Note 60 — Chapter X · FREETHOUGHT IN THE RENAISSANCE

One of the great literary figures of the later Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), is the standing proof of the divorce of the higher intelligence of Italy from the faith as well as the cause of the Church before the Reformation. With this divorce he expressly charges the Church itself, giving as the first proof of its malfeasance that the peoples nearest Rome were the least religious.60 To him the Church was the supreme evil in Italian politics,61 the “stone in the wound.” In a famous passage he gives his opinion that “our religion, having shown us the truth and the true way, makes us esteem less political honour (l’onore del mondo)”; and that whereas the pagan religion canonized only men crowned with public honour, as generals and statesmen, “our religion has glorified rather the humble and contemplative men than the active,” placing the highest good in humility and abjection, teaching rather to suffer than to do, and so making the world debile and ready to be a prey to scoundrels.62 The passage which follows, putting the blame on men for thus misreading their religion, is a fair sample of the grave mockery with which the men of that age veiled their unfaith.63 Machiavelli was reputed in his own world an atheist;64 and he certainly was no religionist. He indeed never avows atheism, but neither did any other writer of the epoch;65 and the whole tenour of his writings is that of a man who had at least put aside the belief in a prayer-answering deity;66 though, with the intellectual arbitrariness which still affected all the thought of his age, he avows a belief that all great political changes are heralded by prodigies, celestial signs, prophecies, or revelations67—here conforming to the ordinary superstition of his troublous time.