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 in 1273 of saying he would only trust God and the Virgin Mary if he received bankable guarantees from them, and of insisting that his career was founded on hard work, not God’s favour, had not been reading the ancients.[44] The notion that God does not hear prayers and either does not or cannot act is quite capable of suggesting itself to people who are unfamiliar with Lucretius. Anyone who has ever had a heartfelt or desperate prayer rebuffed can hardly avoid the thought. If all Europeans before the Renaissance had truly believed in divine providence, the words that sprang instinctively to gamblers’ lips would have been prayers, not blasphemies.
One particular medieval notion, however, does seem to have been given new force by the Renaissance: the festering suspicion, not that religion is an error, but that it is a trick. The Vatican Library contains a manuscript copy of Lucretius’ poem made, apparently in 1497, by a young Florentine scholar whose name would soon become a synonym for atheism: Niccolò Machiavelli. Unlike most Renaissance readers, Machiavelli’s comments on Lucretius pass swiftly over literary, historical and ethical matters, concentrating instead on his materialism and especially his doctrine of chance.[45]
Machiavelli was no Epicurean. In his mature career he showed no discernible interest in doctrine or metaphysics at all. A friend said of him that he ‘finds it difficult to believe the things that should be believed’. When he was appointed to choose a Lenten preacher for Florence in 1521, another friend found the idea laughable, saying that if Machiavelli turned pious it would be proof of senility. Neither of the two surviving versions of Machiavelli’s will made any provision for his soul, and he deleted the word soul from a draft preface to one of his books.[46] His interests were strictly in politics and practical ethics. What made his treatment of religion so shocking was not a new idea, but a new way of applying a very old one.
Machiavelli’s 1517 Discourses on Livy, a splendidly Renaissance distillation of the political lessons of ancient Rome for his own times, includes a substantial section on religion and politics. This begins innocently enough, with the commonplace observation that religion is ‘the instrument necessary above all others for the maintenance of a civilized state’, and that a wise ruler ought always to uphold religion and encourage piety. Most medieval Christians would have agreed, believing this to be one of the God-given benefits of true religion. Lucretius, by contrast, had deplored how politicians used religion to manipulate the people’s fears. Machiavelli agreed with Lucretius’ analysis, but with one crucial difference: he thought manipulation was a good thing. He praised an early Roman king for faking divine authority for his laws: how else would they ever have been accepted? ‘The times were so impregnated with a religious spirit and the men with whom he had to deal so stupid’ – two facts that he plainly believed went together. He recommended that governments should encourage religion ‘even though they be convinced that it is quite fallacious’. He added a breathtakingly cynical story about a Roman general preparing for battle who cast auguries to boost morale. Awkwardly, the auguries warned against an attack. So, with the chief priest’s connivance, the general lied, telling his men that the results were favourable. When rumours of the true result nevertheless leaked out, the general publicly blamed the hapless priest for spreading subversion, and sent him to the front of the attack. The priest was killed early in the battle, allowing