Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt
Alec Ryrie
Top 10 Best Quotes
“It was sharpest of all for Protestants who did not belong to tightly organised and disciplined churches, in which there was either formal confession of sins (as in many Lutheran churches) or systematic oversight of the moral status of church members (as in many Calvinist churches). Those systems did not solve the problem of belief logically, but they did solve it emotionally, since anxious Christians could outsource their concern about themselves to the ministers who policed them. It was a kind of fideism: you cannot be certain of your own beliefs, but you can place your trust in your community instead.”
“What makes Marlowe’s defiance and even D’Amville’s anticlerical contempt compelling is their moral edge. And in their very different ways, Acosta, Coornhert, Eleazar Duncan, Tourneur’s Sebastian and Shakespeare’s secularised ethical vision suggest that it was not only possible, but even natural for the unbelief of anger to be fired by its own moral code. The Church wanted angry unbelievers to stick to their role as villains. Instead, they were beginning to bid for the moral high ground.”
“The plainest case is that of Ludovic Muggleton, best known for eventually founding the eccentric ‘Muggletonian’ sect. In the religious turbulence of 1640s London, he moved fretfully from church to church, increasingly convinced that ‘I must needs go to Hell’. And so, as the only escape, he longed ‘to have said in my Heart, sure there is no God’. He could not quite persuade himself it was true, but he did the next best thing. Since he was convinced he was damned, he withdrew from any kind of religious practice, and tried simply to live virtuously on his own terms. It would not save his soul, but it would spare him the misery of continuously contemplating his future torment. ‘I found more Peace here than in all my Religion.’ In particular, a hope crept up on him: even if there is a God, perhaps there is no immortal soul? ‘I was in good Hope at that time, that there was nothing after Death.’ He developed arguments to persuade himself of this, and for three years ‘had a great deal of peace of mind in this condition’. ‘I dreaded the Thoughts of Eternity … I thought, if I could but lie still in the earth for ever, it would be as well with me, as it would be if I were in eternal happiness … I cared not for Heaven so I might not go to Hell.”
“The pioneering surveyor Richard Norwood was aged about seven when he fell ‘several times’ to ‘reasoning … about whether there were a God’. Like many adults, Norwood’s doubts began with questioning his own salvation. Offhand adult assurances that God loved him felt flimsy. He began to read the Bible in earnest, but when he eagerly shared his scriptural discoveries with his parents, they made me little answer … but seemed rather to smile at my childishness. Upon which and the like occasions I often doubted whether things were really so as I conceived them or whether elder people did not know them to be otherwise, only they were willing that we children should be so persuaded of them, that we might follow our books the better and be kept in from play. And thus did atheism show.”
“One of Gunter’s fears was that the Bible was a ‘policy’, a deliberately manipulative hoax. This venerable theme, revived by Machiavelli, now seemed more compelling than ever. During the Reformation age, Christendom had been splintered into national churches closely controlled by secular governments – none more so than the Church of England. Apparently God’s eternal truth changed when you crossed a border, or on the whims of kings and queens. Bishop Earle’s ‘sceptic’ was ‘troubled at this naturalness of Religion to Countries, that Protestantism should be born so in England, and Popery abroad’. What if we only believe what we believe out of chauvinism and habit? A popular advice-book warned young Englishmen travelling to the Continent against sampling foreign churches, fearing not so much that they would convert as that they would conclude that all churches had good points and bad points, ‘and so, displeased on all sides, you dash upon the rock of Atheism’ – a fate to which those who had ‘seen many countries’ were proverbially prone. Even if you did not give ‘perfect credit’ to another religion, merely to ‘admit of a suspicion that things may be’ as others say was to set the woodworm to work.”
“In the 1640s, a formerly pious London teenager named Sarah Wight suffered four years of spiritual agonies. As she recalled: ‘I could see nothing but Hell, and wrath: I was as desperate, as ever was any … I felt myself, soul and body, in fire and brimstone already.’ From that agonised conviction, it was only a short step to wonder if ‘there was no other Hell, but that which I felt’. At least that held out the hope that death would end her sufferings. On that basis she attempted suicide several times, thinking that ‘if I made away [with] myself, there was an end of my misery, and that there was no God, no Heaven; and no Hell’. But the very fact she had such thoughts convinced her that she ‘was damned already, being an unbeliever’.”
“I. G.’s sufferings were positively transient compared to Hannah Allen’s. As a teenager in the 1650s, Allen went through a period of despair in which she was convinced she was damned. She found a more even keel when she married, but when her husband died in 1664, her spiritual agonies returned worse than ever. She considered suicide, repeatedly harmed herself, and once crawled into a roof void in order to starve to death (her resolve broke after three days). In the end the fog gradually lifted, which she ascribed to God’s mercy, her family’s love and the passage of time. What matters for us is that during her struggles, her family repeatedly tried to persuade her of God’s mercy, but she would have none of it. Once she heard a thunderclap, and told her aunt it was a message from God that she was damned. Surely not, said the aunt: God would not send a miracle to convince someone of their damnation. ‘We do not read of such a thing in all the Scripture.’ But Allen would not be reasoned with. ‘My Answer was, “Therefore my condition is unparalleled; there was never such a one [as me] since God made any Creature, either Angels or Men, nor never will be to the end of the world.”’ She begged friends not to pray for her, since ‘it would but sink me the deeper into Hell’. At first she worried that she had committed the ‘unpardonable sin’ mentioned in the Gospels, but soon she concluded that that sin was for amateurs and she had committed even worse: My Sins are so great, that if all the Sins of all the Devils and Damned in Hell, and all the Reprobates on Earth were comprehended in one man, mine are greater. There is no word comes so near the comprehension of the dreadfulness of my Condition; as that, I am the Monster of the Creation.”
“Doubts crept up on them unawares, seeping to the surface or erupting without warning. At the least, the language of temptation tells us that although this phenomenon was widespread, it was no sort of movement or party. If these doubters learned their doubts from other people, they were not conscious of it. I have found no accounts of being tempted into unbelief by others. The recurrent fear that no one else had ever had such terrible thoughts no doubt reflects the experience of feeling God’s absence, but it does also suggest that these doubters reached their doubts without outside assistance.”
“Christians had always known that they only accounted for a fraction of humanity, but the age of exploration confronted them with the vastness of the non-Christian world as never before. A famous summary in the 1620s guessed that no more than a fifth of humanity were Christian, and that many so-called Christians were so beset with ‘superstitions’ as scarcely to deserve the name. ‘That horrible consideration of diversity of Religions’ inevitably fostered ‘Atheistical spirits’. As Montaigne asked about the cannibals: what reason, laziness aside, do we have to believe that we are right and they are wrong?”
“All these people described their doubts in the same way: as having been thrust unwillingly into their minds by the devil. We might be inclined to dismiss that. In fact it is vital for understanding what this kind of unbelief was and why it matters. First of all, it shows that these narratives are a literary genre, akin to the modern genre of narratives of recovery from mental illness. Like that genre, they suffer from survivorship bias. Early modern Protestants who lost their struggles with atheism did not tell their stories, any more than did those who killed themselves.”
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Book Keywords:
confession, atheism, superstition, machiavelli, mortality, protestantism, reformation, devil, eternity, heaven, unbelief, faith, christianity, mortalism, death, self-harm, doubt, soul, montaigne, hell, sin
