Nika’s Reviews > Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt > Status Update

If the common coin of our shared morals comes into increasing question, with contested histories and myths being reduced to scraps of paper, we will have little to underpin our collective ethics except intuition – unless another shared experience, with luck one less terrible than the Second World War, provides renewed values against which our currency can be rebased.

It now seemed plain that cruelty, discrimination and murder were evil in a way that fornication, blasphemy and impiety were not.

The Renaissance had sown the notion that God’s law in our hearts could transcend Christianity: now it was flowering. The utopian visionary Gerrard Winstanley, a Seeker fellow-traveller, did recommend prayer – but added that to truly pray was ‘to pay the king of righteousness his due’, that is, to conduct yourself honestly, to ‘till the ground according to Reason’, and to recognise and root out evil within yourself.

In bold and restless pursuit of a greater purity, they were eager to leave behind the crass carnalities of a childish faith, just as the first Protestants had abandoned gross superstitions such as transubstantiation. This was not unbelief: it was belief raised to a new height.

The anxiety and intensity of Protestant piety made doubt a serious part of the religious ecosystem. The despair with which a great many Protestants sometimes wrestled could easily shade into doubt of various kinds, whether because God’s mercy seemed too good to be true, or because his justice seemed too terrible to contemplate.

As historians are now recognising, the early modern age endured a crisis of belief as well as of unbelief. Christians of all kinds were being asked, and were asking themselves, whether their ‘beliefs’ were wavering opinions, lazy assumptions, heartfelt convictions or true faith founded on rock.

If we search for certainty on any subject, he [Montaigne] warned, we will at length discover that ‘it is impossible to find two opinions which are exactly alike, not only in different men but in the same men at different times’. No truth is ever definitively established. For example, he chose a lively current dispute: does the sun circle the earth, or vice versa?

Blasphemy was by far the most common offence brought before the Inquisition: typically words uttered during a quarrel, in a tavern or at a gaming table. Crying out ‘I deny God and the bastard of his lineage’, as one Juan de la Calle did during a bad losing streak, might get you into trouble, but it was not a serious atheist’s manifesto.

So the angry and the anxious found themselves allying against traditional Christianity, opposing it not principally on intellectual grounds but on moral ones.