• DOI:10.1353/JHI.1999.0041
• Corpus ID: 159723434

Papirius and the Chickens, or Machiavelli on the Necessity of Interpreting Religion

@article{Najemy1999PapiriusAT,
  title={Papirius and the Chickens, or Machiavelli on the Necessity of Interpreting Religion},
  author={John M. Najemy},
  journal={Journal of the History of Ideas},
  year={1999},
  volume={60},
  pages={659 - 681}
}

• John M. Najemy
• Published 1 October 1999
• Philosophy
• Journal of the History of Ideas

No aspect of Machiavelli's thought elicits a wider range of interpretations than religion, and one may wonder why his utterances on this subject appear to move in so many different directions and cause his readers to see such different things. One reason is of course his famous challenge to conventional piety in the advice to princes (in chapter 18 of The Prince) that, while it is important to appear to be "all compassion, faith, integrity, humanity, and religione, and there is nothing more necessary for a prince than to appear to have the last of these," these "qualities" can actually be "damaging" if a prince insists on observing them at all times. For it is sometimes necessary to act "against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religione."' Machiavelli probably never wrote more famous or infamous words than these, even though they express an obvious, and hardly original, truth about all politics. But the world of the later sixteenthand seventeenth-century reformations and religious absolutisms could not tolerate such honesty, and Machiavelli's reputation was quickly tarred with accusations of devilish immorality by the very societies that thought it was godly to bum heretics. On the issue of religion Machiavelli became, and to some extent remains, a convenient scapegoat often blamed for the decline of religion in the modem world, all of which has no doubt intensified the polemical and ideological nature of the debates surrounding his views of religion in general and Christianity in particular.