Machiavelli accuses Christians of un-civic softness. His attention distracted by Heaven, the Christian neglects reality on earth. Since material reality turns out to be the only kind Machiavelli admits, head-in-the-clouds Christians bemuse themselves, sometimes to the Florentine’s amusement but more usually to his irritation. He works to replace the Prince of Peace with the Prince of War.
Insofar as he succeeded, his princelings initially availed themselves of Christianity as a civil, no longer a prophetic religion, asserting the “divine right” of princes in Europe’s absolute monarchies, the characteristic regime of the early modern, centralized state Machiavelli had conceived as the successor both to petty city-states and the spiritual empire of the Christian Church. But Christianity’s prophetic character proved persistent; the new states fell into uncompromising (because uncompromisable) religious warfare, both amongst and within themselves. Rightly alarmed by this combination of power-politics with religious fervor, Machiavelli’s philosophic progeny began to formulate regimes that might settle this “theological-political” problem: the forthrightly materialist or “secular” absolutism of Hobbes, whereby the monarch alone would determine the religion of his subjects while funneling them into the peaceful pursuits of commerce; or the republicanism of Locke and Montesquieu, whose equally commercial regimes would take strong religiosity out of politics by tolerating every sect that respected the natural and civil rights of citizens. Although the older, monarchic Christians fought back (as in Europe’s Holy Alliance), by the end of the nineteenth century Europe saw itself divided between largely secular republics in England and France and largely secular oligarchies in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Hence the Great War.
Decades before that war, Alexis de Tocqueville spotted a largely unanticipated social consequence of Machiavellian statism. To deny Heaven in the name of defending Earth, men were rejecting not only Christian doctrine but the religious orientation simply. That is, they were ignoring all that is “above” man for the sake of what is in and around him. Physically above us, even the stars are really beneath us, objects to be conquered along the rest of nature. To reject the “high” simultaneously elevates man to world rulership and democratizes the social order. True, Christianity insisted on human equality, but it was human equality under God; Tocqueville calls Christianity a precious bequest of aristocratic life because the revelation of human equality, of human “species-being” (as some of Tocqueville’s contemporaries would put it) came “from above,” from God Who walked on earth but was not of earth. Tocqueville expected the aristocracies of the old regimes to continue to decline, but with the hoped-for proviso that they would do so gracefully, guiding the newly-democratized modern societies away from Machiavellianism, away from materialism, away from the “hard” despotism of would-be Napoleons to come, but also away from the regime Tocqueville suspected more likely: the “soft” despotism of administrative states, wherein the new “aristocrats” or oligarchs would rule not by the authority of God and of eminent men but by the impersonal authority of science, aiming at the continued “conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate,” as that Machiavellian, Francis Bacon, had described the modern “project.” The Great War demonstrated the consequences of failing sufficiently to heed Tocqueville’s advice.
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