Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

So we have anger with God, hatred for priests, rejection of transubstantiation, scepticism about life after death. What does it all add up to? Medieval inquisitors, who liked their heresies neatly classified, had a ready label to hand: Epicureanism. The ancient philosopher Epicurus, whose name is now associated with pleasure-seeking, was notorious in the Middle Ages both for his mortalism and for his strictly naturalistic account of the universe. If the gods existed in this worldview, they were little more than a curiosity. Dante put heretics in the sixth circle of Hell, but he named only one actual sect: the Epicureans, ‘who with the body make the spirit die’, and who are therefore condemned to lie for ever in opened tombs, unwillingly immortal. (Emperor Frederick II was among them.) Dante singled the Epicureans out, one near-contemporary reader claimed, because they are ‘a sect which seems to have more followers than others’.[17]

In fact there is no evidence that this was a ‘sect’ with ‘followers’ at all. Frederick II, Jacopo Fiammenghi and Thomas Tailour did not all belong to some hidden, counter-cultural tradition. Most of the unbelieving voices we can recover sound as if they were isolated individuals working matters out for themselves, using everyday analogies. To take a slippery example: we do not need to believe the wild accusations of heresy flung at Pope Boniface VIII by his enemies in 1303 to recognise the kind of picture that was being painted. The pope supposedly mocked any notion of resurrection in bluntly rationalistic terms, telling believers to go and look at a graveyard: ‘When is your grandmother coming back to tell us about the other world?’ Were all the bones of the dead seriously going to be gathered for the general resurrection? Pointing to the bird on his dinner plate, he allegedly told his companion, ‘you have no more soul than this capon’.[18] Whether dreamed up by the pope himself or by an imaginative accuser, none of these claims suggest intellectual influences. Some insights – that the world is flat, that dead is dead, that bread is bread – simply thrust themselves onto the mind with or without a tradition behind them.[19] Medieval Europeans respected inherited authority, but they could also think for themselves. The conundrum that our lives feel as if they mean something, while the world looks as if it means nothing, confronted them as it confronts us all. Like us all, they found their own solutions as best they could.

The plainest sign of this is that, together with unbelievers and garden-variety heretics, inquisitors regularly dredged up self-taught individuals who spanned the range from idiosyncratic through eccentric to insane. The Italian who argued in 1275 that our bodies cannot be made by God, since death would not otherwise extinguish our senses, claimed to have deduced this and other weird doctrines ‘from his own cogitations’.[20] English bishops hunting Lollards came across individuals whose claims – that Heaven is below the earth, that the Virgin Mary belonged to the Holy Trinity while Christ did not, that Christ had had eighteen apostles – do not reflect any known theological system. A later generation of churchmen enjoyed shocking one another with tales of the man who ‘thought Christ was the Sun, that shineth in the firmament; and the Holy Ghost was the Moon’, or the one who believed his soul was ‘a great bone in his body, and … after he was dead, … if he had done well, he should be put into a pleasant green meadow’.[21] These people are witnesses to an eternal truth: you don’t need to know what you’re talking about in order to have an opinion.

By now we have strayed into a different mood. Mortalism and wilder speculations were not usually fired by anger, but by anxiety, that meeting point of curiosity and fear. What happens to us after we die is a subject worth being anxious about. In the late 1160s, King Amalric of Jerusalem – a corpulent, studious prince who was no friend of the Church’s privileges – fell ill. He summoned William, the archbishop of Tyre, to ask a question that William thought ‘hardly admitted of discussion’: ‘whether … there was any way of proving by reliable and authoritative evidence that there was a future resurrection?’ The shocked archbishop insisted that Christ’s teaching was all the evidence needed, but Amalric asked ‘whether this can be proved to one who doubts these things and does not accept the doctrine of Christ and believe in a future resurrection’. William claimed to have settled the royal conscience with only a few words. Perhaps: but the episode suggests that doubt could surface literally anywhere in medieval Christendom, especially when a brush with illness or danger made fine words about immortality sound flimsy.[22]

King Amalric’s scepticism may have pained his archbishop, but it did not deeply alarm him. Anxieties of this kind – shallow-rooted, always springing up afresh – were a perennial feature of medieval Christendom, but not a serious threat to it. Perhaps they were mere weeds, a tolerable and inescapable problem that could never be permanently eradicated but could be managed. Perhaps they were even a necessary part of the ecosystem, helping the true faith to stay limber. There was no reason to suspect that these medieval doubters were the start of anything. A few weeds were not about to uproot the tree of faith. But when fresh doubts did begin to sprout, they did not do so in virgin soil in which no seed of unbelief had ever been sown.

Physicians, ‘Naturians’ and ‘Nulla Fidians’

If the bishop at King Amalric’s sickbed tried to preserve him in the faith, the same may not have been true of his physicians. To summon medical help was to enter a notoriously sceptical world, a nest of paganism at the heart of Christendom.

Medieval and early modern medicine owed virtually nothing to Christianity. It drew partly on Islamic and, especially, Jewish sources: whether ailing Christians might put themselves in the hands of Jewish doctors was a long-standing dilemma, in which niceties of conscience were usually overwhelmed by practical urgency. Beneath it all, however, Europe’s medical tradition looked to Galen, the great Greek physician of the second century, ‘the most heathenish of all writers’, who did not believe in an immortal soul and whose towering authority Christianity struggled either to undermine or to co-opt.[23]

Even apart from this dangerous inheritance, physicians’ vocation was in inevitable tension with Christianity. They were in the business of changing fate, not submitting to it. They were interested in natural causes of illness, which could be treated, not supernatural ones, against which they were powerless. And they had a vested interest in persuading patients that their methods were more effective than any priest’s rituals. In the twelfth century, it was already said that physicians tended to place ‘undue emphasis upon nature, in … opposition to faith’. In the thirteenth century ‘damned and false men’ were arguing that the Bible ‘speaks falsely’ by describing epilepsy as demonic possession.[24] The fourteenth-century Italian physician Peter of Abano claimed that supposed resurrections were merely natural resuscitations of people who were not in fact dead, and indeed that ‘there is an infirmity which can keep a man insensible for three days and nights, so that he appears dead’. Perhaps Christ had merely passed out and then recovered? Peter died before these remarks could catch up with him, but he was posthumously burned for heresy just in case he was right.[25] In 1497 another physician was tried in Bologna on charges of dismissing Christ’s miracles as natural phenomena. ‘It’s simply not possible’, a Venetian physician supposedly said in 1575 of the miracles worked by his professional rivals in the Church: ‘it’s all an invention of the priests to get more money’.[26] Unbelief, admitted the seventeenth-century English doctor Sir Thomas Browne, was ‘the general scandal of my profession’.[27]

How widespread this sort of thing really was is impossible to say. What is clear is that, running right through the medieval and early modern periods and beyond, there was a well-established stereotype: the sceptical, amoral and self-serving physician, a colleague to the deceitful, amoral and self-serving lawyer and the hypocritical, amoral and self-serving priest. It is already there in Chaucer, whose physician’s studies were ‘but little on the Bible’. A seventeenth-century proverb had it that ‘where there are three physicians, there are two atheists’.[28] Stereotypes of this kind may be unfair or ill-founded, but they take on a life of their own. Sometimes people who grow weary of labouring under hostile assumptions decide they may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

Medics’ supposed atheism was of a specific kind. They were described as ‘naturians’, often ‘mere’ or ‘sole’ naturians. ‘The disease incident to your profession’, one preacher told physicians, is ‘even to be half Atheists, and that by ascribing so much to natural and second causes, and too little to God’. What made it worse was that their patients might be tempted into similar unbelief, placing their hopes for recovery in a doctor’s skill rather than God’s mercy.[29] The more expert the physician, the more likely that his expertise would blind him to the larger truth, and that he would, as the great physician-philosopher Robert Burton warned, ‘attribute all to natural causes’.[30]

In the 1560s, the English physician William Bullein penned a vivid fictional portrait of this kind of unbelief. Antonius, a wealthy merchant, consults Medicus, his physician, frankly admitting that he would spend his entire fortune to save his life, and recalling that in his ‘last great Fever’ he had paid Medicus handsomely. Already we are some way from the Christian ideal, in which the sick submit to God’s will and devote themselves to prayer and charity. But Medicus, knowing on which side his bread is buttered, praises Antonius’ attitude, and supports it by quoting an obscure biblical verse: ‘Honour the Physician, with the honour that is due unto him.’[31] Antonius, amused, points out that Medicus has left out the rest of the verse, which attributes all true healing to God. Lest he seem like a Bible-basher, he hastily adds that he only recognises the verse because he recently chanced to hear it being read when he and his bailiffs were in a church, lying in wait to ambush a pair of bankrupts. Medicus is unabashed at being caught out. ‘I care not, for I meddle with no Scripture matters, but to serve my turn.’ And he points out that, if either of them were to take heed of preachers quoting awkward Bible verses, they could hardly ply their trades as they do. Antonius happily agrees: the Bible is full of ridiculous principles that would bring all normal human society to a standstill, such as ‘the Ten Commandments, etcetera’. If we are really going to be damned for everyday profanity and hating our enemies, ‘then I warrant you, Hell is well furnished’.[32]

So far this is mere impiety, but now matters take a new turn. ‘I think that we two are of one religion,’ Medicus says, conspiratorially. Antonius is nonplussed: ‘I know not mine own religion’, so how can it be the same as someone else’s? Medicus now asks him to check that no one else can overhear them: secrets are about to be spoken. When he is certain that they are alone, he says to Antonius: ‘Hark in your ear sir, I am neither Catholic, Papist, Protestant, nor Anabaptist.’ Antonius asks, ‘What do you honour? The sun, the moon, or the stars?’ None of them, says Medicus. ‘To be plain, I am a Nulla fidian’: a person of no faith. (The newly coined English word atheist was not yet in widespread use.) ‘There are many of our sect’, he adds. And then comes the truly remarkable feature of this exchange. Having heard what ought to be the most shocking religious confession imaginable, Antonius is almost disappointed. He had apparently been hoping for something more novel. ‘Oh. One who says in his heart there is no God. Well, we differ very little in this point.’ He takes his prescription and leaves Medicus to his next patient.[33]

This was satirical fiction, the work of an author who was himself an ardent believer, and ought not to be taken too literally. Still, this much is plain. Physicians were the heirs to medieval Europe’s most robustly secular intellectual tradition. And while they might accept God’s role in human health and sickness, they could do nothing about it and so inevitably tended to ignore it. Whatever their own beliefs, their vocation led them to neglect God, and to do so at a moment when a patient might otherwise be rediscovering the urgency of faith.

So the physician’s consulting room can join the alehouse and gaming table on our list of secularised spaces. Since learned medicine was a tiny world, the preserve of a handful of university-educated doctors and those wealthy enough to be able to afford their services, this is perhaps not very important. Moreover, for all medieval and early modern medicine’s self-importance, it was very often useless and frequently worse, which did not increase its moral authority. Even the staunchest atheist might have been wiser to trust in God’s mercy than to submit to a medieval physician.

Nevertheless, medical secularism could be corrosive, for even in the Middle Ages medicine always held the potential for innovation and scepticism. Patients had an irritating tendency to be more interested in whether a treatment worked than in whether it had good scholarly credentials. When the medical establishment despised experimenters as ‘empirics’ and froze them out of the academy, this merely spurred them on. It is no coincidence that the most notorious Christian dissident of the sixteenth century, Miguel Servetus, who denied the doctrines of the Trinity and of original sin, was also a physician who pioneered theories of the circulation of blood. In the following century, Sir Thomas Browne peered over the edge of unbelief with a coolly critical eye, and used his professional skills to ask searching questions of his religion. The method for determining virginity provided in the book of Deuteronomy, ‘I find … is very fallible’. He suggested that the supposed miracle by which Moses defended the Israelites from snakebite was ‘but an Egyptian trick’; that the fire Elijah had called down from Heaven could be explained chemically; that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was due to ‘Asphaltic and Bituminous’ materials in the water rather than to the people’s sin. This kind of thinking was by no means a slippery slope to atheism – Browne’s case proves that, as we will see – but nor was it a path to simple faith.[34]

In the late 1650s, a Parisian priest named Paul Beurrier visited an aged physician in his parish, whose name he gave only as Basin. This man had travelled widely in Europe, in Turkey and in the East Indies, and had studied with Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Indian Brahmins. In the end, he concluded that ‘all religions were only dreams, and political institutions used by rulers to use the deception of religion and the fear of Divinity to procure their subjects’ submission’. He returned to Paris, ‘determined to live and to die in philosophy’. Beurrier, the kind of priest who enjoys a challenge, visited Basin several times, and Basin eventually laid out for him what he called ‘my philosopher’s religion’. He accepted the existence of a distant, impersonal God who ‘did not involve himself in our affairs, as being beneath him’, but he insisted: ‘First, that the Christian religion is the greatest of all fables; second, that the Bible is the oldest of all fictions; third, that the greatest of all deceivers and impostors is Jesus Christ.’

Basin’s profession was no incidental part of his identity. 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 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.