Backroom Video Thread

[Montmorency]

This anxiety, shallow-rooted, always springing up afresh... There's no reason to suspect these medieval doubters were the start of anything; a few weeds weren't about to uproot the tree of faith. But when fresh doubts did begin to sprout they didn't do so in virgin soil in which no seed of unbelief had ever been sown.



Thus goes a very erudite lecture on the documentary evidence for atheism, or "unbelief" beyond heresy*, in Medieval Europe prior to the emergence of an intellectual/philosophical framework and tradition, before "faith felt simple and doubt felt sophisticated."

It's this kind of scholarship that reinforces the appalling foolishness of the contention that every Medieval European had no cognitive escape from hegemonic Christianity, and moreover that even the nobility - prior to Charles I of England - were utterly convinced that their kings and emperors possessed a divine right of rule.

(Tangent: On Machiavelli's cynical rule for rulers to promote religion for the purpose of social control: "A ruling elite which secretly disdains the ideology that it formerly proclaims tends not to endure very long not least because it usually trains its own wives children and servants in that ideology, so in the end the cynical generation are replaced by true believers or they collapse into internecine quarrels first." -- This postulate should be familiar to all here by now. )

The downside, of course, is that the kind of "independent"-mindedness that may have let people off the same page as their society's legitimating authorities may be the very same that encourages cultishness and great-conspiracism today. Since almost all belief that is not strictly scientific (and much scientific belief at that), broadly speaking, is either intuitive or social.

Great hair too.

*Particularly anti-providentialism, mortalism, anti-clericalism, and the blasphemous instinct