The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx

337 Pages·2015·2.49 MB·English

by  Dominic Erdozain

The Soul of Doubt

THE SOUL

OF DOUBT

The Religious Roots of Unbelief

from Luther to Marx
z

DOMINIC ERDOZAIN

1
1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Erdozain, Dominic.
The soul of doubt : the religious roots of unbelief from Luther to Marx / Dominic Erdozain.
pages cm
ISBN 978–0–19–984461–6 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Conscience—Religious aspects—Christianity—History of doctrines.
2. Faith—History of doctrines. I. Title.
BJ1278.C66E73 2016
234'.23—dc23
2015004453

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To Connie, George, and Emma
So far, all that has given color to existence still lacks a
history. Where could you find a history of love, of avarice,
of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty?
—Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Minds are not conquered by force, but by love and

generosity.
—spiNoza, The Ethics
Contents

Acknowledgments  ix

Abbreviations  xiii

Introduction: Desecularizing Doubt  1

1. The Prophets Armed: Luther and the Making and Breaking
of Conscience  10

2. “To Kill a Man Is Not to Defend a Doctrine. It Is to Kill a Man”:

The Wars of Religion and the Virtues of Doubt  34
3. The Metaphysics of Mercy: Calvin and Spinoza  69

4. In Search of a Father: Voltaire’s Christian Enlightenment  118

5. “A Damnable Doctrine”: Darwin and the Soul

of Victorian Doubt  173
6. The God that Failed: Feuerbach, Marx, and the Politics

of Salvation  221

Conclusion: In Augustine’s Shadow  262

Notes  267

References  299

Index  313

Acknowledgments

hugh trevor-roper oNce said that the best history is written by

amateurs—honest campaigners, richer in enthusiasm than the pro-

tocols of academic discourse. I  hope he is right. This study began

when I was invited to give a lecture at Cambridge University in 2009
on “The making of a secular outlook in modern Britain.” I called my
paper “Christianity without the Mumbo-Jumbo,” based on a phrase of
Clement Attlee’s. Asked whether he was a Christian, shortly before his
death, the ex-Prime Minister and architect of Britain’s welfare state had
replied tersely: “Believe in the ethics of Christianity. Can’t believe in the

mumbo-jumbo.” To the enquiry, “Is there an after-life, do you think?”
Attlee responded: “Possibly.” This struck me as a perfect summary of
what some scholars have termed “diffusive Christianity” and I presented
it as a stoutly British phenomenon—what Nietzsche mockingly termed

“the English consistency”; the faith that outlives faith; the Christian ethic
that somehow judges Christian belief. I knew there were parallels with
Kantian philosophy but my lecture emphasized the organic quality of
British doubt against the intellectual bravura of Continental secularism,
with humorous examples to prove it.

But as I prepared the piece for publication, I started to wonder whether
the contrast with Europe was overstated. Was the French Enlightenment
remotely the “intellectual coup d’état” (in one scholar’s phrase), or the “rise
of modern paganism” (in another formulation), that I had taken it to be?

I began to dig around in Voltaire and Pierre Bayle, one of the guiding lights
of the philosophes, and the results—to my untrained eye—were astonish-
ing. Far from an alternative to my concept of “Christianity without the
mumbo-jumbo,” I felt that I was staring at the shining exhibit. I will never

forget my first encounter with Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary, one of
the bombshells of the early Enlightenment, and the startling discovery