slot happily back into Protestant England for as much as five years he was as he said doubting between communions he conferred at length with his godfather who conveniently enough just happened to be William Lord the Bishop of London and future Archbishop of Canterbury chillingworth's own plan to resolve his crisis was characteristically to write a book thrashing it out and he apparently swore an oath before Lord his Godfather to withdraw from communion with either Church for two years he claimed that this was so that the planned book would appear impartial but it's pretty obvious he's also buying time for his own indecision that's still his situation in 1634 when he is hired to be the tutor to the daughters of a Catholic daughters of a religiously mixed family by the Catholic mother who wants to think she thinks he's still a Catholic gonna keep thinking to keep them in that tradition instead Chillingworth encourages the young women to explore their doubts he tells them that Catholicism is founded on lies explains that the reason it converted was because of the unsoundness of Protestant religion and not the truth of the Catholic and he mused to them that if a third way were opened the Catholics would have no less to do to defend themselves Protestants unsurprisingly when the lady of the house hears about this he's thrown out finally in 1635 he conforms to his Godfather's church again the long-awaited book is finally published in 1638 by which time it's evolved into an anti-catholic polemic the religion of Protestants a safe way to salvation but the Protestantism he's defending here is pretty odd he is he told the girls to him he was tutor that his imagined third alternative to Catholicism and Protestantism which he called simply Christian would fit better in the Protestant and the Catholic Church not because Protestantism was any truer but because it wasn't as he said it's so straight-laced that seems to have been the spirit in which he conformed his book firmly rejected the Catholics claim to find infallible Authority in the church but he wouldn't set up the Bible as an alternative infallible Authority he warned instead that infallibility of the kind that the hard men on both sides were offering was an illusion and he was trying to find a way of dealing with that it's a strange book the the arguments fall into two dangerously unbalanced parts his attack on the Catholic claimed that their church is infallible he's devastatingly effective but he's much less successful in building up his own side of the case than he is at demolishing his opponents how can we be sure that the Bible is God's Word the only way that he can answer this is by redefining certainty he says we can't be certain of the Bible's Authority in the same way that we could be certain of a mathematical theorem or even a scientific fact at best he says we can be morally certain as certain as the nature of the thing we'll bear as lawyers would say certain beyond reasonable doubt in one extraordinary passage in the preface to the book he tells his Catholic opponents that if their arguments weighed in an even balance would have turned the scale and have made your religion more credible than the contrary certainly I should with both mine arms and all my heart most readily have embraced it there is a juddering grinding gear change in the middle of that sentence if you notice at the start he is talking about the most finely balanced of reasoned judgments made according to the balance of probabilities can be tipped by a hair one of the two religious alternatives might emerge looking fractionally more likely than the other and once he has made this carefully weighed judgment he says he will embrace whichever conclusion he reaches with all my heart free from any doubt so give him 51% confidence that you are correct and he will give you 100% commitment now I think it's plain enough why he ends up in this bizarre position he wants to give a hundred percent commitment because that's what Christians do but he no longer believes that much more than 51% certainty is available he's been playing theological beggar my neighbor ensuring that everybody else's religious arguments are left looking as weak as his own and then he is making the miserable best of what's left it's no surprise that when Chillingworth dies only six years later at the age of 41 the Protestant hard man who attends him at his deathbed is appalled fails to persuade Chillingworth into a more conventional Protestantism before he dies and instead end up presiding at his funeral where he buries a copy of Chillingworth book with him and says get the gone there now cursed book that thou may is to rot with I author and see corruption by then though England's reading public have been introduced by our third character to another unnerving model of how to be Protestant in a world of uncertainty sir Thomas Brown in his religio Medici is that this is an instant bestseller when it's published in in in 1642 as a sly meditation on Christianity from the perspective of physician Brown wants his readers to know that his religion is not a matter of habit he's chosen it the rules of my religion he says are drawn not from any particular church but from the dictates of my own reason if that's not alarming enough he added that reason had once led him to doubt the immortality of the soul of the existence of Hell he's now left those errors behind him but he continues to believe that Christian orthodoxy is beset with what he calls sturdy doubts indeed that some of the Bible's stories exceed the fables of the poets he asks how did Noah fit all of the world's animals plus six weeks worth of fodder into an ark that's only 300 cubits long and after the flood how did the animals come to be dispersed across the world so quickly how did some of them get to the Americas he says it's difficult to answer these questions and without the refuge of a miracle and you can hear his distaste for supernatural explanations this doesn't sound like a defense of the true faith but Brown is no atheist he is a post atheist he's a believer who has returned to faith after a dalliance with unbelief and has been changed by the experience he lists all these objections not in order to refute to them or to agree with them but to celebrate them he thinks he says there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith I love to lose myself in a mystery to believe something because you're convinced of it by reason he says that's not faith that's just persuasion he says that he eventually conquered his doubts not with arguments but on my knees in prayer he came to be convinced that true faith is to believe a thing not only above but contrary to reason and against the arguments of proper senses and he cited to tell you it's certain because it's absurd the brutal religious conflicts of the Reformation era did not in fact reduce Christendom faith to rubble people like Montaigne and Chillingworth and brown were not driven into atheism those who seriously wanted to hold on to their faith could find honest intellectually rigorous and emotionally satisfying ways of doing so there's Montana's surrender to uncertainty except that once you've doubted everything including your own doubts there's nothing left but to embrace the ancient faith or there is chillingworth's armed truce with uncertainty recognize that absolute truth is beyond our grasp and resolve to make the best of the shaky and partial truths which are shaky and partial minds can grasp or there's Browns joyful embrace of uncertainty believe all the more strongly precisely because faith is out of the reach of human reason John Donne the poets and convert to Protestantism we never quite left his cradle Catholicism entirely behind him done has this advice for anyone who was unsure when to be credulous and when to be incredulous he says doubt wisely in a strange way to stand inquiring right is not to stray better to stand still than to go wrong to sleep what a run wrong is on a huge hill craggy and steep truth stands and he that will reach her about must and about must go and what the hills suddenness resists winds you don't just charge straight upwards you slowly creep up on the truth this I think is pretty what much what Montana and Chillingworth and brown had done instead of being consumed by their anxieties they had as it seemed to them doubted wisely they had stood still they had worked out their way forward they picked their way up the craggy didn't steep path and they had found their way if not to the summit then at least to secure and level ground but not everybody in post-reformation Europe was a skill a mountaineer as they were anyone who tried to follow them quickly discovered that this is a climb that demanded nimble footwork and a cool head it is perfectly possible to keep your balance when out on a precipice trying to seize hold of scepticism and bend it toward your own purpose while this battle for credulity swirls around you as long as you don't look down but what you can't do is go back believers of this kind the survivors of doubt and anxiety are different creatures from their more naive predecessors witness the apparent absence of Christianity from most of Montana's writings which is usually taken as a sign that he is a closeted atheist I think not the reason I think that is that he explains its absence in his remarkable and sadly under noticed essay on prayer in which he tells us almost in passing that he prayed the Lord's Prayer many times each day and that he continually crossed himself but in the same essay he deplores the habit of singing the Psalms around the house or of routinely reading the Bible it is not a story to be told he says but a story to be reverenced to be feared to be adored and he goes on to explain why his own writings are so conspicuously devoid of religion theology he says is a high mystery and should be honored as such mere laymen like himself shouldn't aspire to it the language of men he said has its own less elevated forms and mustn't make use of the dignity majesty and authority of the language of God when I myself say Fortune Destiny accident good luck bad luck the gods similar phrases I'm offering my own human thoughts maths of opinion not matters of faith so he avoids God talk not because he despises it but because he Revere's it we ought not to be too quick to prayer he suggests since we can't often put our hearts into a prayerful attitude he even wonders if a decree forbidding anyone to write about religion unless they're a priest would be just imprudent as perhaps he says in the last line of the essay would be one requiring me to to hold my peace on the subject which he thereafter proceeds to do Thomas Brown from his very different perspective agreed he advanced his own religious views but he also warned against staking out too bold a position every man he said is not a proper champion for truth you may be sure that you're on God's side but he warned in debate as in battle victory doesn't always go to those who deserve it he says this is why he dealt with his doubts as he did I do forget them or at least defer them till my better settled judgment be able to resolve them rather than striking off on his own in search of the truth I love to keep the road do we believe it we believe these convenient explanations for apparent godlessness that these men's lack of conventionally ostentatious piety is a matter of scrupulous reverence of conscientious avoidance rather than just indifference I think I do because these people are not compelled to make any of these claims but the matter is certainly open to doubt Montaigne justifies his argument against frequent prayer by citing not the Bible but the ancient pagan historian Xenophon maybe that's exemplifying his principles or maybe that's a discrete signal that it's all an act we don't know and it doesn't matter because either way the result is the same take these skeptics and post skeptics at their word except that as a matter of conscience they're withdrawing their faith reverently from public turmoil building it a cloister where it can worship undisturbed in peaceful and honored seclusion the effect is still that God is newly absent from most of everyday life contemporaries had a word for that absence however piously and sincerely it was intended they called it atheism thank you you

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Keywords: Gresham, Gresham College, Education, Lecture, Public, London, Debate, Academia, Knowledge, gresham college, gresham, gresham lecture, free lecture, free public lecture, public lecture, lecture, education, the reformation, protestant, catholics, religion, history of religion, Europe, faith, religious war, wars of attrition, atheism, atheist, henry more, Michel de Montaigne, Caravaggio, William Chillingworth

Id: Pp0V-EkUW_s

Length: 49min 37sec (2977 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 15 2018