“Can It Be that a Sole Authority Remains?” Epistemological Conundrums in Post-Reformation Polemic

The European Legacy 19 (7):819-832 (2014)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The texts of the ancient skeptics resurfaced in the sixteenth century. How the Reformation and the subsequent confessionalization process interacted with the revival of skepticism remains disputed. Some historians contend that skeptical methods, especially those of Sextus Empiricus, were co-opted by French Catholic polemicists in the service of “counter-reformation”; others suggest that they were suppressed on both sides of the confessional divide by the new church-state establishments that were anxious to protect certainty and impose unity. Where these scholars agree, however, is on the historical trajectory of skeptical techniques: the loss of certainty in theology and the emergence of tolerance. The disputations on sacred scripture of Roberto Bellarmino and William Whitaker, the pre-eminent controversialists of late-sixteenth-century Roman Catholicism and English Calvinism, respectively, reveal the perdurance of skeptical techniques through the Reformation. They also reveal their unstable functionality. Bellarmino proposed papal supremacy as a solution to the insufficiency of reason. Whitaker then challenged the traditional foundations of ecclesiastical authority while simultaneously advancing a principle of scriptural hermeneutics that depended upon institutionally-codified dogmatic statements. Both polemicists engaged in epistemological warfare without surrendering their own claims to certainty; both established stricter ways for their churches to achieve that certainty; neither sought to promote tolerance.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 101,757

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2015-09-03

Downloads
27 (#832,152)

6 months
8 (#605,434)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

References found in this work

Praefatio.[author unknown] - 1969 - Studia Leibnitiana 1 (1):3-4.

Add more references