It is in this context that I would like to explore his interest in Roman religion. Among the numerous qualities Machiavelli assigns it35, there is one that stands out, and it has to do with this idea of citizenship as a means to produce citizens who see themselves as actors. Writing about Numa Pompilius, the ‘founder’ of Roman religion, Machiavelli claims that, “having found a very fierce people and wishing to bring them to civil obedience with the arts of piece, he turned to religion as something absolutely necessary for maintaining a civilized society” (Machiavelli 2008, 50). The idea that Machiavelli is putting forward here, that religion helped to render people obedient and civil has led to a widespread interpretation that “presents Machiavelli’s religion as a belief system whose value is determined by its functional utility to the state” (Fontana 1999, 639). This type of interpretation is developed most succinctly and notably by D.E.S. Muir who writes, “to Machiavelli, religion was of most importance in reinforcing the political power of authority” (Muir 1936, 159), but I believe it would seem a rather simple reading of such a complex thinker to make the claim that religion simply serves to buttress authority. This is not to say that Machiavelli does not address this issue. His insistence that religion will keep soldiers from deserting because of their fear of violating a religious oath, as well as his assertion that, “it was necessary for Numa, who pretended to have a close relationship with a nymph who advised him about how he should advise the people…because Numa wanted to establish new and unusual institutions in the city, and he doubted that his own authority was sufficient” (Machiavelli 2008, 51-52), point in this direction. However, that
does not seem to capture the entirety of Machiavelli’s understanding of the purposes and goals of religion, nor the functioning of political institutions more generally.
Instead, I would like to temper the claim that religion should be seem as simply an instrument of the ruling power and forward the more expansive idea that religion, for Machiavelli, is one of the institutions that work develop and maintain a civic and political spirit that can potentially ward off the ravages of time and decay. Pocock notes that, “by the institutionalization of civic virtue, the republic or polis maintains its own stability in time” (Pocock 2003, 183). Beyond the merely coercive, religion, as a civic institution fulfills quite a few roles for Machiavelli. “For Machiavelli, religion was an institution that educated men” (Hale 1961, 177), and this education, rather than simply servicing an additive function in men’s social-psychologies, played a much greater, even constitutive role.
With keen attention being paid to problem of the historical construction of citizenship, Maurizio Viroli writes, “religious worship educates the manners and customs of the people” (Viroli 2010, 22), and it is this attention to ‘customs’ that I argue is very important for Machiavelli. Without sound customs, as a foundational component of the social make-up of the body of citizens, the entire structure of institutions that make up a political body will be for naught: “Just as good customs require laws in order to be maintained, so laws require good customs in order to be observed” (Machiavelli 2008, 68). It is not that Machiavelli offers us a simple equation along the lines of ‘good customs create good laws’, his thinking is much too complex for that. Rather, he seems to offer the claim that laws and customs as co-constitutive of each other. Religion is necessary for
a certain culture to emerge among the people of a city that allows them to understand and observe laws, and laws emerge as a means to ‘maintain’ customs and manners36. It is in this context that we can understand Machiavelli’s discussion corrupts cities that wish to remain free, from Book I of The Discourses. Here, Machiavelli strenuously calls not just for the passage of new laws, but also the creation of new institutions. He notes that, “The institutions and laws established in a republic at the time of its birth, when men were good, are no longer suitable later, once men have become evil…this means that new laws are insufficient, because the institutions that remain in place corrupt them” (Machiavelli 2008, 68). Here, we see several themes that are central to Machiavelli’s political philosophy. First, the concern for previously good republics becoming bad brings us back to the seemingly insurmountable problem of political decay. But it is the desire to fight against that decay that leads us to the second theme: the relationship between customs, institutions, and laws.
For Machiavelli, it is not enough to have a certain set of laws, those laws must be reinforced by a certain set of civic and political customs and institutions that exist within a mutually beneficial relationship to one another. Without one, it would be impossible for the others to have any ameliorative effects on the corruption of the city. Laws that are, ‘good’ will not function as such outside of a set of customs and institutions that are corrupted. Likewise, ‘good’ customs and institutions will fall pretty to the corruption of time and Fortuna if the laws that govern them are not adequate to the task. In addition to the construction of ‘customs’ generally speaking, there is one in particular that
36 In Viroli’s terminology, manners is a much more political and encompassing term. Rather than a term
denoting political behavior, manners is much more concerned with how people interact with one another in a public and political way.
Machiavelli is concerned with as a civic goal and one that he sees as having a clear and intimate connection to the role of religion in a political society: the construction and perpetuation of virtù.
If half of our actions (more or less) are controlled by Fortuna, and the other half are controlled by human effort and activity, what is it about human behavior that will allow us to successfully build the banks and barriers that will divert the raging river of Fortuna? For Machiavelli, that human quality is virtù. This term denotes a great many specific qualities in Machiavelli’s writings: the ability to have foresight, to undertake strong actions, the ability to change actions, “as the character of the times changes” (Machiavelli 1994, 75), prudence, boldness, and great skill. Hannah Arendt give a concise definition of the term when she claims that, “Virtù is the response, summoned up by man, to the world, or rather to the constellation for fortuna in which the world opens up, presents and offers itself to him” (Arendt 1968, 137). Arendt’s definition is helpful not only because it ties virtù directly to fortuna, but because, in referring to virtù as a response, she makes it very clear that virtù is an activity, rather than simply a thing possessed.
The terms itself dominates the pages of The Prince, and while the term is more absent in The Discourses, the specific qualities that are embodied in the idea of virtù recur throughout. It is important, however, to make note of a very specific change that occurs in The Discourses with respect to this term. Unlike in Machiavelli’s famous treatise The Prince, where virtù is seen embodied in specific rulers (princes, kings, etc…), in The Discourses we seem to see a ‘democratizing’ of the term, and its attendant
qualities. No longer is virtù, or the qualities of virtù simply those of great leaders and individual princes. Instead, these terms can be applied to the entire political body: rulers and citizens alike. So rather than just talking about the virtù of a prince, Machiavelli believes that we can talk about the virtù of a society, and it is in this context that religion again plays an important role.
Religion, as a founding institution of society has, is concerned with, “the development of virtù” (Gilbert 1984, 185), and the health of religion is itself a key barometer to the presence or absence of virtù within the body politic. This connecting between religion as a civic institution and political vitality would seem to contradict Leo Strauss’ claim that “In Machiavelli’s presentation the Roman polity as the model is characterized by the unqualified supremacy of political authority proper as distinguished from any religious authority” (Strauss 1978, 184). For Machiavelli, such a simple split between the presence of religious authority and political authority is theoretically nonsensical, and as Ronald Beiner notes, “Religion lies at the heart of Machiavellian politics” (Beiner 1993, 622). For Machiavelli, the political well-being of a community cannot be divorced from the civic functions of religion, what Anthony Parel calls “a form of political ‘education’” (Parel 1992, 52). Rather than seeing politics as reigning supreme over religion, as Strauss claims, religion is one of the ways in which citizens are educated to become political actors. If religion as a civic institution is one of the major factors in the successful functioning of politics, politics and religion, are much more mutually constitutive and work to buttress one another. In fact, one could argue that the ‘health’ of the body politic (its ability to fight against historical decay) can be measured by looking
at how strong the assorted founding institutions (religion, law, and customs) are, and that the continued health of religion is dependent upon strong political actors and actions. This multi-faceted (overdetermined?) conception of politics is essential for understanding just how Machiavelli believes politics operates in, especially, a Republican community. Maurizio Viroli reminds us, “The word politicus was used to denote…the concrete collective life of the city, the customs, the habits, and the passions of the citizens” (Viroli 1993, 157). The intricate connections that Machiavelli draws between religion (as well as other institutions) and politics forces us to see his conception of politics as something that involves nearly the entire social fabric of a community. It is expressive of, and constituted by, the customs, passions, and habits that are exhibited by the community.
In The Discourses we see a very deliberate and clear connection between history, political and cultural institutions, and the health of the political society. Good founding institutions both inspire a type of civic virtù that pervades the polity as well as create the conditions for the emergence of virtuous citizenship. Given that it is only through the presence of this type of citizenship infused with virtù, that a given political society might stave off, even for a time, the ravages of historical decay, it seems self-evident that, for Machiavelli, the primary concern of the political thinker is HOW to ensure that the institutions and culture of the society in question continue to produce these conditions.
If these institutions are themselves historical, and if the defining feature of all historical things are their being subject to decay, would it not stand to reason that those very institutions themselves are also subject to decay, corruption, and collapse? After all, if political communities are universally subject to the ravages of time and decay, as well
as the loss of virtù and virility – the very qualities that are created (and maintained) by these institutions – it would stand to reason that the primary cause of that decay would have to be the decay of those institutions themselves. The case in point, for Machiavelli, would be his extended discussion of Christianity and its role in the corruption of the Italian city states. Here, we see an explicit treatment by Machiavelli of the corruption of founding institutions and how that corruption is immediately and dramatically reflected in the larger corruption of political life.
This theme of a corrupt Italy is one that runs through Machiavelli’s entire political corpus, a theme neatly captured by James Atkinson’s conception of Machiavelli’s, “desperate concern over Italy’s suffering and the yearning for a redeemer” (Atkinson 2010, 23). At the end of The Prince, when he is exhorting for a political hero to arise and redeem Italy, Machiavelli laments, “For see the conditions to which Italy has been reduced…She is beaten, robbed, wounded, put to fight: She has experienced every sort of injury” (Machiavelli 1994, 77). This redeemer, or ‘new ruler’, would be one who can “take control of events…while benefiting everyone who lives here” (Machiavelli 1994, 77). Clearly, this new ruler would need to be a person full of virtù to make up for the clear absence of civic virtù anywhere else in Italy. In The Discourses, Machiavelli continues on this theme of corruption but here he ties it specifically to the issue of religion.
In considering, therefore, why all the peoples of ancient times were greater lovers of liberty than those of our own day, I believe this arises from the same cause that today makes men less strong, which I believe lies in the difference between our education and that of antiquity, based upon the difference between our religion and that of antiquity. (Machiavelli 2008, 158)
Now this claim needs to be parsed carefully, for while on the surface of it, it seems as though Machiavelli is making the blanket claim that Christianity is a corrupt religion that has led to the political corruption (or at least weakening) that he is bearing witness to. Or as Strauss writes, “According to Machiavelli Christianity has led the world into weakness and the failure to imitate the ancients properly is due to some extent to Christianity” (Strauss 1978, 177). While Strauss is correct in one respect, that there is an important connection between Christianity and corruption, the simple claim that Christianity itself is somehow essentially corrupted (or corrupting of people), is misleading. The reality of Machiavelli’s claim is more nuanced than that.
Almost immediately after making this comparison between the ‘religion of antiquity’ and religion of his own time, Machiavelli asserts that, “while our religion has shown us truth and the true path, it also makes us place a lower value on worldly honour, whereas the pagans, who greatly valued honor and considered it their highest good, were more ferocious in their actions” (Machiavelli 2008, 158-159. My italics). This would seem to demonstrate that, for Machiavelli, there is not necessarily a connection between the theological soundness of Christianity (whether it is the ‘true’ religion or not) and the impact that it can or does have on the political community (whether it promotes virtù or not). This leads Sebastian de Grazia to note that rather than Christianity as the target of Machiavelli’s critique, we see that “The Prince and Discourses criticize the Church for its corrupting of Italians and its foreign policy” (deGrazia 1994, 89). This distinction between Christianity and The Church is important because it places the corrupting influence on a specific manifestation of Christianity that has emerged historically.
While Machiavelli does continue to contrast Christianity with the Roman religion of ‘the pagans’ he fails to locate that corruption at the heart of some essence of Christianity. Instead, there almost seems to be the distinct possibility that, for Machiavelli, “rightly interpreted, Christianity teaches that it is permitted to ‘exalt and defend the fatherland’” (Beiner 1993, 623), and in fact, a Christianity ‘properly interpreted’ would be able to embrace the very qualities of worldly glory, love of liberty, and strength, that Machiavelli admires about the Roman pagan religion. For our purposes, this means that whether we see Machiavelli as a Christian37, or as a strategic rhetorician, is largely irrelevant. The important issue concerning religion is how the institution itself has been interpreted, how it has evolved historically; the way in which the institution has been interpreted historically is thrust into the spotlight and takes precedence over the ‘true’ nature of the institution itself. We see this most clearly when Machiavelli argues that the softness of the modern (Christian) world as comes, “more from the cowardice of when who have interpreted our religion according to an ideal of freedom from earthly toil and not according to one of exception ability…these false interpretations that explain why we no longer find…as much love of liberty among the peoples as there was then” (Machiavelli 2008, 159. My italics). Because religion is practiced, carried out, and therefore interpreted by humans, who are flawed and imperfect creatures, there is a distinct possibility that the institution of religion, like any other institution overseen by humans, can, over time, become corrupt and be subject to the ravages of decay and decline.
So if, for Machiavelli, the historical nature of these institutions (religion included) is a key component to understanding his larger political concerns over the seemingly unending conflict between vitality and decay, we have to ask a simple question: what forces does Machiavelli feel can be marshalled against this fear of degeneration? That is to say, if history is the process of decay and corruption, is there anything that can be done to thwart what seems like an inevitable and universal process. The answer, it turns out, is to look in the very same place that we find the cause of the decay. History itself is both the source of this concern and the potential source of its remedy.