Kitabı oku: «Unbelievers»
UNBELIEVERS
An Emotional History of Doubt
Alec Ryrie
Copyright
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Alec Ryrie 2019
Cover design by Jack Smyth
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Alec Ryrie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008299811
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008299835
Version: 2019-09-23
Dedication
for Victoria, my believer
Epigraph
‘Most of us, I suspect … make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.’
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
1. An Age of Suspicion
Impostors, Drunkards and Flat-Earthers
The Fool’s Heart
Physicians, ‘Naturians’ and ‘Nulla Fidians’
From Ancient to Modern
2. The Reformation and the Battle for Credulity
Calvin and the Epicures
Between Superstition and Impiety
‘Doubt Wisely’: From Innocence to Experience
3. The Atheist’s Comedy
Incest, Thunder and Wishful Thinking
Shaking Off the Yoke
The Good Atheist
4. The Puritan Atheist
‘The Monster of the Creation’
Horrid Temptations
Fear of Flying
5. Seeking and Losing Faith
‘It’s a Great Matter to Believe there is a God’
The Spiritualists’ Progress
Farther Up and Farther In
Seeking a Rock to Build On
6. The Abolition of God
The Three Impostors
From Then to Now, I: Anger
From Then to Now, II: Anxiety
From Jesus to Hitler
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
About the Author
Also by Alec Ryrie
About the Publisher
Introduction
Two friends, Christian and Hopeful, are travelling in search of Heaven. On the road, they meet a man named Atheist. When they tell him about their quest, he erupts into ‘a very great Laughter’: ‘I laugh to see what ignorant persons you are, to take upon you so tedious a Journey … There is no such place as you Dream of.’[1]
In John Bunyan’s fable, the travellers stop their ears to these siren words and continue on their way. But as Bunyan knew all too well, Atheist’s defiance was in fact dangerously compelling. The thought he gave voice to was already haunting the historically Christian cultures of Europe and North America when he wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress in the 1670s, and has done so ever since. Perhaps you disagree with Atheist, but you are certainly familiar with the point he was making. Or perhaps you think he spoke the plain and self-evident truth.
This book is about one of the most momentous changes in modern history: the appearance in the once-Christian West of post-religious societies.[2] This is not a total transformation (at least, not yet). Europe and especially North America still have a great many believers, who still have a powerful public voice, and Western culture is steeped in Christianity’s cultural residue. But in every Western society a rapidly rising share of the population, and especially of young people, claims to have no religion. Even in the assertively pious United States, in 2007 this was true of an unprecedented 16 per cent of adults. By 2014 that share had risen to 23 per cent (that is, around 55 million people), including well over a third of those born since 1980.[3] In many of the regional, educational and political subcultures that make up the modern United States, open and unapologetic unbelief is now the norm: something that has never been true before the current generation. In Europe, the share of adults who profess no religion now ranges from a sixth (in Italy and Ireland), to around a quarter (Britain, France, Germany), to well over 40 per cent (Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands). Other studies put the figures even higher. A 2015 survey had 43 per cent of British adults claiming no religion, a figure rising to 70 per cent of those under 24.[4] And on both sides of the Atlantic, many of those who do still claim a Christian identity do so only nominally or residually, their daily lives largely undisturbed by their professed religion.
‘Why,’ the philosopher Charles Taylor asks, ‘was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?’[5] Many of those who (like Taylor himself) continue to believe are conscious of swimming against a cultural tide. Over a century ago, Friedrich Nietzsche notoriously claimed that ‘God is dead … and we have killed him’. In large and growing parts of Western society, that shocking claim has turned into a self-evident truth.
As a historian, my question is: so, who killed him, when, and how? The usual answer is: philosophers, scientists and intellectuals; during the Enlightenment and scientific revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and by means of a frontal assault. In the 1660s, so the story goes, Baruch Spinoza first showed that a world without God could be philosophically coherent. In the eighteenth century there was a double assault: polemicists such as Voltaire and Thomas Paine openly attacked the Church’s moral authority, and philosophers as varied as David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau constructed systems which, whether or not we classify them as strictly atheist, left Christianity far behind. God became, as Pierre-Simon Laplace supposedly told Napoleon in 1802, a redundant hypothesis. Nineteenth-century philosophers such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Arthur Schopenhauer found the case against religion to be almost self-evident. By the time Charles Darwin provided an explanation for the origins of life without reference to God in 1859, the work was virtually completed. All that the wider culture has done since then is catch up.[6]
I wrote this book because I am not satisfied with that stereotypical account. The timescale, the suspects and the nature of the murder are all wrong. Telling the story a different way not only changes our sense of history; it casts our current moment of pell-mell secularisation in a different light.
To take the simplest problem first: the death-by-philosophy narrative is a poor fit with the actual chronology of Western secularisation. Were the religious revivals of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or the apparent Christian resurgence across the West in the 1950s, simply religion’s death throes? Was the sudden collapse of the West’s religious cultures in the 1960s merely the shattering of a husk after centuries of patient hollowing-out?[7] Even if you can explain away this chronological mismatch, the conventional starting point is plainly wrong. If atheism only became a live possibility in the 1660s, how could Bunyan, who was nobody’s intellectual elitist, depict such an assertive and recognisable ‘Atheist’ in the 1670s? How could it be said in the 1620s that there were fifty thousand atheists in Paris, or in the 1590s that ‘there is no Sect now in England so scattered as Atheism’? How could a preacher in Florence in 1305 warn that the question ‘how can it be that God exists?’ was being ‘put by madmen every day’?[8]
These early testimonies to unbelief are often dismissed on the grounds that they lacked philosophical sophistication. If you are only interested in the history of ‘atheism’ as a system of ideas, then that is the end of the matter, and this book is not for you. What interests me is that unbelief clearly existed in practice (in some form, at some level) before it existed in theory. In which case, we have not only been looking at the wrong centuries, but profiling the wrong suspects. Intellectuals and philosophers may think they make the weather, but they are more often driven by it. People who read and write books, like you and me, have a persistent tendency to overestimate the power of ideas. Some of us may occasionally change our beliefs and our lives as the result of a chain of conscious reasoning, but not very often or very honestly. Our own age has forcibly reminded us that intellectual elites often struggle to bring their societies with them. Their default role is to tag along, explaining with perfect hindsight why things inevitably turned out as they did.
The conventional story has it that philosophers attacked religion and people therefore stopped believing. But what if people stopped believing and then found they needed arguments to justify their unbelief? ‘The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing,’ cautioned Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century’s shrewdest wrestler with doubt.[9] Apart from a heroic or cold-hearted few, most of us make our lives’ great choices – beliefs, values, identities, purposes – intuitively, with our whole selves, embedded as we are in our social and historical contexts, usually unable to articulate why we have done it, often not even aware we have done it. If we have the inclination, we might then assemble rationalisations for our choices: rationalisations which may be true, but in a meagre, post hoc way.[10]
My point, simply, is that it is not only religious belief which is chosen for such instinctive, inarticulate, intuitive reasons. So is unbelief. In which case, the crucial juncture in the history of atheism is the period before the philosophers made it intellectually respectable: when the raw dough began to bubble with unexplained energy, making it urgent that intellectuals discover ways to bake, slice and package it. It is no great surprise that Enlightenment thinkers could develop atheistic philosophies. Anyone who needs a philosophy badly enough will find one, and as we will see, arguments against God and against Christianity’s core doctrines were nothing new in the mid-seventeenth century. The question is not, where did these criticisms come from, but, why did some people start to find them compelling?[11] To answer that question, we do not need an intellectual or philosophical history of atheism: we need an emotional history.
I do not mean to imply that the intellect and emotions are opposites, or that emotion is irrational. The notion that ‘head’ and ‘heart’ are opposites is a seventeenth-century canard that we are still struggling to shrug off. My gripe is with what one outstanding recent historian calls the ‘intellectualist fallacy’: ‘a tendency to privilege the clean logic of ideas above the raw fuel of human experience among the forces of historical change’.[12] The term ‘emotion’ here does not refer only to spontaneous or involuntary passions. Indeed, it includes (but is not exhausted by) the conscious intellect. We may not be able to govern our emotions fully, but we curate and manage them, and we learn them from the culture around us as well as discovering them within ourselves. It is in this sense that they can be said to have a history.[13]
Pursuing that history gives this book an hourglass shape. We begin in the broad acres of Europe’s medieval ‘age of faith’, before closing in on the so-called ‘early modern’ period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, in particular, on the Protestant world during the Reformation. We then concentrate even more tightly on what I see as the subject’s crux: the early and mid-seventeenth century in Protestant north-western Europe. Only in the final chapter do we broaden out again, to see, after that crisis, how unbelief broke cover and emerged into the open in philosophical dress. Beneath that dress, I argue, its emotional shape has remained remarkably consistent down to the present.
The book tells two interwoven emotional stories of unbelief: stories of anger and of anxiety. Anger is the more obvious of the two: grudges nurtured against an all-embracing Christian society, against the Church in particular and often also against the God who oversaw it all. The unbelief of anxiety was a quite different experience: the unsettling, reluctant inability to keep a firm grip on doctrines that people were convinced, with their conscious minds, were true. On their own, neither of these perennial emotions threatened Christendom. If anything, they were part of the moral equilibrium and self-renewal of a thriving Christian society. What made them dangerous was the Protestant Reformation, which deliberately turned angry unbelief into a weapon of mass theological destruction, and in the process stirred up anxious unbelief like never before. The result was a strange convergence of the two emotional streams. Anger became increasingly righteous in tone: ‘atheists’ were universally assumed to be monsters of depravity, but angry unbelief turned into a moral revolt and began to find its own, distinct ethics. Meanwhile, as anxious unbelievers found that everything they tried to grapple with turned to mist and shadows, some of them despaired of finding doctrinal certainties and fastened their grip onto ethical certainties instead. So the angry and the anxious found themselves allying against traditional Christianity, opposing it not principally on intellectual grounds but on moral ones.
The emotional history of Western atheism, then, is not a story of an external assault on Christianity. It is a story of Christians and post-Christians attacking from within, and doing so from the moral high ground. When some of them reached the point of wanting to abandon or abolish God, it was not because of their intellectual rationalisations, but because their ethics and even their theology demanded it. As the sociologist Peter Berger has observed, ‘historically speaking, Christianity has been its own gravedigger’.[14] This is not chiefly because it generates intellectual critiques of itself. Rather, it generates moral critiques of itself: an operation so successful that, in parts of the Western world, the patient now seems in real danger of death. Whether the story will end that way, or whether Christianity will find that what does not kill it makes it stronger, remains to be seen. My point is simply that the history of unbelief follows a dynamic established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This dynamic is not separate from the history of belief. It is part of it.
Or so this book will argue. For now, listen to that battle-hardened pastor John Bunyan, who filled his book not with straw men and caricatures, but with acute warnings of the real temptations that awaited his readers. His ‘Atheist’, with his mocking insults, seems at first to represent angry unbelief at its crudest, but there is more to him than that. He goes on to tell the travellers that, twenty years ago, he himself heard tell of the city of God and set out on a pilgrimage to find it. Only bitter experience convinced him the search was fruitless. His tragedy is not his unbelief, but his faith. ‘Had I not, when at home, believed, I had not come thus far to seek.’ If there was a Heaven, he warns the younger travellers, he would have found it. ‘I have gone to seek it further than you.’ So now he is headed wearily home, ‘and will seek to refresh myself with the things that I then cast away, for hopes of that, which I now see, is not’.[15] His unbelief is a direct result of the anxious searching that once defined his faith. It has left him with a moral imperative: to save believers from themselves.
So far I have been tossing around words like ‘atheist’ and ‘unbeliever’ as if their meanings are obvious and equivalent, which they are not. Before we go any further it is as well to be clear what we are talking about.
Nowadays ‘atheism’ simply means the claim that there is no God. The word has included this ‘hard’ or philosophical sense from its beginnings, but only as part of a much wider range of meaning, which we might do well to recover. The Greek word ἄθεος (atheos) means, literally, without God or gods. It was a term of abuse, applied in ancient times to people like Socrates, condemned for his supposed rejection or neglect of socially established religious norms. Early Christians, who would not acknowledge the Graeco-Roman gods, were sometimes also called ἄθεοι, a charge they indignantly denied. But the word atheos was scarcely ever used in Latin in ancient times. When the Greek word was translated into Latin, impius, ‘impious’, was usually felt to be the nearest synonym. The word ἄθεοι occurs only once in the Bible, where it was translated into Latin as sine Deo, ‘without God’. Only with the rediscovery of Greek in the Christian West during the Renaissance did the word come into widespread use – transliterated into Latin as atheos in the early sixteenth century, and then very quickly spreading into European vernaculars: Italian ateo, German Atheist, French athée.[16] It arrived late in English, via French, in 1553.[17] Its range of meaning was still much wider than ‘hard’ atheism. In the 1540s the English scholar John Cheke wrote a Latin treatise in which he lambasted
those who … live as if God were altogether without care of them; and who neither consider with themselves, nor care whether there be a God or no, or whether he has any Administration or Foresight of human Affairs … The Scriptures mark them out under several Titles, but it is most agreeable to our present purpose to call them ἄθεοι.[18]
We might question whether such people are atheists or if the nineteenth-century term ‘agnostic’ would fit better, but the point is that Cheke was not talking about metaphysics at all. His targets were, as we might say, the godless, regardless of what beliefs they formally professed. This was the standard usage until the eighteenth century and even beyond. As well as ‘contemplative’ or ‘speculative’ atheists – philosophical deniers of God – there were ‘practical’ atheists, who claim to believe but live as though they do not. As the seventeenth-century essayist Thomas Fuller put it, the ‘practical’ atheist is not someone who ‘thinks there is no God’, but someone who ‘thinks not there is a God’.[19]
All this made atheist a usefully elastic term of abuse. It was like the word fascist in modern, everyday use: a word with a broad but not limitless range of meanings, whose use typically marks the moment when an argument descends into name-calling.[20] Sometimes atheist was plainly stretched too far – preachers who claimed that all sinners were atheists, or that disputing one specific Christian doctrine was tantamount to atheism, were playing polemical games rather than advancing serious definitions.[21] Even so, this broad sense of the word is more useful than the narrow modern one, for it takes us away from the abstractions of metaphysical definitions into the everyday reality of how religious cultures thrive, decay or dissolve.
My subject in this book, then, extends beyond ‘contemplative’ atheism into the penumbras of doubt and unbelief. As a point of metaphysics, whether or not you believe there is a deity is interesting. But in itself it has no more consequences than whether or not you believe there are other universes parallel to our own. As John Gray puts it, someone with ‘no use for the idea of God … [is] in truth an atheist’, whatever such a person claims to believe or disbelieve.[22] ‘Practical atheist’ remains a sensible term for those whose formal belief in God has no tangible effect on their lives – who observe no religious practices, adhere to no specifically religious ethics, and participate in no avowedly religious community. Our subject is not only those who abandon religious beliefs and change their lives as a result, but also those who abandon religious living and whose residual religious beliefs consequently wither.
In other words, I make no apology for using words – ‘atheist’, ‘sceptic’, ‘unbeliever’ – which describe what people are not. Our subject is a disappearance: the evaporation of a once very widespread religious culture. Those curmudgeonly terms are inadequate to describe what, if anything, has taken its place, but that will have to wait until we have a clearer idea of how the disappearance happened. The mystery we are addressing is how believers became unbelievers: and if the word unbelief sounds like it still has belief at its core, well, I think it does.
Before we embark for the Middle Ages, some readers may have suspicions about the book’s scope, and about its agenda.
The book’s scope is unashamedly Eurocentric and Christian-centric, with a couple of small but important supporting roles played by European Judaism. Within that frame, it focuses disproportionately on the Protestant world and in particular on England, which is almost the exclusive focus of a couple of crucial chapters. This partly reflects my own historical specialism, but is also because, for reasons that I hope will become clear, I think the Protestant and English material is distinctively important as well as rich.
If this all feels parochial, that is because the phenomenon we are considering –Western secularism – is a parochial one. It is an offshoot of European Christendom, and in particular (so I will argue) of the Protestant world. In global terms, it is a counter-current, even an aberration. The dominant religious story of the past two centuries is surely the spread of Christianity and of Islam around the globe, a race in which those two hares have so far outpaced the secular tortoise that it takes a considerable act of faith to believe it might one day catch up. It is true that Western secularism has spread across the planet along with various other Western cultural exports, but there are relatively few countries beyond the North Atlantic region where it has really put down roots: Uruguay, perhaps, or the ‘Anglosphere’ outposts of Australia and New Zealand. There are certainly many other modern countries, such as Turkey, India or China, where the ‘secular’ is a potent social or political force, but these ‘secularisms’ are not at all Western in flavour. And in most of the world, including many of those countries, ‘religion’ in its many forms is going from strength to strength. The once-widespread assumption that Euro-American secularisation represented the probable future of humanity as a whole now looks much more like an expression of cultural imperialism than a level-headed forecast. So I am in no sense claiming to write a history of a universal or global phenomenon, but of a specific and local one – important in its own context, to be sure, especially for those of us who live in its homelands, but one that neither foreshadows any kind of global destiny nor is inscribed indelibly into Western culture itself.
As to my agenda: I am a historian of religion, and am myself a believer (and, in the interests of full disclosure, a licensed lay minister in the Church of England). When such a person starts writing about unbelief, it is fair to suspect a hatchet job. I hope that is not what I have done.
Of course, no one can be objective on this subject. We were born into this world and we’re going to die here; we all have a stake in this and are forced to make our wager. My own position is that I am a believer with a soft spot for atheism. I abandoned my youthful atheism for reasons that seem to me sufficient and necessary, but I still respect it. Like many of the characters in my story, I find an honest atheism much more honourable and powerful than the religion of many of my fellow believers. I hope readers will find that I have treated unbelievers with due respect – if not always with kid gloves. This is one reason why, throughout the book, I write about what ‘you’ or ‘we’ might have experienced as a medieval or early modern believer or unbeliever, rather than using the easy, distancing impassivity of pronouns like ‘one’ or ‘they’. I think it is worth the imaginative effort of trying to put ourselves in their place.
In writing an emotional history of atheism, I am not arguing that atheism is irrational. I am arguing that human beings are irrational; or rather, that we are not calculating machines, and that our ‘choices’ about what we believe or disbelieve are made intuitively, with our whole selves, not with impersonal logic.[23]
Happily, since I am convinced that arguments as such have precious little bearing on either belief or unbelief, there is no danger of a book such as this converting anyone to or from anything. Nor, of course, is that its aim. My hope is instead that believers and atheists alike might understand better how unbelief has gone from feeling intuitively impossible to feeling, to many people, intuitively obvious; and how, during the long and fractious marriage between faith and doubt, both partners have shaped each other more than they might like to admit. ‘If you want to understand atheism and religion,’ says the steely atheist John Gray, ‘you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites.’[24] My purpose is merely to remind both parties how long their fates have been intertwined and how much they owe to one another, not least so they might be willing to talk and to listen to one another again.
So to atheist readers, my message is: please appreciate that unbelief is, like almost everything else human beings do, very often intuitive, non-rational and the product of historically specific circumstances. If that were not so, it would be fragile indeed. And to believers, my message is: please understand that atheism and doubt are serious. They have real emotional power and moral force, and they have flourished and are flourishing for very good reasons. The fact that those reasons are often deeply rooted in religion itself makes them all the more powerful, and means that the chasms separating us are narrower than we like to imagine.
It only remains to add that, in what follows, all translations are my own unless otherwise indicated; and that in quotations, spelling, punctuation and occasionally usage have been modernised for comprehensibility.
1
An Age of Suspicion
‘The bastard! He doesn’t exist!’
Samuel Beckett, Endgame
Impostors, Drunkards and Flat-Earthers
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Sicily, Germany, Italy and Jerusalem, was perhaps the most powerful ruler of the Middle Ages. According to Pope Gregory IX, he was also an unbeliever. In 1239 the pope accused Frederick of calling Moses, Jesus Christ and Muhammad ‘charlatans’ and ‘deceivers’ who had fooled the entire world, of scoffing at the notion ‘that a virgin could give birth to the God who created nature’, and of maintaining that ‘one should accept as truth only that which is proved by force of reason’. The pope and the emperor were bitter and long-standing enemies, and these charges were certainly exaggerated, but it is true that Frederick had a voraciously curious mind. He had been asking his favourite scholars some alarming questions. Where is God? Where are Heaven, Hell and Purgatory? What is beyond Heaven? What is the soul? Is it immortal? If so, why do the dead never return?[1]
Rumour had it that one of those scholars, Pietro della Vigna, had not only suggested to Frederick that Moses, Christ and Muhammad were frauds, but had written a book arguing the case: Of the Three Impostors. There is in fact no evidence that this book ever existed. Yet it became notorious purely on the basis of that wickedly alluring title. For nearly five centuries dreadful tales of it were whispered. Della Vigna’s name was eventually forgotten, but his imaginary book was not. Almost every unnerving or scandalous figure of the next few centuries was at some point credited with having written Of the Three Impostors – Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli, Miguel Servetus, Giordano Bruno and many more. Scholars, eccentrics and troublemakers hunted for copies. A scandalous Swedish princess offered a bounty for it. It was easy enough to meet someone who had met someone who had once seen the book, but not to get any closer. Finally, in the early eighteenth century, enterprising French atheists actually wrote a book to go with the fearsome title. Inevitably, the result was an anticlimax.[2]
If we want to understand unbelief in the Middle Ages, the supposed Age of Faith, Of the Three Impostors is a good place to start. Like the book, medieval unbelief existed in the imagination rather than in any fully articulated form. It was a rumour, not a manifesto; an inarticulate suspicion, not a philosophical programme. Its vagueness was what made it powerful.
It is sometimes said that atheism in pre-modern times was simply impossible. This claim, supposedly made by the great French literary historian Lucien Febvre, is now routinely dismissed by historians of atheism. But Febvre’s point was subtler than that. He was well aware that medieval and sixteenth-century Europeans frequently attacked religion, sometimes in scabrous terms, and that they readily accused one another of unbelief. His point was simply that, like Of the Three Impostors, these attacks and accusations had no substance. They were simply imaginings of what atheism might be. As such, Febvre concluded with magnificently Gallic disdain, unbelief of this kind ‘did not matter, historically speaking … It hardly deserves to be discussed, any more than the sneers of the drunkard in the tavern who guffaws when he is told the earth is moving, under him and with him, at such a speed that it cannot even be felt’.[3]
It is an intriguing comparison. Before we leave the tavern in search of some more genteel atheists, we should let the drunkard have his say.
How do we, in the early twenty-first century, know that Febvre’s drunkard is wrong and that the earth is indeed moving? Very few of us have the astronomical skill to determine the question for ourselves. We believe it because learned authority tells us it is true; because it is an important part of a wider web of knowledge we have about the world around us; and because we have seen very persuasive pictures explaining it. And yet, like Febvre’s drunkard, we sometimes struggle to hold on to the fact. We say that the sun ‘rises’ even though we know it does no such thing. We treat the ground beneath our feet as if it were stationary. It feels stationary. For most practical purposes, it might as well be.
To wonder nowadays whether the earth really is moving, and whether five centuries’ worth of accumulated astronomy is a hoax, you do not need to be a drunkard or a fool. You need to be independent-minded and self-confident. You need to be suspicious: ready to believe you are being lied to. And it helps if you are not very well educated. If you are woven too tightly into our civilisation’s web of knowledge, you will not be able to kick against it. To see this at work, I recommend visiting the websites of modern flat-earther organisations – which, in their stubborn refusal to be hoodwinked by the intellectual consensus of their age, are the closest thing our own world has to medieval atheists.[4] Of course, whether you are a modern flat-earther or a medieval atheist, the lack of deep engagement with the dominant intellectual systems of your age which makes your doubts possible also blunts their power. You may have some slogans and some hunches, but you will be unable to refute astronomers who come at you with their orbits and laws of motion, or theologians wielding essences and ontologies. You can only reply with the perennial mulish wisdom of the sceptic who is told to admire the stitching on the emperor’s clothes: I just don’t see it.
Independent-minded, suspicious and uneducated people were in plentiful supply in medieval Europe. It is no coincidence that the original story of the emperor’s new clothes dates back to fourteenth-century Spain. Raw and inarticulate as this scepticism was, it should not be ignored. It set the tone both for the more dangerous unbelief that was to follow, and for the way Christian society would respond.
The Fool’s Heart
Medieval Europeans did not have the word ‘atheism’, but they understood the idea well enough. When the founder of medieval theology, Anselm of Canterbury, wrote his famous ‘ontological’ proof that there is a God in the 1070s, it was a devotional exercise in using reason to praise God, not a serious attempt to persuade actual sceptics. Still, he imagined and tried to reply to the counter-arguments which a sceptic would make. The scholarly method he was pioneering required him to do it. Medieval theologians built up their schemes of knowledge by systematically examining all possible objections to them. The greatest of those theologians, Thomas Aquinas, whose proofs of God were less dreamlike than Anselm’s, did not merely conjure up an opponent as a debating foil. Imagining what an atheist’s arguments might be, he affirmed that it is perfectly possible to think that there is no God.[5] But there is little sign of these scarecrows coming to life and turning into real doubters.
Anselm called his imagined sceptic ‘the fool’. This was not a gratuitous insult. It was a deliberate allusion to a rather different stereotype of unbelief. Twice in the book of Psalms we read, ‘The fool says in his heart, “There is no God”’. This biblical ‘fool’ is not a simpleton, but a villain who refuses to believe so that he can do vile deeds, untroubled by fears of divine justice.[6] That is obviously a grossly unfair caricature. But to judge by the cases of people accused of unbelief before medieval church courts, it was at least partly correct.
In 1273 a merchant named Durandus de Rufficiaco de Olmeira was hauled before officials of the bishop of Rodez, in southern France. He confessed to telling a friend that profit was better than virtue. When the friend teased him, saying that he did not care for his soul, he replied, ‘Do you think there is any soul in the body other than the blood?’ As a young man, he said, he used to cross himself piously, but it never did him any good, nor had his fortune suffered when he stopped. He also admitted to having scorned the miracle of transubstantiation, in which the sacramental bread is transformed into Christ’s body. ‘Even if the body of Christ were large as a mountain, it would long ago have been eaten up by priests.’ Likewise, in 1299, Uguzzone dei Tattalisina, a notoriously tight-fisted moneylender from Bologna, was accused of dismissing the Bible as a mere fiction. He allegedly told Mass-goers that they might as well venerate their dinner as the consecrated bread; claimed that the True Cross, Christendom’s most venerated relic, was just a piece of a bench; and said that ‘there is no other world than this’. Another Mass-mocking moneylender from the same city was more explicit in denying that there was any afterlife or resurrection. When challenged on the point, he retorted, ‘When did you see the dead return to us?’[7]
The courts do not seem to have found these cases of unbelief especially surprising. These men were grasping, stone-hearted money-grubbers, so it made theological sense that they should have no faith. When Nicholas, the abbot of Pasignano, was accused before the Italian Inquisition in 1351 of various acts of fraud and extortion, including threats to castrate anyone who dared testify against him, it was positively a relief to discover that he also believed that it was better to be rich than to be in holy orders, or that he treated the liturgy with contempt.[8] It hardly mattered whether these people lived wicked lives because they had abandoned their faith, or had abandoned their faith in order to live wicked lives. Either way, angry and contemptuous unbelievers of this kind did not threaten the religious world around them. They reinforced it.
The same was true of an even angrier species of ‘unbelief’: blasphemy. In 1526 a servant boy in Toledo was hauled before the Spanish Inquisition after multiple witnesses reported him for saying ‘I deny God and Our Fucking Lady, the whore of the cuckolded arsehole’. Unusually inventive, but not unique. Blasphemy was by far the most common offence brought before the Inquisition: typically words uttered during a quarrel, in a tavern or at a gaming table. Crying out ‘I deny God and the bastard of his lineage’, as one Juan de la Calle did during a bad losing streak, might get you into trouble, but it was not a serious atheist’s manifesto. Thomas Aquinas argued that such blasphemies were sinful, but not heretical: mere insults to God, arising from a momentary, almost involuntary eruption of rage. And what more potent way to insult God than to deny him altogether? Like another common medieval oath – cursing your own parents – this was about shock and macho posturing. It was playing Russian roulette with your own soul, to show that, since you were plainly not afraid of God, you were not afraid of anything. Another Spaniard, Juan Gutierrez, was accused in 1516 of saying ‘God is nothing’. In the cold light of day before the tribunal, he admitted the charge, but maintained plaintively that he had of course not meant it. He had simply been ‘fired up by anger and passion and dismay’. He had, he said, lashed out at God much as he might have said to a neighbour in a quarrel, ‘Go on, you’re nothing!’ Most inquisitors were content to accept this kind of excuse. Even when blasphemy was too serious to go unpunished, the penalties – the pillory, cutting off the ears – were typically designed to humiliate. These people were not seriously arguing that there is no God. They were just showing off.[9]
Blasphemers insulted God but did not forget him. If they were angry with him, that was simply a recognition of his power. If you believe in an omnipotent God, everything is his fault. The irony, as pious commentators observed, was how constantly God’s name was on blasphemers’ lips. But this did not make their defiance trivial. Blasphemy had the effect of scent-marking places – alehouses, gambling dens, brothels, barracks, ships – where different rules applied, and where a degree of demonstrative impiety was expected or even rewarded. In the centuries to come, these irreligious spaces would serve as reservoirs of angry, scornful or contemptuous unbelief, from which it could seep out into the wider culture. It is no coincidence that these were all thoroughly male-dominated spaces. Blasphemy was, the lawyers agreed, a gender-specific crime. Women, it was said, blasphemed less than and differently from men. They typically complained to God of their suffering, challenged his justice or cursed their own births.[10]
Even if you did not mean it when you defied God, your words had consequences. If God did not strike you down for your wickedness, you might reach for the dread words more readily next time – or go further, since blasphemy depends on shock value and is therefore liable to runaway inflation. You might find yourself asking in your heart: is there really a God? Even to try out the feel of the words on your tongue was to peer over the edge of a cliff. Perhaps you were only trying to scare yourself, or others, and had no intention of actually leaping off. But you had looked, you had imagined, and felt a thrill that was more than fear. If the time ever came to jump – or if the cliff ever began to crumble beneath you – you would not be entirely unready.
Losing your temper with God might feel good, but it did not achieve very much. A more practical and dangerous target for anger was his self-appointed representatives on earth. The case of Isambardus de Sancto Antonio, in thirteenth-century southern France, ought never to have come to anything. All that had happened was that, when a preacher introduced his sermon by promising to ‘say a few words about God’, Isambardus said audibly, ‘the fewer the better’. If he had apologised to the court, nothing more would have happened. But he refused, and instead launched into a series of tart remarks about how priests invented ceremonies to extort money from the people. Likewise the Montauban peasant who claimed in 1276 that he would not confess his sins to a priest even if he had sex with every woman in the village. He was no more making a theological argument than he was eyeing up his neighbours; he was simply railing against one of the most widely resented pinch points of priestly control over lay people. Another Spaniard was accused before the Inquisition in the late fifteenth century for saying, ‘I swear to God that this hell and paradise is nothing more than a way of frightening us, like people saying to children “the bogeyman will get you”’. This is resentment at being manipulated, not speculation about the fate of the dead.[11]
I do not mean that these incidents were trivial: quite the reverse. Amateur theological speculation was a minority activity in the Middle Ages, but resentment of priests was a sport for all. Historians disagree over how widespread ‘anticlericalism’ was in medieval Europe, but everyday life certainly offered plenty of potential points of friction between priests and common people: from the gathering of tithes, fees and offerings, to the imposition of tedious moral and ritual constraints. Any priest who found himself at odds with an awkward parishioner might naturally fall back on his authority as God’s representative, forcing the parishioner either to give way, or to enlarge his quarrel to include God. A dispute over a few pence or an illicit pat of butter in Lent could very quickly escalate into something much more serious.
In practice, one issue above all tended to trigger these escalations: the medieval clergy’s most visible and most outrageous claim to spiritual authority. In the Mass, every priest presided at a daily miracle, in which bread and wine were wholly but undetectably transformed into the literal substance of Christ’s body and blood. The reason the Western Church formally defined this doctrine of transubstantiation in 1215 was that dissident groups were questioning it. Thereafter the sacrament of unity became a shibboleth, dividing those who could and could not embrace this hard teaching. Transubstantiation made sense in Aristotelian philosophical terms, but it was always counterintuitive, and only became more so as philosophy moved on during the later Middle Ages. Hence the procession of medieval miracle stories in which unbelievers suddenly saw the ritual at the altar as it ‘truly’ was: a broken human body, a blood-filled chalice. In the stories, these visions were typically judgements on unbelief rather than rewards for faith. In the earliest and best known of them, Pope Gregory the Great prayed for the gory truth to be shown to a woman who laughed at the thought that bread she herself had baked could be Christ’s body. Invariably, these doubters begged for the dreadful vision to be hidden from them again.
The Church, in other words, did not downplay the difficulty of believing in the sacrament. It revelled in it. The reason Christ’s body looked, felt and tasted like bread, according to the encyclopaedic medieval theologian Peter Lombard, was ‘so that faith may obtain its merit’. Believing was meant to be hard. Stories of bloody visions did not settle doubts so much as tease hearers with a certainty they could not have, rubbing their noses in the incongruous and glorious truth that their incredulous hearts were commanded to embrace.[12] Denials of this miracle were not unthinkable: they were necessary. Every Doubting Thomas story needs a sceptic.
Doubting transubstantiation was hardly exclusive to atheists. It was a point on which Jews, Muslims and Christian dissidents of various kinds could all agree. The Inquisition’s chief purpose was to hunt for heretics, not unbelievers. Yet their dragnets did not discriminate. Some of their catch were not members of any organised or coherent heretical group, but seemed to represent distinctive, sceptical traditions – or simply to be speaking for themselves. When the bishop of Worcester interrogated a heresy suspect named Thomas Semer in 1448, for example, he was looking for so-called Lollards, members of an English sect who disparaged priests’ status and traditional ceremonies. It quickly became clear, however, that Semer was something different. He not only denied transubstantiation, as the Lollards did, but dismissed the Mass entirely as an empty ritual. He rejected the Bible – which Lollards venerated – as a cynical tool of social control: ‘a set of prescriptions for human behaviour of human devising to keep the peace’. He claimed that Jesus Christ was simply the natural son of Mary and Joseph. At a second interrogation, Semer claimed that paganism was better than Christianity, and that everyday life proved that the devil was stronger than God. Unlike most Lollards, he persisted in his denials until he was executed by burning.[13] What we cannot know is to what extent this kind of scepticism was an ever-present feature of medieval religion’s sea floor, only stirred up by trawling inquisitors; and to what extent it specifically flourished in those corners of the ocean which were filled with heretical variety and therefore attracted the inquisitors’ attention.
Another of Semer’s shocking denials provides an important clue: he rejected any notion of the soul, of Heaven or of Hell. Wherever we find serious unbelief in medieval or early modern Europe, we find this ‘mortalist’ claim – that dead means dead, end of story. Mortalism is entirely compatible with belief in a God, but it was more than just an attack on a specific Christian (and Jewish, and Muslim)[14] doctrine. Medieval and early modern Christianity was intensely focused on salvation, the last judgement and the state of the dead. Strip that out, and while you might still have a rather abstract God, you have precious little religion. In theory, mortalism is not atheism. In practice, it might as well be.
So we find, for example, Jacopo Fiammenghi, an elderly Italian monk whose decades of debauchery, fraud and intimidation finally caught up with him in 1299. Witnesses accused him of saying that ‘there was not another world, neither heaven nor hell, but only this world’. When asked about his soul, anima, he replied, ‘a peach has an anima’ – the same word meant the fruit’s stone. An Englishman named Thomas Tailour confessed in 1491 to believing ‘that when a man or woman dieth in body, then [he] also dieth in soul; for as the light of a candle is put out … so the soul is quenched by the death of the body’.[15] A slightly later preacher’s anecdote picked up the same vivid image. In this story, a believer and an ‘atheist’ fall to arguing over the nature of the soul:
The Atheist said: I will show you what it is. So he caused a candle to be lighted and brought to the table; he blew it out, and said: your soul is no more than the flame of that candle … It is blown out, and so shall it be with your soul when you die.
Medieval churchmen certainly believed that mortalism was enough of a problem to need regular denunciation.[16]
So we have anger with God, hatred for priests, rejection of transubstantiation, scepticism about life after death. What does it all add up to? Medieval inquisitors, who liked their heresies neatly classified, had a ready label to hand: Epicureanism. The ancient philosopher Epicurus, whose name is now associated with pleasure-seeking, was notorious in the Middle Ages both for his mortalism and for his strictly naturalistic account of the universe. If the gods existed in this worldview, they were little more than a curiosity. Dante put heretics in the sixth circle of Hell, but he named only one actual sect: the Epicureans, ‘who with the body make the spirit die’, and who are therefore condemned to lie for ever in opened tombs, unwillingly immortal. (Emperor Frederick II was among them.) Dante singled the Epicureans out, one near-contemporary reader claimed, because they are ‘a sect which seems to have more followers than others’.[17]
In fact there is no evidence that this was a ‘sect’ with ‘followers’ at all. Frederick II, Jacopo Fiammenghi and Thomas Tailour did not all belong to some hidden, counter-cultural tradition. Most of the unbelieving voices we can recover sound as if they were isolated individuals working matters out for themselves, using everyday analogies. To take a slippery example: we do not need to believe the wild accusations of heresy flung at Pope Boniface VIII by his enemies in 1303 to recognise the kind of picture that was being painted. The pope supposedly mocked any notion of resurrection in bluntly rationalistic terms, telling believers to go and look at a graveyard: ‘When is your grandmother coming back to tell us about the other world?’ Were all the bones of the dead seriously going to be gathered for the general resurrection? Pointing to the bird on his dinner plate, he allegedly told his companion, ‘you have no more soul than this capon’.[18] Whether dreamed up by the pope himself or by an imaginative accuser, none of these claims suggest intellectual influences. Some insights – that the world is flat, that dead is dead, that bread is bread – simply thrust themselves onto the mind with or without a tradition behind them.[19] Medieval Europeans respected inherited authority, but they could also think for themselves. The conundrum that our lives feel as if they mean something, while the world looks as if it means nothing, confronted them as it confronts us all. Like us all, they found their own solutions as best they could.
The plainest sign of this is that, together with unbelievers and garden-variety heretics, inquisitors regularly dredged up self-taught individuals who spanned the range from idiosyncratic through eccentric to insane. The Italian who argued in 1275 that our bodies cannot be made by God, since death would not otherwise extinguish our senses, claimed to have deduced this and other weird doctrines ‘from his own cogitations’.[20] English bishops hunting Lollards came across individuals whose claims – that Heaven is below the earth, that the Virgin Mary belonged to the Holy Trinity while Christ did not, that Christ had had eighteen apostles – do not reflect any known theological system. A later generation of churchmen enjoyed shocking one another with tales of the man who ‘thought Christ was the Sun, that shineth in the firmament; and the Holy Ghost was the Moon’, or the one who believed his soul was ‘a great bone in his body, and … after he was dead, … if he had done well, he should be put into a pleasant green meadow’.[21] These people are witnesses to an eternal truth: you don’t need to know what you’re talking about in order to have an opinion.
By now we have strayed into a different mood. Mortalism and wilder speculations were not usually fired by anger, but by anxiety, that meeting point of curiosity and fear. What happens to us after we die is a subject worth being anxious about. In the late 1160s, King Amalric of Jerusalem – a corpulent, studious prince who was no friend of the Church’s privileges – fell ill. He summoned William, the archbishop of Tyre, to ask a question that William thought ‘hardly admitted of discussion’: ‘whether … there was any way of proving by reliable and authoritative evidence that there was a future resurrection?’ The shocked archbishop insisted that Christ’s teaching was all the evidence needed, but Amalric asked ‘whether this can be proved to one who doubts these things and does not accept the doctrine of Christ and believe in a future resurrection’. William claimed to have settled the royal conscience with only a few words. Perhaps: but the episode suggests that doubt could surface literally anywhere in medieval Christendom, especially when a brush with illness or danger made fine words about immortality sound flimsy.[22]
King Amalric’s scepticism may have pained his archbishop, but it did not deeply alarm him. Anxieties of this kind – shallow-rooted, always springing up afresh – were a perennial feature of medieval Christendom, but not a serious threat to it. Perhaps they were mere weeds, a tolerable and inescapable problem that could never be permanently eradicated but could be managed. Perhaps they were even a necessary part of the ecosystem, helping the true faith to stay limber. There was no reason to suspect that these medieval doubters were the start of anything. A few weeds were not about to uproot the tree of faith. But when fresh doubts did begin to sprout, they did not do so in virgin soil in which no seed of unbelief had ever been sown.
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