Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt. Alec Ryrie
to keep men in awe’.[51] Machiavelli’s contribution was to say out loud what others had long whispered, breathing new confidence into the long-standing suspicion that religion was all a giant trick. When the sixteenth century’s religious crises broke, this began to matter.
In the meantime, some of those who were enthralled by the Renaissance’s ancient novelties acquired a reputation for unbelief, sometimes justified, often not. Perhaps Étienne Dolet really did deny the immortality of the soul – the charge for which he was burned to death in Paris in 1546. What we know for certain is that his view of the question was almost wholly pagan. The true immortal, he wrote in 1538, is one to whom ‘for all future time life after death has been gained by his reputation … renowned either by military glory or by literary reputation’. This was the immortality he himself sought, adding:
What indeed has death been able to accomplish as yet against Themistocles, Epaminondas, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Caesar, Pompey, the Scipios, Demosthenes, Isocrates, Lysias, Homer, Pindar, Aristophanes, Cicero, Sallust, Plautus, Terence, Virgil, Ovid?
This was the company for which Dolet longed, not dreary Christian saints. He was so immersed in classicism that he had lost his moorings in his own century. It was like the Italian friar who told inquisitors in 1550 that there was no soul and that Christ was merely human, adding that he put more faith in Ovid than in the Bible. (As if to confirm his affinity with all things Graeco-Roman, he added that ‘he would rather worship a pretty little boy in the flesh than God’.)[52] At the very least, the Renaissance ensured that anyone searching for unbelief knew where to look. In the mid-seventeenth century, an unknown French scholar put together a hefty compilation of extracts from ancient and Renaissance writers which argue that there is no God and no soul, and that religion is a political device. This document appears to have been a wholly private project: unpublished and, as far as we know, unread until its modern rediscovery.[53] Its contents might once have been disconcerting. By the mid-seventeenth century, they were banal.
This compilation’s most insidious claim was that the truly wise had always known that religion was a lie. This condescending conspiracy theory was perhaps the Renaissance’s most important, direct contribution to unbelief. When the radical Italian theologian Lelio Sozzini wrote in 1549 that ‘most of my friends are so well educated they can scarcely believe God exists’, he was joking, but the joke depends on the stereotype of the learned unbeliever who is too sophisticated for faith.[54] North of the Alps, the association between Italians and atheism became proverbial. ‘Italy’, wrote the Englishman Richard Harvey in 1590, ‘hath been noted to breed up infinite Atheists.’ If his own countrymen were tempted by doubt, they were liable to be called Italianate.[55] The pungently nationalistic English scholar Roger Ascham admitted that he had only been to Italy once, for nine days, but it was enough to convince him that the ‘special point that is to be learned in Italy’ was ‘first, to think ill of all true Religion, and at last to think nothing of God himself’. The very word atheist, Ascham lamented, was unknown in England ‘until some Englishman took pains to fetch that devilish opinion out of Italy’.[56]
For all the nationalistic tub-thumping, there is no mistaking the undercurrent of concern. The old unbelief of anger had acquired a new mood of cosmopolitan, satirical scorn. The rumoured covens of mocking atheists gathering in sixteenth-century cities, calling themselves ‘the damned crew’, are probably as imaginary as Of the Three Impostors, but like that phantom book, they matter. Believers began to hear knowing laughter at the back of their minds, ‘turning things that are serious into mockery’.[57] Faith felt simple; doubt, sophisticated. In the 1580s, Jacques du Perron, a French royal servant and future cardinal, presented an argument for the existence of God to King Henry III’s court, as a formal exercise and an entertainment. Basking in his audience’s applause, he was foolish enough to add that, if they wanted, he could present the opposite case as well. The king, who already had quite enough problems with religious extremists, was furious, but there is no reason to think that du Perron was a secret atheist. He explained, backpedalling frantically, that he was merely hoping ‘to demonstrate his wit’ – and nothing was wittier than a knowing flirtation with atheism.[58] That flirtation did not, in itself, significantly threaten Europe’s long marriage to the old faith. Only if the marriage itself ran into trouble might it become dangerous.
The cynicism and mockery of Renaissance humanists did not mark the start of a high road to modern atheism, any more than the anger of medieval blasphemers or the professional disdain of learned physicians. Self-limiting and by definition marginal, these atheisms were irritants, in equilibrium with the faith rather than destabilising it. If the Renaissance contained a serious threat to Christendom, it was of a subtler kind.
Machiavelli’s open fascination with Lucretius’ doctrine of chance was very unusual. Most Renaissance scholars treated Lucretius the way medieval theologians had treated Aristotle: they took what they could use and left the rest. The historian Ada Palmer has recently examined all fifty-two extant fifteenth-century manuscripts of Lucretius’ poem. Machiavelli’s is quite unlike any of the others. The sections of the poem which deny the immortality of the soul and assert that the world is governed by chance were sedulously ignored by most fifteenth-century commentators. More than 90 per cent of the notes Palmer has found comment either on Lucretius’ style and language, or on incidental historical information in the poem. Most of the rest focus on Lucretius’ moral philosophy or medical opinions. Aside from Machiavelli’s, only five of the manuscripts pay more than the most passing attention to Lucretius’ dangerous ideas, one of them only briefly, the other four in order firmly to mark them as errors.[59] Most Renaissance readers believed, or wanted to believe, that Epicureanism could be house-trained.
It did not quite work. Renaissance scholars were keen to learn from the ancients’ exemplary lives as well as their exemplary Latin (indeed, they were convinced the two were connected). Surely – so the argument went – Christians should be spurred to new heights of righteousness by the shameful thought that these mere pagans had outstripped them in virtue? It was an innocent rhetorical ploy, its double edge quite unintended. Christianity was, in this view, simply the consummation of all that was best about ancient philosophy. The greatest of the Renaissance’s house-trainers, the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus, included in his Colloquies a self-styled Epicurean who claimed that ‘there are no people more Epicurean than godly Christians’: for Epicureans held that the purpose of human life is the pursuit of happiness, and as everyone knows, true happiness is to be found in virtue. It was an over-tidy view of Epicureanism – Lucretius’ work has rather more sex in it than Erasmus’ – but also a singular view of Christianity. Erasmus united Renaissance philosophy with his homeland’s tradition of practical devotion, and a dash of German mysticism, to conclude that the heart of Christianity was its ethics. Christian theology conventionally emphasises that human sin is pervasive and that sinners must be saved by God’s grace. Erasmus, who was suspicious of too much theology, wanted his readers to strive not to be sinners at all. Christians had traditionally thrown themselves on Jesus Christ’s mercy, as their Saviour. Now they were being urged to imitate him, as their exemplar.[60]
So far, this was no more than a shift of emphasis. Erasmus remained a faithful, if provocative, Catholic Christian. But the implications were unsettling. If Christianity was supremely about ethics, and if ancient pagans had been outstandingly virtuous, did that mean unbelievers could achieve true godliness? Christ might be the ideal example, but did that mean he was necessarily essential? Could reason and the God-given natural law implanted in every human soul not bring us to the same destination? In which case, should Christians concentrate less on the devotional and sacramental life of the Church and more on cultivating the kinds of virtues which pagans and Christians might share? Erasmus and his colleagues were in no sense trying to ask such provocative