by Peter Watson
The practice of numbering biblical verses, introduced by the printer Robert Stephanus in Geneva in 1551, also played a part. Being able to find their way around the scriptures more easily for many people only pointed up the many glaring inconsistencies and conflicting truths. Anabaptists pointed out that Genesis supported polygamy. In Mark’s gospel, on the other hand, Jesus said ‘a man…shall cleave to his wife’ (10:6). Divorce is permitted in Deuteronomy but not in Matthew.7 The book of Kings encourages the non-payment of taxes, whereas Matthew’s gospel says they must be paid. Many other practices and traditions, sanctified by time, and which the laity assumed were in the scriptures, were actually nowhere to be found. These included papal authority, the celibacy of priests, transubstantiation, infant baptism, the canonisation of saints and the impossibility of salvation outside the Catholic church.8
The fragmentation epitomised by the inter-faith violence, and accompanied by the discovery by the wider public of the inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible, helped to produce a situation where, by the end of the sixteenth century, sects with more or less extreme views had proliferated to the point of bewilderment so that there was now, if anything, too much theological choice, making the discovery of the ‘true faith’ more difficult, more impossible, than ever. One result was that the word ‘atheist’ came to be much more widely used than ever before.9
Atheism is a Greek word. The first recorded atheist in history was Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (fl. 480–450 BC). Certainly he was the first to be accused of atheism, and was prosecuted and condemned for his free thought.10 Yet Socrates tells us that Anaxagoras’ books were widely available in Athens and that anyone could pick them up for a drachma–in other words, he wasn’t regarded as a crank.11 The poet Diagoras of Melos was also accused of atheism, after he had concluded that there could be no god because so many acts of iniquity went unpunished.12 (We are also told that Diagoras broke up a statue of Hercules and used it for firewood, impudently daring the god to perform his thirteenth labour by cooking turnips.) More than one character in the plays of Euripides impeaches the gods, insisting there can be no truth in the ‘miserable tale of poets’.13 In ancient Rome, there was less free thought than in Athens. There are no references to religion in Cicero’s private letters and in Petronius’ Satyricon the characters take pleasure in ridiculing priests who officiate at mysteries they don’t really comprehend.14 But this too is scepticism rather than out-and-out atheism.
As was referred to in the Introduction, James Thrower has examined what he calls ‘The Alternative Tradition’, the rejection of religious explanations in the ancient world. He described, for instance, the Lokayata tradition in India, beginning in the sixth century BC, which was essentially a hedonistic approach to the world, based on a lost text, the Brhaspati Sutra. This system arose at much the same time as Buddhism and the Upanishads (it was also known as Carvaka) and its central beliefs were a rejection of tradition and magic, and that the body and the self were one and the same, meaning there was no life after death: one lived for pleasure in the here and now. Purana Kassapa, a wandering Indian ascetic, also attacked the fundamental Hindu doctrine of karma, held that there is no hereafter, and that morality is a natural phenomenon, whose only purpose is to help life on earth. He was followed by Ajita Kesakambali and Makkhali Gosala, the founder of the Ajivikas, a sect which survived at least into the thirteenth century AD, who had a naturalistic conception of man.15 The notion of ‘natural laws’, which explain change and evolution in the world, was not at all uncommon in ancient and medieval Indian thought.16
Thrower also notes that in China the Taoists discouraged speculation about the ultimate origin and end of nature, stressing the eternity and uncreatedness of the Tao, that all was silent and empty before Heaven and Earth were produced, that there was a fundamental unity to nature–i.e., a set of laws, which it was the job of philosophy to apprehend, rather than creation as such. In China supernatural forces were ruled out by Xun Zi (298–238 BC), who discounted the efficacy of prayer and divination, who recommended the study of nature rather than its worship and, like his later epigone Wang Chong (AD 27–97), argued that what happens in the world is the fruit of human ‘merit or demerit’, rather than supernatural forces.17 The naturalistic theories of Zhu Xi (1130–1200) were considered in Chapter 14.
Thrower’s argument is that when these Indian and Chinese ideas are put together with Greek and Roman thought–Ionian science, the sophists, the Epicureans, Roman notions of imperium, their very great practicality in turning successful emperors into gods–the approach to the natural world, omitting supernatural elements, amounts to an alterative chain of thought that has had insufficient attention from historians.
J. M. Robertson, in his history of free thought in the West, says there was a ‘startling display’ of freethinking at Paris University in 1376, by the philosophical students. Among a list of 219 theses that they proposed, they denied the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection, and the immortality of the soul. They insisted that prayer was useless and that there are ‘fables and falsehoods’ in the gospels as in other books. They were sharply ‘scolded’ by the archbishop but nothing more serious seems to have resulted.18
The historian Jean Seznec has chronicled the survival of the pagan gods in Renaissance art, from Botticelli to Mantegna and from Correggio to Tintoretto. He shows how pagan antiquity had never really disappeared in the Middle Ages, not the gods anyway. The dukes of Burgundy had prided themselves on being descended from a demi-god and the Trojans were very popular at their court.19 Jupiter and Hercules were included in the tapestries of Beauvais cathedral,20 and four mythical divinities were represented in the fifteenth-century chapel of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, among them Apollo, Mars and Jupiter.21 In the campanile in Florence Jupiter is dressed as a monk!22 Seznec’s point, insofar as it relates to this part of our narrative, is that the pagan gods and the Christian God had lived side-by-side until the Renaissance, with medieval people unwilling to discard the classical gods entirely.23
While Copernicus was being (slowly) assimilated across Europe, Michel Eyquem, better known as Montaigne (1533–1592), was using his classical education and his mixed background (a devout Catholic father, and a Jewish mother who converted to Protestantism) to evolve a way of looking at the world which repudiated the orthodox Christian position and prepared his fellow men for the shattering changes that were about to break over them.
Montaigne’s background made it next to impossible for him to accept that any one faith had a monopoly of divine revelation and this thinking he applied not just to beliefs but also to morality. Growing up amid the flood of discoveries from the New World had its effect too, producing in him a lively interest in the diversity of customs and beliefs found on the other side of the Atlantic, where people were ‘Achristian’, a label that would also come to be applied to early sceptics.24 This gave Montaigne a great tolerance for others, and for different ways of thinking, and together these provided the basis for his complete rejection of one of the central tenets of Christianity. For Christians of the world in which Montaigne grew up, the chief purpose of someone’s intellectual life was to secure salvation in the world to come (he was especially critical of Luther).25 Philosophy’s main function, in such a world, as the handmaiden of theology, was likewise ‘the preparation of man for a safe death’.26 Montaigne thought this was nonsense and reversed the proposition, arguing that the purpose of knowledge is to teach men how to live more adequately, more productively, more happily, right here on earth. This revision had a major effect on the shape of intellectual life. Among other things, it meant that, for Montaigne, theology, ‘the queen of the sciences’, and philosophy were now much less important: they were replaced as the chief objects of interest by psychology, ethnology and aesthetics. This was in effect the birth of the human sciences.
In doing this, Montaigne gave a huge injection of intellectual muscle to the secular world, and to the purpose and value of diversity. In arguing
against the ‘otherworldly’ obsession of Christianity, he also cast doubt on ideas about the immortality of the soul.27 ‘If philosophy is to teach us how to live rather than how to die, we must gather the largest possible amount of information as to the ways in which men live and then analyse this mass of material in calm and judicious fashion.’28 It was immediately obvious to Montaigne, looking around him at the newly-gathered material from the New World and elsewhere, that men and women had devised many ways of adapting to their environment. It was therefore self-evident that God favoured diversity over uniformity.29 In the same way, Montaigne’s concentration on this life rather than the next also downgraded in importance yet another basic ingredient of Christianity, the concept of the soul, and the related tendency to assume that anything to do with the soul was good and wholesome and anything to do with the body was base and bad. From this two things followed. One, it hit at the clergy, as intercessors for the fate of the soul. And two, it freed people from the medieval belief that sexual relations were bad in themselves. Instead Montaigne maintained that sex should be dignified but no guilt should attach to its practice.
Montaigne’s conceptual innovations amounted to a major break with the traditional Jewish/Christian tribal idea of God as a jealous, arbitrary and, yes, occasionally cruel God. Instead, as more than one historian has remarked, Montaigne shares with Lord Shaftesbury in England the honour of discovering that ‘God is a Gentleman’. Montaigne never really doubted that there was a God, but he radically changed our idea of what God is.
One reason Montaigne never really doubted that there was a God was because to do so in his lifetime was next to impossible. In his classic book The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, the French historian Lucien Febvre argues that ‘the conceptual difficulties in the way of a complete denial of God’s existence at this time were so great as to be insurmountable’. ‘Every activity of the day, which was punctuated with church bells summoning the faithful to prayer, was saturated with religious beliefs and institutions: they dominated professional and public life–even the guilds and universities were religious organisations.’ What people ate was surrounded by religious rituals and prohibitions.30 In Montpellier at the beginning of Lent the old pots used for cooking meat were broken and new ones installed, for fish. Cooking a capon on Friday was punishable by beating or public humiliation at Mass. If insects or rats infested the countryside, the priest was called first to get rid of them.31 ‘People had simply not yet achieved the objectivity necessary to question the existence of God, nor would this exist until a body of coherent reasons had been established, each based on scientific discoveries which nobody could deny.’32
And so, when people accused one another of ‘atheism’ they meant something different from what we mean today. Many equated atheism with libertinism.33 The Frenchman Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), who was both a scientist and a friar, claimed that there were ‘about 50,000 atheists’ in Paris alone but the ones he named personally all believed in God. The fact is that Mersenne called people atheists when their views about God differed from his own and this was typical. At that time the word ‘atheist’ was used not as we would use it today but as an insult. People in the sixteenth century never dreamed of calling themselves atheists.34
Nevertheless, views and opinions did begin to change. Montaigne led the way but it took nearly a century before Copernicus’ views were fully accepted, as people gradually grasped, and then got to grips with, the full implications of what he was saying. These events have been painstakingly set down by Thomas Kuhn.
Kuhn shows, as was mentioned earlier, that professional astronomers were for decades able to use most of the information provided by Copernicus without paying attention to his central thesis, that the earth went round the sun. The commotion was slow in starting and when it did start it was because its arguments had reached beyond astronomers. To begin with, Copernicus and those who agreed with him were ridiculed for the absurdity of their beliefs.35 Jean Bodin (1529–1596), the French political philosopher, was particularly dismissive. ‘No one in his senses, or imbued with the slightest knowledge of physics,’ he wrote, ‘will ever think that the earth, heavy and unwieldy from its own weight and mass, staggers up and down around its own centre and that of the sun; for at the slightest jar of the earth, we would see cities and fortresses, towns and mountains thrown down.’36
The most bitter objections, however, came from those who found that Copernicus’ theory conflicted with scripture. Even before Copernicus published his book, but when his ideas were beginning to circulate, Martin Luther, in one of his ‘Table Talks’, held in 1539, was quoted as saying: ‘People give ear to an upstart astrologer [sic] who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon…This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.’37 As biblical citation was increasingly used against the Copernicans, they were labelled either ‘infidels’ or ‘atheists’. Eventually, about 1610, when the Catholic church officially joined the battle against the new astronomy, the charge became one of formal heresy.38 In 1616 De revolutionibus and all other works that affirmed the earth’s motion were placed on the Index and Catholics were forbidden to teach or even to read Copernican doctrines.
By this time, as Kuhn shows, the full implications of Copernicanism had been assimilated, as people grasped that his results were potentially destructive of a whole system of thought. Kuhn’s description is worth quoting at length: ‘If, for example, the earth was merely one of six planets, how were the stories of the Fall and of the Salvation, with their immense bearing on Christian life, to be preserved? If there were other bodies essentially like the Earth, God’s goodness would surely necessitate that they, too, be inhabited. But if there were men on other planets, how could they be descendants of Adam and Eve, and how could they have inherited the original sin, which explains man’s otherwise incomprehensible travail on an earth made for him by a good and omnipotent deity? Again, how could men on other planets know of the Saviour who opened to them the possibility of eternal life? Or, if the earth is a planet and therefore a celestial body located away from the center of the universe, what becomes of man’s intermediate but focal position between the devils and the angels?…Worst of all, if the universe is infinite, as many of the later Copernicans thought, where can God’s Throne be located? In an infinite universe, how is man to find God or God man?’ These questions helped to alter the religious experience of man.39
Both John Donne and John Milton thought that Copernicus might very well be right (Keith Thomas reminds us that Britain was more highly educated in Milton’s day than at any time until the First World War) but in spite of this neither liked the new system and, in Paradise Lost, Milton reverted to the traditional view for his drama.40 The Protestant leaders, Calvin as well as Luther, were just as keen to suppress the expression of Copernican beliefs butthey never had the police infrastructure that the Counter-Reformation Catholics did and so were much less effective. Even so, when in 1616, and more explicitly in 1633, the church prohibited the teaching or believing that the sun was the centre of the universe, many Catholics were shocked, and shocked for two reasons. One, the more educated could see that by then the new theory was being supported by fresh evidence that was emerging all the time. And two, this was an important change of stance by the church: hitherto it had always maintained a dignified silence on cosmological matters, which at least had the merit of preventing it from ever being in the wrong, and at the same time allowed the appearance of being open to new ideas. Now all that was thrown out.41
The traditional view became even harder to support in 1572 with the appearance in the night sky of a nova, or new star. Then there was a series of comets which appeared in 1577, 1580, 1585, 1590, 1593 and 1596. Each of these episodes showed that the heavens were mutable, again in contradiction of the scriptures.42 No parallax was observed with these bodie
s, forcing people to conclude that they were further away than the moon, which meant that they occupied the zone of the heavens which was supposed to be filled by crystalline spheres. Bit by bit, Copernicus became harder to dismiss.43
Kepler, as we have already seen in an earlier chapter, discovered that the orbits of the planets were ellipses, not spherical, and this too destroyed the idea of crystalline spheres. Kepler, however, hesitated to face up to the full implications of his discoveries and it was Galileo, and his telescope, which provided ‘countless’ pieces of evidence which put Copernicanism beyond doubt.44 First was his observation that the Milky Way, which to the naked eye had been just a pale glow in the sky, now turned out to be a vast collection of stars. Next, the moon was revealed to be covered by craters, mountains and valleys (from the size of the shadows cast Galileo was able to estimate their height). Thus the moon was shown to be not so very different from earth, further fuelling doubts about the difference between this world and the heavens.45
But the very worst observation, and the one which had the biggest impact on the seventeenth-century imagination, was Galileo’s identification of the four ‘moons’ of Jupiter, orbiting the planet in roughly circular fashion. This not only confirmed exactly what Copernicus had argued, about the earth orbiting the sun, but–perhaps more important–it confirmed the more general notion that the earth was not the centre of the universe, that it was in fact just one body among thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, in an infinite universe. It was now that the greatest opposition to the Copernican system was shown and that is perhaps to be expected. Until Galileo, it was possible to have honest doubts about Copernican theories; but to doubt the Copernican system after Galileo required people to deliberately misunderstand the evidence.46 Cardinal Bellarmino, the leader of the church officials who condemned Copernican views, nevertheless acknowledged the problem. In a letter written in 1615 he said: ‘If there were a real proof that the sun is the centre of the universe, that the earth is in the third heaven, and that the sun does not go round the earth but the earth round the sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and rather admit that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true.’47 Not until 1822 did the church permit books to be printed which accepted that the earth’s motion was real, a delay which fatally damaged Catholic science and likewise church prestige.48 And so, despite the evidence, it took two hundred years for Copernicus to be fully accepted. During these years, however, the attitude to God was being transformed.
