By contrast, in Machiavelli’s first and most infamous book, The Prince (1513), religion is notable chiefly by its absence. In this utterly pragmatic, amoral worldview, popes and bishops are political players like any other. Machiavelli not only dismissed Christian ethics as nonsense for simpletons; he apparently despised Jesus Christ himself. He was not so foolhardy as to say so explicitly, and indeed avoided naming Christ at all. But how else are we to read his praise of Moses, who as an ‘armed prophet’ had compelled obedience, and who was therefore vastly superior to the (unnamed) ‘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 thought, nor acquire skill in anything, except war’ is hardly an endorsement of the Prince of Peace.[48]
Was any of this actually dangerous? Even if we take the cynicism of The Prince at face value, Machiavelli was not openly trying to subvert Christianity. By his own theory, in fact, rulers ought to encourage it. Perhaps the contradiction lay in writing any of this down, rather than whispering it in a ruler’s ear – but then, Machiavelli was a less successful politician in practice than 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 secularised space. Alongside the alehouse, the gaming table and the consulting room, we now have the council chamber. But as long as the theory underpinning the council chamber’s religious cynicism requires the rest of the population to be trained in religious enthusiasm, that theory’s impact will be self-limiting. Ruling elites who secretly disdain the ideology they formally proclaim tend not to endure very long, not least because they usually insist that their wives, children and servants adhere sincerely to that ideology. So, in the end, if they avoid collapsing into internecine quarrels, they are replaced by true believers.
Unless their cynicism leaks out into the wider populace. Machiavelli wrote that Italy in his own time had ‘lost all devotion and all religion’ and become ‘irreligious and perverse’. He described this as a ‘debt’ Italians owed to the Renaissance papacy, whose open corruption had destroyed their faith. He meant it ironically, but it is hard not to hear a note of appreciation. If the purpose of religion was to build a strong state, then – as Machiavelli saw it – Christianity was not a very good religion. Ideally it ought to be replaced with something more muscular and (to be plain) more manly.[49] In this Machiavelli belongs to a strand of anti-Christian thought stretching back to the Emperor Julian and forward to Edward Gibbon and Friedrich Nietzsche: a strand which despises Christianity for its otherworldliness, its cherishing of weakness and its tendency to pacifism.
In the intellectual history of atheism, this strand of thought is decisively important. In the social, political and emotional history of unbelief, it is peripheral. Far from renouncing Christianity’s distinctive ethic of mercy, most modern atheism has redoubled it. Even Nietzsche was far more governed by Christian-style ethics than he liked to admit.[50] The only serious attempt to put this strand of anti-Christian thought into practice is twentieth-century fascism, which ended by pulling the house down on itself and everyone around. Machiavelli’s unbelief was genuinely shocking, but – for that very reason – it was a dead end: a position that was prevented by its own inner logic from building any kind of mass following. So does it matter to our story at all?
Perhaps only for this reason: Machiavelli gave new voice to an old, corrosive thought, and so gave new fuel to the unbelief of anger. He was (naturally) eventually credited with having written Of the Three Impostors, and it is almost true. The Prince is a real book, but it is also an imaginary one, indeed a much-imagined one: whispered about in fascinated horror more than it was read. The power of Machiavelli’s writing even now is not that it tells us anything new, but that it tells us what we have always suspected, bluntly and without qualm or apology. The hunch that religion was a political trick played by the powerful was as old as politics itself. But now that hunch had a name. The play The Jew of Malta, written in 1589–90 by the English dramatist Christopher Marlowe, opens with a prologue to the audience by a speaker who identifies himself as ‘Machiavel’, and explains:
Albeit the world think Machevill is dead,
Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps …
Though some speak openly against my books,
Yet will they read me …
I count Religion but a childish Toy,
And hold there is no sin but Ignorance.
Marlowe himself was accused of claiming that ‘the first beginning of Religion was only 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