"A magisterial book... Hecht’s poetical prose beautifully dramatizes the struggle between belief and denial The breadth of this work is stunning."

--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A bold and brilliant work and (lucky us) highly readable, thanks to the elegant and witty author."

--GARRISON KEILLOR

"Hecht is right that doubt’s story deserves to be told... [and] she tells it in just the right spirit...Hecht is the rare doubter who can simultaneously disagree with people of faith while granting them respect and taking their ideas seriously."

--ALAN WOLFE, New Republic

"Hecht, a historian and poet, aims to give doubt its due in her lively and endlessly provocative new book... a continuous and intricate narrative of doubt."

--Christian Century

Like belief, doubt takes a lot of different forms, from ancient Skepticism , to modern scientific empiricism, from doubt in many gods to doubt in one God, to doubt that recreates and enlivens faith and doubt that is really disbelief. There are also celebrations of the state of doubt itself, from Socratic questioning to Zen koans; there is the sigh of the world-weary, the distracted hum of the scientist, and the rant of the victimized. Yet with all this conceptual difference there is a narrative to tell here: doubters in every century have made use of that which came before. At other times, great notions of doubt have been reinvented in relative isolation from the original and in fascinating new forms. This is a study of religious doubt, all over the world, from the beginning of recorded history to the present day. The story builds and does so in the same erratic, wildly creative way that the history of belief does. Once we see it as its own story, rather than as a mere collection of shadows on the history of belief, a whole new drama appears and new archetypes begin to come into focus. Without having the doubt story sketched out as such, it’s hard to see how patterns of questioning have mirrored certain types of social change, for instance, and hard to identify doubt’s most enduring themes. There are saints of doubt, martyrs of atheism, and sages of happy disbelief who have not been lined up as such, made visible by their relationships across time, and given the context of their story.

INTRODUCTION Doubt Is No Shadow:

     A Quiz and a Guide to the Question ix

ONE Whatever Happened to Zeus

and Hera?, 600 BCE-1 CE

Greek Doubt

TWO Smacking the Temple, 600 BCE-1 CE

Doubt and the Ancient Jews

THREE What the Buddha Saw, 600 BCE-1 CE

  Ancient Doubt in Asia

FOUR When in Rome in Doubt, 50 BCE-200 CE

 Empire of Reason

FIVE Christian Doubt, Zen, Elisha,

 and Hypatia, 1-800 CE

 Late-Classical Mix

SIX Medieval Doubt Loops-the-Loop, 800-1400

Muslims to Jews to Christians

SEVEN The Printing Press and the

  Age of Martyrs, 1400-1600

  Renaissance and Inquisition

EIGHT Sunspots and White House Doubters, 1600-1800

  Revolutions in the Authority of Reason

NINE Doubt’s Bid for a Better World, 1800-1900

 Freethinking in the Age of Science and Reform

TEN Principles of Uncertainty, 1900-

The New Cosmopolitan

CONCLUSION The Joy of Doubt:

    Ethics, Logic, Mood

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Acknowledgments

    Index