Reviewed by: An Emotional History of Doubt by Alec Ryrie Peter Heinegg (bio) An Emotional History of Doubt. By Alec Ryrie. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 2019. 262 pp. $27.95. The standard genesis of modern western atheism, recently highlighted by the emergence of the likes of (who else?) Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, et al., sees it as the product, first of the Renaissance and its celebration of pre-Christian antiquity, most notably the influence of the work of Epicurus and Lucretius. More to the point, historians generally stress the rise of science and the Enlightenment as a whole, with the usual suspects such as Spinoza, Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, and the Utilitarians, culminating inevitably in Nietzsche. But Ryrie, Professor of the History of Science at Durham University (and a self-confessed "believer with a soft spot for atheism), tries a different approach. He takes as his epigraph Julian Barnes's remark in The Sense of an Ending (2011), "Most of us, I suspect… make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reason to justify it. And call the result common sense." In other words, the progression to both belief and unbelief is not a rational venture, an orderly kind of religious—or anti-religious—sorites, but an instinctual, emotional development, for which we later build one of Barnes's sincere, but after the fact rational explanations. More specifically, Ryrie traces the rise of atheism in northern Europe to the Reformers' attack on Catholic orthodoxy and practice. Nowhere was fusillade of criticism and creative innovation more intense (and, at times, more bizarre) than in England; so Ryrie concentrates on English theologians and churchmen in the late sixteenth century and the turbulent period of 1640 to 1660 (with its sometimes antic cast of Levelers, Ranters, Quakers, Fifth Monarchists, Muggletonians, etc.). And could this have been a major line of thought leading to the death of God? Contrary to the contemptuous, mocking stance and tone of today's atheists, he looks for the roots of atheism not in cold-eyed militant secularism or aggressive rationalism, but in "two interwoven emotional stories, of anger and anxiety." His case, more sketched out than minutely developed a mere 200 pages here seems to make prima facie case that the proverbial oceans of ink spilled in recent centuries by writers vehemently trying but failing to settle once and for all the question of God's existence show us that this is not primarily an intellectual enterprise? Tastes are deeply felt sensations; and the old saw still holds, De gustibus non est disputandum. And the New Atheists haven't even managed to impress many academic philosophers, who hold their popularizing brethren in mild, or not so mild, disdain. [End Page 427] Perhaps they just don't want their atheism that shaggy. The Protestant Reformation unleashed a tsunami of anger, in language often both furious and foul, against the corrupt beliefs and practices of Rome—and before too long those of competing denominations as well. From there it was a logical leap to attack the very Deity presiding over the whole scheme, though writers couldn't say that out loud for many year. Anxiety, says Ryrie, originally derived from "the unsettling, reluctant inability to keep a firm grip" on doctrines consciously believed to be true. Descartes (unmentioned by Ryrie) used his methodical doubt like a sort of well-trained retriever, who could track down and capture difficult issues, without ever getting violent about it. (There was no way his supposedly unsparing methodical doubt was going to destroy the Holy of Holies.) But the hounds of later religious philosophers were a fiercer breed of hunter. What Christian writers in the Renaissance meant by "atheism" was not so much unbelief, but acting immorally, as if there was no God (and no afterlife to fear for one's transgressions). John Bunyan's Atheist sadly recounts how he searched for the supernatural world, and having to his great sadness not found it, he set off to find however much previously avoided sin he could commit. Ryrie's topic, then, is not about embracing or rejecting a doctrinal belief, but observing religious practices, adhering...
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Dec 10, 2020
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