Machiavelli and the Politics of Grace

Abstract

The simplicity of Machiavelli's complexity is established in unprincipled expediency. This is bluntly expounded in Il principe concerning antithetical qualities that traditionally evoke praise or blame. These are generosity and miserliness, benefaction and avarice, cruelty and compassion, faithlessness and faithfulness, effeminacy and cowardice versus ferocity and courage, courtesy and pride, lasciviousness and purity, guilelessness and craftiness, stubbornness and flexibility, gravity and frivolity, religiosity and skepticism. 1 The lack of parallelism, the rhetorical disorder that presents now a virtue, now a vice, first in each antithesis signals his intention of upsetting their usual evaluation. Machiavelli scrambles their status perversely to counsel an evaluation that is valueless. An option about piety concludes the list emphatically: religiosity and skepticism. This is a false antithesis. In only a decade the humanist Erasmus will both religiously and skeptically deliberate divine grace and human choice. Indeed, he will propose that in disputed questions skepticism is piety. The conflicting methods of treating that question, whether deliberatively or assertively, will have violent, divisive, irreversible political effects. 2 Although Machiavelli does not venture to explain his false antithesis, he [End Page S224] designates it the most important. His meaning is inferable from his exposition of other pairs. 3