What Brought Machiavelli Glory?

Book Review: Don V. Pascal, Machiavelli in Christendom (2026).

Niccolo Machiavelli was a foreign diplomat for the city-state of Florence, Italy in the early 1500’s, an author of books on politics and history, a playwright of comedies, a composer of carnival songs, sonnets and a serenade, an organizer and strategist of a citizen militia for self-defense and author of the book The Art of War. When the Medici banking family conducted a murderous political coup and took over Florence, Machiavelli was imprisoned, tortured, and eventually freed when a wealthy patron arranged his release. He was exiled to his family’s farm and hung out in a local tavern when he wasn’t writing books and letters. His most famous book, The Prince, was dedicated to the ruthless Lorenzo di Medici, on how to avoid being an unrealistic ruler, provoking the anger of the people, internal conspiracies and how to overcome the barbarian occupation of his city. The Prince was addressed to the Medici’s to seek his reinstatement as a diplomat, which failed. His next most famous book was The Discourses on Livy’s history of Rome. The Discourses and the Prince described how monarchies degrade into tyrannies, aristocracies into oligarchies, and democracies into anarchy.

Present day writer, Don V. Pascal, is the author of the recent superb book Machiavelli in Christendom, on how Machiavelli was enmeshed in the institutions of Christendom and could never have been what modern writers say he was (a classical philosopher advocating despotism - Friedrich the Great, Jean-Jacque Rousseau), a teacher of evil and irreligion (Leo Strauss), a political schemer (Catholic Cardinal Pole), a revolutionary (Rousseau), or a libertine who embraced sexual immorality – Roger Ascham).

As Pascal points out, the above-mentioned anti-Roman positions were not available for anyone serving anywhere in Florentine government in the era of Christendom. There was a secular university in Florence, the Studio Fiorentino, at that time but it is unlikely Machiavelli could have been schooled there because it didn’t exist during his formative years. It was only after his political banishment that he was offered a job at the secular University of Florence writing a history of the City-State of Florence. Once he was banished as diplomat for Florence, he dared not cross the Medici Pope if he wanted to regain his former position. Machiavelli praised charismatic religious figures such as Moses, Cyrus, Romulus and Theseus as role models of leadership because they established new states by prudently employing cruelty and the force of their character, but never gratuitously. He called this strength of character and willingness to sacrifice for one’s homeland a “virtue” in contrast to the modern inverted definition of the term as holiness, purity, meekness and pacifism.

German idealist scholar Johann Fichte in his book Machiavelli as Author (1814) corroborates Pascal: “in order to understand the man, in order to let justice be done to him, by no means however must one judge him according to concepts he does not have, and according to a language he does not speak. But the most perverse thing (is to) force him, centuries after his death, into a school (of thought) which he nevertheless had no opportunity to attend in life…He does not say be a usurper, or seize the government through villainous acts; rather he recommends in regard to the former that one should well consider beforehand whether one will be able to carry it (usurpation) through, and of the latter (an overthrower) he never speaks recommending it…But he does say: if you are now a usurper, or if you have come to government through villainous acts, then it is always better to keep you whom we now have, than a new usurper or villain…” (“better the devil you know than the devil you do not know” – Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, 1511). If there are villains, it is those who call Machiavelli a villain or teacher of villainy.

I’m not a Machiavelli scholar, but I have read all his writings. The impression I have of Machiavelli from his letters is he was a realistic, not an idealistic, other-worldly nor pious Christian. He wrote four poetic sermons on ambition, fortune, and penitence, and ingratitude and envy, one of which he even presented before the Religious Company of Piety and Pope Clement in 1532. He often ended his personal letters with “may Christ keep you”. (Yes, Machiavelli wrote “the ends justify the means” but the second part of that is strangely always omitted: “but only in an emergency” such as war, insurrection, corruption or invasion by immigration – See Raymond Belliotti, Machiavelli’s Secret, 1996).

Portraying Machiavelli as a teacher of evil sells books, internet clicks, and movies but is not anywhere near an accurate depiction of his character once you understand the context in which he wrote. The smear from an apparent fabricated letter was that Machiavelli was immoral because he had an encounter with an elderly prostitute. What is not stated is that it was incredibly common and widely accepted in a patriarchal culture in Italy for a man to have mistresses, especially in the upper classes in Florence, Italy in the early 1500’s. Having a mistress did not mean abandoning one’s wife or family. This licentiousness extended to Catholic priests such as Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican Friar of Florence, Italy who, nonetheless, notoriously preached against unnatural sex. But Savonarola failed to organize a militia when the French invaded Florence, resulting in plunder, murder, and rape. Machiavelli called him an “unarmed prophet” because he formed no militia institution to protect his parishioners, instead focusing on a moral crusade on sexual misconduct.

To readers seeking sensation and scandal about how Machiavelli (erroneously) taught evil, the first part of Pascal’s book might be considered dry and boring because it contains nothing titillating nor conspiratorial. Pascal describes how Machiavelli was born and socialized as an “insider” to Christendom, and how Christendom operated not through charismatic individuals, nor entirely on the authority of a pope, or the forgiveness of pastoral priests but through the coerciveness of institutional infrastructure, hierarchical rule, procedural law, and by gaining voluntary legitimacy from the people.

In the second part of the book Pascal provides fascinating institutional case studies on: how Moses had to use violence against his own followers to establish the state of Israel; the institution of Judges in ancient Israel failed; how the Maccabean Revolt was a response by Jewish zealots to institutional capture by the Greeks; and how the Christian Apostle Paul institutionalized local social forms to build a network of Christian churches in the Greek Empire.

Pascal asserts that modern institutions are the legacy of Christendom, only operating with secular labels. He says commercializing the market for “Machiavellianism” has turned the study of Machiavelli into “something like a Renaissance Patrick Bateman: a tactical genius for sociopaths, with all the manipulation and power moves, stripped of any historical context whatsoever.” (Patrick Bateman is a fictional character created by novelist Bret Easton Ellis. Bateman is the villain and unreliable narrator of Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho and is played by Christian Bale in the 2000 film adaptation of the same name). Pascal writes that the commercialistic and vindictive form of writing about Machiavelli “strips out the institutional (true) grit, the intellect, and context in which he wrote”. To Pascal you “cannot understand Machiavelli without Christendom nor Christendom without Machiavelli”.

The aim of Pascal’s book is to bust the false notion that heroes and failed leaders both can only be evaluated by the morality or immorality as individuals not by the institutions that channeled them in the direction they are in, sustained them, held over them the threat of assassination or excommunication, and had the power to venerate or denigrate them upon their death. Machiavelli was not some mythic hero for secularism against Christendom nor some Spartacus leading a slave revolt against imperial Rome. Albeit Machiavelli was a critic of the Papacy and “unarmed prophets”. Machiavelli focused not on what an idealistic heavenly city Florence could be such as St. Augustine’s book The City of God, but on how Florence could defend itself without using disloyal mercenary forces. Institutions were stronger than appeals to morality.

Pascal: “The sack of Rome (in 1527) confirmed everything he (Machiavelli) had argued: that a civilization which mistakes moral consensus for institutional capacity will find, eventually that its walls are thinner than it thought. The army that crossed the Tiber (river) that May was not composed of pagans or infidels. It was composed of Christians (who nevertheless were mercenaries and mutinied because they were unpaid), led by the most powerful Christian ruler in the world (Pope Alexander aka Rodrigo Borgia), serving an emperor who bore the institutional title of Rome’s Christian successor). They destroyed the capital of the institution that had done more than any other to build the civilization they were dismantling. Machiavelli spent his life asking how this kept happening. This book attempts to explain what he found” (not by focusing on the failings of individual leaders but in the lack of institutional capacity of loyal soldiers, not mercenaries, to defend the city). It would have been like employing invading migrants in America today to work for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and then not paying them.

This is a book with relevance to our own current internal dismantling of civilization oddly legitimatized by fundamentalist and moralistic Christianity.

I can’t totally fault the other book reviewers who have been indoctrinated by the vast number of novels, academic books, as well as Hollywood movies, all with a secular agenda to portray Machiavelli as a teacher of evil. Dr. Michael Jackson, PhD, even compiled a book “Machiavelliana: The Living Machiavelli in Modern Mythologies, 2018, on the multitude of distortions of what Machiavelli wrote. Also see my Amazon book review of the novel The Prince of Mars by James Thompson.

However, a couple of corrections are needed to the other book reviews.

I wonder whether one reviewer read the book. His review states Pascal’s book cannot be understood without comprehending the Christian ideas that was the basis for Machiavelli’s practical politics. Not so. Pascal makes it unequivocally clear that Christian institutional structures create ideologies and even after such ideologies die, the institution and the official social position or political office often remains. Pascal states that “what matters politically are the Christian institutions, moral language, and authority structures…not as decoration, not as ideology layered over a secular political reality underneath…but as a framework (and infrastructure) within which public life operated”. Pascal calls out other scholars for mis-portraying Machiavelli as a lapse Catholic humanist, a deliberate anti-Christian teacher of evil, or a classical political philosopher, because “they presuppose a vantage point outside Christendom that was not available” (page 9) during that era.

Another reviewer says Machiavelli is a mystery man: either a secular or cultural Catholic who didn’t subscribe to supernatural beliefs, or the first modernist who believed in strict separation of church and state, or was like a revolutionary Leninist bent on subverting Christianity and revolutionizing the republic? (paraphrased). The reviewer also contends Pascal’s Machiavelli sought a balanced approach to all three. Nothing could be further from what Pascal wrote about Machiavelli’s institutional context. Pascal makes it clear that he rejects all these mistaken images of Machiavelli nor did he seek a balanced approach to them. That is because all three are modernized views that were not even socially plausible at the time because Machiavelli was totally embedded in the institutions of Christendom. It was about as possible for a foreign ambassador like Machiavelli to be like a superficial “cultural Christian” or a Leninist-like infiltrator and revolutionary, in the 1500’s in Italy as a leopard can change its spots. Moreover, Machiavelli believed in the supernatural in that the constellation of stars in the night sky influenced human events (although he didn’t formally practice astrology).

I can’t recommend this book high enough.