Skeptical faith

Richard Popkin ( The History of Scepticism ) writes of a crisis of skepticism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: “With the rediscovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of writings of the Greek Pyrrhonist Sextus Empiricus, the arguments and views of the Greek sceptics became part of the philosophical core of the religious struggles then taking place. The problem of finding a criterion of truth, first raised in theological disputes, was then later raised with regard to natural knowledge, leading to la crise pyrrhonienne of the early sixteenth century.”

At the time “‘sceptic’ and ‘believer’ are not opposing classifications. The scpetic is raising doubts about the rational or evidential merits of the justification given for a belief; he doubts that necessary and sufficient reasons either have been or could be discovered to show that any particular belief must be true and cannot possible be false. But the sceptic may, like anyone else, still accept various beliefs.”

It wasn’t the skeptics who subverted the possibility skeptical faith, but believers. So argues Travis Frampton in a recent book on Spinoza’s biblical criticism. Frampton says that the Reformers were so insistent on the need for certain assertion in matters of religion that they drove out the kind of detached tolerant faith of Erasmus: “Away, now, with Sceptics and Academics from the company of us Christians,” Luther exhorted, “let us have men who will assert, men twice as inflexible as very Stoics!”

Luther was surely right in saying we can’t budge when the gospel is at stake. With the benefit of hindsight, though, I wonder if Luther would be entirely happy to discover exactly what inflexible Stoics Protestantism helped create.