The Yale Review

1 6 2 Y G O D A N D T H E G A U N T L E T W I L L I A M G I R A L D I Oddly enough, the architects of the Inquisition were not concerned with atheists. In Spain the Inquisitors remained mostly indi √erent to nonbelievers, Muslims, and Jews; instead, they focused their murderous energies on heretics, blasphemous Christians, and those Jews who had converted and who were now having a hard time disposing of their Hebraic rituals. In France, the Inquisitors sought to smite the Cathars – a Christian sect whose belief system included elements of Gnosticism and Manichaeism – in a move more political than religious; by challenging the edicts of Rome and the sovereignty of the pope, the Cathars were pre-Lutheran reformers. Pope Innocent III, as lunatic as Caligula, slaughtered some two million people in his holocaust to rid the world of Catharian ideas. Medieval witch hunters, too, from Britain to Germany to Italy would have gladly dined with an atheist: they were misogynistic, celibate monks on a mission to stamp out female sexuality and shrugged o√ rumors of nonbelievers. These misfits of civilization were sex- and Satan-obsessed in a way that made Calvin proud. The Inquisition did not fixate on atheists because atheism as we now understand it is a nineteenth-century body of thought – 1 6 3 R roughly contemporaneous with the 1859 publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species – made possible by the rationality unleashed in the Enlightenment. The likes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx heartened many an atheistic thinker and artist in the twentieth century: Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, among significant others. Only evangelicals believe that Darwin singlehandedly bolstered global godlessness, a large part of the reason they are so hell-bent on banishing evolution in schools. Darwin was not an atheist, a fact they would soon discover if they took a breather from denigrating him and instead read his pages. Nietzsche, of course, was an atheist, but he did not intend his declaration of God’s death in The Gay Science (1882) to be an original rallying cry for nonbelievers (something that does not exist cannot very well die). Dispensers of incendiary quotes omit the second half of the ‘‘God is dead’’ line as it appears in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–85): ‘‘of his pity for man hath God died.’’ Nietzsche has more to say about the emotions underlying a culture that needs to believe than about the anti-theology of a people who never did. Before Darwin’s blueprint and Nietzsche’s pronouncements, David Hume in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) had already begun to displace God as omnipotent Prime Mover. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776– 88) revealed the true, nefarious personalities of the priests and popes who ruled the Church (he made it di≈cult for a congregant to hand over his obligatory weekly donation). And Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841) was the first modern and complete materialist explanation of religion. Feuerbach asserted that God is a ‘‘projection’’ of the acute anxieties of the human psyche, that belief is an e√ort in feeling, an emotional experience worlds away from rationality. His idea that ‘‘theology is esoteric anthropology ’’ – homo homini deus est (man is a god to man) – would influence Marx and Friedrich Engels, who came to see in the modern world the socioeconomic and cultural forces that allow religion to flourish. But Hindus had realized in the ninth century b.c. that their deities were symbols of psychological powers, and Xenophanes, in rebellion against Homeric supernaturalism, anticipated Feuerbach by understanding that gods are the fabrications 1 6 4 G I R A L D I Y of those people who believe in them: ‘‘If cattle or horses or lions had hands, then horses would portray their gods as horses, and cattle as cattle.’’ Alister McGrath, in The Twilight of Atheism (2004), marks the beginning of modern disbelief with the routing of the Bastille in 1789: an ideal and perhaps inevitable culmination of...