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 the general to declare that this was divine vengeance for his lies; he proceeded to win his victory.[47] Low cunning like this is as old as war and politics, but no one had ever earnestly described it as praiseworthy before.
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