Unbelievers. Alec Ryrie
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that history gives this book an hourglass shape. We begin in the broad acres of Europe’s medieval ‘age of faith’, before closing in on the so-called ‘early modern’ period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, in particular, on the Protestant world during the Reformation. We then concentrate even more tightly on what I see as the subject’s crux: the early and mid-seventeenth century in Protestant north-western Europe. Only in the final chapter do we broaden out again, to see, after that crisis, how unbelief broke cover and emerged into the open in philosophical dress. Beneath that dress, I argue, its emotional shape has remained remarkably consistent down to the present.
The book tells two interwoven emotional stories of unbelief: stories of anger and of anxiety. Anger is the more obvious of the two: grudges nurtured against an all-embracing Christian society, against the Church in particular and often also against the God who oversaw it all. The unbelief of anxiety was a quite different experience: the unsettling, reluctant inability to keep a firm grip on doctrines that people were convinced, with their conscious minds, were true. On their own, neither of these perennial emotions threatened Christendom. If anything, they were part of the moral equilibrium and self-renewal of a thriving Christian society. What made them dangerous was the Protestant Reformation, which deliberately turned angry unbelief into a weapon of mass theological destruction, and in the process stirred up anxious unbelief like never before. The result was a strange convergence of the two emotional streams. Anger became increasingly righteous in tone: ‘atheists’ were universally assumed to be monsters of depravity, but angry unbelief turned into a moral revolt and began to find its own, distinct ethics. Meanwhile, as anxious unbelievers found that everything they tried to grapple with turned to mist and shadows, some of them despaired of finding doctrinal certainties and fastened their grip onto ethical certainties instead. So the angry and the anxious found themselves allying against traditional Christianity, opposing it not principally on intellectual grounds but on moral ones.
The emotional history of Western atheism, then, is not a story of an external assault on Christianity. It is a story of Christians and post-Christians attacking from within, and doing so from the moral high ground. When some of them reached the point of wanting to abandon or abolish God, it was not because of their intellectual rationalisations, but because their ethics and even their theology demanded it. As the sociologist Peter Berger has observed, ‘historically speaking, Christianity has been its own gravedigger’.[14] This is not chiefly because it generates intellectual critiques of itself. Rather, it generates moral critiques of itself: an operation so successful that, in parts of the Western world, the patient now seems in real danger of death. Whether the story will end that way, or whether Christianity will find that what does not kill it makes it stronger, remains to be seen. My point is simply that the history of unbelief follows a dynamic established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This dynamic is not separate from the history of belief. It is part of it.
Or so this book will argue. For now, listen to that battle-hardened pastor John Bunyan, who filled his book not with straw men and caricatures, but with acute warnings of the real temptations that awaited his readers. His ‘Atheist’, with his mocking insults, seems at first to represent angry unbelief at its crudest, but there is more to him than that. He goes on to tell the travellers that, twenty years ago, he himself heard tell of the city of God and set out on a pilgrimage to find it. Only bitter experience convinced him the search was fruitless. His tragedy is not his unbelief, but his faith. ‘Had I not, when at home, believed, I had not come thus far to seek.’ If there was a Heaven, he warns the younger travellers, he would have found it. ‘I have gone to seek it further than you.’ So now he is headed wearily home, ‘and will seek to refresh myself with the things that I then cast away, for hopes of that, which I now see, is not’.[15] His unbelief is a direct result of the anxious searching that once defined his faith. It has left him with a moral imperative: to save believers from themselves.
So far I have been tossing around words like ‘atheist’ and ‘unbeliever’ as if their meanings are obvious and equivalent, which they are not. Before we go any further it is as well to be clear what we are talking about.
Nowadays ‘atheism’ simply means the claim that there is no God. The word has included this ‘hard’ or philosophical sense from its beginnings, but only as part of a much wider range of meaning, which we might do well to recover. The Greek word ἄθεος (atheos) means, literally, without God or gods. It was a term of abuse, applied in ancient times to people like Socrates, condemned for his supposed rejection or neglect of socially established religious norms. Early Christians, who would not acknowledge the Graeco-Roman gods, were sometimes also called ἄθεοι, a charge they indignantly denied. But the word atheos was scarcely ever used in Latin in ancient times. When the Greek word was translated into Latin, impius, ‘impious’, was usually felt to be the nearest synonym. The word ἄθεοι occurs only once in the Bible, where it was translated into Latin as sine Deo, ‘without God’. Only with the rediscovery of Greek in the Christian West during the Renaissance did the word come into widespread use – transliterated into Latin as atheos in the early sixteenth century, and then very quickly spreading into European vernaculars: Italian ateo, German Atheist, French athée.[16] It arrived late in English, via French, in 1553.[17] Its range of meaning was still much wider than ‘hard’ atheism. In the 1540s the English scholar John Cheke wrote a Latin treatise in which he lambasted
those who … live as if God were altogether without care of them; and who neither consider with themselves, nor care whether there be a God or no, or whether he has any Administration or Foresight of human Affairs … The Scriptures mark them out under several Titles, but it is most agreeable to our present purpose to call them ἄθεοι.[18]
We might question whether such people are atheists or if the nineteenth-century term ‘agnostic’ would fit better, but the point is that Cheke was not talking about metaphysics at all. His targets were, as we might say, the godless, regardless of what beliefs they formally professed. This was the standard usage until the eighteenth century and even beyond. As well as ‘contemplative’ or ‘speculative’ atheists – philosophical deniers of God – there were ‘practical’ atheists, who claim to believe but live as though they do not. As the seventeenth-century essayist Thomas Fuller put it, the ‘practical’ atheist is not someone who ‘thinks there is no God’, but someone who ‘thinks not there is a God’.[19]
All this made atheist a usefully elastic term of abuse. It was like the word fascist in modern, everyday use: a word with a broad but not limitless range of meanings, whose use typically marks the moment when an argument descends into name-calling.[20] Sometimes atheist was plainly stretched too far – preachers who claimed that all sinners were atheists, or that disputing one specific Christian doctrine was tantamount to atheism, were playing polemical games rather than advancing serious definitions.[21] Even so, this broad sense of the word is more useful than the narrow modern one, for it takes us away from the abstractions of metaphysical definitions into the everyday reality of how religious cultures thrive, decay or dissolve.
My subject in this book, then, extends beyond ‘contemplative’ atheism into the penumbras of doubt and unbelief. As a point of metaphysics, whether or not you believe there is a deity is interesting. But in itself it has no more consequences than whether or not you believe there are other universes parallel to our own. As John Gray puts it, someone with ‘no use for the idea of God … [is] in truth an atheist’, whatever such a person claims to believe or disbelieve.[22] ‘Practical atheist’ remains a sensible term for those whose formal belief in God has no tangible effect on their lives – who observe no religious practices, adhere to no specifically religious ethics, and participate in no avowedly religious community. Our subject is not only those who abandon religious beliefs and change their lives as a result, but also those who abandon religious living and whose residual religious beliefs consequently wither.
In other words, I make no apology for using words – ‘atheist’, ‘sceptic’, ‘unbeliever’ – which describe what people are not. Our subject is a disappearance: the evaporation of a once very widespread religious culture. Those curmudgeonly terms are inadequate to describe what, if anything, has taken its place, but that will have to wait until we have a clearer