In August 2008, anticipating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species (1859), Richard Dawkins presented on British television three programmes designed to celebrate Darwin's genius. By contrasting Darwin's theory with ideas of creation that he ascribed to religion, Dawkins stressed the originality of Darwin's naturalistic account of how species developed from pre-existing forms. The invocation of a contrasting religious position had a didactic function - to reinforce the viewer's understanding of Darwin's science and its naturalistic presuppositions. A second goal, having many antecedents in the history of science, was to use the theory's supposed implications for religion as a technique for exciting public interest in, and appreciation of, Darwin's achievement. However brilliant the exposition of a scientific theory, without claims that the theory has major implications for something else there has always been the risk of indifference in a general audience. Because of their prevalence, religious beliefs have often, conveniently, constituted that something else. There can be a temptation in such contexts to exaggerate the cultural implications of scientific innovations for the purpose of promoting the science. Dawkins' anti-religious juxtaposition of science and religion does, however, serve a third and explicitly avowed goal - that of persuading those who live in religious darkness that there is a great light.

The Medici played a central role in Machiavelli's life and works. Until 1494 he lived in a city dominated by them, and from 1498 to 1512 he was employed by a government to which they represented a threat and an alternative focus of allegiance for discontented Florentines. When, after eighteen years of exile, they returned to Florence in 1512, the Medici removed Machiavelli from the chancery and his other posts, but he strove subsequently to win their favor, most famously by dedicating The Prince first to Giuliano de' Medici, an idea he had to abandon, and subsequently to Giuliano's nephew, the younger Lorenzo. These efforts were unsuccessful until 1520, when he finally secured their patronage in the form of a commission from the Florentine Studio, arranged by its head, Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, to write a history of Florence, a book that devotes much attention to the deeds of the family's leading members in the fifteenth century. In Machiavelli's last years, Medici favor brought him several minor government posts and assignments. Little is known of Machiavelli's early connections to the Medici. Apart from the friendship of his father, Bernardo, with the Medici chancellor Bartolomeo Scala, the best evidence for Niccolò's links to the Medici is the poem he addressed to Giuliano, son of the elder Lorenzo. Following the expulsion in 1494 of the Medici regime, which was replaced by the most broadly based constitution in Florence's history, whose core was the Great Council of over three thousand members, and especially during his chancery years from 1498 to 1512, Machiavelli had little to do with the Medici.

Machiavelli best combined his talent with success when writing for the theater. His signature, “historico, comico et tragico,” to a letter to Francesco Guicciardini of October 1525, sounding so much like an epitaph, suggests he knew as much. But as the first element of that series indicates, his theatrical vocation was never independent of the study of antiquity and the coordinated observation of contemporary politics. Drama gave Machiavelli opportunities not only for mirroring the civil society of his day (one of the traditional definitions of the function of theater), but also for fashioning on the stage an image of the statecraft that he above all others was competent to dissect. Lodovico Ariosto's omission of Machiavelli from the canon of Italian poets in the 1516 edition of the Orlando furioso may have helped truncate Machiavelli's career as a narrative poet (the Asino and second Decennale remained unfinished), but Machiavelli, along with Ariosto and Bernardo Bibbiena, was a chief dramatic voice of the generation that witnessed “the ruin of Italy.”

Readers and playgoers agreed: written around 1518, Mandragola enjoyed prestigious early performances (Rome 1520, Venice 1522, and Florence 1526) and was anthologized both early (1525) and later (1554) in the century; it was performed by the Accademia Olimpica in Vicenza in 1564, as was Clizia in 1569.2

Over the past ninety years we have come to understand and appreciate the world, the universe which embraces it, and their emergence and development in completely new ways. Thanks to astronomy and physics - particularly to the speciality known as cosmology - we now know that the universe we inhabit began expanding and cooling from an extremely hot and dense, homogeneous, simple state about 13.7 billion years ago. That initial state, often now referred to as the Planck era, was so extreme that our current physics is completely unable to describe it. Space and time as we know them had not yet emerged, and the fundamental forces of gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear interactions were undoubtedly unified, and thus indistinguishable from one another. Only a thorough and complete quantum description of reality, including space-time and gravity - a quantum cosmology - would be adequate. That is something we do not yet possess, although many people are expending tremendous efforts to develop the components of such a description by exploring superstrings, loop-quantum gravity and non-commutative geometry, as well as exploiting semi-classical approaches to quantizing space-time, gravity and the universe itself.

The military occupies a paradoxical, if not controversial, place in Machiavelli scholarship. Most commentators agree that Machiavelli's concern with military affairs was at the heart of his political thinking and that the military crisis of contemporary Italy crucially influenced his views. It is widely recognized that Machiavelli considered force and military strength to be determining factors in relations among states. Scholars also concur that his involvement with the new Florentine militia ordinance of 1506 was an important formative experience during his chancery days and that the idea of a conscript army or citizen militia was a key element in his classically inspired republicanism. Despite this widespread acknowledgment of the role of the military in Machiavelli's thought, the Art of War (1521), his most systematic and detailed treatment of military organization and the methods of war, remains by far the least studied of his major works. How can this paradox be explained, and is this relative lack of interest in the Art of War justifiable? This chapter analyzes Machiavelli's military experience and writings on military matters and takes a critical look at the Art of War. By comparing this late work to the earlier memoranda Machiavelli composed in connection with the militia project and his theorizing on military affairs in The Prince and the Discourses, we will ask how and to what extent the Art of War contributes to our overall understanding of Machiavelli's political and military project, and in what way his military experience and the role he played in the militia ordinance of 1506 prepared, or anticipated, his views on military affairs in the major works.

When he wrote The Prince and the Discourses, which were published only after he died, Machiavelli was a defeated and suspect man. Reading the prefaces and dedication of the Discourses on Livy, one feels that the author had lost all hope that more auspicious times might come for Florence and himself and that he was placing his hopes elsewhere: with his restless and immanent wisdom he was trying to reach peoples in other places and times, hoping his books could teach them to decipher and demystify their own history. Because of Machiavelli's denial of divine providence and his assertion that humans make their own history, his work invites them to take control of their own fate by seizing the first appropriate opportunity. Although he offers a political analysis devoid of moral prejudice, his writings are not without a certain use of dissimulation. “Machiavelli,” wrote Leo Strauss, “does not go to the end of the road; the last part of the road must be travelled by the reader who understands what is omitted by the writer.” This is why, in more than one sense, Machiavelli considered his Discourses a work in progress. As Machiavelli himself emphasized, history is most often written for the benefit of the winners; by contrast, his work is like a thorn in their flesh. He invites us to mistrust authority, including that represented by tradition and constituted power. However, he does not deny that some such power may be necessary to defend freedom against its enemies.

“He who builds on the people builds on mud”: Machiavelli cites this saying in The Prince (9.272) only to refute it by arguing that the people, if properly managed, will provide a more secure foundation for the Prince's state than fortresses or allies or mercenaries. This important moment in Machiavelli's work does more than elevate the people as well as the Prince who rules them; it also focuses on what must be considered perhaps the key metaphor in the book defining the Prince's activities: he “makes foundations [fare fondamenti].” Machiavelli repeats some version of this notion dozens of times in the relatively short text of The Prince, encouraging the reader to see the Prince as a cross between an architect and a mason, and illustrating the thesis, argued long ago by Jacob Burckhardt in his classic Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), namely, that people in the period saw the state as a work of art. That Machiavelli should focus on foundations is not surprising since the Prince he describes is “new”: he does not inherit a state, but is faced with the challenge of creating one. Machiavelli is thinking of such “new” princes as Hieron of Syracuse, who rose up through the ranks of the army to seize control of Syracuse; the mythical Theseus, who founded Athens; and, perhaps the most memorable of them all, Cesare Borgia, who attempted, but failed, to create an enduring state in Italy. Even established rulers who already possess states, such as Ferdinand of Aragon, can be “new” (21.291), in this case because he is new to those portions of his realm he acquired after his marriage to Isabella of Castile. “New” princes must, of course, begin at the beginning: before they can build a state, they must make its foundations.

In the dedications to both The Prince and the Discourses, Machiavelli asserted that he had acquired his understanding of politics through lengthy experience of the contemporary world and continual reading of ancient texts. His fourteen-year career in the Florentine chancery placed him at the hub of government and politics and afforded him manifold opportunities, whether at his desk in Florence or as an emissary abroad, to observe and experience at close hand the problems of Florentine politics and territorial administration and European diplomacy and statecraft, problems on which he meditated and began to write during his career in government. Machiavelli's participation in the political world came to an abrupt end in 1512, when a successful coup against Piero Soderini, the elected permanent head of Florentine government, caused the collapse of the republic, the restoration of a generally unpopular Medici regime, and Machiavelli's dismissal from his posts and banishment from political action. The coup and his fate gave Machiavelli the time to write more discursively about his understanding of political affairs from a perspective sharpened by the failure of the regime and personal loss. Among the issues that preoccupied Machiavelli in the major works of his enforced retirement were military strength and force, political stability, and leadership, or rather their reverse: the military weakness, instability, inadequate justice, factionalism, and absence of leadership that dogged the Florentine Republic for much of his time in the chancery.

In the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy Machiavelli undertook a wide-ranging comparison of ancient and modern states and societies, enlivened by a running contrast between the ancient Roman republic and modern Florence that gives the work much of its polemical force. The proem to book 1 announces a search for “new methods and institutions [modi e ordini nuovi]” for “organizing republics, maintaining governments, ruling kingdoms, organizing militias, conducting wars, rendering justice to subjects, and extending territorial power.” Machiavelli chose Livy's history of Rome as his textual interlocutor because of its abundant material on the early history of the ancient republic, which was, for Machiavelli, the exemplary state by which all others, ancient and modern, should be assessed. This was not a purely theoretical inquiry. Motivated by the “inborn desire I have always had to work, without fear or hesitation, for those things I believe will benefit everyone” (proem, book 1), Machiavelli hopes that “those who read these analyses of mine may more easily draw from them that utility for which knowledge of history should be sought.” Asserting (proem, book 2) that ancient “virtù” and modern “vice [vizio]” are “clearer than the sun” and that the modern debasement of religion, laws, and military training has reached extreme levels of corruption, particularly among those holding the reins of power, he must “boldly” say what he understands of “past and future times, so that those, still young, who will read these writings of mine can reject the present and prepare themselves to imitate those former times whenever fortune gives them the opportunity.”

“I have not adorned this work nor filled it with long periodic sentences or pompous and magnificent words or any of the other elegant niceties and superficial ornaments with which many writers like to adorn and elaborate their matter; for it was my intent that it should either be entirely unembellished, or that the variety of the argument and the weightiness of the subject matter should alone constitute its appeal.” Machiavelli's scornful dismissal of verbal ornament in the dedicatory letter of The Prince can look to modern eyes like a rejection of “rhetoric,” in the reductive sense that word is often given today, namely, overripe verbal bombast. Within Machiavelli's culture, however, rhetoric was understood in a broader and more positive sense as a comprehensive practice of persuasion, embracing the conceptual as well as the verbal, and as an art with a particular political vocation. Machiavelli's writings are heavily indebted to this rhetorical tradition, not only for the form in which they cast their arguments, but also for their substance. We might even describe political practice, in the distinctive way Machiavelli frames it, as a creative adaptation of rhetoric. In Machiavelli's Florence, as in the classical world, rhetoric offered a sophisticated model for a complex, power-oriented civic practice: power-oriented in the sense that the orator's mission was to mold his listeners' responses and work on their wills. Machiavelli's genius lies in the transformative political use he proposes for this practice. His, however, is an innovation with long historical roots.

The Scientific Revolution has always played a prominent part in the historiography of science and religion. Historians typically use the expression 'Scientific Revolution' to refer to that period from the early sixteenth century to the late seventeenth, when something recognizably like modern science coalesced out of previously distinct traditions such as natural philosophy, the mathematical sciences and Renaissance magic. The importance of this period in science and religion discussions is largely owing to the causes célèbres provided by the Copernican theory in general (which defied the biblical pronouncement that the earth shall not be moved), and by Galileo's championing of the theory in particular. Second only to Darwinism, the Copernican revolution and the Galileo affair are all too often regarded as demonstrating clearly and irrefutably that science and religion just do not mix, and indeed are essentially incompatible with one another. But this view only came to be accepted in the late nineteenth century when science became, not a weapon to be used against religion, but a battlefield, over which both religionists and secularists fought. For the vast majority of us today religious belief is a matter of personal choice, but before secularism became the norm in the West God and religion were so pervasive in social, political and intellectual life that it seems fair to say that all but a very few intuitively thought in a religious way.

In 1939 the eminent Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad observed that discussions of the relations between religion and science among his contemporaries had 'acquired something of the repulsiveness of half-cold mutton in half-congealed gravy'. Fortunately for readers of this volume much has changed in the years since Broad offered this droll assessment and it is safe to say that the field of science and religion now offers a much more appetizing prospect. There are several reasons for the renewed vigour of discussions about science and religion. Developments in the sciences themselves have played a key role. In cosmology, the rise to prominence of Big Bang theory has led to speculations about how the temporal origins of the universe might be linked with the idea of creation. Related to this, the surprising fact that our universe seems remarkably fine-tuned for the emergence of intelligent life has, for some commentators at least, breathed new life into what had once been regarded as moribund arguments from design. Fine-tuning arguments have also found their way into chemistry and biology, raising intriguing questions about purpose, teleology and their place in the sciences. The profoundly mysterious quantum world continues to challenge commonsense understandings of matter and causation, inspiring religious and philosophical speculations about divine action and free will and, more generally, about the nature of reality itself.

In 1896 Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), author of the infl uential A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), suggested that Charles Darwin's Origin of Species had entered the theological arena 'like a plough into an ant-hill'. As was so often the case when he assessed the impact of science on theology, White exaggerated when he alleged that Darwin's theory 'rudely awakened' believers from a lethargic state of 'comfort and repose'. Still, it is unquestionably true that from the outset of its publication in November 1859, Darwin's work elicited much attention and generated more than a little hostility. Religious thinkers in Great Britain and the United States, who serve as the subjects of this chapter, initially charged that in rejecting the interpretation of the history of life as a succession of independent creations of species in favour of a theory predicated on 'random' variation and natural selection, the Darwinian hypothesis challenged the idea that natural history was the realization of a plan initiated and sustained by a providential deity and undermined the veracity of the scriptural depiction of the scheme of redemption. Although some of those thinkers felt compelled to alter their views after it became apparent that most natural historians had embraced the transmutation hypothesis, others continued to regard that hypothesis as a fundamental assault on both natural theology and biblical revelation. By 1920, the chronological endpoint of this chapter, the theory of evolution had become the most theologically controversial scientifi c hypothesis since the time of Galileo.

“. . . what exhilarates us human creatures more than freedom, more than the glory of achievement, is the joy of finding and surrendering to a Beauty greater than man, the rapture of being possessed.” (Teilhard de Chardin) / “The teleology of the Universe is directed toward the production of Beauty. Thus any system of things which in any wide sense is beautiful is to that extent justified in its existence.” (Alfred North Whitehead) / Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe that the universe is the temporal and spatial expression of an eternal meaning or purpose. In these traditions, authentic human life begins with a steady trust that something of everlasting significance is going on in the universe and that our own lives are connected to this larger drama. However, these same faith traditions are also aware that whatever purpose the universe might have can never be made completely clear to mortals. Why not? Because if there is a pervasive purpose in the universe, in order for it to give meaning to our own lives it would have to be larger and deeper than any human mind could fathom. At least, this is the teaching of all traditional theologies. Purpose, if real, would grasp us more than we could grasp it. We could encounter purpose only if we let it take hold of us and carry us away, just as we may have allowed a great symphony or poem to carry us away in its intoxicating beauty. We cannot appreciate a great work of art or allow it to have any impact on us unless we abandon the need to control it intellectually. The same would be true of cosmic purpose.

In book 2, chapter 5, of the Discourses, Machiavelli argues that Christianity was unable to eradicate the glorious deeds of pagan antiquity because it continued to use the Latin language. If, instead, Christian writers “had been able to write in a new language, the other persecutions they carried on indicate that we should have no record of things past.” With this sardonic observation, Machiavelli signals his awareness that revolutions in political thought are first and foremost revolutions in language: transformations in the way we speak about politics can themselves produce a new understanding of political action. Machiavelli was not of course the first to write about politics in the vernacular. His innovation was instead to inaugurate an entirely new “discourse” about politics, one that eviscerated the reigning humanist pieties and recommended force and fraud to tyrants and republics alike. Machiavelli boldly announces this innovation in both his major political works. In The Prince, he says he is the first to analyze the “verità effettuale” of politics; in the Discourses (book 1, preface) he claims to “enter upon a path not yet trodden by anyone” and to discover new “modes and orders.” Although his bid for fame was not heard in his lifetime, it was remarkably prophetic of his afterlife and reputation. In Machiavelli's time, Aristotle was the most famous political thinker in the West; in our time, Machiavelli is.

Machiavelli's grandson Giuliano de' Ricci, who devoted much of his life to gathering, preserving, and copying his grandfather's papers, tells a perhaps apocryphal story that reveals how Machiavelli's contemporaries understood his personality and unconventional attitudes. In 1504, four years after Machiavelli's father died, a friar at the Franciscan church of Santa Croce, where the family chapel was located, informed Machiavelli that some bodies of persons not from the family had been illegally buried there and that he ought to have them removed. But Machiavelli told the friar, “Well, let them be, for my father was a great lover of conversation, and the more there are to keep him company, the better pleased he will be.” The kernel of truth in this story lies in Machiavelli's gratitude to his father for passing on an enjoyment of conversation and initiating him into the world of writers, and also in Machiavelli's penchant for viewing things with a slant frequently at odds with propriety. Indeed, the pragmatism and sly, ironic wit that characterize his response to the friar appear repeatedly in his writings. The anecdote underscores the significance that “conversation” had for a man who delighted in talking to and questioning people and books and enjoyed an easy familiarity with them. His love of friendship, dialogue (even imagined ones), and irony, frequently leavened with a mischievous and mocking wit, never left him (not even, as another legend has it, on his deathbed).

In this chapter I will examine the relationship between religion and science in debates over issues having to do with the human body from the 1960s to the present. These are now generally called bioethical debates, and these debates have been a primary location of interaction between religion and science from the mid-twentieth century forward. While the ability of scientists to intervene in the human body has obviously been increasing for centuries, in the 1960s this ability was perceived to have taken a quantum leap. In 1953 the structure of DNA had been discovered, suggesting to many in the 1960s that scientists would soon be able to control the genetic constitution of the human species through human genetic engineering. While kidneys had been transplanted for a number of years, 1967 saw the first heart transplant, which in turn led to more organs being transplanted. Whereas historically a person was considered dead when their heart and breathing stopped, the invention of artificial respiration, coupled with the need for transplantable organs, led in the 1960s to novel questions about who was really dead and therefore could be taken off life-support. While abortion had been practised for millennia, by the mid-1960s women could, for the first time, find out the genetic characteristics of the foetus through amniocentesis and decide, to a limited extent, what kind of child they would have. In 1969 scientists in England created the first embryo in a test-tube, which would later lead to the first 'test-tube baby' in the late 1970s.