Anxious and Angry: Alec Ryrie’s Genealogy of Emotions and Belief
When intellectuals look for explanations of developments in history, we tend to look at other intellectuals. We tend to see thinkers as the driving force of history. Prioritizing the mind and its abstract reasoning, we disregard human affectivity. Like Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times, we proclaim, “You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.” Alec Ryrie, historian of religion and professor at Durham University, does not discard facts or the life of the mind in his genealogy of modernity, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt. He places the intellect and the pursuit of facts in the context of the emotional life of believers and non-believers. He examines the emotions that formed the reasoning minds of the people of Europe so that he can understand the emotional grounds of belief and unbelief.
Ryrie builds on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age in that he also wants to understand how atheism and unbelief, which were nearly impossible in the Middle Ages, became common today. If God is dead, he wants to find out “who killed him, when, and how?” Too many historians have tended to the look for “the usual answer . . . philosophers, scientists, and intellectuals.” Ryrie does not pardon this trio; rather, he includes bartenders, obscure ministers, and angsty teenagers in his genealogy. For him, unbelief and belief are affective states, prior to any intellectual stance. Like any genealogy, Ryrie depends on an anthropology of the human person. His philosophical anthropology avoids an account of unaffected minds who disbelieve on the basis of reason and argument: “Most of us make our lives’ great choices . . . intuitively, with our whole selves, embedded as we are in our social and historical contexts, usually unable to articulate why we have done it, often not even aware that we have done it.” Ryrie wants to discard the reason versus emotion canard. Our reason is affective; our affects are reasonable.
A genealogy of human values and beliefs ought not disregard the affective life. It is not just that our reasoning is affected and our affections reasonable. Our affects lead the way, especially when they are combined with affected social practices. Our rationalizations of our lives “may be true, but in a meagre, post hoc way.” Considering this, the complicated relations our emotions have with social practices, we need a genealogy of the emotions that undergirds belief and unbelief. Our varying emotional stances towards God have changed over the past 1000 years; our intellectual stances have followed suit. We must track the former to understand the latter.
For this, we do not need an account of intellectual stances on theism, but rather an account of the lived experiences of belief and unbelief. A more robust account of atheism and theism extends beyond arguments for or against God’s existence into the lives of human persons and communities. This means we need to go beyond “‘contemplative’ or ‘speculative’ atheists—philosophical deniers of God” to explore what Ryrie calls “practical atheists, who claim to believe but live as though they do not.” Practical atheists intellectually affirm God’s existence, but in their emotional, and so social and moral, lives, they act as if God does not exist. It is not necessarily that they are hypocrites but rather that their emotional and social lives have shifted prior to their intellectual affirmations. We must track how emotions led people to realize they were no longer believers.
In contemporary life, most socio-cultural spaces have been secularized. Our cultural landscape is marked by practically atheistic space. He examines how these spaces of divine absence grew. Ryrie is like a detective whose case regards a missing person; his “subject is a disappearance: the evaporation of a once very widespread religious culture.” He sketches a cultural topography, describing how gaps opened in the religious space that was Christendom. If now we find few spaces where God is central, in the Middle Ages there were few spaces where God was not. Ryrie begins his exploration with the expansion of these spaces-where-God-is-not. Ryrie’s medieval archive is incidents of blasphemy in pubs and amongst doctors, and his Renaissance texts are political works. In each case, he finds the development of “another secularized space. . . . Alongside the alehouse, the gaming table, and the consulting room, we now have the council chamber.” These spaces slowly grew, leading to the modern situation in which “religion was confined to quarters, like a once-formidable relative sent to a nursing home.” How did these small gaps in the religious spaces of Europe grow to such an extent?
Anger and anxiety challenged Christian faith. Anger arose over avarice and desire for power within the Church, and over the venial hypocrisy of fellow Christians. It often ended up directed at the God who established this religion. Christians increasingly became wracked with anxiety over issues of damnation, doubt, and ecclesial uncertainty. Debates, especially among “freethinkers,” arose over whether virtuous but irreligious people could go to heaven. If they could, was religion necessary? These debates were grounded in anxiety about salvation. Ryrie sees the source of destabilizing anxiety in the practices of Christians:
The Reformation. . . . mobilized doubts as a weapon and encouraged ordinary believers to do the same, in the hope that they would make their way through a reflective and experienced faith rather than a simple and trusting one. . . . The implicit doubts that had long pervaded Christendom became explicit. The aim was not to turn believers into unbelievers. It was to turn naïve believers into sophisticated, self-aware believers, who had confronted temptation and overcome it.
These doubts developed into a deep anxiety about how to ascertain the truth of religion. For some, this meant a deepened faith; for others, this anxiety began to stifle faith.
While Ryrie maintains that the anxiety was more widespread and created a deeper sense of unease, it was anger that brought a moral force to unbelief. As unbelief spread, sourced by deep-seated unease, the moral imagination of what an atheist was like changed. Increasingly, the image of a wildly immoral man no longer was the dominant image of an atheist. Here Ryrie highlights The Atheist’s Tragedy, a play from 1611. The atheist D’Amville is portrayed as an amoral, sex obsessed, incestuous man, who ultimately kills himself with an axe accidentally. The model was clear; to be an atheist was to fall into sundry sins. Ryrie writes that the Church “wanted angry unbelievers to stick to their role as villians.” As anger and anxiety flowed together, atheists “were beginning to bid for the moral high ground.” They were increasingly imagined as persons motivated by deep moral concern.
Ultimately, for Ryrie, “The moral force of the unbelief of anger and the moral urgency of the unbelief of anxiety mixed into a gathering flow of insistent, ethically driven doubts that began carving Christendom’s old-established landscape into something new.” Part of what makes unbelief so common in contemporary life is not that people have been logically convinced of unbelief, but that they feel Christian belief is morally problematic. Christian witness was supposed to attract people by the moral lives of believers. The confluence of anger and anxiety now means that most people are repelled by the ethics of Christianity, even if, as I explore in my review of John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism, they are repelled for ethically Christian reasons.
Ryrie challenges intellectual historians to work on genealogies that are not limited to ideas or disincarnate minds. We must engage with historical developments of persons as wholes. This means investigating the mirror of history and finding people. This should allow us to look at ourselves in a more comprehensive way. In this, I think Ryrie misses an opportunity, one that the academy makes nearly impossible. If the heart of his work is foregrounding the moods that undergird cultural and religious change, it means that intellectuals should start to foreground their own affects. What emotions do we bring to our texts and questions? What are we anxious about? What makes us angry? How do our doubts and certainties play off each other? Ryrie’s book reminds us that despite the various certainties of our time, anxiety and anger are presently destabilizing us and so opening new possibilities. Foregrounding our own emotions may help us continue to think belief and unbelief in new ways. And that makes me feel hopeful.
