William B. Parsons states the thesis of his book clearly at the start: “Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince serves as a critique of Jesus Christ and his teachings. In particular, The Prince instructs readers to abandon Christ as a model for human life and adumbrates a vision of political life that rejects Christian politics as hostile to progress and human flourishing. Crucial to this project is Machiavelli’s exhortation to wage war against the Catholic Church” (p. 1). What follows is a relentless demonstration, chapter by chapter, of The Prince in support of the view that this is very nearly the whole of Machiavelli’s project to which all his other characteristic aims are subordinate. At one level, this is not a new argument since it confirms the suspicions entertained by the Catholic Church since the appearance of The Prince, dramatized by Shakespeare, and expressed, with more reserve, in commentaries by such as Leo Strauss and Clifford Orwin, among others. It is distinctive in insisting that Machiavelli’s goal in writing The Prince is “largely defined” by a resolute program to reject Christianity and the church. In this way, he emerges as the prototype of the Nietzschean Anti-Christ, as the founder of a decisively modern way of thinking.

Parsons has read widely in the literature on Machiavelli. He knows the variety of interpretations, including the view that Machiavelli was a Christian. He wants to settle this so far as may be possible by showing in commentary on every chapter of The Prince that even when Machiavelli seems to be talking about something else, he is always referring to the debilitating effects of Christianity, and that he goes well beyond the conventional skepticism of his time toward the corruptions of the church. He refers to the well-known disputes among Harvey Mansfield, John Pocock, Leo Strauss, Quentin Skinner, Maurizio Viroli, and others. Parsons takes the view, against the contextualists of the Cambridge school and the historicism of twentieth-century scholarship, that the power of Machiavelli’s thought transcends the bounds of his time and place and must be judged on its own terms. Only detailed exposition of the text itself will reveal the true intent of the author.

Parsons offers five principles of interpretation: 1) The text is self-revelatory. 2) Machiavelli provides practical examples of the ways in which Christian morality encourages weak and misguided political judgments. 3) Many commentators underestimate the grandiosity of Machiavelli’s goals. 4) Detailed comparisons of Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels to Machiavelli’s political judgments will show that he was not concerned with engaging the medieval theological tradition but, rather, with dealing directly, without intermediary, with the Gospel message as he saw it: “I judge that Machiavelli’s thought consists of his own peculiar commentary on ancient history, rather than a distillation or reflection of modern commentary on that history. Thus, it makes sense to apply this critical approach to understanding Machiavelli’s opinion of the New Testament, which is, according to his own curious bifurcation of history, the most ancient of modern texts”(p. 9). 5) That there are only one or two explicit references to Jesus in either The Prince or The Discourses does not alter the fact that Machiavelli’s teachings consistently and intentionally contradict the Christian Scriptures; Machiavelli assumed that these contradictions would be apparent to the careful reader.

Readers can follow Parsons’s analysis of each chapter of The Prince by reading each in turn, along with his commentary. Since Chapter Six is universally regarded as of central importance, let us consider his analysis of that as exemplary of his overall approach. Parsons notes that while Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus are invoked as the great founders of orders, Machiavelli is silent about Jesus and Muhammed but mentions Savonarola and Hiero, who are inferior founders. The four great founders were decidedly self-reliant, although there is a qualification regarding Moses, who was God’s agent and thus possibly a lesser founder than the others, who nonetheless pretended to divine inspiration. Parsons thinks that Machiavelli is proposing that Moses may have pretended likewise, in which case he is to be seen in the same light as the pagan founders. In other words, the Judeo-Christian tradition might descend from a similar pretense, while it has been elevated by a noble lie through convention to the status of revelation.

That all four resorted to arms confirms Machiavelli’s belief in the necessity of arms. Christianity’s claim to universality would ultimately depend on the conversion of Constantine to become practical. But ambivalence must arise in the tension between the Gospel message, as in the Sermon on the Mount, and the necessities of defending Christendom in practical, political life. This promotes pulling of punches when necessity dictates stern and ferocious action. To restore ancient Roman military virtue demands the overthrowing of the Christian tradition. Insofar as Machiavelli might support the continued existence of a “church,” it would be in service to a civil religious cult that reinforces the regime, replacing the doctrine of the two cities: “Despite his initial equivocation regarding the inclusion of Moses, Machiavelli’s analysis is indifferent to the prophets’ various pretensions to divine inspiration. Arms appear necessary to and sufficient for the prophets’ earthly success; claims of divine support may benefit these men in important ways, but it is not necessary ‘to found their state and security’” (quoting from Chapter Six, pp. 43–44). And Savonarola’s inclusion as a failure “reminds one that Machiavelli has scrupulously avoided a discussion of the most prominent unarmed prophet, and the source of Savonarola’s inspiration: Jesus Christ. Indeed, Machiavelli’s inclusion of Savonarola is evidence of the particular care with which he approaches the central, albeit implied, question of chapter 6: How should we judge Christ, the prophet whom Machiavelli does not dare to ‘reason about’ explicitly?” (p. 44). Implicitly, Christ is the enervating role model.

Parsons concludes, after detailed exposition of the whole of The Prince, that Machiavelli is the philosophic founder of a modernity in search of wealth and glory in which religion is gradually altered to fit with secular, mundane pursuits. It was not necessary to attack Christianity overtly if a movement could develop to reinterpret the spiritual life as integral to the material life, leading to the “spiritualization” of the material life or to spiritual fulfillment as a function of material satisfaction in pursuit of imagined and wished-for temporal satisfactions: “Unlike Christ, who commends patient suffering, Machiavelli seeks to encourage those with audacious spirits to work assiduously to exploit fortune’s floods for the common benefit… . This prescription for the union of power, wisdom and daring is identical with the beginning of the modern world” (p. 185). Parsons offers in great detail a Machiavelli to which careful readers have always had access, even if they may question whether Machiavelli was so singularly obsessed with destroying Christianity as the author insists. The effect is to force on us an existential either/or, for or against modernity (which demands more analysis of the complexities of modernity than he allows here), challenging the moderate liberalism that is our alternative.