Justified True Belief

(●) The Florentine secretary who told rulers to study men as they are rather than as they ought to be, and whose name became a word for the advice. + There are not many people whose surname turns into an adjective, and fewer still whose adjective means something they would not have recognised. "Machiavellian" now means cold, scheming, two-faced. The man it comes from was a mid-level civil servant who worked fourteen years for a republic, lost the job when the republic fell, was tortured on suspicion of a plot he had nothing to do with, and spent his last fourteen years on a small farm trying to get back into public life and failing. He matters here for one reason. For a thousand years, Christian writers who advised kings wrote in a form scholars call the mirror for princes: a book that holds up an image of the good ruler and tells the prince to become it. Be just. Be merciful. Keep your word. Fear God. Machiavelli read those books, decided they were useless, and wrote the opposite. A prince who behaves as the books say, he argued, will be destroyed by the many around him who do not. So the prince had better learn how not to be good, and use the knowledge when necessity requires. That is the hinge. Almost every later quarrel about whether politics has its own morality, whether a statesman may do what a private citizen may not, and whether results can excuse methods, traces back through this small book written on a farm in 1513 by a man who had lost everything and wanted his old job back. One signature fact: he never saw it printed. The Prince was published in 1532, five years after he died.

(●) 1469 AD: Born in Florence to a lawyer with more books than money. + Niccolò Machiavelli was born in Florence on 3 May 1469, the third child of Bernardo Machiavelli and Bartolomea de’ Nelli. The family name was old and respectable and the family purse was thin. Bernardo was a jurist barred by debt from much regular practice, and what he had instead of income was a library and the habit of using it. We know this because Bernardo kept a household diary, and it survives. In it he records that he indexed all the place names in Livy’s history of Rome for a printer, and was paid in a copy of the book. That copy sat in the house where his son was growing up. Livy’s History is the work Machiavelli would spend his middle age writing a commentary on, and the accident of a father’s unpaid labour put it on the shelf. Of the boy himself almost nothing is recorded. He learned Latin from a schoolmaster named Paolo da Ronciglione, and apparently never learned Greek, which mattered: his ancients are Roman ancients, read in the original, while Plato and Aristotle reach him second hand. Florence in those years was Lorenzo de’ Medici’s city, prosperous and brilliant and governed by one family behind a republican screen.

(●) 1498 AD: Weeks after Savonarola burned, the restored republic handed him its second chancery. + The Medici were driven out of Florence in 1494, and for four years the city belonged to Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican friar who preached repentance to enormous crowds and told Florence it was to be the new Jerusalem. On 23 May 1498 Savonarola was hanged and burned in the main square. Within a month the city gave a twenty-nine-year-old with no recorded public career the post of Second Chancellor of the Republic. A chancery is the permanent writing office of a government: the men who draft the letters, keep the records, and brief the elected magistrates who come and go. It is the part of a government that stays when the officeholders change, and Florence had two of them. Machiavelli soon also served as secretary to the Ten of War, the committee that ran Florence’s military and foreign affairs, and the two jobs together made him the republic’s eyes abroad. An ambassador is the man who signs. Machiavelli was the man sent to watch, to talk, and to write home what he saw. He watched from very close range. Over fourteen years he was sent to Louis XII of France four times, to the court of the Emperor Maximilian, to Pope Julius II on campaign, and repeatedly around Italy. The dispatches he sent back run to thousands of pages, and they read like the notebooks of a man who has stopped expecting rulers to behave the way books about rulers say they will. In 1501, between two of these journeys, he married Marietta Corsini, and the one letter of hers that survives, sent after him to Rome in November 1503, is among the few places where he appears as somebody’s husband rather than somebody’s secretary. She complains that he does not write, tells him the new baby is white as snow and looks like him, and asks him to come home.

(●) 1502 AD: He spent four months at Cesare Borgia’s elbow and never got over it. + Cesare Borgia was the son of Pope Alexander VI, and in 1502 he was carving a state for himself out of the Romagna, the belt of small lordships across the middle of Italy. Florence sent Machiavelli to follow him and report. From October to January he was in Borgia’s camp, writing home nearly every day. Two scenes stayed with him. The first was at Cesena, the day after Christmas. Borgia had put a hard man named Ramiro d’Orco in charge of pacifying the province, and Ramiro had done the job, with a brutality that left the whole population hating him. That hatred had to go somewhere, so Borgia sent it where it would do him some good: he had Ramiro killed, and the body left out in the square for the town to find in the morning. Machiavelli reported it in a dispatch and later wrote it into The Prince: Ramiro was found "on the piazza at Cesena with the block and a bloody knife at his side," and the sight left the people "at once satisfied and dismayed." The second scene was at Senigallia on the last day of 1502, where Borgia coaxed his own mutinous captains into a friendly meeting and had them strangled. Machiavelli was in the town that night, and the account he wrote of the whole manoeuvre afterwards is a cool one, more interested in how the trap was built than in the men who died in it. It is worth being careful about what he took from this. He did not admire Borgia as a man, and he says plainly that Borgia finally failed, undone by the death of his father and by his own mistake over the next papal election. What he admired was the method: a ruler who acted first, understood that a new state is a dangerous state, and did not wait for events to arrange themselves.

(●) 1506 AD: He talked Florence into arming its own farmers, and three years later Pisa fell. + Italian cities of that century did not fight their own wars. They hired them out to condottieri, contractors who supplied soldiers by the season, and the arrangement had the drawback you would expect: men who fight for money have every reason to keep a war going and none to die in it. Machiavelli had watched Florence spend fortunes failing to retake the rebel city of Pisa with troops like these, and he made the case, in writing and in committee, for something Florence had not had in generations. A militia, drawn from her own peasants, drilled in her own villages, commanded by her own officers. In 1506 the city voted it through and put him in charge of recruiting. He rode the countryside himself, enrolling men village by village. On 8 June 1509 the Pisan magistrates handed over the keys of their city, starved out by a blockade his militia had helped to hold, and the secretary who had argued for it was, briefly, a man whose theory had worked. His friend Filippo Casavecchia wrote from Barga nine days later to congratulate him, and told him that every day he found in him the greatest prophet the Hebrews or any other people ever had. This is the practical root of a conviction that runs through everything he later wrote: that a state’s strength is its own armed citizens, and that hired soldiers and foreign allies are a way of borrowing strength you will one day have to repay.

(●) 1512 AD: The militia broke at Prato, the republic fell, and he lost the only work he loved. + In August 1512 a Spanish army marching for the pope and the exiled Medici came down on Prato, ten miles from Florence. The garrison was Machiavelli’s militia. It broke, the town was stormed and sacked with great slaughter, and Florence, hearing what had happened, gave in without a fight. The Medici came home after eighteen years, and the republic was finished. He was dismissed from the chancery in November, fined, and forbidden to leave Florentine territory for a year. Then came worse. In February 1513 two young republicans were caught with a list of men they thought might join a plot against the Medici, and his name was on it. He was arrested on 19 February and taken to the Bargello, the city prison, where the interrogators used the strappado: the prisoner’s wrists are tied behind his back, he is hauled off the ground by them, and then dropped short, which tears the shoulders. He was given six turns of it. He confessed nothing, because there was nothing to confess. What saved him was an election in Rome. On 11 March Giovanni de’ Medici was chosen pope and took the name Leo X, Florence celebrated with a general amnesty, and Machiavelli walked out of the Bargello the next day. He was forty-three, notorious, unemployed, and barred from the city’s business.

(●) 1513 AD: On a small farm south of Florence, in borrowed evenings, he wrote The Prince. + He retreated to the family property at Sant’Andrea in Percussina, about seven miles from the city, and there he wrote the most famous letter in Italian literature. It went to his friend Francesco Vettori, the Florentine ambassador in Rome, on 10 December 1513, and most of it is a description of an empty day. He snares thrushes. He supervises woodcutters who are always quarrelling with the neighbours. He takes a book of poems to the spring. He eats what the farm yields, and then goes down to the inn to play cards with the host, a butcher, a miller and two bakers, where the arguments over a farthing can be heard in the next village. Then the evening comes, and the letter changes gear: "But when evening falls I go home and enter my writing-room. On the threshold I put off my country habits, filthy with mud and mire, and array myself in royal courtly garments. Thus worthily attired, I make my entrance into the ancient courts of the men of old, where they receive me with love, and where I feed upon that food which only is my own and for which I was born." That English is the rendering printed, with no translator named, in Henry Cust’s introduction to the Tudor Translations Machiavelli of 1905. For four hours, he tells Vettori, he feels no weariness, forgets all care, and is frightened neither by poverty nor by death. And then, almost as an aside, he mentions that he has been setting down what he learned from those conversations, and has composed a small treatise, De Principatibus, on principalities. That is The Prince, announced in a postscript. He meant to give it to a Medici and be given work. The work never came, and the book was not printed until 1532.

(●) 1520 to 1527 AD: The family that ruined him hired him to write Florence’s history, and he died eleven days after the restored republic refused him his old post. + Slowly the door opened a crack. A circle of young aristocrats had taken to meeting in the Rucellai gardens in Florence, to talk politics and read the ancients, and they took him up as well, the out-of-work secretary with Livy in his head; the Discourses are dedicated to two of them. His comedy La Mandragola was a hit. Then, in 1520, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, who would soon be Pope Clement VII, commissioned him through the university to write a history of Florence, and attached a salary to it. In 1525 he presented the finished Florentine Histories to the cardinal, who was pope by then. In 1526, with an imperial army loose in Italy, the city put him on the commission responsible for the walls. The man who had argued Florence into raising her own soldiers was being asked about her defences again. Then the wheel turned once more. In May 1527 the troops of the Emperor Charles V sacked Rome, the Medici were thrown out of Florence again, and the republic Machiavelli had served for fourteen years was restored. This was the return he had been waiting for, and he wanted his old chancery post back with it. The new government voted on 10 June 1527, and voted against him: to the young republicans he was the man who had written a handbook for tyrants and then taken Medici money to write their history. The post went to another man. He fell ill within days and died on 21 June 1527, about fifty-eight years old, leaving his family very little. How he died has a small mystery attached to it. There is a letter that passes as his son Piero’s, and it says that he confessed his sins to a friar named Matteo, who stayed with him to the end. Italian scholarship now judges that letter probably a forgery, and the accounts that date the death to the twenty-second all trace back to it. What is certain is quieter than the story: a few friends were with him, and he was buried the next day in Santa Croce. The grand monument now over the grave was put up by admirers two and a half centuries later, in 1787, and its Latin line has become almost as famous as anything he wrote: Tanto nomini nullum par elogium, no praise is equal to so great a name.

What He Taught

(T1) Politics must be learned from how men actually behave, not from how they ought to behave. + Suppose a friend asks you how to handle a difficult colleague, and you answer by describing how a perfectly reasonable colleague would respond. You have said something true and something useless. Machiavelli thought the whole advice-to-princes tradition had been doing exactly that for centuries, and he announced his break from it in a single paragraph at the head of chapter fifteen of The Prince: many writers, he says, have pictured republics and principalities that never existed, and he intends instead to follow "the real truth of the matter." This is the move that makes him look modern, and it is worth being exact about what it is and is not. It is not the claim that there is no such thing as good and evil. He uses the words freely, calls cruelty cruelty, and never pretends that a murder is anything else. It is the claim that a ruler who acts on a description of how people should behave, in a world where most of them do not, will be destroyed, and that his destruction will take his people down with him. Political advice, on this view, has to begin from the actual material: ambitious, frightened, changeable people, most of whom will keep faith while it suits them. Christian thinkers had an answer to this long before he made the objection, and it is not the one he expected. Scripture is not sentimental about human nature either. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9) is not a rosier account of mankind than his. The parting of ways is not over whether men are bad. It is over what a ruler is permitted to become in response.

(Q) "How one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation." + Source: Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter XV (W. K. Marriott translation, 1908). The sentence that opens his break with the mirror-for-princes books. He has just said that he will depart from the methods of other writers, and that since he means to write something useful to the man who grasps it, he will follow the truth of the matter rather than the imagination of it (T1).

(T2) A ruler who means to keep his state must learn how not to be good. + Here is the sentence everything else hangs on, and Machiavelli does not soften it. A prince must "know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity." Not always, and not for pleasure: on necessity, as a skill held in reserve, the way a surgeon holds a knife. He works this out most fully around cruelty, and the example he reaches for is one he had watched. Cesare Borgia was called cruel, he writes, yet that cruelty settled the Romagna, united it, and gave it peace. Set against it the merciful Florentines, who let the town of Pistoia tear itself apart rather than take the hard step that would have stopped it and be thought cruel for taking it. Borgia, on that comparison, was the kinder man. From this he draws a distinction he keeps returning to, between cruelty well used and cruelty badly used: severities done all at once, out of necessity, and then stopped, against severities that start small and go on growing. The first, he says, a state can survive. The second consumes it. The same reasoning produces his most quoted line, that it is safer to be feared than loved, because love is held by a bond of obligation which men, being selfish, break whenever it serves them, while fear is held by a dread of punishment that never lets go. Even here he adds a limit that people who quote him rarely notice: the prince must avoid being hated, and the surest way to be hated is to take men’s property or their women. Fear without hatred is the target. And here is where a Christian reader has to stop and be honest about what is being conceded and what is not. That rulers bear the sword, and that this is not the same office as a private man’s, is not a Machiavellian invention; it is in Scripture, where the magistrate is called God’s servant, "an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer" (Romans 13:4). A judge who sentences a murderer is not failing to love his neighbour. What Scripture does not do, and what Machiavelli does, is turn the sword into a general licence. The magistrate in Romans 13 is under the law he administers and answerable to God for it. Machiavelli’s prince is answerable to the result.

(Q) "Hence it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity." + Source: Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter XV (W. K. Marriott translation, 1908). It comes a few lines later in the same chapter, and it is the hinge of the book. Marriott’s "know how to do wrong" renders an Italian phrase more literally read as "learn to be able not to be good," which is why the teaching is usually given in that form (T2).

(T3) A ruler keeps his word only for as long as keeping it serves him. + Chapter eighteen of The Prince is titled, with a straight face, "Concerning the Way in Which Princes Should Keep Faith," and the answer it gives is: when convenient. An early scholarly editor observed that this chapter has given more offence than anything else Machiavelli wrote, and it is easy to see why. The argument runs in two steps. First, there are two ways of fighting, by law and by force; the first belongs to men and the second to beasts, and since the first is often not enough, the ruler must know how to use both. Ancient writers taught this in a fable, he says, when they had Achilles and other princes brought up by Chiron the centaur, a teacher who was half man and half animal. Second, if a prince must use the beast, he should use two: the lion, because the fox cannot defend himself against wolves, and the fox, because the lion cannot see a snare. Rely on the lion alone and you do not understand your situation. Then comes the part that sets him against every confessor in Christendom. A prudent lord cannot and should not keep his word when it turns against him and the reasons that made him give it are gone, and he will never lack good-sounding excuses for breaking it. And since men judge by appearances, he must above all appear merciful, faithful, humane, upright and religious; of these, he adds, the appearance of religion is the most necessary of all to have. Notice the shape of the recommendation. He is not advising a prince to be irreligious. He is advising him to hold his faith, whatever it is, at arm’s length from his decisions, and to treat the appearance of it as a working tool. To a Christian that is not a tactic but an answer to the deepest question a person is asked, given in the negative.

(Q) "Therefore a wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it exist no longer. If men were entirely good this precept would not hold, but because they are bad, and will not keep faith with you, you too are not bound to observe it with them." + Source: Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter XVIII (W. K. Marriott translation, 1908). The sentences follow directly on the image of the fox and the lion. The justification offered is the wickedness of other men, which is worth holding on to: the whole permission rests on the claim that a promise given to people who would break theirs was never really binding (T3).

(T4) A free people governs better than a prince, and its quarrels are the source of its liberty. + Anyone who knows only The Prince has met about a fifth of Machiavelli, and the wrong fifth. His long book is the Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy, a chapter-by-chapter commentary on the early history of the Roman republic, and it is a republican book from end to end. He says in it, flatly, that a people is more prudent, more stable and of better judgment than a prince, that a people restrained by law is no more fickle than a ruler restrained by none, and that where princes excel is chiefly in framing new institutions, while peoples excel at keeping good ones. His most original argument in that book is about conflict. Everyone in his century believed that a city torn between its nobles and its common people was a city in decay; Rome was admired in spite of its quarrels. Machiavelli says the quarrels were the point. Every republic contains two dispositions, the few who want to dominate and the many who want not to be dominated, and the friction between them is where laws protecting freedom actually come from. In three hundred years of shouting and shop-closing and crowds streaming out of the city, he counts, Rome exiled fewer than a dozen citizens and killed very few. The noise was the machinery of liberty working. Two further convictions hold this together. A free state must be armed with its own citizens, because mercenary and auxiliary troops are, in his phrase, useless and dangerous, and a city that hires its courage has none. And a republic that means to last must periodically be dragged back to its founding principles, since institutions rot quietly from within, which is a thought Christian reformers of his own century were applying to the church at the same moment for reasons of their own.

(Q) "But as for prudence and stability of purpose, I affirm that a people is more prudent, more stable, and of better judgment than a prince." + Source: Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Book I, chapter 58 (Ninian Hill Thomson translation, 1883). The chapter is headed "That a People is wiser and more constant than a Prince," and it is an answer to Livy and to every historian who had repeated that nothing is more fickle than a crowd. His reply is that princes freed from law are worse, and that the difference lies in the restraint, not in the nature (T4).

(T5) Christianity as its interpreters have taught it has made the world weak. + This is the charge that put him on the Index, the Roman list of books Catholics were forbidden to read, and it deserves to be stated at its full strength rather than waved at. Why, he asks in the Discourses, did the ancients love liberty so fiercely and we so little? Because of a difference in training, and behind that a difference in religion. The old religions gave their highest honours to men loaded with worldly glory, generals and founders of cities, and located the human good in greatness of soul and strength of body. Ours glorifies men of a humble and contemplative life instead, and places the good in humility, lowliness, and contempt for the things of this world; and if it calls us to be brave, it is brave to suffer rather than to do. The result, he says, is a world made feebler and handed over to bad men, because the mass of mankind, hoping for heaven, think more about bearing injuries than about avenging them. He adds a second charge in the same book: that the Roman court’s example has made Italians irreligious, and that the papacy, never strong enough to unite Italy and never weak enough to let anyone else do it, has kept the country divided and open to invasion. Now the qualification, which is not a footnote but part of the argument. Machiavelli does not say Christianity is false, and he does not quite say it is the problem. He says the fault lies with those who have interpreted the faith to suit indolence and ease rather than valour, and that if we remembered that religion permits the defence of our country we would see it as a duty to be able and ready to defend it. Elsewhere he writes that if the princes of Christendom had kept religion as its Founder established it, the Christian states would be far more united and prosperous than they are. So the complaint is aimed at a particular reading of the gospel, the one that had made monasteries of half of Italy while the other half was being fought over by foreigners. What he never asks, anywhere, is the question the gospel actually raises: not whether these teachings make a nation strong, but whether they are true.

(Q) "This manner of life, therefore, seems to have made the world feebler, and to have given it over as a prey to wicked men to deal with as they please; since the mass of mankind, in the hope of being received into Paradise, think more how to bear injuries than how to avenge them." + Source: Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Book II, chapter 2 (Ninian Hill Thomson translation, 1883). The chapter is about why the peoples of antiquity fought so hard for their freedom. The sentence immediately following is the one his critics and his defenders both have to reckon with: that if the world has grown soft, this "results from the baseness of those who have interpreted our religion to accord with indolence and ease rather than with valour" (T5).

(Q) "Had religion been maintained among the princes of Christendom on the footing on which it was established by its Founder, the Christian States and republics had been far more united and far more prosperous than they now are." + Source: Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Book I, chapter 12 (Ninian Hill Thomson translation, 1883). Written by a man who had spent his career watching popes lead armies. He goes on to say that the nearer a country lies to Rome the less devout it is, and that anyone comparing the church’s beginnings with its present practice might well think its chastisement close at hand. Luther nailed his theses to a church door in the same decade, and he and Machiavelli agreed about the symptom and about nothing else.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He turned the mirror for princes upside down, and Erasmus published its finest example three years later. + To see what Machiavelli did, set his book beside the one written next door to it in time. In 1516, three years after The Prince was drafted, Erasmus of Rotterdam published the Education of a Christian Prince for the young Charles of Habsburg, soon to be the Emperor Charles V. It is the mirror-for-princes tradition at its best: the ruler is a servant of his people, war is nearly always a disaster he should be ashamed of, and the measure of a good prince is whether his subjects can love him without flattery. There is no sign that either man ever read the other, and neither of them knew he had a rival. But between the two little books lies a fork in the road for Western political thought, and the fork is a question about what a ruler is for. Erasmus answers with an office under God, held in trust, judged by the good of the people. Machiavelli answers with a state to be kept, judged by whether it is kept. There is one place where the two men would have shaken hands. Both had watched Pope Julius II ride to war in armour; Erasmus satirised him savagely, and Machiavelli had stood in his camp taking notes. Neither thought the church of their day was in a position to lecture anyone.

(†) Rome answered with condemnation: a cardinal called The Prince the work of Satan’s finger, and the Index banned everything he wrote. + The sharpest of the early answers came from Reginald Pole, the English cardinal, in a defence he addressed to the Emperor Charles V in 1539. Pole believed that Thomas Cromwell had put Machiavelli’s teaching into Henry VIII’s hands, and he wrote that although a man’s name stood on the title page, the book had been written by the finger of Satan. Historians have long doubted the story of Cromwell’s recommendation, and Pole’s defence stayed in manuscript for two centuries, but the phrase escaped and became the standard Catholic verdict. In 1559 it was made official. Pope Paul IV’s Index of Prohibited Books, the Roman list of what Catholics were forbidden to read, condemned Machiavelli’s writings entirely, not this book or that passage but the whole shelf. He kept that status for centuries, in the company of Erasmus, whose works were on the same list. Catholic writers of the next generation took the argument up in a different key. Where Pole denounced, Giovanni Botero, a priest who had spent twenty years in the Society of Jesus before leaving it, and Jesuits proper such as Pedro de Ribadeneyra tried to answer him on his own ground with what they called reason of state properly understood, a statecraft that took necessity seriously without granting that necessity dissolves the moral law. Whatever one makes of the result, it is the shape a serious reply has to take: not the claim that rulers never face terrible choices, but the claim that facing one does not remake right and wrong.

(†) Protestant republicans read the other book, and the armed citizen went with them into the English and American arguments about liberty. + While Rome was banning him, a very different set of readers was making him a teacher. English and Dutch republicans of the seventeenth century, many of them serious Protestants, took up the Discourses rather than The Prince and found in them an argument they needed: that free states are stronger than tyrannies, that liberty is preserved by citizens who bear arms and share in government rather than by the virtue of a good ruler, and that institutions must be pulled back to their first principles before they rot. James Harrington, writing his model commonwealth in the years after the English civil war, called him the only politician of later ages, using the word as his century did, to mean a serious student of politics rather than a man running for office, and he built openly on him. Algernon Sidney, executed in 1683 for his republican writing, drew from him too. Rousseau, a century later, argued in the Social Contract that The Prince was really a republican’s book, a lesson to peoples disguised as advice to kings, and that its author had been forced to veil his love of liberty while living under the Medici. That reading is too neat, but it is not fanciful: the man who wrote it had spent fourteen years serving a republic and was killed politically for it twice. By way of that tradition, two of his convictions reached the founding arguments of the English-speaking world: that a standing army of hired men endangers a free people, and that free governments survive by balancing interests against each other rather than by trusting rulers to be good. Christians have taken both sides of that inheritance ever since, and the argument about it is not settled.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: results that excuse the means, a word kept only while it pays, and faith valued for what it produces. + The quarrel is with what he himself wrote, and it is not hard to locate. Three things in his own books are where the gospel will not follow him. - The result excusing the act. Discussing Romulus, who founded Rome and killed his brother, he lays it down that "although the act condemn the doer, the end may justify him; and when, as in the case of Romulus, the end is good, it will always excuse the means" (Discourses, Book I, chapter 9). Scripture has a short answer, and it is short because Paul had heard the argument already and would not entertain it: "And why not do evil that good may come?" (Romans 3:8). The answer he gives is not a counter-argument but a verdict on the people making it. - The promise held at will. A prince, on his account, is released from his word when keeping it turns against him. The Psalm that asks who may dwell on God’s holy hill answers, among other marks, the man "who swears to his own hurt and does not change" (Psalm 15:4), which is exactly the case Machiavelli exempts. And the plain proverb has no exception clause for statesmen: "Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who act faithfully are his delight" (Proverbs 12:22). - Faith weighed by its yield. His question about Christianity is whether it makes a people able to defend itself. It is a fair political question and it is not the first question, because a religion that made men splendid soldiers and was false would still be false. "For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?" (Mark 8:36) is the counter-question, and he never asks it. Two things should be said on the other side, because they are also true. Machiavelli forced Christian political thinking to be honest about a real problem: rulers do face choices where every option harms someone, and a piety that refuses to look at that is not innocence but evasion. And the man was not the monster of the English stage. He served his city faithfully for fourteen years, took no bribes in an age that expected them, was tortured rather than name men he had no evidence against, and died poor, leaving a wife and children very little. What he did with his own life and what he advised other men to do with theirs are not the same document, and the ledger here is against a doctrine, not against a soul.