Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

Abstract

In Ryrie's world, people do not believe because they are persuaded by arguments and reasons. They choose beliefs on an “emotional”—that is, arational—level and then adopt available arguments to supply their reasons. Intellectual historians seeking to solve the mystery of the death of God in our culture—as Ryrie's Nietzsche had understood the modern age—were operating from false epistemological and psychological premises. Metaphysicians, natural philosophers, heterodox theologians, freethinkers, and savants indeed provided the cognitive building blocks of religious unbelief, but saying that does not explain why anyone appropriated those arguments. The history of unbelief in early modern Europe was not a history of ideas, but a history of emotions. Early modern religious life led to anger at ecclesiastical corruption and anxiety over salvation, which led to a lived doubt. Unbelief in practice preceded unbelief in theory.Ryrie's anxious and angry actors, however, beset by various and widely divergent sets of doubts, do not construct atheistic worldviews to give plausibility to any emerging disbeliefs, and he has no way of linking a Calvinist's anxiety about salvation or a Jansenist's revulsion at the ecclesiastical hierarchy to any abandonment of a theistic worldview. The “doubts” that, for Ryrie, will lead us to unbelief pertain not to whether we live in a universe that cares for us, designed by a benevolent intelligence for our well-being, but to baptism, clericalism, transubstantiation, hell, and the immortality of the soul. When Ryrie writes of anger at God, he almost always means, as he himself acknowledges, anger at those who have claimed to be God's agents.There are few intellectual historians who would conclude from human behavior that civilizations (let alone our colleagues’ opinions) change because arguments and ideas compel logical and evidentiary assent. Systems of thought, writ large or small, are multivalent, capable of being diversely appropriated in complex and diverse ways—and that diversity (think on appropriations of Locke, Rousseau, Marx, and Freud) invites historians to pose questions about cultural, subcultural, institutional, political, social, intellectual, and biographical contexts. Beliefs and means of persuasion coexist in critical ways. If anticlericalism, anxiety over one's salvation, and despair over the injustice of the world led one to build an “atheistic” worldview, then Nietzsche's “God is dead” should have been proclaimed long before. Religious anger and anxiety were always there. What was new? Printing and the rapid increase in the number of publishers, the exponential growth of primary and secondary education, and the rising tide of laymen among those educated, all created a dramatically more secular reading public. Debates that Christian theologians dealt with intra muros were now extramural. Travel literature, wildly popular, introduced new European readers not only to functioning non-Christian cultures but also to cultures that some missionaries themselves described as atheistic (thereby creating the bestsellers of missionary literature).Ryrie trumpets at the outset a desire to account for a culture without God only to conclude with an “atheism” indistinguishable from an anti-Christian critical deism or various heterodox theisms. Atheism in its fullest sense—a disbelief in God—is not simply a variety of heresy, but a belief that one lives in a world without design, plan, or care for its creatures. Why did some readers and listeners reach that belief and disbelief? To answer that question in terms of both emotions and thought, from the outside looking in, would require a unified field theory of cognition. I'll wait.