Atheism

Atheism and sodomy in 16th century England are two highly complex, multi-layered subjects that I can hardly do justice here. In some respects they have similarities, which is why it is beneficial to read the two contributions one after the other. A comprehensive, excellent and highly recommended work on the subject is Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt by Alec Ryrie.¹

How much atheism is in Marlowe?

Unlike the sodomy Richard Baines put on record in his note, which suddenly became Marlowe’s homosexuality in the late 19th century, atheism is something he was probably accused of during his lifetime and then consistently since his death. Whereas this originally did not concern his person, but his work. For while Marlowe’s characters almost all maintain conventional private lives for the times, their attitude to religion is questionable. From today’s perspective, his works clearly contradict the assumption that they are atheistic.² His heroes do not deny God, they challenge his supremacy.³ Even the Baines note

"[…] strikes not by denying that such men as Moses and Christ ever lived but by stripping them of devine authority and explaining them as ambitious men seeking power under the pretext of religion."⁴

For the Elizabethans, therefore, atheism meant something different than it does for us. When Sir Christopher Hatton described William Allen, the founder of the English College, as a "shameless atheist "⁵ , he did not mean to imply that Allen did not believe in the existence of God, but that he worshipped another God. "Atheismus war ein typisches Kennzeichen des Andersseins."⁶ From this point of view, Marlowe’s works could well be considered "atheistic". They were different from the characters you had seen on stage up to that point, which was the basis of much of their success.⁷ Also, in Marlowe’s work, Christians are a morally highly questionable group whose weaknesses he relentlessly exposes, which may also have supported the accusation that his works have a tendency towards atheism.⁸ Within tolerable limits, Marlowe questioned certain religious dogmas such as divine providence,⁹ but he did not negate them.

"Marlowe was a dramatist writing to earn a living as well as a poet expressing his ego. He had to provide plays that would pass the censorship and appeal to the orthodox and suspicious audiences. We cannot suppose that such an audience had the least natural sympathy with libertine views in religion. It was certainly open to Marlowe to complicate their naïve assumptions, but not to flout them."¹⁰

What could be considered an expression of atheism in the late 16th century was meaningless by the late 1820s. William Hazlitt noted in his Reflections on Doctor Faustus:

"I cannot find in Marlowe’s play, any proofs of the atheism or impiety attributed to him, unless the belief in witchcraft and the Devil can be regarded as such; and at the time he wrote, not to have believed in both would have been construed into the rankest atheism and irreligion."¹¹

The world has not become more pious, religious or clerical since then. Nevertheless, Marlowe is repeatedly described as an avowed atheist even by those who should know better. The following is just one example among many. The reputable historian Ian Mortimer wrote in 2013 in The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England: "The word atheist also means ‘against God’ and in this sense it comes to be used in the late sixteenth century as a method of smearing a person’s reputation."¹² and gives a few examples of this: John Caius, Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth I., but: "Such accusations are all propaganda."¹³ Only with Marlowe, according to Motimer (he does not reveal why), it is completely different. He was a genuine atheist and proclaimed this loudly for years!¹⁴

How the accusations are alike

We’d better hook up where Mortimer is on firm historical foundation. Nothing lent itself so well to a character assassination as the accusation of atheism and sodomy. At the end of 1580, a scandal broke out at the English court that had absolutely nothing to do with Marlowe and at the same time has astonishing parallels to him. The cause was Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who for some years had been said to have a conspicuous closeness to Catholicism. He suddenly begged Elizabeth I for mercy for his religious error, which he had only now realised, and accused some high-ranking Catholic nobles, including Lord Henry Howard and Charles Arundell, of conspiracy. The latter struck back by bringing a series of charges against Oxford in their turn. At that time, marriage negotiations were in progress between England’s Queen and François-Hercule de Valois, Duke of Alençon, Henri III’s brother. All those accused by Oxford supported this project, which is why the matter caused an international excitement. Temporarily, some house arrests were imposed and several interrogations were carried out, but in the end no one was charged. Although the whole thing came to nothing, Oxford had mainly harmed itself with this action, according to a letter from the French ambassador Michel de Castelnau to Henri III.¹⁵ The reason why Elizabeth I withdrew her favour from him was more likely due to the pregnancy of the lady-in-waiting Anne Vavasour, who was having an affair with the married Oxford. Howard and Arundell also fell out of favour. Not that it did him much good, but Oxford had been right. Charles Arundell defected to the Spanish in 1583. Henry Howard was involved in the Throckmorton Conspiracy in the same year.¹⁶ If Howard is to be believed, de Vere was a satanist, necromancer, libertine and conspirator who had attempted to murder almost the entire English aristocracy on several occasions, either himself or through hired assassins. Furthermore, Oxford had ¹⁷

• uttered blasphemies against the Holy Trinity.
• said that the Bible defends dissoluteness more than Aretino.
• claimed he can summon Satan and had spoken to him many times.

To this Charles Arundell¹⁸ added that Oxford, in the presence of Walter Raleigh among others,

• had dismissed the Trinity as an old wives' tale.
• claimed he could write a better Bible within 6 days.
• regard Jesus Christ not as God, but as a simple human being.
• found Joseph to have been both a cuckold and a wanker.
• propagated that there is no life after death. This is only an invention to terrify people in this world.
• told me that he had often invoked the devil.
• created a book of prophecies under the guidance of the devil.

Howard’s and Arundell’s accusations span several documents, yet even these few excerpts reveal striking similarities with the Baines note, which in turn parallels Baines' own confession at the English College in Rheims,¹⁹ and the letters of Thomas Kyd²⁰. As mentioned, there is absolutely no connection between the de Vere scandal and Marlowe. So where do these similarities come from? If the documents are an independent account of atheism in practice, then England’s atheists were in fact paedophiles of both Epicureanism and Arianismwho felt an almost pathological urge to communicate themselves to everyone around them, and to Walter Raleigh in particular, as well as to publish their views in book form for those they could not reach directly, and whose goings-on, known to everyone for years, no one had felt the need to put an end to. Of course, it was not like that. Thomas Beard, a committed Puritan, in 1597 in The Theatre of God’s Judgements accused Marlowe in very similar terms of the same wicked utterances as in the Baines note and Kyd’s letters. None of these documents was available to him. Arundell, Howard, Baines, Kyd and Beard have not copied from each other, but have drawn from the same pool of stereotypes and clichés. As mentioned, atheism and sodomy were popular accusations when one wanted to damage a man’s reputation. (This post explains why this only worked for men.) There was a catalogue of accusations to fall back on if necessary. If an investigation did take place, as with Walter Raleigh, the allegations proved to be unsubstantiated.²¹ One of these clichés, which was also frequently used in connection with Marlowe, is the authorship of an infamous work full of blasphemy.

De tribus imposteribus

After Marlowe’s death, the debate continued to revolve around his subversive attitude, which Gabriel Harvey, who compared him to the satirist Lucian of Samosata who was critical of religion,²² called "Marlowisme "²³. Perhaps he too suspected him of being the author of De tribus imposteribus.²⁴ The above-mentioned Thomas Beard first publicly accused Marlowe of:

"[…] not only in word blasphemed the Trinitie, but also (as it is credibly reported) wrote bookes against it, affirming our Savior to be but a deceiver, and Moses to be but a conjurer and seducer of the people, […]"²⁵

The notorious text in which Moses, Jesus (and Mohamed, not mentioned by Beard) are portrayed as impostors is entitled De tribus impostoribus. No one has ever read it, but many wrote it. In 1239, Pope Gregory IX accused Emperor Frederick II of considering the three founders of religion to be impostors, which the Emperor denied. Since then, it has been claimed that a book exists in which these blasphemous views are recorded. The list of those who have been imputed authorship reads like a Who’s Who of literature and philosophy: Averroes, Giovanni Boccaccio, Pietro Aretino, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Niccolò Machiavelli, Giordano Bruno, Tomaso Campanella, François Rabelais, Baruch Spinoza, John Milton and many others.²⁶ The problem with the matter was always that no one could produce this work until 1716, when a manuscript from the estate of the Lutheran theologian Johann Friedrich Meyer was acquired for Prince Eugene’s library. The not very long Latin treatise is entitled Compendium de imposturis religionum, was not written before 1687 and is almost certainly by Johannes Joachim Müller (1661-1733). In 1719, Traité des trois imposteurs appeared in print and also anonymously. Today it is thought to have been written between 1677 and 1700 by Jean-Maximilien Lucas. Any connection with Marlowe is thus missing. Being accused of having written an atheistic work that defames the founders of three world religions as frauds was nothing special for centuries, certainly not an attitudinal trait and certainly not proof of authorship or the existence of this writing per se.

Alexander Grosart was convinced in 1881: "There is not the slightest doubt that Marlowe was well acquainted with 'De Tribus Impostoribus' […]"²⁷ Paul Harold Kocher always assumed that Marlowe had written a tract against Christianity that had never been published.²⁸ and George Truett Buckley said:

"Even if we could be sure that Marlowe had never seen the book, we yet know that he had heard of it, and with nothing but the title to go on, a person of his fertility of imagination could readily have conjectured the information that such a book ought to contain."²⁹

Of course he will have heard of it, almost everyone with an above-average education had heard of it and even people lacking any imagination knew what would be in this book. It has been talked and written about for centuries. (It’s like Mrs Columbo – everyone has heard of her, but no one has ever seen her). Those who published truly subversive writing did so firstly abroad, secondly anonymously, and thirdly they did not tell everyone, as Marlowe had supposedly done.

So what was Marlowe’s attitude to religion?

The crucial question is not: What did Christopher Marlowe believe in? Apart from "We don’t know", there can be no answer to that. (Unless some letters or diary entries of his happen to turn up at some point in this regard). Parker scholars, as Marlowe was, were expected to pursue a clerical career.³⁰ As a cleric, he would have received a respectable social status as well as economic security. He deliberately decided against it. We don’t know his motives: did he just not feel like it? Was there a crisis of faith? Did he doubt not God but religion?

"Marlowe was called an atheist in his own day; the word served then to describe any unorthodoxy. But […] if he was an atheist in the modern sense at all, he was a God-haunted atheist, involved simultaneously in revolt and the sense of the necessity for punishment against such a revolt, simultaneously fascinated and horrified by the apparent self-sufficiency of the fallen world."³¹

Therefore, the much more intriguing question is: how do Marlowe’s characters feel about religion? They come to a realisation that was already well known in the 16th century, but rarely expressed so openly: "[…] religion is a political tool that benefits few numbers of people while it causes torture and death to many."³²