Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt. Alec Ryrie
of the true faith, it stands to reason that reason should give way. In its own way, this principle still holds. Many of us, in the modern world, might struggle to refute a flat-earther armed with jargon and ingenious technicalities. But we trust that there are astronomers who can, and are content to submit our reason to their authority.
The Protestant Reformation, by using reason as a battering ram against the papacy, destabilised this entire structure. Catholics quickly became convinced that their enemies were decaying ‘from faithful believing, to carnal reasoning’.[14] And so, as well as fighting fire with fire, and defending their doctrines as logical and rational, Catholics emphasised that the Protestants were guilty of something much worse than honest mistakes about theology. They were revealing themselves to be incredulous – and therefore, in Christian terms, self-evidently wrong. At the heart of the Reformation struggles was a battle for credulity.
The chief arena of this battle was that perennial lightning rod for scepticism, the doctrine of transubstantiation. Protestants were bitterly split among themselves over what to make of the sacrament of the Eucharist. Martin Luther continued to insist that Christ’s body was physically present in the bread and wine, while Calvinist and Reformed Protestants talked of a spiritual or even merely a symbolic presence. But they were united in rejecting transubstantiation, and many of their arguments against it boiled down to claiming that it was impossible, ridiculous, or an offence against reason. To call something impossible, however, was to say that God could not do it – which sounded blasphemous. Catholics worked hard to turn this into a dispute over whether God had the power to perform the miracle of transubstantiation. It was strikingly rare for Protestants to give what might seem the obvious rejoinder: that God could do it but there was no reason to believe he actually did.[15]
In the mid-1540s, as Calvin was waking up to the threat of Protestant-accented scepticism, a group of English Catholics laid out a defence of transubstantiation, asserting not only that it was reasonable but also that it transcended rationality and credibility, ‘surmounting incomparably all wit and reason of man … The more that [a doubter] by reason, ransacketh and searcheth for reason, in those things that passeth reason … into the further doubt he falleth’.[16] These Catholics did not disapprove of reason, but of carnal reason: doubting, disbelieving, self-based and so self-limiting. Richard Smith, the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, argued that in the doctrine of the Mass,
there be many things that appear strange … unto carnal reason … Unless we believe we shall not understand … Unless we be humble and low in our own sight, and think ourselves unworthy, and unable to know or to be made privy to such high mysteries and secret things, the said mysteries and secret things shall be hid from us.[17]
The most formidable of these writers, Bishop Stephen Gardiner, argued that even to ask how the miracle of transubstantiation was performed was ‘a token of incredulity’. He pointedly praised the apostles who, when Christ spoke about his body being eaten, had ‘needed no further explanation to understand it, but faith to believe it’. Like many others, Gardiner contrasted those apostles with another set of biblical characters: the Capernaites, who, when Christ claimed to be the bread of life, asked incredulously how this man could give them his flesh to eat.[18] The Capernaites became a favourite symbol for carnality: a lumpish species of error distinguished by its failure to lift its eyes above the human and the mundane.
What made this charge so effective was that it was so nearly true. Protestant attacks on the Mass really did have a whiff of incredulity about them. They tended to meet Catholic theology’s philosophical precision not with counter-arguments, but with derision. How can Christ’s body be in so many places at once? With all those Masses celebrated daily, surely Christ’s body must be the size of a mountain? – as if those thoughts had never occurred to Thomas Aquinas. They used scoffing hypothetical cases: if a mouse happens to eat a consecrated Host, does it receive Christ? If someone is seasick after receiving the sacrament, does he vomit his Saviour half-digested onto the deck?[19] According to one Protestant, Catholics are ‘not ashamed to swear, that … they eat [Christ] up raw, and swallow down into their guts every member and parcel of him: and last of all, that they convey him into the place where they bestow the residue of all that which they haue devoured’.[20] That is not an argument; it is a gag reflex. And it proved his opponents’ point.
The shrewd, deeply sceptical but equally deeply Catholic French essayist Michel de Montaigne believed that the Protestants’ reckless scorn had started a fire that swept quickly out of control among the common people:
Once you have put into their hands the foolhardiness of despising and criticizing opinions … and once you have thrown into the balance of doubt and uncertainty any articles of their religion, they soon cast all the rest of their beliefs into similar uncertainty. They had no more authority for them, no more foundation, than for those you have just undermined … They then take it upon themselves to accept nothing on which they have not pronounced their own approval, subjecting it to their individual assent.[21]
Before long, rueful Protestants were agreeing. The devil, it was said, whispered in believers’ ears: ‘You thought that this and that was a truth, but you see now it comes to be debated, it proves but a shadow, and so are other things you believe, if once they were sifted and debated.’ In one imagined debate between an atheist and a Protestant, the atheist mocked the Protestant for appealing to long-standing tradition. ‘The Church of Rome being ancienter … why then are you not of it, if you will go for long received opinions?’[22]
Nor was it all just rumours. Noël Journet was a soldier-turned-schoolmaster who converted to Protestantism in the late 1570s, only to be expelled from the French Protestant church for circulating handwritten tracts which ridiculed the Bible’s supposed contradictions as ‘fables … dreams and lies’. He proposed to replace Christianity with a ‘strange religion of which one never speaks’. This, Catholic pamphleteers warned after Journet was put to death, was where Protestantism led. Geoffroy Vallée, another Frenchman executed for being somewhere between religiously eccentric and insane, also claimed that most doubters had first ‘passed through Protestantism’.[23] The same trajectory was visible in attacks on Protestant orthodoxy in England in the next century. Right-thinking Protestants were outraged when radical dissidents claimed there was no such place as Hell. The radicals replied that Catholics had said the same when Purgatory had been questioned a century before. And while orthodox Protestants might have distinguished sharply between burning popish service-books (good) and burning Bibles (bad), it is no surprise that zealots in the heat of the moment might not have known when to stop. Likewise, when you were used to deriding transubstantiation as idolatry, it did not sound too outlandish to say that ‘the flesh of Christ, and Letter of Scripture, were the two great Idols of Antichrist’. Protestants had worked long and hard to train their people to beware of the devil masquerading as an angel of light. They could hardly claim innocence when the same principle was turned back on them.[24] The Reformation’s lesson, it seems, was summed up in a newly coined proverb: ‘He that deceives me once, it’s his fault, but if twice, it’s my fault.’[25]
For all these reasons, Catholics naturally concluded that unbelief was a peculiarly Protestant problem. Protestants were quick to disabuse them. The shrewd and unorthodox Protestant polemicist William Chillingworth, who had spent a brief and unhappy stint as a convert to Catholicism, blamed the rise of unbelief squarely on the Catholics. What else could they expect when they imposed tyrannical discipline, forged miracles, promulgated ‘weak and silly Ceremonies and ridiculous observances’, and demanded that Christians accept doctrines – such as transubstantiation – which are ‘in human reason