Conclusion: Machiavelli’s Gospel

Summary

I love my native city more than my own soul.

In the Discourses, Machiavelli opines that religious sects “vary two or three times in five or in six thousand years” (II.5.1). This means that Machiavelli believed that Christianity—which “come[s] from men” (D II.5.1) and is thus subject to this general rule—would survive between approximately 1,666 and 3,000 years. This explains his flexible approach when combating Christ: sometimes, he intimates that the destruction of Christ's legacy is imminent; at other times, he proposes a more covert, long-term strategy to defeat the Prince of Peace.

In either case, once Christianity is destroyed, Machiavelli does not think it will come back from the dead. While he concedes that one might renew sects by leading them “back towards their beginning” (D III.1.2), the examples of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic prove that a renewal will not remedy Christianity's defects, precisely because its founder is so lacking. Nor is a renewed Christianity likely to find another earthly dynamo like the Roman Empire to supplement its effeminate meekness with ferocity and order: because it has rendered the world “effeminate and heaven disarmed” (D II.2.2), virtue reigns only in the ancient histories that it failed to extirpate—or in provinces untainted by Christianity. This explains why Machiavelli invokes a Mosaic redemption at the end of The Prince. Just as Rome had to return to the example of the “fierce and bellicose” Romulus, rather than “quiet and religious” Numa (D I.19.1), Christians must look to the ancient example of the unchristian and inhuman Moses to renew their religion. Failing that, the bellicose orders of the ascendant Ottoman Empire of “the Turk”—following Moses's most faithful imitator, Muhammad—stand poised to inundate Italy with its superior arms, orders, and virtue.

The Prince is written to demonstrate the insufficiency of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, as a model for human life. Machiavelli's commendation of the prince of war, which occurs at the center point of the book, is important evidence of this effort. Yet the strongest evidence of Machiavelli's anti-Christian plan consists in his repeated contradictions of the New Testament and his critical allusions to the life and teachings of Christ.