Outrageous Richard

Richard Dawkins, the atheists' atheist, is on the offensive. He wants to proselytise to his cause, violently so, at least violent in words. The target is those who totter on the threshold between belief and doubt, who are to be ridiculed and be "swayed by a display of naked contempt" to make sure that they fall on the right side of the Prophet's line.

Oh, to believe or not to believe, that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Richard, or to drop arms against a sea of insults, and by agreeing end them?! Smell the wind, smell the scent of the new absolute as bad as the old absolutes; smell absurdity, intolerance and malice as tools of conversion; smell a new jihad as it sweeps across the land. I offer no comment on belief or disbelief here; I comment solely on the technique of tirade. And now the words of another poet come to mind:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yes, what rough Dawkins, his hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? :-))

Blood and Wind-a Voyage into Medieval Atheism

I read a really interesting article in the BBC History Magazine (January, 2009) while sipping my morning tea! It’s called Doomed or Disinterested?, written by one John H Arnold. It concerns the degree to which some people in the Middle-Ages developed an active scepticism towards the teachings of the church.

Now, I had always known that, throughout its history, their had been dissenters and apostates within the Catholic community, though I had assumed that in the high Middle Ages such people would be more likely to embrace one heresy or another rather than outright disbelief. But many did. We cannot be sure just how many but it was a concern to those who wrote on religious questions at the time.

The question of transubstantiation, the concern that the act of faith was not enough in itself among the laity, was particularly troublesome. William of Pagula wrote that priests should not rest on the theological dogma alone, but provided more practical reasons enabling them to persuade their parishioners. The bread, he says, is not experienced as flesh and blood so that it does not provoke “horror” in those receiving it; so that “pagans” do not ridicule Christians; and because people are “not accustomed to eating bleeding flesh.” Yes, he does!

Some of the ‘miracles’ of the day were, in point of fact, conceived to overcome practical doubts about the Eucharist. In one popular tale a woman receiving the sacrament from Pope Gregory the Great burst out laughing when he declared that it was the body of Christ. When asked why she is said to have replied, “Because I heard you say that the bread I made with my own hands is God’s body.” Immediately the bread changed into the shape of a finger and the woman recovered her faith! Precious, is it not?

I suppose these cases could be taken as an example of proto-Protestantism, a belief that communion is only a symbolic act. But there are also cases of outright and simple atheism or scepticism, right across Europe. Giordano of Pisa said of this, “There are many people today who do not believe that there is another life, or that things could be better than in this one." Another wrote of those ‘unbelievers’ who are unhappy when their loved ones died because they do not believe that they will ever see them again.

My favourite example of this common-sense scepticism is that of Guillemette Benet of Oracle in southern France, who lived in the late fourteenth century. She is reported to have told her neighbours on several occasions that the soul is nothing but blood or wind. She reached this conclusion for two reasons; first when she banged her nose and noted the subsequent bleeding; and second, when she observed the death of a friend’s child, noting only the exhalation of air at the end. From this she deduced there was no heaven and no hell; no afterlife at all.

Blood and Wind. I shall write a book with such a title one day; truly I shall.

Was Hobbes an Atheist?

Well, many of his contemporaries certainly thought so. In October 1666 a committee of the House of Commons was empowered to examine the views expressed in Leviathan as part of the preparations for a bill intended to make hereesy a crime. Some even went so far as to suggest that Hobbes' doctrines were responsible for the Great Fire of London!

His books were either banned or burnt, and the Catholic church placed De Cive on its Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1654. He was regularly attacked in the press of the day, which delighted in detailing the torments he would suffer in the after-life for his apparent lack of belief. It was his rationalism and materialism that tended to disturb people most; even God is reduced to a material level. Archbishop Tenison was to say of him "Yet for the very handsomeness in dressing his Opinions, as the matter stands, he is to be reproved; because by that means, the poyson which he hath intermixed with them is with the more readiness and danger swallowed."

His views were certainly unsettling in an age not noted for latitude in matters of faith and belief: that there was no personal Satan; that the Pentateuch and many other books of the Bible were revisions or compilations from earlier sources; that few miracles could be credited after the Testament period; that witchcraft was a myth; and that religion was often confused with superstition. He was, as one writer has noted, 'anti-ecclesiastical, anti-clerical, anti-enthusiastic, anti-theology, anti-creeds and anti-inspiration.'

So, was he an atheist? All I can really say here is that the evidence suggests not; and in his personal life he adhered to the Anglican Church, which, in any case, was for him a necessary instrument of Leviathan. He believed in God as First Cause, but denied most of the manifestations and attributes accorded to Him by organised religion; even holiness, goodness and blessedness, which in the Hobbesian view are all unknowable facts. His God, such as He is, is distant, cold, intellectual amd essentially unknowable. What did he really believe? That is a question that can only be answered by God…and by Hobbes!