William Perkins was a puritan minister in the late Elizabethan church and is most famous as a prolific and popular writer of sermons and treatises that matched the abstract precepts of Calvinist theology to the daily pastoral concerns of ordinary believers. Writing mostly in the 1590s, Perkins was living in a country that was officially Protestant and was becoming increasingly so in practice, as well; the pace of change, though, was too slow for Perkins, and he was also acutely aware that the process of change could reverse and bring about the return of Catholicism. Perkins was born in 1558, the year that Queen Elizabeth acceded to the throne, and he died in 1602—just months before she did. He was, in a very literal sense, a product of the Elizabethan period. But Perkins was also the consequence of a different category of the era—that of “confessionalization” or the pan-European rage of increasingly exclusivist faiths that competed evangelically and sought to inculcate a sectarian identity in their own. The doctrinal and ecclesiological fudges that had secured a form of Protestantism in England represented both progress and regress to someone like Perkins. On the one hand, he was born in the year that the Catholic Queen Mary I (“Bloody Mary”) died, and, throughout his lifetime, Perkins would never see a Church of England Protestant judicially executed because of his or her religion. But, on the other hand, the Elizabethan Reformation had not gone far enough: yes, it had established the “true” faith on paper, but in its attempts to include the lukewarm, it had ultimately served to protect outwardly benign enemies under the cloak of conformist Protestantism. Perkins generally aimed his tracts at the “godly,” or those who were trying to be. But he did not only seek to reaffirm them in their identity—he also challenged them to prove themselves to be what they said—or hoped—they were.
Identity is too often stressed as a solution and less often as a problem. Identity, almost by definition, is premised upon division: puritans, it is said, were confirmed and comforted in their identity by the existence of anti-puritans; Calvinists by Anti-Calvinists; and Protestants, more broadly, by Catholics. These oppositional typings, though, also served to reveal more fundamental questions. Confessional identity may have been about what one was not more than what one was, but self-confidence cannot be built wholly on negatives. Simply disliking Catholics did not make one a “good” Protestant, nor was a self-declared member of the “godly” necessarily elect just because he or she was revolted by sin. This period is notable for its cultural fascination with ideas of hypocrisy, dissimulation, and the tragedy of falling from grace: the proliferation of religious identities during the Reformation era contributed to this by threatening to undermine all of those identities. The medieval comfort of universal assent to one religion was gone forever. There were so many religions to choose from now, and the vast majority of those were certainly incorrect, even satanically inspired. So if everyone else was wrong, then why should not you be as well? What if the whole battle over which faith was correct ended up showing that the entire edifice of religion was built upon sand?
This is where the subject—and word—“atheism” comes in. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the use of this label became more and more frequent, but its meaning was hard to pin down. On one level, the charge of “atheism” came as readily to the lips of “orthodox” early modern writers as “communist” or “fellow traveler” did to some McCarthy-era Americans—the term was aggressively elastic, a byword for personal enmity, cultural nonconformity, or political protest—and was thus a phrase of abuse that went well beyond the nominal confines of its technical definition. But the early modern sense of “atheism” was also far more than the paranoid overextension of an “objective” external enemy: it was also the product (and cause) of a wider crisis of certainty. Ideas of hypocrisy, secrecy, and manipulation were a core—if often implicit—theme within all sorts of early modern discourse, from treatises upon political theory to bawdy ballads.Footnote 1 The atheist was sometimes portrayed as a monster, but he could also represent the idea of a Judas—the enemy within, perhaps a friend, perhaps even oneself. It represented a novel and highly flexible discourse, and this article seeks to explore the opportunities and challenges posed by the idea of atheism within the thought of William Perkins. Perkins is an important figure because his popularity in print made him one of the most influential Protestants of the seventeenth century, both in England and abroad. As both a theological powerhouse and astute commentator on his own culture, Perkins can also tell us a great deal about the ways in which the concept of atheism functioned in early modern England. We shall see him using the concept to discuss a range of contemporary problems, both social and intellectual. Through this essay I intend to show that recent historiography has tended to overlook the significance of the idea of atheism to orthodox early modern writers, and the next two sections will give an indication of why this is so.
Historiographical Background
Before the relationship between Perkins and atheism is explored, though, it is necessary to establish some context. In terms of scholarship, early modern atheism is a subject that has been explored in considerable depth but, as we shall see, without much breadth. That is, some questions have been exhaustively analyzed, while others have barely been asked at all.
A particularly brilliant book by Lucien Febvre emerged in 1942. The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais questioned the assumption that a coherent rejection of theism was conceptually possible before the scientific revolution of the late seventeenth century. He argued that the rigorous distinctions between natural and supernatural spheres of causation that became common currency in the wake of Newton, Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza were essentially alien to those naturally skeptical minds that came before them. Thus, even the scurrilous and earthy Rabelais, whose writings were widely deemed atheistic, was—properly speaking—a theist. Rabelais had no choice: neither existence nor its purpose could be explained in any other way.
Febvre taught historians a valuable lesson about the “limits of the conceivable,” and his work continues to attract critical attention over half a century later. Highly sophisticated (and accurate) though much of this criticism is, it has tended to attack Febvre’s annaliste approach upon one primary ground—the objective existence, or otherwise, of early modern atheism in the “modern” sense. So, as if to nectar, generations of scholars have been drawn to the question of whether particular contemporary writers can be accurately described as atheists: Sarpi, Marlowe, Ralegh, and Hobbes (among many), have been put to this particular test.Footnote 2 The point of this article, though, does not rest upon whether some, all, or none of these important individuals were coherent deniers of God: I intend to explore the anti-atheist literature itself.
With few exceptions, scholarly discussion of early modern atheism has been oriented around two questions. First, to what extent did it exist? Second, given that something like concrete atheism certainly emerged during the Enlightenment, where did it come from? Both of these questions share the same emphasis: the identification of “real” atheists in the premodern world.
For all of the scholarly curiosity that has surrounded the subject of identifying early modern atheists, almost no interest has been shown in early modern writings against atheism. The standard explanation for this omission is that the contemporary authors defined atheism in extremely broad and often contradictory ways—that their use of terms such as “atheist” and “unbelief” only serve to create “endless confusion” when it comes to the task of identifying “real” atheists.Footnote 3 Michael Hunter is unusual in having looked seriously at the way in which the genre tended to function, although his important article, “The Problem of Unbelief in Early Modern England,” is primarily descriptive and orients itself around the Febvre debate more than around the less explored terrain of anti-atheism as a concept.Footnote 4 The question of why so many early modern writers penned treatises against atheism when no—or very few—real atheists existed has been almost totally ignored.
The widespread scholarly silence over the subject of anti-atheist treatises is understandable. If our task is to find out whether real atheists existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then anti-atheist tracts do indeed obscure the issue. For example, John Dove, in his A Confutation of Atheisme (1605), included among his list of atheist types those who “doth scoffe at God and deride him.”Footnote 5 By contrast, Martin Fotherby, in his Atheomastix (1622), argued explicitly that blasphemers and mockers cannot be atheists because “all their sinnes are absolutely grounded upon [God’s] supposition.”Footnote 6 He asks, “who would raile upon a thing, which they thinke to have no being?”Footnote 7 Fotherby understands atheism as a preoccupation of “men of the sharpest witts, the greatest spirits, and the richest endowments” who “out of the penetrating and dividing nature of their firie wits … doe trouble themselves with many questions and doubts … which never creepe into the heads of simpler and unlearned persons.”Footnote 8 By contrast, Sir George More, in his A Demonstration of God in his Workes (1598), attempted no sociological analysis at all and simply stated that “all fooles which deny God [are] denied to be men, and taken for brute beasts.”Footnote 9 Dispute can often be found—even within one treatise—over whether “all the streets do sound, all Tables and Ordinaries Resound” with atheism or whether “there be no particular person in the World, but that (in some degree) he beleeveth, that there is a God.”Footnote 10
This confusing state of affairs has led historians, in the main, to pass over early modern commentary on the subject in favor of their own attempts to uncover the atheism of writers who fell under suspicion. As such, scholars who argue that Hobbes was (or was not) an atheist focus their attention on his Leviathan (1651) but almost never at Bishop Bramhall’s The Catching of Leviathan (1657), a critical contemporary riposte that laid the charge of atheism at Hobbes’s door. Taking the example of the generally excellent collection of essays titled Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, edited by David Wootton and Michael Hunter, not one of the ten chapters makes any substantial use of contemporary anti-atheist writings in the construction of their arguments. Almost without exception, the preferred methodology is to examine allegedly atheistic writings and to “read between the lines” of the texts in order to discover the true meaning of the writers. In itself, this approach is very sensible: in an age in which the public profession of unbelief would attract the attention of the authorities and could easily result in one’s execution, the only sensible compromise between personal survival and public education was, in the words of David Berman, to communicate through “the art of theological lying”—a method that was calculated to provide “exoteric protection against enemies, and esoteric communication with friends.”Footnote 11
If my primary objective were to discover real atheists, I would doubtless adopt the same approach. But what if we were to ask a different type of question? Rather than the question, Did early modern atheists exist? what if we ask, instead, What can early modern anti-atheism tell us about contemporary perceptions? A clear analogy for this approach exists within the field of witchcraft studies. The early modern “witch craze” phenomenon, which resulted in well over fifty thousand judicial executions across Europe, has attracted enormous scholarly attention.Footnote 12 When investigating the causes and courses of early modern witchcraft, historians routinely turn to contemporary demonological texts (among other sources). These writings, which described and theorized the effects of the devil upon his acolytes, started to appear in the late fifteenth century and did much to create a contemporary culture in which popular superstition was branded heretical and resulted in ancient folk practices—and their practitioners—being interrogated under the standard of Christian orthodoxy.Footnote 13 This widespread concern heightened and subtly shifted in form during the era of the Reformation, when the question became not one of Christian orthodoxy but, rather, of Catholic or Protestant identity. As we will see, a similar story could be written about the “fiction” of atheism.
The word “atheist” passed into Latin in 1502,Footnote 14 a dating that can be broadly aligned with the publication, in 1487, of the Malleus Maleficarum, the antiwitchcraft tract that has been widely credited with sparking the witch craze itself.Footnote 15 Anxieties about both atheism and witchcraft, then, preceded the Reformation itself but, perhaps, were consequences of the types of cultural instability that both caused and affected the era of religious conflict that was to come. As David Wootton put it, “the Reformation saw the rapid construction of a new vocabulary to describe unbelief”—and no shortage of individuals who would employ this novel tongue for their own purposes.Footnote 16 The treatments of antiwitchcraft and anti-atheist writings by historians follow an almost opposite pattern, though. While almost no scholars would suggest that “real” witchcraft existed during this period, they nonetheless examine demonological (antiwitchcraft) treatises in significant depth. They do not take contemporary fears about maleficium at face value but instead treat it as a metaphor for wider social and cultural concerns. Conversely, the existence of early modern atheism is a lively subject, while the regard of scholars for anti-atheist writings is (at best) politely dismissive. Thus, fantastical early modern writings about demons having sex with witches offer an important cultural insight, while fantastical early modern writings about atheists running wild are, well, fantastical. How are we to square this historiographical imbalance?
I have already shown that contemporary anti-atheist writings suffered from an obvious conceptual confusion over what “atheism” actually was. Although similar things could be said of antiwitchcraft treatises, I shall leave that analogy to one side now and return to the question that I posed before: What can early modern anti-atheism tell us about contemporary perceptions?
As we shall see, William Perkins was able to use the concept of atheism in a controlled and meaningful way when he was applying the word as an adjective (“atheistical”) to something else—for that “something else” was always more tangible than this novel chimera of the ideological unbeliever. Real people who held to an intellectually developed belief system that rejected the existence of God were even thinner on the ground in the early modern world than were supposed witches: because of that fact, the subject proved extremely difficult to talk about as a theoretical construct—as an “-ism.” Before we move on to Perkins, it is necessary to establish how other contemporary writers attempted to handle the subject of atheism as an abstract noun and to get a feel for what concerned them.
Anti-Atheism as a Genre
Anti-atheist texts began to emerge in England for the first time during Queen Elizabeth’s reign and were soon being printed “by the gross.”Footnote 17 They had no obvious precedent and reflected new fears. They also tended to attract a substantial readership. For instance, the popular puritan writer Henry Smith’s Gods Arrow Against Atheists (1604) was one of his best-selling works and ran into at least eleven editions over the next half century. This section will map out some key characteristics of typical anti-atheist treatises.
First, these treatises tended to open with a flurry of anxiety about the specter of atheism before seeming to become confused and then going on to talk about something else instead. Henry Smith’s Gods Arrow Against Atheists is a case in point. He seems more interested in showing that atheism does not exist than that it does. Taking an anthropological angle, he argues that “the common use of all Heathens, in lifting up their eyes and hands to heaven, in an sudden distresse that commeth upon them,” is ample proof of mankind’s inner sense of the divine.Footnote 18 He goes on to state that all known societies “by naturall instinct put a difference betweene vertue and vice, good and evill,” and that this would be inexplicable “were there not a God.”Footnote 19 Having established to his own satisfaction that “all nations and people in the world … have some one kind of religion or other, though all finde not the right religion,” Smith busies himself for the treatise’s remaining ninety-plus pages with investigating how “right” and “wrong” religion can be distinguished.Footnote 20 The detail of his argument can be left to one side here, save to say that the word “atheist” becomes increasingly infrequent after page seven and that his final comment on the matter seems to come barely a third of the way into his exegesis. Taking the subject of heathen religion, Smith opts for the soft target of societies that “delighted in the slaughter of men” and suggests that the deities they worshipped “in their filthinesse and uncleannes, must needes be divels.” How does this link with the theme of atheism? Smith makes a neat rhetorical point: “The religion of the powerfull Jesus … must needs, even by the acknowledgement of the Divels themselves (whom he doth command) be the true religion.”Footnote 21 In other words, by praying to Satan these (un)believers tacitly show themselves to be theists, because the devil is, perversely, the primary witness for God’s existence and majesty. Smith’s implication—that acknowledging Satan equates to an affirmation of God—represents an appeal to the commonplace that to deny the devil is equivalent to denying divinity as a whole.Footnote 22 The devil is, within this understanding, the ultimate theist.
This point allows Smith to springboard his argument into an examination of alternative theisms. He goes on to discuss Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestant separatism, proving through the example of negatives the truth of a centrist Protestant faith. In all of this, though, atheism, disappears from sight. The reader is left free to lump these “wrong religions” together into the category of atheism, on the grounds that although they do not deny God’s existence, they do deny some of his attributes. That said, Smith also says quite clearly that theism is built into the hearts of all men in all times: “God’s Arrow” of the title, therefore, does not follow a straight course.
A second observation about anti-atheist treatises follows naturally from this: if the primary subject (atheism) disappears, what takes its place? The answer, very often, was what we might call “creative theism.” John Dove’s A Confutation of Atheism (1605) is a good example of a text designed to impress. Dedicated to King James only a couple of years after his accession, Dove’s book attempts to show that an active and evangelical preaching ministry, underpinned by moderate Calvinism, would serve England well, in the aid of “the subversion of Atheisme and all Impietie.”Footnote 23 After an initial discussion that attempts to prove that state-sponsored religious zeal always produces better social consequences than a policy of permissiveness, Dove goes on to detail his arguments against atheism. Toward this end, he addresses a dizzying array of subjects, ranging from the truth of Scripture, to the immortality of the soul, to proofs of the world’s divine origins, to a detailed demonstration of Aristotle’s monotheism. In all of these subjects, it should be noted, Dove eschews the clichéd dogmatic arguments that were standard within more established and commonplace polemical genres. That is, anti-Catholic literature, for instance, had taken on repetitive and generic characteristics by the early seventeenth century, and deviation from the key themes and shibboleths could, even with the best intentions, attract controversy. By choosing a less stereotyped polemical form, Dove was able to discuss more esoteric subjects without the obligation to rehearse the well-worn grooves of proving the absolute truth of Protestantism. It is noteworthy, for instance, that Dove barely mentions Catholicism in the entire treatise.
A good example of this freedom from form is Dove’s attempt to prove that the biblical account of the flood and Noah’s ark accords with scientific—as distinct from scriptural—analysis. He tries to solve the problem of the ark’s capacity with a detailed mathematical calculation based upon the ingenious premise that the biblical unit of the cubit “is the length of a mans arme from the elboe to the top of his middle finger [but that] such cubits were longer then now they are, because men were of higher stature then now they are.”Footnote 24 Equally, he insists upon the veracity of the biblical passage that the world was filled with water, from a clever argument about the gradient of mountains and the philosophical question of whether “the mistes which are in the valleyes” can be “reckoned among the waters which are above the firmament” and thus constitute “rayne.”Footnote 25 In another place, Dove opines that his scriptural proofs “may suffice to confute the Jewe which doth allow the authoritye of the bookes of Moses, but it wil not serve for the confutation of the Atheist, for he will aske me how it may stand with humane reason?” In response, Dove announces boldly that “I will dispute by reason against the Atheist.”Footnote 26 John Dove did not seem to be unhappy about this challenge: indeed, it was one that he created for himself. No contemporary atheists are named in the treatise nor atheistic texts quoted. Dove is thus left free to turn the discussion in any direction he chooses.Footnote 27
Dove also gives us access to a third theme of anti-atheist writing: that even the real and visceral subjects of “godly” abuse are rendered somehow distant and theoretical by the taking of atheism as the writer’s primary subject. Dove defined atheism in a number of ways, and one of them was in terms—as noted above—of “those who doth scoff at God and deride him.” Now, this was—or should have been—the standard stuff of puritan opprobrium. Indeed, much of the current historiography stresses how “godly” identity was forged through the example of opposites. Peter Lake, for instance, has argued that there were “complex dialectical relationships between the puritan and anti-puritan images”—that the identity of puritans was formed, in large part, out of the existence of a hostile, godless “other,” the hatred of whom gave them collective purpose and meaning.Footnote 28 These discussions of the ungodly, moreover, were never less than visceral: the relevant sermons and treatises are packed with realistic firsthand accounts of Protestant ministers’ unfortunate encounters with blasphemers and scoffers in the street, outside the pub, inside the church, and so forth. By contrast, John Dove—within the context of atheism—styles these people as “the swaggerers of our age, which are not ashamed to call them selves the damned crue.”Footnote 29 Very few treatises that were actually about scoffers and mockers would risk the self-parody suggested by the improbable remark that these undesirables would actually style themselves as “the damned crue.” That was the minister’s job.
Thus, by taking “atheism” as his primary focus, Dove manages to abstract something that was actually real while also trying to disprove arguments for atheism that nobody was making in the first place. Or, to put it in another way, Dove was writing a treatise against atheism that was too learned for a general audience and yet too eclectic to convert anyone who genuinely did doubt God’s existence. For whom, after all, would the precise length of the Old Testament cubit prove a convincing argument either one way or the other?
Our brief survey has shown that writings that took atheism as their explicit subject tended to demonstrate certain collective characteristics. They disagreed over what atheism was, they tended to avoid the subject when they could have addressed it directly, and even workaday issues such as blasphemy took on an unreal haze under the ghostly light cast by the question of fundamental unbelief. Does this make the genre nothing more than mere junk, though?
Michael Buckley—among the most perceptive of authors who have touched upon the relationship between anti-atheist literature and real atheism—has observed that “the term atheist is not hopelessly vacuous, but unless the instance to which it is applied and the meaning to which is it used are determined, its employment is profoundly misleading.”Footnote 30 What, though, is the literature of abstracted anti-atheism but a genre without “instance” or terms of “meaning”? Rather like attempting to capture something that one sees in the corner of one’s eye, what ends up being described is something else entirely. In decontextualizing atheism by removing it from the contexts to which it had a dynamic relationship, early modern anti-atheist writers ended up, for the most part, talking about alternative subjects. The question “why?” is one that I intend to explore on another occasion.
I shall now turn to writings about atheism where the term is used as a descriptor of something else. This is fundamentally different from trying to write about atheism because, in the former case, the writer begins his mental (and literary) process not with a deeply nebulous concept but with something concrete that he feels able to define and explicate. William Perkins never wrote a treatise explicitly against atheism: the samples of his works that I will be focusing on here were all intended to discuss alternative subjects. In the case of A Golden Chaine (Latin, 1590; English, 1591), Perkins was attempting to lay out the formal structures of Calvinist theology; How to Live, and That Well (1601), by contrast, is a short and straightforward treatise aimed at arming those who are “weak” in faith against common errors into which they could fall; and The Exposition of the Creed (1595), a systematic and pietistic exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, uses the theme as a backbone for a free-ranging discussion of all aspects of doctrine and observance. Taken together, these three texts will show the varied ways in which Perkins understood the nebulous concept of atheism and how he was able to apply it dynamically to a range of contemporary issues, both theological and sociological. For comparative purposes, we shall also be drawing on Francis Bacon’s influential essay, “Of Atheism” (1601), as well as some of the texts already discussed.Footnote 31
Atheism versus Saving Faith
When Perkins looks at the subject of saving faith, he regards it as inimical to the general pattern of “natural” life. It is the enemy, not the friend, of sensory experience. As such, he advises that believers must “shut up our eies, and simply without any more adoe trust God upon his bare and naked word, & suffer our selves to be ledde by it. In naturall things experience is first, and then faith comes afterward. … But God must be trusted, though that which he saith be against reason and experience.”Footnote 32 Indeed, “Gods word is flat contrarie to the nature and disposition of man.”Footnote 33 Consequently, our faith must be “absolute.” Perkins often uses a standard Reformed language of saving faith as being utterly renewing—an obliteration of the human before his conversion. “Once man is made a new creature, faith gives him his life and sense: faith is the eye of the mind, the hand of the soule [and] the mouth of the heart.”Footnote 34 The argument for salvation—for the life of faith and for its transformative effects—is, therefore, literally incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it. The “seede of Woman” and the “seede of the Serpent” represent irreconcilable psychological, as well as soteriological, categories. It is not so much that the devil’s spawn refuse to understand; rather, they are unable to. Sometimes, Perkins sounds as though the elect have no use at all for the standard emotions, thoughts, and instincts with which they were born. “The raigne of faith is, when it beares rule and sway in the heart and life. For where faith is … neither thought, will, affection, nor lust raignes, but faith alone.”Footnote 35 It is a “dutie” of belief in God to “denie our selves; utterly to become nothing in our selves.”Footnote 36
At once, then, true belief is established as an unnatural and unusual state of existence. Perkins explains this reality in terms of the Fall. Original sin is “a disorder or evill disposition in all the faculties and inclinations of man” and “runneth as a leprosie over all mankinde.” Indeed, it is of “a weight sufficient to presse downe the soule to the gulfe of hell.”Footnote 37 Failure instinctively to grasp “true religion” follows ineluctably: the “matter of all heresies, is naturally ingrafted in mans nature. This is worthy [sic] the observation of students in divinity.”Footnote 38 For Perkins, then, this point is a fundamental premise.
Original sin stems, of course, from Adam and Eve’s disobedience against God in Eden. In his Exposition of the Creede, Perkins lists eight reasons for the act of betrayal they committed in eating the apple, and the first one he gives is “unbeleefe, in that they doubted and distrusted of the truth of Gods word which he spake to them.”Footnote 39 This was what Perkins calls “the mother-sinne”—the ur error, if you like—that condemned all mankind to the misery that followed. As such, “it is the principall law of the kingdome of darknes, not to beleeve God. Hereupon our enemie Satan endeavoureth by all means to imprint this lesson in the mindes of our first parents: and having effected his purpose, he ever since indeavoured to make this sin to raigne in the lives of men.”Footnote 40 It is a small but significant point: Perkins tells us that the “principall law” is “not to beleeve God” rather than not to believe in God. This was no unintentional slip, for we can see it again when he writes that “not to beleeve God, is very Atheisme. For [if we refuse to assert His absolute providential control] God is made a lyar, and his glories and majestie is abolished. It is the greatest part of our glorie to beleeve God.”Footnote 41 Within this understanding, God represents absolute and undeniable existence; the only question is what you make of it.
Compared with Henry Smith, then, Perkins is at once in agreement and at odds with his contemporary. Unlike Smith, Perkins explicitly identifies atheism with the Fall and thus makes it a timeless, indeed “original,” phenomenon—a cause of human nature rather than an effect of it. He agrees with Smith, though, over the point that some conception of the divine exists within all men. For instance, Perkins often sought to categorize different types of faith. And, within those formal structures, he rarely contrasted saving faith with atheism per se. Rather, his additional categories were “temporarie” or “hypocriticall faith” (which were common among the reprobate) and “historicall faith.”Footnote 42 This last is Perkins’s absolute minimum and a denominator so low that it is not even common: this is “the faith of devills,” who know that God exists but unabashedly oppose him. Here, Perkins and Smith both agree with John Calvin, who stated in his seminal Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559) that belief in God “is not a doctrine that must first be learned in school, but one of which each of us is master from our mother’s womb, and which nature itself permits no one to forget, although many strive with every nerve to this end.”Footnote 43 The purpose of the “school” is to instil the right type of religious belief.
Even Francis Bacon—hardly a natural bedfellow of evangelical Calvinists—held that knowledge of God was deeply imbedded in man: “God never wrought a miracle to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it.”Footnote 44 Perkins would have agreed with this remark in its essence, although he and Bacon differed profoundly over this equation between evidence in nature (God’s “ordinary works”) and supernatural truth. For Perkins, as we have seen, true faith not only came from beyond nature but was also naturally opposed to nature itself.
According to Bacon, “a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”Footnote 45 To Perkins, though, “curiositie” led only to error. On the surface, Perkins’s attitude to atheism here is similar to that of Martin Fotherby, who said that atheism was generally the preserve of intelligent and learned men who fall victim to “the snares of their owne curiosities.”Footnote 46 Fortherby’s solution, though—like that of John Dove—was to provide a detailed set of rational arguments to counter the intellectual arguments of unbelievers. Using the Bible to refute atheism, Fortherby states, is “meerely idle” and “a foolish kinde of proofe,” which, because atheists do not accept the divine origins of the text, “would make the cause ridiculous.”Footnote 47 Perkins, however, has no truck with such an approach. His solution to the problem of atheism is unashamedly faith-based.
In his systematic treatise A Golden Chaine, Perkins wastes no time on the question of whether God exists. In fact, the sum total of his commentary on this question runs as follows: “As for the Atheists, which confidently avouch there is no God, by Gods Law they ought to die the death: nay, the earth is too good for such to dwell on. Malefactours, as theeves & rebels, for their offences they have their reward of death: but the offence of those, which denie there is a God, is greater: and therefore deserves a most cruel death.”Footnote 48 Perkins invokes the image of the atheist in order to ridicule and discredit the notion that anyone could deny the existence of God. Indeed, so uninterested is Perkins in pandering to the foolishness of atheists that, throughout his writings, he entirely ignores the tradition of trying to prove God’s existence through rational arguments. The very next sentence in A Golden Chaine illustrates this well. With the abrupt assertion that “The second point followeth, namely what God is,” Perkins dismisses any need for further deliberation on the matter.Footnote 49
Perkins’s primary recourse is always to Scripture, which “discovers and reveales the secret thoughts of men, that no art or learning can discover: and this argues that it was penned by him who is the searcher of all hearts.” The Bible, Perkins maintains, “containe[s the] full and perfect doctrine for the pacifying, setling, and directing of the conscience in al things.”Footnote 50 If one reads the Bible and remains unmoved, Perkins suggests, then one is very likely to be a reprobate.
Failure to assent to the authenticity and divine nature of Scripture was an even worse moral crime than failing to be stirred by its contents. In How to Live, and That Well, Perkins provides a neat and comprehensive reason for believing in God:
It is a principle in nature that there is a God: if there be a God, nature can say he is to be worshipped: if he be to be worshipped, he hath revealed himselfe and his will to man, for otherwise he cannot be worshipped. And this revelation is to be found in the writings of the Prophets and Apostles, and in no other writings of men; because we finde the doctrine of the Scriptures to be agreeable to the very nature and majestie of God. … For it is the most ancient, & all other religions come farre short of it. It is one and the same, evermore consenting with it selfe, without change or alteration. The Apostles agree with the Prophets; the Prophets with Moses: and all with the first revelation, made at Creation.Footnote 51
Within one short sweep, Perkins moves from existence to personality to denomination. Between the Bible and the conscience, there is no need for alternative sources of divine proof.
Perkins’s forceful adoption of sola scriptura as a central tenet was double-edged though, for while the Bible became increasingly important as a pillar of faith with the advent of Protestantism, the messages contained within the text also became more disputed. Protestants searched for certainty through Scripture, but, as John Morrill has noted, these hopes could also be dashed, upon “the sickening realisation that the text that was the flawless Word of God, meant for mankind’s instruction and as the title deeds of salvation, was itself flaky”—the consequence, indeed, was “a Babel of voices reading discrepant texts.”Footnote 52 From the Johannine Comma to the authorship of the Pentateuch, the Bible was beginning to beg as many questions as it answered.Footnote 53 The philologies of humanism provided a spade both to dig new holes and to fill them in, although often with a set quantity of earth, it seemed. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Perkins cited one of his chief contemporary causes of unbelief as “the light of naturall reason,” which he terms “the blind Divinitie of the world.” Because common sense and actual salvation turn in different directions, “in a life acceptable to God, faith is required; the light of reason will not serve the turne.”Footnote 54
Perkins—as versed in the finer points of humanist technique as anyone—unashamedly rejected a rational approach to religion. He was, in the technical sense of the word, a skeptic. Perkins belonged to a tradition of philosophical skepticism that held that the traditional epistemological bases for various truth claims were inadequate. Richard Popkin points out, though, that skepticism did not necessarily mean rejecting all hope of attaining knowledge or lead inevitably to the conclusion that all beliefs were baseless—only that the rationale for knowledge or belief had to be carefully redefined. As such, the “sceptic” and “believer” are not opposing classifications.Footnote 55 Perkins’s skepticism led him to embrace the paradoxical twin of rational analysis: fideism. That is, he responded to textual criticisms of the Bible—insofar as he responded at all—as though they were a devilish snare designed to test true faith. Reason is best friends with the devil (who is famously able to quote Scripture), and intellectuals doubtless figured disproportionately among the reprobate. Saint Augustine famously said that hell was built for the curious, and Perkins was equally dismissive of those who read the Bible and still doubted: “If any say, that they finde no such evidence in Scripture, I answer, it is their owne fault: for if they would seriously read the Scripture with prayer to God, it would appeare.”Footnote 56 There is no point in arguing with people who do not feel its force and are not willing to try to feel.
Perkins makes the Bible even more central to his theistic worldview than he actually has to. Indeed, within his writings as a whole, it is hard to say whether he rests most fundamentally on the Bible as a proof of God or in God as a proof of the Bible. To take just one example, the first chapter in his highly systematic Golden Chaine is “Of the Bodies of Scripture,” and the second is “Of God, and the nature of God.”Footnote 57 In other words, the Bible comes first—even (from a human perspective at least) before God. From one perspective, this made sense: by beginning with the undisputable existence of the Bible, Perkins was trying to create a strong platform on which to build. By telling believers, though, that Scripture was the basis for everything else, Perkins may also have accidentally generated new grounds for doubt. As we have seen, the Bible was more open to criticism than ever during Perkins’s lifetime. One person’s refutation of atheism could thus become another’s invitation to it.
Anti-Atheism and Confessional Polemic
Perkins, as we have seen, sought explicitly to defend the theistic position only in passing, even if he did locate the origins of unbelief within the eternal frame of Adam and Eve’s first independent thoughts. He was not, it would seem, particularly exercised by atheism, if we are to limit it to its modern definition. His bullish fideism—a consequence of his profound philosophical skepticism—led him to take a relatively clean and unproblematic approach to the existence of God. The matter was not subject to rational analysis but was comprehensively demonstrated by the twin pillars of conscience and Scripture, which were a conduit to supernatural certainty. In all of this, he gave the same message different meanings, according to the nature of his readership. For those Protestants who were in the infancy of faith, Perkins taught them to reach for strong, fundamental principles, while for more educated and sophisticated readers, he told them to be distrustful of their intellects and to locate their faith within the basics. These two readerships, though, were unified in their Protestantism—and, here, Perkins used the concept of “atheism” as a means of confirming them in their identity while also urging them to locate and expunge the remnants of “false belief” in their thoughts and emotions. Because of this, and because of the confessional context, it is no surprise to find Perkins talking about atheism most energetically and dynamically within the context of polemics, which targeted the alternative theistic positions that he regarded as stages along a slippery slope that led to outright unbelief. Perkins’s habit of thought—which, naturally, becomes a polemical strategy—was to lump together the brands of (ir)religion that he disagreed with. We can see how he instinctively approaches the issue when he says things like this: “The Turke lives by the false faith: the Jewe by his, the Papist by his. For he beleeves as well the traditions of men, as the word of God, and his puts his trust not onely in God, but also in the creatures, namely Saints and Angels. Thus also doe Magitians, sorcerers, witches, inchanters.”Footnote 58 All religions but the “true” one, then, rely upon the “traditions of men.” Islam and Judaism are little more than straw men for Perkins: his true concerns are to do with Christendom and, in particular, England. As such, he aims most of his fire at Catholicism. In A Golden Chaine, Perkins tells us that “if a man will but take a view of all Poperie, he shall easily see, that a great part of it is meere Magique,” before segueing immediately into a discussion of witchcraft.Footnote 59 Going to see a priest to cure one’s spiritual ills is no different from visiting a “wizzard or sorcerer,” and the fact that the habit abides, despite a generation of Protestant evangelism, is testament to the attractiveness to the fallen human of having “confidence in vaine creatures” instead of God.Footnote 60 Sometimes Perkins talks as though Catholicism is akin to the “natural religion” of mankind—it is, “under new tearmes maintaining the idolatrie of the heathen.” It is a subtle, corrosive presence, in some ways made safer when it is doctrinally labeled—at least its labeling allows a health warning to be applied to something that otherwise could appear temptingly “common sense.” Given this, Catholicism is not so much a cause of the world’s spiritual ills as an effect of it. “All this argues,” he says, “that Poperie denied with the mouth abides still in the heart.”Footnote 61
Perkins returns again and again to the power of God (and the individual’s belief in that power) as the primary source of all truth. This emphasis makes no sense, though, unless we consider the wider context of Perkins’s worldview. He was a child of the Reformation and grew to maturity during its “confessional” era. Despising Catholicism—and knowing why it should be despised—was just as central to Perkins’s project as was communicating a positive vision of faith; indeed, to confessional warriors such as him, the two went hand in hand.
While the logic of skepticism may have suggested the importance—indeed positive necessity—of epistemological doubt, fideism sought to refute exactly that proposition. And the path of Europe’s Long Reformation is the story of fideism’s (temporary) victory over the concept of legitimate doubt.Footnote 62 By the later sixteenth century, shades of gray were being forced, increasingly, whether willingly or unwillingly, into black-and-white party positions. Within the Reformed camp, predestination—as doctrinal minutiae and as a confessional flag—became more and more important as a means of drawing a tent around allies on the battlefield and expelling the rest as fair game beyond its ungenerous edges. One could not pick and choose one’s doctrines or express doubt about any of them: it was necessary to believe unequivocally in the entire package.
It was an irony of this doctrinal straitening, though, that potential allies were also cast out in the search for a pure and Judas-free core. If belief in the abilities of nondivine agencies rested at the consistent heart of his definition of atheism, with witchcraft representing the inner circle, and Catholicism the circle that bled beyond that, then Perkins was also assertive in branding alternative Protestantisms as atheistic for their refusal to grant the God of Calvinism the all-ruling hand. Unbelief, on Perkins’s account, could ascend to the very finest maneuvers of predestinarian etiquette. In his Exposition of the Creed, Perkins enters into a detailed exegesis of how God planned the Fall and engineered the means by which individuals might subsequently be saved. How to balance divine prescience against predetermination? Perkins tells us that they “must be joyned together, and not severed. Will without [fore]knowledge is impotent, and foreknowledge without will is idle.” To Perkins, this was not a conjecture but a fact. (It is interesting that fideism’s psychological impulse often overrode its skeptical base. That is, Perkins could easily have regarded this area of debate as one of epistemological uncertainty; instead, he styled it as one of life or death simplicity.) He goes on to state that those who do make a distinction between divine will and divine foreknowledge “bring in little better than Atheisme … and rise the very foundation of Gods providence.”Footnote 63 In other words, unless you agree that God simultaneously imagined and generated the complete physical and salvific history of humankind, without a moment’s pause between the two, you “bring in little better than Atheisme.” Here, Perkins is consigning not only the vast majority of Catholic thinkers to hell but also all but a select (or elect?) cadre of uncompromising Protestant ones as well: such was confessionalization.
We can find Calvin agreeing: “Even though [atheists] are compelled to recognise some god, they strip him of glory by taking away his power … they, by fashioning a dead and empty idol, are truly said to deny God.”Footnote 64 From this perspective, it is Calvinism or bust: a choice as subtle as that between worshipping the Reformed God’s power or seeking forever to raise a (comfortingly) “dead” deity. There was no via media, unless one meant by that the dominion of ever prevalent “heresie.” Approaching the issue from a less partisan angle, Francis Bacon was able to find something reassuring in how the diverse cultures of the world all seemed to possess an idea of the divine: “The Indians of the West have names for their particular gods, though they have no name for God: as if the heathens should have had the names Jupiter, Apollo, Mars, &c; but not the word Deus: which shews that even those most barbarous people have the notion, though they have not the latitude and extent of it.”Footnote 65 In this, Bacon demonstrates the extent of Perkins’s polemicism: the latter would rather sweep alternative theisms into the category of atheism than, like Bacon, use alternative theisms as a device for isolating genuine unbelief. Perkins, clearly, is more concerned with spreading atheism like a contagion outside the body of a pure orthodoxy that he has delineated than he is in establishing a broad theistic consensus. Perkins is not interested in defending abstract theism: his sole interest is in the Calvinist God, because only the doctrine of predestination puts man and God in their correct relational place and, thus, describes the true character of both. Even the moderate Calvinist John Dove made a point of stating, in the very first sentence of his Confutation of Atheism, that, although “sometimes under than name of Atheists are comprehended Pagans, Infidels and Idolators, all such as are ignorant of the true God, albeit in their kinde they be very devoute, religious and godly … [yet] these be not the [true] atheists.”Footnote 66 He goes on to criticise Catholicism not once in the course of the treatise but instead tacitly enlists the rival camp (along with Judaism) in order to assert the argument, against atheistical “innovation,” that truth “cannot be newe, as God him selfe cannot be newe, therefore there is onely the true religion which is the ancientest of all.”Footnote 67
It is interesting that explicitly anti-atheist works often sought to create a theistic consensus in order, as Martin Fotherby put it, to show that atheists—as against believers—number “but as one drop of brine in the whole ocean.”Footnote 68 The strategic aim may have been to make such people feel so isolated that they returned to the fold. When atheism was not the primary focus, though, a much more sectarian game was often played with the concept. Among the Long Reformation’s loudest and most convinced voices there was a pronounced reluctance to declare any common ground between the rival camps at all, and “atheism” became not only a convenient means of categorizing otherness but also a “snarl word” used to express genuine and uncomprehending hatred.Footnote 69 Within much of the anti-atheism genre, by contrast, it was as though confessionalization had never happened.
The debate over what should be labeled “atheist” was an important one, but it was not the only discussion in town. There was a separate question of what caused atheism and, here, the Long Reformation could emerge less as a process that confirmed religious identities and more as one that sowed the seeds of genuine unbelief. In his “Of Atheism,” Francis Bacon attempted to explain what he took to be the proliferation of unbelief during his lifetime, and one of the main causes that he identified was “divisions in religion.” He particularly stressed that atheism is most likely to result if these divisions “be many; for any one main division addeth zeal to both sides, but many divisions introduce atheism.”Footnote 70 Bacon’s suggestion is that the Reformation, as a dualistic divide, was not the main issue (indeed, the adding of “zeal to both sides” neatly captures the confessional dynamic) as much as was the parthenogenesis of new creeds beyond the original split. In other words, he may have been tacitly pointing to the proliferation of sectarian divisions within Protestantism. He would have meant the Anabaptists and Familists, of course. But what about puritanism itself? Exactly which was the straw that broke the camel’s back? Confessionalization, with its attendant hardening of doctrinal positions, may in itself have been an engine of atheism, as far as Bacon was concerned. In his essay, “Of Unity in Religion,” he notes that “men create oppositions which are not; and put them into new terms so fixed, as whereas the meaning ought to govern the term, the term in effect governeth the meaning.”Footnote 71 And Perkins, surely, was one of those men.
Bacon goes on to argue that a connected cause of atheism is “the scandal of priests.” What we now call “anticlericalism” is a famously double-edged sword.Footnote 72 Bacon’s position, though, seems to be that criticism of particular ministers undermines all ministers. Puritan mockery of the “dumb dogges” of centrist Protestantism was no less corrosive than plebian mockery of overzealous puritan divines. This relates neatly to Bacon’s first point. Where does the criticism stop? Just when will certainty result?
Bacon’s next cause of contemporary atheism is the “custom of profane scoffing in holy matters, which doth by little and little deface the reverence of religion.”Footnote 73 On the surface, this is a clear area of agreement between Perkins and Bacon, as “profane scoffing” was a virtual obsession for almost all puritan divines. Perkins, though, might have interpreted this trait as an effect of atheism, while for Bacon it read more like a cause and as a culmination of the first two reasons that he gives: “When atheists and profane persons do hear of so many discordant and contrary opinions in religion, it doth avert them from the church, and maketh them to sit down in the chair of the scorners.”Footnote 74
Taking Bacon’s first three causes of atheism together, then, he is suggesting that when ordinary people see a proliferation of truth claims from different religious standpoints, they initially listen to the criticisms and connect these with actual scandals surrounding ministers that they know or have heard of, but eventually they end up decrying “holy matters” as a whole. And Perkins was a contributor to—indeed, ringleader of—this process. In seeking to provide certainty, Perkins was also inculcating doubt—he was saying, don’t believe them: believe me. Bacon, standing somewhat apart, was able to see what Perkins could not allow himself to acknowledge.
To Perkins, the notion that he was himself encouraging unbelief would surely have been nigh on inconceivable. For him, the solution to the problem of unbelief—as to so much else—was the universal acceptance of Reformed doctrine and praxis. Anything else—whether it be Catholicism or Protestant anti-Calvinism—was either atheism or an invitation to it.
Atheism and Protestantism
Perkins would not have agreed with Bacon’s critique, but this does not mean that he would not have acknowledged many of the same problems. Perkins understood the growth of atheism rather differently. It is here that we must take account of Perkins’s sociological—and, indeed, personal—reflections.
We have established that Perkins considered Catholicism (like “atheism,” a label for many occasions) to be the weak man’s choice and, consequently, an ever-popular one. But Catholicism was no longer the most serious pastoral challenge. Post-Armada, the English were singularly proud of not being Catholic, even if few were as Protestant as Perkins would have wished. His assertion that Catholicism led directly to diabolic atheism thus required a parallel focus: that soft Protestantism was a part of the same slippery slope. We now turn to the explicitly domestic aspect of Perkins’s anti-atheist writings.
Despite the enforced quiescence of domestic Catholicism, when Perkins looked at the country in which he lived, he saw godlessness abounding: “Though [men] sooth never so, yet their usuall dealings proclaime their unbeleefe.”Footnote 75 And taking a typically “puritan” angle: “In outward profession, I confesse, we [the English] carrie the shew of Christians, but in deede and truth, by our lives and conversation, very many among us denie Christ: for in everie place the common practice is to spend the time in drunkennesse and surfetting, in chambering and wantonnesse.”Footnote 76 Standard stuff, but perhaps historians have overemphasized the rhetoric of debauchery and creation of the “other” at the expense of the first clause of this passage—that so many Englishmen by Perkins’s time were able to “carrie the shew of Christians.” Reprobates could be Protestant, too. Nevertheless, the new religion was bedding in, and the concern of ministers was slowly shifting from people who professed the wrong faith to people who professed the right one but with insufficient inward conviction. Indeed, the problem went even deeper than this. Some people possessed inward conviction, but one built on weak foundations, which ensured that it would end up crumbling away: “This is a very common faith in the Church of God: by which many rejoyce in the preaching of the Word, and for a time bring forth some fruits accordingly, with shewe of great forwardnes, yet afterward shake off religion and all.”Footnote 77
People have temporary faith because that faith has temporal causes: such as “a desire of praise among men,” or “profite, commoditie, the getting of wealth and riches”Footnote 78 But, as every good Calvinist schoolboy knew, “we are under the wrath of God by nature, and cannot attaine to everlasting life of our selves.” Indeed, it was a prerequisite of salvation to “utterly despaire in respect of our selves.”Footnote 79 One could not self-will saving faith, especially not for worldly reasons. But this is what people were increasingly trying to do. The visible church of Protestantism, then, was in danger of becoming atheistical as well—and we shall come back to this issue.
In his popular treatise, How to Live, and That Well, Perkins gives a compendious account of varieties of “unbeleefe” that he has observed in late Elizabethan society. He treats the subject of atheism more sociologically than polemically here, in the context of a simple guide to piety for basic believers, perhaps because he is more concerned with showing those who have a “weak faith” the dangers of noncommitted Protestantism than the iniquity of a full-throated Catholicism that they were unlikely to buy into.
Some of the categories that Perkins delineated in this itemized discussion of atheistic forms are generic manifestations of standard puritan obsessions: he rails against “worldlines,” “lusts of the heart,” and the “wilful ignorance” of those who think that personal salvation is none of their concern. I shall pass over these typologies here. Instead, I will focus upon the interrelated categories of “Apostacie” and “Hypocrisie”—for these, I shall contend, are able to give us a real insight into the dynamic interplay between theology and sociology in Perkins’s thought.
“Hypocrisie” was an idea that obsessed the practical theology of English Calvinism. Even if believers could convince themselves of their own sincerity, it was quite another question as to whether one could be sure that one’s brethren or family would not “backslide.” Perkins, for one, considered hypocrisy to be almost ubiquitous: “Hypocrisie [is] nothing else but the unbeleefe of the heart, covered over with the false appearance of faith. And it is the common sinne of these times. … For men make the highest degree of profession that can be, when they come to the Lords table; and yet afterward take libertie to live and die as they list.”Footnote 80
This widespread anxiety about hypocrisy was not simply to do with people who said one thing and thought another; it also concerned those who convinced themselves of a proposition that was false. One could “take libertie to live and die” as one wished not only because of an explicit conscious choice but also as a consequence of deep-seated unconscious desires. After all, “hypocriticall faith” was as much a self-deception as it was a misleading of one’s friends—hence the superabundance of contemporary pastoral tracts, which urged believers to root out their internal compromises. To this we shall return.
For now, though, I want to focus on another category of unbelief in Perkins’s list. He cites “Apostacie” prominently and defines it as “the fault of the people of this land in the daies of [the Marian] persecution.”Footnote 81 But if his past tense is to be believed, it begs the question, why bring it up fully a lifetime later? I would contend that the memory of Queen Mary’s reign was very much alive during the 1580s and 1590s and not only for the widely understood reason that Protestants were creating and celebrating their identity through a narrative, inspired by John Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs,” of providential triumph over adversity. It was, of course, brilliant propaganda, but have historians somewhat overstressed the empowering and unproblematic elements of that legacy? What about its negative consequences for Protestant writers of the succeeding generations, who were fighting to establish a communal reality, as well as a polemical identity? Certainly, a memory had been created that was hard to live up to.
Perkins did not dwell much upon the strength of faith that allowed the martyrs to go to the stake with dignity; instead, he spoke critically about “the fault of the people of this land” in transferring their religious identity so meekly to that of a monarch who murdered Protestants. The bitter memory of collaboration stuck in Perkins’s gut and possessed a bile that generally led him to shun the neatly linear Foxean account.
In his Golden Chaine, Perkins describes “temporarie faith” as “the common faith that abides in this land. Men say that beleeve as the prince beleeveth, and if religion change they will change.”Footnote 82 (It is worthwhile noting that Perkins makes this sociological point again, within the context of a treatise that is often deemed purely theoretical—early modern theology, though, was rarely entirely “abstract.”) Internal betrayal is a sore point for Perkins, and one that he rubs. People, “by reason of the authoritie of princes lawes … are made to learne some little knowledge of the word: they beleeve it to be good and professe it: and thus for the space of thirty or forty yeares men heare the word preached, and receive Sacraments, being for all this as voide of grace as they were in the first day: and the reason is because they doe barely professe it, without either liking or loving the same.”Footnote 83 It is worth noting that, here, Perkins is referring not narrowly to Queen Mary’s reign but to the “thirty or forty yeares” since then: he is thus providing something like a critique of the drift to Protestantism during the reign of Elizabeth I. Of course, Perkins never explicitly criticized either his monarch or her church—unlike many puritans, Perkins was not one to indulge in overtly subversive political commentary.Footnote 84 On the other hand, the English church of the 1590s, under the unswervingly anti-puritan hand of Archbishop Whitgift, was hardly amenable to the evangelical, conscience-centered Calvinism that was being espoused by Perkins and his fellows. The English may have been guilty of “Apostacie” in conforming to the Catholic church of Queen Mary, but what of the suggestion that a similar sort of conformist rejection of true belief had not occurred within Perkins’s lifetime as well, and perhaps at the very heart of the church? Francis Bacon, as we will recall, argued that atheism had proliferated because of “divisions in religion”; Perkins might easily have countered that a workaday Protestantism that sought conformity at the expense of doctrinal emphasis was more likely to prove itself to be the engine of atheism.
The concept of hypocrisy was very present and very personal for Perkins. Yes, Catholics were atheists, and so were anti-Calvinists, but what about those within the “godly” community? Who could know how they would respond to the challenges of the future? To Perkins, history had already shown that “Protestants to day [become] to morrow Papists. … This day, honest & civill men, the next day cruel murderers.”Footnote 85 The possibility that one could betray oneself, as well as others, was a source of constant anxiety—nobody knows whether they would be willing to sell out until a tempting price is named. Perkins and people like him looked upon the Marian martyrs with a degree of envy: they, at least, had been able to prove beyond all doubt that they believed in what they said.
Perkins’s concept of atheism had personal refractions as well. The modern poet Miguel de Unamuno wrote that “Life is doubt, And faith without doubt is nothing but death.”Footnote 86 Perkins, on this account, often urged something close to death. But, upon close examination, atheism can be located at the center of his entrenched fideism:
There is no man in the world, be he called, or not called, [who] if he looke narrowly [i]nto himselfe, shall [not] finde his heart most filled with manifolde doubtings and distrustings, whereby hee shall feele his self even caried [sic] away from beleeving in God. Therefore the dutie of every man that will truly say hee beleeves in God, [is] to labour to see his owne unbeliefe and the fruits therof in his life. As for such as say they have no unbeliefe, nor feele none; more pitifull is their case, for so much greater is their unbeliefe.Footnote 87
This is a remarkably honest statement. Indeed, it might be suggested that Perkins speaks more expansively and honestly about unbelief in the context of the elect saint than he does when he is talking sociologically. It should be noted, for instance, that Perkins talks on this occasion about “beleeving in God” rather than “beleeving God.” “Unbeleefe” is truly ubiquitous, and the true saint is obliged to “acknowledge and bewaile” it. He says that these motions are a signal to “examine” our conscience, and “labour to be convinced.”Footnote 88
It is worth noting that Perkins offers no distinctive prescriptions to this malady. Of course, he does not leave the command to “labour” hanging in empty air, but his solutions are not specific to this and, instead, feed back into the standard methods of puritan pastoralia. Perkins’s, in this respect, is a calm treatment: he sees the issue as part and parcel of the life of faith, rather than something that requires panic measures. Atheism and election go hand in hand. Atheism is the curse of Adam and sainthood the ultimate cure, but it is not a comprehensive temporal palliative.
Conclusion
The concept of atheism had a ubiquitous potential in Perkins’s thought: it could find applications within the context of the classic “other” (Catholics, scoffers, and mockers), lukewarm Protestantism, and even in terms of the godly self. It was a concept that Perkins ranged from theological ahistory, as the primary cause of the Fall, through to contemporary sociological analysis, as a commentary on the processes of Reformation. Atheism could span these conceptual divisions because “it is like a huge sea, the banks whereof cannot be seene, nor the bottome searched.”Footnote 89 It was, in other words, the dark heart of man.
To say, though, that “atheisme” had a universal applicability is not the same thing as writing it off as a mindless term of abuse. Yes, it could be that and could be just an alternative word for idolatry or impiety. But Perkins was not indiscriminate about how he used the term and, even if it is not possible to reconstruct a precise definition through his writings, that is because the idea had a dynamic and highly connective quality to it. “Atheisme,” it would seem, only had meaning when it was applied to something else.
One clear interpretation that can be drawn out of this analysis, though, is that “atheisme” was, for Perkins, a strong word that he did not use lightly. It was, in the broadest terms, a metaphor for crisis, even, as we have seen, for the crises of the believer, who sought to be both sincere and dedicated but could not be absolutely certain that he was either.
Sitting at the center of the wider context is the phenomenon of the Reformation. As Richard Popkin has argued, the challenge for each of the confessional camps was to comprehensively discredit the “criteria of truth” forwarded by one’s enemies while, simultaneously, propounding an alternative criterion that was capable of withstanding the counterblasts of polemical scrutiny. And this conflict took no prisoners. Indeed, it “was to unleash a sceptical crisis not only in theology but also, shortly thereafter, in the sciences and in all other areas of human knowledge.”Footnote 90 Perkins, as we have seen, chose to assert the mediation between conscience and the holy writ as the final word in epistemology and to attack all alternatives as recourse to the inventions of human wit. But his narrow fideism, in ignoring the many and varied rational and textual critiques of this position, made his stance simultaneously impregnable and deeply vulnerable, for the whole edifice of his thought and emotion rested upon a single loud message that, if wrong, would explode everything else as well.
Beyond this intellectual anxiety, Perkins was worried about the future. He rejected the celebration of a neat history of the providential triumph of Protestantism in favor of a sociological critique of human faithlessness and moral failure. As such, Perkins was a man who championed a Reformation that troubled his soul just as it confirmed his own identity. And “atheisme” represented the nebulous, connective tissue between the things that Perkins felt most certain about and most fearful of.
