Based on a video lecture.
Niccolò Machiavelli is perhaps one of the most controversial philosophers in history. And at the same time, as someone once accurately put it, he is almost unique among philosophers in needing no introduction: say the name and everyone immediately knows who you mean. A celebrated diplomat, military adviser, one of the founders of political philosophy in the modern sense of the word. He lived from 1469 to 1527.
His older Florentine contemporaries, Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, both had serious trouble with the Catholic Church — especially Pico — and both developed forms of religiosity unconventional for the era: Pico in the spirit of Kabbalah, Ficino in the spirit of Neoplatonism. I mention this for a reason: Machiavelli’s most famous work, The Prince, would also be placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Catholic Church. And it is no accident that Machiavelli developed such an intense interest in pagan religion and ancient philosophy.
He wrote The Prince as a guide for Lorenzo de’ Medici. It is this work that gave Machiavelli his worldwide reputation.
Amoralist or Thinker?
Unfortunately, that reputation is primarily associated in the popular imagination with amorality and political cynicism. Here is one of the illustrative passages:
“A prince must understand that he cannot observe all of those things for which men are considered good, since in order to maintain the state he is often obliged to act against faith, against charity, against humanity, against religion. And therefore it is necessary that he have a mind ready to turn itself according to the way the winds of fortune and the changeability of affairs require — not to deviate from what is good, if possible, but to know how to do evil, if constrained.”
It is largely because of such passages that Machiavelli entered history with the reputation he did.
That said, alongside his genuine statements, Machiavelli also became famous for things he never actually said. The celebrated maxim “the end justifies the means” is a fabrication — he never wrote it. In this he joins the illustrious club of Mark Twain, Faina Ranevskaya, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who as everyone knows once said: “The main problem with people on the internet is that they never check their quotes.”
The Prince was duly placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Frederick the Great, in his Anti-Machiavel, described its author unambiguously as a teacher of evil and an enemy of all mankind. That is quite a citation to earn.
Religion as Instrument
Since religion in all its manifestations is my primary interest — and particularly how past and present intellectuals thought about it — that is exactly what I want to discuss in the case of Machiavelli. What did he think about religion? How does it fit with the famous image of the cynic and political amoralist?
Machiavelli was a man of his time. By the period when he was active, the Reformation was already knocking at the door. Church reform was overdue: the institution was riddled with nepotism and simony, that is, a casual attitude toward ecclesiastical appointments — who received them, how they were obtained, and what qualities were expected of candidates.
Within his political philosophy, Machiavelli regarded religion primarily as a social instrument — a means by which a ruler could manage the masses. In his view, one can do without the idea of God, but one cannot do without religion as a social institution. In chapter six of The Prince, on new principalities acquired by one’s own arms, he writes: “All armed prophets have conquered, and unarmed ones have come to ruin.”
It is worth noting that Machiavelli almost never uses the word God in his texts. Open The Prince and search for the term — you will find it appears very rarely. He had a rather interesting natural philosophy: he explained human nature through the action of humours, which in turn he connected to the movements of celestial bodies. On this basis some scholars — most notably J.G.A. Pocock — argued that his philosophy is fundamentally anti-Christian in character.
Florence at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a haven of freethought, and Machiavelli could pursue his work without drawing directly on Christian doctrine or theology. Scholars such as Maurizio Viroli and Ronald Beiner have argued that Machiavelli’s ideal was the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire — above all as a model of a powerful and effective state. And it is worth noting that in Rome, religion performed a powerful consolidating function: conquered peoples were granted religious freedom, and conflicts on religious grounds were kept to a minimum. For Machiavelli, with his moral relativism and rejection of any single universal morality, this was an obvious ideal.
Free Will and Fortune
At the centre of Machiavelli’s religious worldview are not love or mercy but power and force. This reminds me personally of the philosophical project of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Here is another passage that made a strong impression on me — and that I consider a genuinely literary achievement, something one can read for pure aesthetic pleasure:
“I know that many have held and hold the opinion that the affairs of the world are in such wise governed by fortune and by God that men cannot alter them by any prudence of theirs… Sometimes, thinking about this, I am to some degree converted to their opinion. Nevertheless, that our free will may not be altogether extinguished, I think it may be true that fortune is the ruler of half our actions, but that she allows the other half or thereabouts to be governed by us. I would compare her to an impetuous river that, when turbulent, inundates the plains, casts down trees and buildings, removes earth from one side and places it on the other; everyone flees before it, and everything yields to its fury without being able to oppose it; and yet, though it is of such a kind, it does not follow that men, when the weather becomes calm, are unable to make provisions against it by dykes and banks, so that, rising again, the waters may pass away by canal or their rush may not be so wild or dangerous.”
I should note that this is in translation — in the Italian original the language must be extraordinary.
Some scholars call Machiavelli the “Italian Luther.” But this passage on free will is essentially the opposite of what Luther argued. In On the Bondage of the Will (1525), Luther categorically denied free will in matters of salvation. That is a fundamental difference.
Reformer or Anti-Christian?
Machiavelli’s negative attitude toward the Catholic Church is evident, though scholars disagree on how to interpret it. Some hold that he wanted to reform the Church and called for reform — in this sense genuinely an Italian Luther. Others argue that his teaching is anti-Christian in its overall character.
My own view is that the closest position to the truth is this: Machiavelli remains within Christianity, but understands it in his own distinctive way. He rejects the Church’s role as intermediary in personal salvation, because he is convinced of God’s absolute sovereignty — the human being needs no mediator. In this he is actually close to Protestantism. At the same time, religion remains for him an indispensable element of a successful state.
And finally, perhaps the most famous and ostensibly “amoral” passage, from chapter seventeen of The Prince:
“Every prince ought to desire to be considered clement and not cruel. Nevertheless he ought to take care not to misuse this clemency. Cesare Borgia was considered cruel; notwithstanding, his cruelty reconciled the Romagna, unified it, and restored it to peace and loyalty; if this be rightly considered, he will be seen to have been much more merciful than the Florentine people… Concerning this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved. One should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved. For it may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger, and covetous of gain; as long as you benefit them, they are entirely yours; but when the necessity is remote, they turn against you.”
One can hold different views on Machiavelli and his ideas, which do look rather amoral — at least at first reading. But they resonate with what Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War. Human nature has changed since then: Steven Pinker has shown convincingly that our values today are significantly more humanistic than they were in the sixteenth century. So perhaps Machiavelli’s framework, which was extraordinarily relevant for his era, has partly lost its practical force today. Though looking at contemporary politics, sometimes one wants to say: gentlemen, you could really use a Machiavelli.