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The Reformation and the Battle for Credulity
‘“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”’
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
‘The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.’
Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
There is a well-established view that the credit, or blame, for modern unbelief lies with the Protestant Reformation, a view most recently laid out in Brad Gregory’s 2012 book The Unintended Reformation. The argument goes something like this. Martin Luther’s defiance of the pope from 1517 onwards ended up shattering Western Christendom into rival parties, each of which regarded the others’ errors as intolerable. As they dug their trenches and pounded each other with polemical and then with literal artillery, they tore up the religious landscape that they were fighting over until it could no longer be recognised. With all sides condemning each other’s false beliefs, it was hard to prevent civilians caught in the crossfire from reaching the conclusion none of the combatants wanted: what if they are all wrong? As battles subsided into exhausted ceasefires, armed truces and frozen conflicts, ordinary people and their governments began systematically to evade those conflicts and the terrible destruction they could cause by confining ‘religion’ to a private sphere and creating a new ‘secular’ public space. People who could not agree about religion could at least work around it, and discovered that they did not particularly miss it. And so religion was confined to quarters, like a once-formidable relative sent to a nursing home: spoken of with respect, paid a ritual visit occasionally, its debts honoured, but not allowed out in public where it might cause distress or embarrassment. In truth – though it would be crass to say so out loud – it was simply kept ticking over until it died a natural death.[1]
It is a powerful story with a lot of truth in it. But the world it explains is not quite the world we have. It does not explain why European Christianity endured for so many centuries after the Reformation; nor why, in our own times, a religiously fractured society like the United States is so much less secular than relatively homogeneous ones like Norway or France. Above all, it mistakes the part that unbelief played in the Reformation itself. Unbelievers did not merely play supporting roles, as battlefield medics or architects of postwar reconstruction. Unbelief was a part of the action from the beginning, and its role in the conflict was decisive. It was not a by-product of the Reformation conflicts. It was a weapon in them.
Calvin and the Epicures
In 1542 John Calvin, the French Protestant leader in exile in Geneva, received an unwelcome letter from a friend in Paris. The French capital, Antoine Fumée warned Calvin, was being overrun by ‘Epicureans’, whose doctrines were spreading like a cancer. Fumée’s description of these wild-living unbelievers is suspiciously vague. There are no names, dates or places. It is not clear how much of this is eyewitness testimony and how much rumour. He did claim to have spoken to some such people, describing their ‘charming words’ and how they ‘sedulously avoid trouble’. Their typical opening gambit was to ‘annul faith in the New Testament’, suggesting that Plato’s works were wiser and more learned than the Gospels, even though no one considered him to be God. As conversation progressed, their attacks on the Bible would become progressively more barbed. A particular butt for their ‘impudence’, apparently, was the Song of Songs: the Old Testament book of love poetry which Jews and Christians have always taken as an allegory of God’s love for humanity, but which for these scoffers was shamelessly indecent, a mockery of the notion of Holy Scripture. The fact that their own lives were far more debauched did not trouble them.[2]
Perhaps this was just another rumour of sophisticated Renaissance atheists. Some of these Epicureans’ supposed talking points were lifted almost verbatim from Machiavelli.[3] But the reason this was unnerving to Calvin was that they also seemed to be familiar with Protestant doctrine. As Europe’s religious divisions widened, people were starting to fall through the cracks.
Calvin did not respond immediately, but a few years later he was confronted with a case he could not ignore. On 27 June 1547, an anonymous death threat was left in the pulpit of Calvin’s church in Geneva. In a city seething with religio-political tensions, this was a serious matter. An informant traced the threat to one Jacques Gruet, an impoverished former cathedral canon and serial troublemaker from a once-grand Genevan family. Gruet’s house was searched. Among his papers was a tract in his own hand in which, as Calvin summarised it, ‘the whole of Scripture is laughed at, Christ aspersed, the immortality of the soul called a dream and a fable, and finally the whole matter of religion torn in pieces’.
Gruet denied holding any of these views, but eventually, under torture, he confessed to having left the note threatening Calvin – and also to having corresponded with Étienne Dolet, who had been executed for mortalism in Paris the previous year. Gruet was executed for sedition, blasphemy and atheism on 26 July. Any disquiet about this summary process was silenced two years later, when a much longer book in Gruet’s hand was discovered hidden in the rafters of his old house, ‘full of … detestable blasphemies against the power, honor and essence of God’. On Calvin’s advice, the book was solemnly and publicly burned.[4]
Much of the content of Gruet’s documents – so far as we can reconstruct them – was simply the medieval unbelief of anger brought to boiling point. ‘God is nothing … Men are like beasts.’ The soul, or any afterlife, are ‘things invented by the fancy of men’: ‘I believe that when man is dead there is no hope of life.’ Jesus Christ was not God’s son, but ‘a fool who wanted to claim glory for himself’, and who deserved his fate. Gruet ridiculed divine providence: ‘it is absurd: do not you see that all prosper, Turks as much as Christians? … Everything that has been written about the power of God is falsehood, fantasy and dream’. All religion was a human fabrication.
But there is a new note to the rage that seethes through these texts. Much of it settled on Calvin himself, one of whose books Gruet had filled with furious annotations. An (undelivered) letter to Calvin praised him with vitriolic irony as ‘greater than God’, and urged him to ‘reject the doctrine of Christ and say … that you have found by the Scriptures that it is not he who was the Messiah, but yourself. Then you will have an immortal name, as you desire.’
Gruet was not the only person to be alienated by Calvin’s fierce self-belief, but his grudge against the reformer gave his religious criticism a new focus. Like Fumée’s Epicureans, Gruet’s most consistent target was the Protestants’ most prized asset: the Bible. He ridiculed the Creation story: how could anyone know, ‘since there was nobody there at the time?’ The authors of the New Testament were ‘marauders, scoundrels, apostates’. The Bible as a whole contained ‘nothing but lies’ and taught ‘false and mad doctrine … All the Scripture is false and wicked and … there is less sense than in Aesop’s fables’.[5]
In 1550, the year after Gruet’s book was discovered, Calvin at last did as Fumée had asked eight years before, and wrote a book, Concerning Scandals, denouncing the rising tide of godlessness. He had a simple explanation of when and why this surge had started. It was all because of the Protestant Reformation: ‘Whereas thirty years ago religion was flourishing everywhere, and we were all in agreement about the common and customary worship of God, without any controversy, now ungodliness and contempt for God are breaking out on all sides.’