Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt. Alec Ryrie
Early in their acquaintance, Beurrier remarked platitudinously that Basin surely wished to live and die a good Christian. Basin indignantly denied it: ‘I am a physician and philosopher. I have no other religion than to be a philosopher, and wish to die a philosopher, as I have lived.’
Basin is not the only shockingly frank character in Beurrier’s memoirs, and the story seems to have lost nothing in the telling.[35] But with its suggestion that Christian and physician were incompatible alternatives, it implies that the medical world was one of those reservoirs in which unbelief lay dormant throughout the Middle Ages – until stirred into life by what Basin called ‘philosophy’. That brings us out of this medical byway into the cultural upheaval that defined the modern age.
From Ancient to Modern
Medieval Europe was Christian to its bones; but it also venerated the ancient world, which had only latterly embraced Christianity, and some of whose greatest minds had rejected religion of any kind. Medieval theology’s central scholarly project was to reconcile the Christian and Graeco-Roman intellectual legacies. In its own terms, this project was impressively successful, but no sooner was the battle won in the thirteenth century than an unexpected new front opened up. The brash new movement that arose in the city-states of northern Italy was not trying to cause religious trouble. This ‘Renaissance’, as we now call it, was a cultural and a political project. A series of scrappy, turbulent and remarkably wealthy miniature republics were trying to stabilise themselves and to protect their independence from one another, and from the twin threats of the papacy to the south and the Holy Roman Empire to the north.
In an era when hereditary monarchy was the norm, republican city-states were a novelty, but there was an obvious precedent: the pagan republics of ancient Greece and Rome. Italians who studied those examples quickly found that their political lifeblood had been oratory, rhetoric and the art of persuasion. So what we call the Renaissance began as an attempt to recover the eloquence of the age of Cicero, to scale once again the heights of Latin as it had been used in the classical era, in order to rebuild Rome’s glories in Florence, Pisa and Siena.
These pioneers of the Renaissance venerated the ancient world at least as much as any other medieval scholars, but they used that veneration in a new way. Instead of humbly seeing themselves as heirs of an unbroken tradition, charged with preserving, transmitting and (perhaps, cautiously) interpreting it, they came to suspect that during the long ages separating themselves from the ancients, corruptions had crept in. The everyday Latin of the medieval Church and university seemed barbarous and uncouth next to the elegance of the ancient rhetors. At the start, this modest philological observation seemed innocent of religious implications. Yet they had started using the ancient, pagan past as a yardstick with which to measure the more recent, Christian past.
These scholars described their field as studia humanitatis: the study of human authorities, as opposed to divinity. From this they are nowadays often called ‘humanists’. The word is misleading – they were, as we would now say, students of the humanities, rather than ‘humanists’ in the modern, atheistic sense – but the implications are not entirely wrong. It is partly that Christianity could not be completely insulated from the new critical methods these scholars were developing. The Bible is an ancient text, and Renaissance scholarship began to raise awkward questions about whether it had been translated and interpreted correctly; whether its text, as generally accepted, was accurate; even whether a correct translation or an accurate text would ever be possible.
For the moment, this was not much more than a whisper of unease, although it would build into an insistent din over the centuries ahead.[36] A more immediate threat came directly from the attempt to bring classical values into the late medieval world, a project which unmistakably gave Renaissance humanism a certain secular flavour. The challenge this posed to Christian orthodoxy was latent, slow-burning and eminently avoidable. But it was there.
In 1417, the Florentine scholar and manuscript hunter Gianfrancesco Poggio Bracciolini discovered the lost text of Lucretius’ Of the Nature of Things. This epic poem from the first century BCE is the best surviving summary of Epicurean philosophy, but that was not why fifteenth-century Italians copied and re-copied it so avidly. It was rather that, in an age hungry for the best Latin style, Lucretius was hard to beat. Like modern film critics watching The Birth of a Nation or The Triumph of the Will, Lucretius’ Renaissance readers admired him despite his ideas, not because of them. He was so eloquent that even the authors of anti-atheist tracts could not resist quoting his aphorisms.[37] And so Epicureanism, which for centuries had been an imagined poison, began to seep into Europe’s groundwater for real.
In 1431 Lorenzo Valla, a pioneer of biblical criticism and a bitter rival of Poggio, wrote On Pleasure, a dialogue between a Stoic, an Epicurean and a Christian. Naturally the Christian had the last word, but the Epicurean had by far the most lines and, readers generally agree, the greatest share of the author’s sympathies.[38] By the end of the century, some Italians were no longer simply playing with Epicureanism. In 1482 the brilliant, unorthodox theologian and magician Marsilio Ficino claimed that sufferers from melancholy, whose bodily humours were ‘cold, dry, and black’ and whose spirits were therefore ‘doubtful and mistrusting’, were drawn to Lucretius and to unbelief. Ficino’s suggested regime to alleviate this malady has more than a whiff of self-medication.[39] In 1517 the city of Florence banned the reading of Lucretius in schools, worried by the unhealthy interest he was generating.
Lucretius was only one face of a larger problem. Even the Renaissance humanists’ most revered political mentor, Cicero, had written a treatise, Of the Nature of the Gods, that almost persuaded a young French student into what he called ‘atheism’. When an English poet in the 1570s wrote a dialogue between a believer and an atheist, he lifted his atheist’s arguments wholesale from Cicero.[40] Equally dangerous ideas could be found in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, one of medieval Europe’s best-known classical works and one of the first to find print publication, in 1469. Pliny – now better known for having been killed by his own reckless curiosity during the eruption of Vesuvius at Pompeii – was a Stoic, not an Epicurean, but he too professed a wearied ignorance about whether there were any gods, and mocked the notion ‘that the sovereign power and deity, whatsoever it is, should have regard of mankind’. He dismissed any notions of life beyond death or of a soul as ‘fantastical, foolish, and childish’, called the idea of divine omnipotence ridiculous, and directed his readers’ attention instead to ‘the power of Nature’, saying, ‘it is she, and nothing else, which we call God’. His book was read with particular attention by physicians.[41]
Still, we should not overestimate the impact of these ideas. It was not news to late medieval Europeans that most ancient writers were not Christians. When Lucretius, Cicero and Pliny dismissed pagan religion, good Christians were happy to agree, simply regretting that those virtuous men had not had the opportunity to take the final step of faith in Christ. When the daring Mantuan philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi argued in 1516 that Pliny and Aristotle had been mortalists, he provoked furious controversy and accusations of heresy – but there is no good reason to doubt his insistence that, regardless of what Aristotle might have thought, he himself believed the Church’s doctrine.[42] The actual idea of mortalism was blandly familiar, not disturbingly novel. The same is true of anti-providentialism: the argument that the world is governed simply by nature (Pliny) or by chance (Lucretius), so that God becomes an abstract curiosity, unable to answer prayers or work miracles. This is, the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt has argued, the idea which gave birth to the Renaissance and to the modern world. It is true enough that amid the chaotic opportunities of fifteenth-century Italy, anti-providentialism had a certain appeal.[43] But it was hardly new. The French builder accused