How to be an Atheist in Medieval Europe

my agenda for this series of lectures is summed up by the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor who asks why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in say 1500 in our Western society while in 2000 few years before he wrote many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable I think the fact of that shift the fact that in Europe and in North America and their cultural offshoots in the old Christendom unbelief is now the cultural default and religious practice is a countercultural stance that requires fairly steady effort to maintain I'm going to take that fact for granted we'll be coming back to it explicitly in the final one of these lectures for now I'm happy to take Nietzsche's famous claim that God is dead and we have killed him as true or at least as a truth about Western society and culture not necessarily about God him or herself if I were a philosopher I might be inclined to ask what that claim means but I'm a historian which is a simpler creature and so this sounds to me like a murder mystery if God is dead who exactly killed him when did it happen and what weapons were used the usual answers are philosophers scientists and intellectuals during the Enlightenment and scientific revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries and by means of repeated bludgeoning Spinoza in the 1660s first showed that a world without God could be philosophically coherent Voltaire shredded the church's moral authority Hume destroyed its metaphysics Darwin explained the origins of life without reference to God and so by 1882 Nietzsche was announcing a death not committing a murder the main thing that I want to do in these lectures is to question that story I think the timescale suspects and the murder weapon are all wrong you've been promised some medieval atheists and I'm coming to those in a minute but first I want briefly to explain why I think they matter the most obvious problem with that classic time scale for the history of atheism that starting point in the second half of the 17th century is that we can find plenty of examples of unbelief and rumors of unbelief well before that period a preacher in Florence in 1305 warned that the question how can it be that God exists was being put by madmen every day now this sort of thing is usually dismissed on the grounds that they were madmen it wasn't philosophically respectable it's not sophisticated atheism and if you're only interested in the history of atheism as a system of ideas then that's the end of the matter and these lectures aren't for you what interests me is evidence that unbelief existed in practice before it existed in theory in which case we've been not only looking at the wrong centuries but profiling the wrong suspects intellectuals and philosophers may think that they make the weather but they're more often driven by it people who read and write books have I'm afraid a persistent tendency to overestimate the power of ideas some of us sometimes do change our minds and beliefs and lives as a result of the of a chain of conscious reasoning but not very often and not very honestly I think our own age has forcibly reminded us that intellectual elites often struggle to bring their societies with them their default role is often just to tag along behind explaining why things have inevitably turned out the way they did the conventional story is that philosophers attacked religion and so people stopped believing but what if people stopped believing and therefore found that they needed arguments to justify their unbelief most of us make the the great choices beliefs value identities intuitively embedded in our social and historical context usually without being able to articulate why we've done so often without being aware that we've done so if we're that way inclined we might then assemble rationalizations for the choices that we've made and those rationalizations might even be true but true in a sort of meager post hoc way I think we all recognize that that's true of belief I've all I want to suggest is that that may be true of unbelief as well if so then the crucial juncture in the history of unbelief is the period before the philosophers made it intellectually respectable the period when the rule dough begins to bubble with unexplained and sometimes unwelcome energy making it urgent that intellectuals discover ways to bake slice and package it it's no great surprise that the Enlightenment thinkers could develop atheistic philosophies anybody who needs a philosophy badly enough will find one and arguments against God were nothing new in the mid 17th century and so I think the question isn't where did these criticisms come from but why did some people start to find them compelling and to answer that question I think we need not an intellectual or a philosophical history of atheism but an emotional history so these lectures will tell what is in the conventional narrative the prehistory of atheism only in the last of the six will we turn our attention properly to the modern world when unbelief breaks cover and emerges into the open in philosophical dress but beneath that dress I'm going to argue that it's emotional shape has remained remarkably consistent down to the present they're occurring key notes of this story are anger and anxiety and their moral consequences but more of that as we go through for today what I want to do falls into two parts first I want to talk about what seems to have been the perennial endemic manaphy stations or unbelief in the medieval world based it should be said and pretty haphazard evidence but I think it forms a coherent picture and then in the second half of this lecture I want to look at how the novelties of the early Renaissance affected this picture but first let's meet some medieval atheists Richard asked for ones who managed to avoid getting burned here's one frederick ii holy roman emperor king of sicily king of germany italy and jerusalem possibly the most powerful ruler at any point in medieval europe and according to Pope Gregory the ninth an unbeliever in 12:39 the Pope accused Frederick of calling Moses Jesus Christ and Muhammad charlatans and deceivers who between them had fooled the entire world accused him 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 now these charges are certainly exaggerated but it is true that Frederick had been asking his favorite 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 did the dead never return rumor had it that one of Frederick's scholars Piero della Vania had suggested to Frederick that Moses Christ and Mohammed were frauds and had indeed written a book arguing that case under the title of the three imposters it's important to be clear that this book never existed but it became notorious on the basis of that wickedly alluring title alone for nearly five centuries dreadful tales of this book were whispered eccentrics troublemakers hunted for it a Swedish princess offered a substantial bounty for anyone who could bring her a copy plenty of people meet someone who has met someone who has once seen a copy of the book nobody manages to get any closer finally in the 18th century some enterprising French atheists actually write a book to go with the fearsome title I mean inevitably it's an anticlimax if we want to understand unbelief in the Middle Ages I think of the three imposters is a good place to start like medieval unbelief itself the book existed in the imagination it's a rumor not a manifesto it's an inarticulate suspicion not a philosophical program that's what makes it powerful it has been suggested that atheism in pre-modern times is simply impossible in one sense this is obviously true in the sense that the Greek word atheists whose meaning is more like godless or impious than claiming that there is no God that word doesn't make its way into Latin until 1501 and not into European binoculars until later on the word atheist first appears in English in 1553 but behind that semantic points it's a more serious issue that when medieval and early modern Europeans talked about atheism or unbelief those words had a much wider range of meaning than they do for us now as well as actual denials of God they include what was sometimes called practical atheism that is living as if you do not believe there is a God even if you claim that you do believe and also what we might call constructive atheism that is attacking fundamental Christian doctrines such as the immortality of the soul in such a way that whether or not you claim to believe in a deity of some kind you have nothing that they would call a religion I have to say I rather like this broad definition I think that the story of unbelief and godlessness is more interesting and important than that of atheism as narrowly defined I mean on its own whether or not you believe that there is a God has no more consequences than whether or not you believe there are universes parallel our own as John Gray puts it someone with no use for the idea of God is in truth an atheist whatever metaphysical opinions such a person may have at this point its traditional to invoke the great French literary historian lucien feather whose argument that unbelief was impossible in earlier in pre-modern times is now routinely dismissed by historians of the subject but favorites point is more subtle than he's usually given credit for he was well aware that pre-modern europeans frequently attacked religion sometimes in pretty scabrous terms and also that they readily accused one another of unbelief his point was that like of the three imposters these attacks and accusations had no intellectual substance and as such he concluded with magnificently Gallic disdain unbelief of this kind did not matter historically speaking it hardly deserves to be discussed any more than the snares of the drunkard in the tavern who give fours when he's told the earth is moving under and with him at such speed that it cannot even be felt I like this comparison before we leave the tavern in search of some more genteel atheists let's hear the drunkard out how do we here today know that febris drunkard is wrong and that the earth is in fact moving not many of us have the astronomical skill to determine the question for ourselves we believe it because we're universally told it's true by learning Authority because it's an important part of a wider web of knowledge that we have about the world around us and because we've seen some very persuasive pictures explaining it and yet like Fabrice drunkard we sometimes struggle to hold on to the fact we still say that the Sun rises even though we know 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 you do not need to be a drunkard or a fool what you need to be is independent minded and self-confident you also need to be suspicious ready to believe that you are being lied to and it also helps if you are not very well educated if you're woven too tightly into our civilizations web of knowledge then you're not going to be able to kick against it if you want to see this at work I recommend spending some time not too much time visiting the websites of modern flat earther organizations which in their stubborn refusal to be hoodwinked by the intellectual consensus of their age are the closest thing that our own world has to medieval atheists suspicions around in that one but my particular favorite of these four for sheer reasonableness is this one it's an even balance isn't it of course whether you're a modern flat earther or a medieval atheist your lack of deep engagement with the dominant intellectual systems of your age makes your doubts possible but also blunts their force you might have some slogans and some hunches but you won't be able to refute astronomers who come at you with their orbits and laws of motion or theologians wielding essences and ontology 'he's all you can reply with is the mule ish wisdom of the skeptic who is told to admire the stitching on the Emperor's clothes I just don't see it now independent minded suspicious and uneducated people are in plentiful supply in medieval Europe it's no coincidence that the original story of the Emperor's New Clothes dates back to 14th century Spain raw and inarticulate as this skepticism was it shouldn't be ignored let's have a few examples in 1234 1273 a merchant named Aranda style Mara was hauled before officials of the Bishop of a day in southern France he confessed having told a friend that profit was better than virtue and his friend teased him with not caring for his soul and he replied do you think there is any soul in the body other than the blood he said that as a young man he had been accustomed to cross himself piously but it never did him any good nor his fortunes suffered when he stopped and he also admitted to having scorned the miracle of transubstantiation in which sacramental bed bread is transformed into Christ's body even if the body of Christ were as large as a mountain it would long ago have been eaten up by priests or again in 1299 look at senator toughie totally Cena a notoriously tight fisted moneylender from Bologna was accused of dismissing the Bible as mere fiction he allegedly told mask owers that they may as well venerate their dinner he claimed that the true cross Christendom is most venerated relic was just a piece of a bench and he said that there is no other world than this one another mass mocking moneylender from the same city was more explicit in denying that there was any afterlife or resurrection when did you see the dead returned to us the church courts did not find these men's beliefs especially surprising their merchants and moneylenders grasping stone-hearted money grubbers it makes sense that people like that should have no faith when a monk like Nicholas the abbot of passignano was accused in 1351 of various acts of fraud and extortion including threats to castrate anyone who dared to testify against him it's positively a relief to discover that he also believed it was better to be than in Holy Orders or that he treated the liturgy with contempt perhaps these people lived wicked lives because they'd abandoned their faith perhaps they'd abandoned their faith in order to live wicked lives either way angry and contemptuous unbelievers like this didn't threaten the religious world around them they reinforced it the same is true of an even angrier species of unbelief blasphemy in 1526 a servant boy in Toledo was hauled before the Spanish Inquisition for saying before multiple witnesses I denied God and our lady the of the cuckold at our soul which was unusually inventive but not unique blasphemies by far the most common offense heard by the Inquisition typically words of uttered during a quarrel in a tavern or at a gaming table as Thomas Aquinas had argued these blasphemies are mere insults to God arising from momentary eruptions of rage and what more potent way to insult God than to deny him altogether like another common medieval of both cursing your own parents this is a form of posturing it's playing Russian roulette with your own soul in order to show that since you're plainly not afraid of God you're not afraid of anything blasphemers insulted God but they didn't forget him if they're angry with him that's simply a recognition of his power after all if you believe in an omnipotent God everything is his fault as pious commentators observed the irony was how constantly God's name was on blasphemers lips but their defiance isn't trivial either blasphemy has the effect of scent marking certain places ale houses gambling dens brothels armies and navies places where different religious rules apply where a certain amount of demonstrative impiety is expected even rewarded these irreligious spaces could as reservoirs of angry scorn for contemptuous unbelief for where it could seep out into the wider culture it's no coincidence these are all thoroughly male spaces blasphemies very gender specific women it was said blaspheme Gless often and also differently from men typically challenging God's justice or cursing their own births even if you didn't mean it when you defied God your words had consequences if God doesn't strike you down for your wickedness then you might reach for those words more readily next time or worse because blasphemy depends on shock value which means it's liable to galloping inflation even if you're sure that there really is a God by saying out loud that there isn't you've peered over a cliff edge maybe you're only trying to scare yourself or others you've got no intention of actually leaping off but you've looked and you've imagined you've felt a thrill that isn't purely fear it doesn't mean that if the cliff ever begins to crumble beneath you you're not going to be entirely unready of course losing your temper with God might feel good but it doesn't achieve very much a more practical target for your anger is his self-appointed representatives on earth a great many supposed cases of unbelief in the medieval church courts are plainly much more about resentment of the clergy than they are of Christian doctrine the montalban peasant who claimed in 1276 that he would not confess his sins to a priest even if he'd had sex with every woman in his village was no more analyzing sacramental theology than he was actively eyeing up the entire female population he's railing against one of the most widely resented pinch points of priestly control over laypeople likewise the Spaniard who was accused before the Inquisition in the 1490s 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 it's not speculation about the fate of the Dead by which I don't mean to downplay these incidents quite the opposite amateur theological speculation was a minority activity in the Middle Ages but resentment of priests that is a sport for everyone everyday life offered plenty of potential points of friction between priests and people and any such quarrel might naturally lead the priest falling back on his authority as God's representative and that forces the disgruntled layperson to enlarge his quarrel to include God as well a dispute over a pat of butter during Lent can very quickly escalate into something much more serious in practice one issue above all tended to trigger those escalations the medieval clergies most outrageous claim to spiritual authority in the mass every priest presided at a daily miracle in which bread and wine were holy but undetectably transformed into Christ's body and blood the doctrine of transubstantiation was always controversial and counterintuitive hence the precession of medieval miracle stories in which unbelievers suddenly see the ritual at the altar as it truly is a broken human body a blood filled chalice these visions are not in these stories rewards for faith they are judgments on unbelief the stories end with the horrified doubters begging for the dreadful vision to be hidden from them the Church does not downplay the difficulty of believing in the sacrament it revels in it it accentuates it the encyclopedic medieval theologian Peter Lombard explained that the reason Christ's body looked and tasted like bread was so that faith may obtain its merit believing is meant to be hard denials of this miracle aren't unthink they're necessary every doubting Thomas story needs a skeptic now of course most opponents of transubstantiation aren't unbelievers as such they were Christian heretics or indeed Jews or Muslims but the Inquisition's dragnets didn't discriminate some at least of their cash don't look like any kind of standard-issue heretic for example in 1448 the Bishop of Worcester interrogated a man named Thomas Sima the bishop was looking for members of the so-called Lollard sect but it quickly became clear that Sima was a different fish like the Lollards he denied transubstantiation but he then went on to dismiss the mass entirely as an empty ritual he rejected the Bible Lord's venerated it he objects it as a cynical tool of social control he denied Jesus Christ's virgin birth he claimed that paganism was better than Christianity and that the devil was stronger than God and unlike most Lollards he persisted in these denials and was burned at the stake what we can't know is to what extent this kind of skepticism was an ever-present feature of medieval religion seafloor only stirred up by trawling inquisitors and to what extent it specifically flourished in those corners of the ocean which were filled with hieratic all variety and which therefore attracted inquisitors attention but another of his shocking denials provides an important clue he rejected any notion of the soul of heaven or of Hell wherever we find unbelief in pre-modern Europe we find this mortal issed claim that when we die we die of course mortal ISM is completely compatible with belief in a God but this isn't just an attack on a specific doctrine medieval early modern Christianity was intensely focused on the state of the dead strip that out you might still have a God but you've got precious little religion so we find for example Jack Hope off your menu an elderly Italian monk who's decades of indiscipline fraud and intimidation finally caught up with him in 1299 he insisted that there was not another world neither heaven nor hell but only this worked he was asked about his soul his anima and he replied a peach has an anima the same word means the stone of the fruit in 1491 another Englishman Thomas Taylor confessed teaching that when a man or a woman died afin body then also died earth in soul for as the light of a candle is done out so the soul is quenched by the death of the body that image to the blown out candle is much repeated medieval churchmen certainly felt that mortal astir widespread enough to need regular denunciation those churchmen who liked their heresies neatly classified had a label for all this Epicureanism Epicurus who's that the ancient philosopher whose name is now associated with pleasure-seeking was notorious in the Middle Ages both for his mortal ism and for his strictly naturalistic account of the world if the gods existed in this world view they're only a curiosity dancing made room for Epicureans in the sixth circle of hell they're condemned to live forever in opened tombs unwillingly immortal but in fact there's no evidence that any epicurean sect or tradition existed most of the unbelieving voices that we can recover sound as if they're isolated individuals working things out for themselves using everyday analogies inquisitors regularly came across opinionated self-taught individuals whose beliefs span the range from idiosyncratic through eccentric to insane and who'd reached these beliefs as one explained in 1275 from his own cogitations some insights that dead is dead or bread is bread simply thrust themselves onto the mind with or without a tradition behind the medieval Europeans could 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 in the same way that it confronts all of us and like all of us they found their solutions as best they could and like all of us they didn't need to know what they were talking about in order to have an opinion but by now we're dealing with a different mood if you notice mortal isms not usually fired by anger but by anxiety that meeting point of fear and curiosity after all what happens to us after he dies is subject worth being anxious about in the late 11:00 60s King Amalric of Jerusalem that's him on the Left getting married 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 evidence that there was a future resurrection the shocked archbishop quoted Christ's words but the king asked whether this can be proved to one who doubts these things William claimed that he settled the Royal conscience with only a few more words maybe so 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 this sort of anxiety shallow-rooted always springing up afresh is a perennial feature of medieval Christendom and not a serious threat to it perhaps these anxieties weren't work were just weeds a tolerable and inescapable problem which couldn't be permanently eradicated but could be easily controlled maybe there are even a necessary part of the ecosystem against which the true faith can learn its strength there's no reason to suspect that these medieval doubters were the start of anything a few weeds weren't about to uproot the tree of faith but when fresh doubts did begin to sprout they didn't do so in virgin soil in which no seed of unbelief had ever been sown so that's the story that the church course tell but I don't mean to write the scholars and intellectuals out of this tale altogether they're of course aware of unbelief as a theoretical possibility scholastic theologians sometimes used atheists as straw men in their arguments for the existence of God and historians have sometimes wondered if these imaginary atheists ever came to life I know of no evidence that they did never mind fictional unbelievers medieval theology had plenty of real ones to deal with the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome who medieval Europeans venerated but who awkwardly were mostly pagans or worse medieval theologies central scholarly project was to reconcile the Christian and the greco-roman intellectual legacies and it has to be said it's a hugely successful project but no sooner was that battle won in the 13th century then an unexpected new front opened up the brash turbulent new movement that sprung up in the city states of northern Italy which we call the Renaissance was not a religious project it was an attempt to revive the language and political culture of the Ancients but this gave it a secular flavor which set it apart in the medieval world in 1417 the Florentine scholar Jim fresco podía discovered the lost texts of Lucretia PSA's of the nature of things this epic poem from the 1st century BCE is still the best surviving summary of epicurean philosophy but that's not why 15th century Italians copied and recopied it so avidly simply in an age that was hungry for the best Latin style Lucretius was hard to beat renaissance scholars read Lucretius in the same way that modern students of cinema watch films like The Birth of a Nation or the triumph of the well they watch it for the technique not for the ideology the result was the epicureanism which had been a boo word for centuries seeps into the ground water for real some of the reputations of epicureanism that start to be written begin to seem a little less than wholehearted in 1517 Florence's Medici rulers banned Lucretius from the city's schools alarmed by the unhealthy interest that he was generating and it's not just Lucretius Sisera plenty the elder amongst others are being very widely read and translated and their texts include what we might think would be shockingly anti religious sentiments but for now sauce readers don't seem to have been shocked it is not after all news to them that most ancient writers were not Christians when Lucretius and Cicero and Pliny lambaste pagan religion Christians are very happy to agree with them and simply to regret these virtuous men because of when they lived hadn't had the opportunity to take the final step of faith in Christ nor were the skeptical ideas that they voiced unheard of mortal ism as I've been saying is entirely familiar in medieval Europe likewise anti providential ISM the argument that the world is governed simply by nature as Pliny claimed or by chance as Lucretius held so that God becomes an abstract curiosity who's unable to answer prayers or work miracles that ideas sometimes taken to have been the the core concept of the Renaissance but it's nothing new the French builder who was accused in 1273 of saying that he would only trust God in the Virgin Mary if he received bankable guarantees from them and of insisting that he owed his prosperity to his own hard work not to God had not been reading nutricious but he might as well have been like mortal ISM the notion that God does not hear prayers and either does not or cannot act is entirely capable of suggesting itself to people without an intellectual tradition behind it anybody who has ever had a desperate or heartfelt prayer rebuffed could hardly avoid the thought if all Europeans before the Renaissance had truly believed in divine providence then the words that sprang instinctively to Gamblers lips would have been prayers not blasphemies but it does look as if one particular medieval notion was given new force bother in essence the Vatican library contains a manuscript copy of Lucretia tsa's poem made in 1497 by a young Florentine scholar named niccolò machiavelli Machiavelli's comments on the text pay very little attention to its literary historical or even ethical content but concentrate intensely on Lucretius is materialism and especially on his doctrine of chance now Machiavelli is not an epicurean in his mature career he showed no discernible interest in doctrine or metaphysics at all his interests are strictly in politics and in practical ethics or anti ethics what made his treatment of religion so shocking wasn't a new idea but a new way of applying a very old one the last notorious of Machiavelli's two books his discourses on Livy from 1517 includes a hefty section on the role of religion in politics this begins with the commonplace observation that government sports to encourage religion in order to preserve social harmony most medieval Christians would have agreed with this Lucretius by contrast resented the way that politicians used religion to manipulate the people Machiavelli agrees with Lucretius analysis but with one crucial difference he thinks that manipulation is a good thing he praised an early Roman King for faking divine authority for his laws how else would he ever have persuaded the people to accept them especially he says since the times were so impregnated with a religious spirit and the men with whom he had to deal were so stupid two facts which plainly go together Machiavelli recommended that governments encourage religion even though they be convinced that it is quite fallacious and he adds a breathtakingly cynical story in which a Roman general who's preparing for battle casts auguries in order to boost morale and then awkwardly it turns out that the auguries warned against an attack the general still wants to attack and so with the chief priests connivance the general lies he tells his men that the results had been favorable but inevitably the results of rumors of the true result leak out and descents start spreading amongst the ranks so the general publicly blames the hapless chief quick priest for spreading subversion for lying about the results sends him to the front of the attack and so when the priest is killed early in the battle the general can describe that as divine vengeance on the priest for telling lies and proceed to win his victory now of course things like that have been happening for as long as there have been soldiers and politicians but nobody had ever earnestly described it as praiseworthy before by contrast in Machiavelli's most infamous book the prince religion is notable chiefly by its absence this is an utterly pragmatic and amoral worldview Pope's and bishops are simply political players like any other Machiavelli doesn't just dismiss Christian ethics as nonsense for simpletons it appears to me at least from the text that he despised Jesus Christ himself he's not so foolhardy as to say that explicitly remarkably he never refers to Christ by name but I don't know how else to read his praise of Moses as an armed prophet who had compelled obedience and who's therefore vastly superior to the 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 thoughts nor require skill in anything except war is hardly an endorsement of the Prince of Peace so we can see how Machiavelli came by his self here as repeat there was any of this actually dangerous he's not openly trying to subvert Christianity by his own theory rulers ought to be trying to foster it I'll be cynically maybe the contradiction lay in writing any of this stuff down rather than whispering it in a ruler's ear but then Machiavelli was a less successful politician in practice than he was 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 secularized space alongside the alehouse in the gaming table we now have the council-chamber but as long as the theory requires that the rest of the population has to be trained in religious enthusiasm the theories impact is going to be self-limiting a ruling elite which secretly disdains the ideology that it formerly proclaims tends not to endure very long not least because it usually trains its own wives children and servants in that ideology so in the end the cynical generation are replaced by true believers or they collapse into internation quarrels first unless of course they do something silly like write a book about it and their cynicism leaks out into the wider population Machiavelli wrote that Italy in his own time had lost all devotion and all religion and had become irreligious and perverse now of course by his theory this is a bad thing but it's not wholly bad because if the purpose of religion as he sees it is to build a strong state then in his terms Christianity is not a very good religion ideally it should be replaced and his room uses about this with something less innovating more muscular to be blunt more manly and in this Machiavelli belongs to a strand of anti-christian ethical thought stretching back to the Emperor Julian and forward to Edward Gibbon and Nietzsche a strand which despises Christianity's are the worldliness its submissiveness its cherishing of we penis and its tendency to pacifism that kind of anti-christian thinking is important intellectually I want to suggest it's not very important historically far from renouncing Christianity's distinctive ethic of mercy modern Western atheism has redoubled it even niches far more governed by Christian style ethics than he liked to admit the only serious attempt to put this strand of anti-christian thought into practice has been 20th century fascism which ended by pulling the house down on itself and everyone around it Machiavelli's anti-christian thinking's genuinely shocking but because it's shocking it's a dead end it's a position that is prevented by its own inner logic from building any kind of mass following so does it matter perhaps only for this reason he gave new voice to an old corrosive thought there were some rumors that said that Machiavelli was the true author of the book of the three imposters and it's almost true the prince is a real book but it's also an imaginary one it was indeed a much imagined one whispered about in fascinated horror much more than it was read the power of Machiavelli's writing even now isn't that it tells us anything new but that it tells us what we've always known and does it bluntly without qualms and without apology the suspicion that religion was a political trick played by the powerful was a perennial one but now that suspicion has a name Machiavelli is said out loud what a great many other people had long suspected it's all a giant trick and the time would come when making that idea legitimate was going to matter in the meantime some of those who were enthralled by the Renee sources ancient novelties acquired a reputation of own beliefs whether justified or not it's still unclear whether Etienne de l'Est really did deny the immortality of the soul that's the charge for which he was burnt the state in Paris in 1546 but it is clear that his view of the question was almost wholly pagan in 1538 he wrote that the true immortal is one to whom for all future time life after death has been gained by his reputation renowned either by Military Glory or literary reputation that's the immortality that he himself said he sought he added what indeed has death been able to accomplish as yet against the mr. Cleese epimer hadass Alexander the Great and all these other splendidly ancient gentlemen that's the company the Dalai longed for not a procession of dreary Christian saints he's so immersed in the classical world that he has lost his moorings on his own century people like him who are at the cutting edge of learning are simply not very interested in religion when the radical Italian theologian lilius at Seanie wrote in 1549 that most of my friends are so well educated that they can scarcely believe God exists he was of course joking but the joke depends on there being a stereotype the learned unbeliever that he could draw north of the Alps the association between the Italian Renaissance and atheism became proverbial in England Italian became a euphemism for atheist by the early 16th century that 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 the book of the three imposters but like that phantom book they Madame believers begin to here knowing laughter at the back of their minds faith feels simple and doubt feels sophisticated it was christened UM's first serious flirtation with unbelief but let's not get this out of proportion bad flirtation didn't in itself signal frequently threaten yours long marriage to the old faith only if the marriage itself ran into trouble might have become dangerous that's a story for next time if the Renaissance itself offered a real threat to Christendom it was of a subtler comment let me say by way of conclusion a little bit of what I mean Machiavelli's open fascination with Lucretius his skepticism is very unusual most renaissance scholars who read Lucretius treated him the way medieval theologians had treated aristotle by taking the bits they can use and leaving the rest lovely study by the historian a de Parma has shown that almost all 15th century commentators on Lucretius ignored his anti religious passages great many comments on his style his ethics his scientific findings his medical findings in particular his use of language his historical references and they simply ignore the really controversial stuff most Renaissance readers believed or wanted to believe that Epicureanism could be house-trained and it almost worked epicurean or indeed stoic ethics could be made to look pleasingly compatible with Christianity Renaissance scholars could learn from the exemplary lives and virtues of the Ancients as well as from their exemplary Latin and it was easy to fold this into Christian orthodoxy the argument went surely Christians should be spurred to new heights of righteousness by the shameful thought that these mere pagans had outstripped them in virtue it's an innocent rhetorical ploy the double edge of it was quite unintended on this view Christianity is simply the consummation of all that was best about ancient philosophy and these pagan philosophers these pre-christian philosophers had simply been like John the Baptist blazing the way for the true gospel the greatest over the Renaissance is how strainers the Dutch scholar Erasmus wrote a dialogue in which one of the characters claimed there are no people more epicurean than godly Christians the argument goes that Epicureans hold that the purpose of life is the pursuit of happiness and as everybody knows true happiness is to be found in the pursuit of virtue QED it's a rather over tidy view of Epicureanism there's no getting around the fact that we're Chris's work has got quite a lot more sex in it than Erasmus is does but it's also a singular view of what Christianity is Erasmus United Renaissance philosophy with his Dutch homelands tradition of practical devotion to conclude that the heart of Christianity was its ethics Christian doctrine conventionally focused on how sinners must and can be saved by God's grace Erasmus who was suspicious of too much doctrine wanted his readers to strive not to be sinners at all Christians had traditionally thrown themselves on Jesus Christ's mercy as their Savior but now they're being urged primarily to imitate him as their exemplar in itself this could not be more harmless it's a mere shift of emphasis but the implications are unsettling if Christianity is supremely about ethics if the ancient pagans are outstanding ethical exemplars doesn't that mean that unbelievers can achieve true godliness ok Christ is the finest pattern of virtue but maybe reason the god-given natural law which is implanted in every human soul maybe they can bring us to the same destination maybe Christians should therefore concentrate less on doctrine maybe even less on the devotional and sacramental life of the church and more on cultivating virtues which pagans as well as Christians might share maybe they ought to recognize that believer and unbeliever alike could be brethren Erasmus and his colleagues were in no sense trying to ask such alarming questions they were trying to purify Christianity not to undermine us and that is what in the centuries to come would make their approach so dangerous thank you you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 509,531

Keywords: religion, divinity, atheism, medieval period, medieval history, history, medieval europe, middle ages, Church, church courts, christianity, blasphemy, GOD

Id: Eb5mYqnKFlI

Length: 51min 59sec (3119 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 02 2018