Abstract
The latest studies on clandestine philosophical literature reveal the importance of this corpus to understanding how skeptical arguments were transmitted and modified in early modern Europe. We will try to show this by means of an anonymous text likely written before 1711 and entitled Doutes des pyrrhoniens (Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Cabinet des manuscrits fonds général, Inv. No. 15191). The manuscript is composed of eight chapters or doubts and distinguishes a “more moderate pyrrhonism” from a “furious pyrrhonism”. The latter, relying on the fraudulent character of all religions, wants to erase them from the face of the earth; the former, “a little more philosophical”, admits the existence of a God and is not even against religions: only the question of the origin and function of these institutions is allowed. Our main argument will be that the difference between these two forms of Pyrrhonism is less epistemological than it is political. Indeed, both forms agree that religion is a manifestation of social power that has nothing to do with an alleged divine revelation. The question is no longer about the truth of religion , but about whether or not it is advisable to abandon it as a regulatory component of society.
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Notes
- 1.
Miguel Benítez, “La duda como método: escepticismo y materialismo en la literatura clandestina”, La cara oculta de las Luces. Investigaciones sobre los manuscritos filosóficos clandestinos de los siglos XVII y XVIII, Valencia, Generalitat Valenciana, 2003, p. 349.
- 2.
“Since Sextus Empiricus in his Sophistic doubts has not respected neither the sacred nor the profane, good people should show outrage to those who continuously insist on bringing this author back to the scene, whether in Greek, Latin or French” (Mémoires pour l’histoire de sciences et de beaux arts , January 1727, pp. 37–38). All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.
- 3.
In the same comment about Huart’s translation, and after questioning that a philosopher as devout as Pierre-Daniel Huet could have been the author of the posthumous Traité de la faiblesse de l’esprit humain and so be considered a skeptic like Montaigne, Charron or Bayle (Ibid., p. 39), the writer adds: “How can I believe that there is a God if I must be suspicious of the reason that tells me so, of the wonders of the universe that announce so, of the geometric truths that are better suited for my intelligence and that are substantially more evident? I have no criterion, no judgment, no rule of truth and no certainty ; who can thus assure me of the existence of that God?” (Ibid., p. 53).
- 4.
“Clandestine philosophical literature” or, more simply, “clandestine philosophy”, must be understood as a corpus of more than three hundred works that spread across Europe between 1659 (when Theophrastus redivivus was written, perhaps the first and most important one) and mid-eighteenth century. Many of these are in French, some in Latin, and a few in English. Some are represented in only a single copy; others have been copied and repeatedly modified. In broad terms, the prevailing philosophical trends that appear in them are atheism and deism. However, as Antony McKenna has pointed out, we may also “find within the core itself of clandestine literature lost souls, sensitive minds and restless spirits who feel their way through the dark—philosophers who reject dogmatists’ final statements, who dare to doubt, and who after rejecting the ‘tie’ of faith as some say, far from discovering man’s greatness, discover his misery. In short, philosophers whose cry is not one of victory but of anguish, who reencounter the Pascalian situation of ‘the misery of man without God ’” (Antony McKenna, “Le ver est dans le fruit: le scepticisme au XVIIIe. siècle: l’exemple de De Laube”, Scepticisme, Clandestinité et Libre Pensée, ed. G. Paganini, M. Benítez and J. Dybikowski, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2002, p. 166).
- 5.
Benítez, op. cit., p. 350.
- 6.
Undoubtedly, the most notable example of this is the work entitled, in one of its versions, Nouvelle philosophie sceptique, which was spread under the name Parité de la vie et de la mort. In its first printed copy of 1714, this text carried this full title: “Answer in the form of a dissertation to a theologist asking what skeptics—who seek the truth everywhere, both in nature and in philosophical writings—mean when they say that life and death are the same thing. Where we can see that life and death of minerals, metals, plants and animals, with all their attributes, are nothing more than ways of being of the same substance, to which these changes neither add nor take away anything. By Mr. Gaultier, Niort doctor”. In this way, the indifference (adiaphoria) of Pyrrho of Elis, that is, the state of equilibrium between pleasure and displeasure, attraction and rejection, in which the legendary father of skepticism, they say, tended to maintain himself, was transformed very quickly into a materialist thesis. Cf. Parité de la vie et de la mort. La Réponse de médecin Gaultier , ed. Olivier Bloch. Paris, Universitas, Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 1993, pp. 119–121.
- 7.
Doutes des Pirroniens / Premierement / Si la Religion est formée, ou / vient de Dieu; ou bien si c’est un / artifice des Hommes Politiques / Secondement / En suposant que Dieu en soit / l’auteur; / Savoir, quelle est la Veritable, / et celle qu’il faut choisir, d’entre / le grand nombre des Religions / differentes qui sont répandües / par toute la Terre. We quote based on the original manuscript: Bruxelles, Bibl. Royale de Belgique, ms. 15,191. The manuscript is bound and has an ex libris: “Ex Bibliotheca C. Van Baviere Facult. Juris. Acad. Bruxell. A secretis”. The text shall hereafter be quoted as Doutes. The only complete modern edition is the Spanish one: Dudas de los pirrónicos, ed. Fernando Bahr, Buenos Aires, El cuenco de plata, 2017.
- 8.
Gianni Paganini, “Du bon usage du scepticisme: les ‘Doutes des pyrrhoniens’”, La philosophie clandestine à l’Age classique, ed. Antony McKenna and Alain Mothu, Paris, Universitas. Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, p. 293.
- 9.
Regarding the moral customs of the monks of Japan called “bonzes”, the manuscript states the following: “They abstain from eating meat and fish, they shave their beards and their hair, they hide their excesses (like in other places) under the appearance of an austere life. Their main business is to bury the dead! Everything is like it is here. Peoples, convinced that in the other life their parents may have some needs, do not save at all to provide them the relief the bonzes promise them. They even use other artifices to grow rich: they borrow money from the simplest minds and promise to repay them in the other life with succulent interests—they say amongst themselves that there is plenty of time to pay. Those who want to draw a parallel between the East and the West will not find anything like these debts in the other world. On the other hand, however, many comparisons will be provided by unfulfilled celibacy, deceit hidden under the mantle of strict morals, benefits of burials, help sent to souls pulled apart from their bodies. Our missionaries reveal the frauds committed by the ministers of idols. They ridicule them, but as an old satirist said: ‘By just changing the name, the issue applies adequately to yourselves’” (Doutes, p. 97). Bayle, for his part, writes: “The bonzes make a profession of celibacy life. But ‘they do not always observe it very exactly. They abstain from meat and fish, they shave their beards and hair and they conceal their debaucheries under the appearance of an austere life’ [Journal des savans, 18 July 1689, p. 492, Dutch edition]. Their most profitable activity comes from burying the dead. For the people, being persuaded that the souls of their relatives may have needs in the next life, spare nothing to procure for them the comforts which the bonzes promise if they pay substantial alms. Another device which they use to enrich themselves is to borrow money by promising ordinary people that they will repay it with substantial interest in the world to come. And when they borrow in this way they say among themselves that the terms are worth the rate [Ibid., p. 493]. Those who seek to draw parallels between the East and the West would be hard put to find an equivalent for debts payable in the world to come. Nevertheless, celibacy ill observed, deceit hidden under the appearances of a rigid morality, profit-making out of burials, and solace dispatched to souls separated from the body, would afford a great many comparisons. (…) Missionaries returning from the Indies publish accounts of the deceptions and frauds they have observed in the worship of these idolatrous nations. They laugh at them, but they should worry lest they are reminded of the saying ‘quid rides? mutato nomine de te fabula narratur’ (Horatius, Satires, 1.6) [‘Why do you laugh? Just change the name and the same tale can be told about you’] ”. (Pierre Bayle, Political Writings, ed. Sally Jenkinson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 130–131).
- 10.
Again, we are thinking about the work entitled Parité de la vie et de la mort, a “beautiful libertine mess” (as expressed by Olivier Bloch), regarding whose composition its author writes: “When I began writing, my only purpose was to elucidate in a few words your difficulty. If I did not fulfill said purpose, it is because from the outset I forgot what I had planned. And I followed my thoughts more or less like cards follow one another in a game of Lansquenet. Thus, this writing has grown to such an extent that you may not have the patience to read it. (…) I began more or less like a preacher who climbs his pulpit without being ready, who begins his sermon with the first thought that comes to his mind followed by thoughts introduced by fate, who moves from one topic to the next only because thoughts came to his mind this way, in a straight line, one after another” (Parité de la vie et de la mort, op. cit., p. 193).
- 11.
This is a classic thesis in the history of freethinking. We may find it, e.g., in Pietro Pomponazzi’s Tractatus de immortalitate animae (1516), where he writes: “Some [men], anyway, are so ferocious and perverse by nature that they cannot be moved by any of those stimuli, as daily experience teaches us. For this reason, politicians have spoken about eternal rewards in the afterlife for the righteous; and for the immoral, eternal punishments that truly instill fear. Most men, if they do good, do so more for fear of eternal punishment than for hope of eternal reward. And since this last idea may be useful for all men, regardless of their kind, the lawmaker—aware of the human inclination towards evil and bearing in mind the common benefit—has sanctioned that the human soul is immortal, regardless of the truth and only in consideration of rectitude, with the purpose of carrying men towards righteousness” (Pietro Pomponazzi, Tratatto sull’immortalità dell’anima, ed. Vittoria Perrone Compagni, Firenze, Leo S. Olschki, Editore, 1999, pp. 99–100).
- 12.
Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, ed. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 10.
- 13.
This includes moral oppression, political oppression, and even economic oppression, since “it was neither God who distributed the land so that some had more than they need and others nothing. It left the land and the sea to all men in general. The strongest, or the cleverest, took it over, after which they made the law: that no one could take away what they owned” (Doutes, p. 27).
- 14.
“When we investigate whether existing things are such as they appear, we grant that they appear, and what we investigate is not what is apparent but what is said about what is apparent – and this is different from investigating what is apparent itself” (Sextus Empiricus, op. cit., p. 7).
- 15.
Regarding the references to Spinoza in this manuscript, I allow myself to refer to my work: Fernando Bahr, “Spinoza, Bayle y la filosofía clandestina. Materiales para una refacción de la historia”, Spinoza en debate, ed. María Jimena Solé, Buenos Aires, Miño y Dávila, 2015, pp. 77–90.
- 16.
This is also the case for Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, “Aristotle, Protagoras, Diodorus and others said that this order called Nature was eternal and that everything came from this first eternal material beginning, whose nature we do not know. Aristotle himself acknowledged the eternity of the world and everything in it: so the beginning of men was men, the beginning of the horse was the horse, who in turn came from other men and other horses who had existed since eternity. Plutarch claims that Plato held the same opinion ; in Timaeus he described the formation of the world (as if it had had a beginning) only to explain better how the cause —or this divine and intelligent form he calls God—had created beings, which could only be done by assuming that things had begun being” (Doutes, pp. 6–7).
- 17.
“Furthermore, that opinion was not established between us, but four or five centuries after the establishment of Christian religion . This appears to be so by virtue of Orosius’ letters to St. Augustine and from the latter to St. Jerome, and from Orosius’ journeys to visit the two Fathers seeking to untangle that uncertain article, that neither dared to clarify. Upon reading said letters, one can conclude that the Churches had many doubts and were divided on this issue” (Doutes, p. 11).
- 18.
It is useful to remember that, for Pierre Bayle, this notion of a God as “both the agent and the victim of all the crimes and the miseries of man” was “the most monstrous hypothesis that could be imagined, the most absurd, and the most diametrically opposed to the most evident notions of our mind”, since, among other things, it lead us to conceive a God in a constant struggle with itself; in picturesque terms, a God that “modified into German has killed God modified into ten thousand Turks” (Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary. Selections, ed. Richard Popkin , Indianapolis/New York/Kansas City, The Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc., 1965, p. 312).
- 19.
“I think it is so indifferent to God that you killed a lion as it was this lion that shattered you, that a man killed you or that you were the one who killed him (…). Millions of men die each hour on the surface of the earth, whether due to the order he established in Nature or due to plagues, wars, floods, and other harmful alterations of the elements; alterations which are also consequences of the natural order. In effect, what does it matter if men die from natural causes or perish due to the violence we just mentioned? What could that mean to the eternal Being?” (Doutes, p. 25).
- 20.
On a sidenote, the manuscript reads: “Diogenes Laertius: Life of Zeno”. However, the quoted passage seems very similar to the one Cicero attributes to the Stoic Balbus: “The universe itself was made for both gods and men [Principio ipse mundus deorum hominumque causa factus est]” (Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, II, 154, ed. H. McGregor and J. M. Ross, London, Penguin, 1972, p. 185).
- 21.
Against this very clear fact, the author states that, “at different times, they (and in our time, the famous philosopher Descartes) have tried to convince us that animals have no soul and that they are mere insensitive and unaware machines” (p. 30). Aside from that, he remembers two other authors: Mamertus and Pereira. The former, Claudianus Ecdidius Mamertus (fifth century AD), wrote the treaty De statu animae, which was compared by Louis Ellies Dupin with Cartesian doctrine (cf. Louis Ellies Dupin Nouvelle bibliothèque des auteurs ecclesiastiques, Mons, 1691, III, II, p. 226b). As for Spanish doctor Gómez Pereira (1500–c.1558), he wrote a work entitled Antoniana Margarita (1554), in which he held that animals were machines that lacked a sensitive soul. Bayle analyzes Pereira’s teachings on this matter in Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique , 5th. ed., 4 vols. Amsterdam/Leyde/La Haye/Utrecht, P. Brunel et al., 1740, III, pp. 649–656.
- 22.
“The last resource you have is to say that such arguments ruin everything, that there will no longer be any limit or rule in societies; in short, that there will be only war and confusion. We agree. It is necessary for there to be laws such as the ones that exist. There is an absolute need for them, and magistrates could not go far enough in their duties to enforce them, as well as to punish transgressors. The only statement is that all actions performed are indifferent or, better said, in no way bad in relation to God; and that God is not the author of what men call evil to society, since everything we call evil is only so in relation to society and not before God” (Doutes, p. 28).
- 23.
Cf. Gianni Paganini, Les philosophies clandestines à l’âge classique, Paris, PUF, 2005, p. 87. The main sources of this comparative history are Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride for Egyptian religion, Sir John Marsham’s Chronicus Canon Aegiptiacus, Ebraicus & Graecus (1672) for Jewish religion, and accounts from Jesuit missionaries (Bouchet, Martini, Le Comte, etc.) for Middle Eastern and Far Eastern religions.
- 24.
See, for e.g., the manuscript titled Cymbalum Mundi sive Symbolum Sapientiae , where it is set forth that Jesus never called himself “God”, “that his teachings were merely of philosophical nature and aimed at man living this life, not the next, calm and happy based on the precepts of moral philosophy” (Cymbalum Mundi sive Symbolum Sapientiae, ed. G. Canziani. W. Schröder and F. Socas, Milano, FrancoAngeli, 2000, pp. 142–144).
- 25.
“By the handing down of customs and laws, we accept, from an everyday point of view, that piety is good and impiety bad” (Sextus Empiricus, op. cit., p. 91).
- 26.
“Pythagoras, in order to set forth his morals, made others believe that he was the son of Mercury, that he had a thigh of gold, that he had been to the Hells; in short, he invented hundreds of tales of this nature, to achieve the veneration and admiration of the peoples of Italy, to which he gave their laws” (Doutes, p. 51).
- 27.
“But the quality in which the Roman commonwealth is most distinctly superior is in my opinion the nature of their religious convictions. I believe that it is the very thing which among other peoples is an object of reproach, I mean superstition, which maintains the cohesion of the Roman State. These matters are clothed in such pomp and introduced to such an extent into their public and private life that nothing could exceed it, a fact which will surprise many. My own opinion at least is that they have adopted this course for the sake of the common people. It is a course which perhaps would not have been necessary had it been possible to form a state composed of wise men, but as every multitude is fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned passion, and violent anger, the multitude must be held in by invisible terrors and suchlike pageantry. For this reason, I think, not that the ancients acted rashly and at haphazard in introducing among the people notions concerning the gods and beliefs in the terrors of hell, but that the moderns are rashest and foolish in banishing such beliefs” (Polybius, The Histories, 5–8, trans. W. R. Paton, Cambridge/London, Harvard University Press, 1923, III, p. 295). See Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 34–36.
- 28.
“Whence comes it, I beg you, that although there is among men a prodigious diversity of opinions bearing on the manner of serving God and of living according to the laws of propriety, one nonetheless sees certain passions consistently ruling in all countries and in all ages? Why are ambition, avarice, envy, the desire to avenge oneself, shamelessness, and all the crimes that can satisfy these passions seen everywhere? Why are Jew and Mohammedan, Turk and Moor, Christian and Infidel, Indian and Tartar, the inhabitant of the firm earth and the inhabitant of the isles, nobleman and commoner, all the sorts of peoples who in other respects have as it were nothing in common except the general notion of man—why are they so similar in regard to these passions that one might say they copy one another? Whence comes all this, if not from the fact that the true principle of the actions of man (I except those in whom the grace of the Holy Spirit is deployed with all its efficacy) is nothing other than the temperament, the natural inclination toward pleasure, the taste one contracts for certain objects, the desire to please someone, a habit gained in the commerce with one’s friends, or some other disposition that results from the ground of our nature, in whatever country one may be born, and from whatever knowledge our mind may be filled with?” (Pierre Bayle, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet , trans. Robert Bartlett, Albany, SUNY, 2000, p. 169).
- 29.
This is not, by any means, an original thesis of the manuscript we are analyzing. Beyond the passage that can be traced back to Polybius, which we mentioned above, we may find this line right at the center of clandestine literature. This is shown by the fact that in Theophrastus redivivus there are two chapters entitled “In quo difusse ostenditur religionem omnino esse artem politicam” (Theophrastus redivivus, ed. Guido Canziani and Gianni Paganini, Firenze, La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1981–1982, II, p. 349).
- 30.
Cf. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , ed. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975, pp. 159–161.
- 31.
“What is a skeptic? A skeptic is a philosopher who has doubted everything he or she believes, and who believes what has been proven true by a legitimate use of the reason and senses. Do you want something more precise? Turn a Pyrrhonist sincere and you will have a skeptic” (Denis Diderot, Pensées philosophiques, ed. R. Niklaus, Oeuvres complètes, Paris, Hermann, 1975, II, p. 35).
- 32.
Jean Pierre de Crousaz, Examen du pyrrhonisme ancien et moderne, La Haye, 1733, p. 378.
- 33.
Although it is not about making a classification by categories and species, it is clear that both “furious” and “moderate” Pyrrhonists belong, in turn, to the “good Pyrrhonists” group discussed in the Second Doubt; that is, neither of them lost their “bon sens” in questioning the existence of the world, of the self, and of a First Eternal Being.
- 34.
As has already been mentioned, the author considers the Egyptian religion (from which, he thinks, all others derive, with the exception of those from the Far East and India), as well as the Jewish, the Christian, the Mohammedan, and the Brahmin religions, the “three religions from the vast Empire of China,” and that of Japan. The same fact is found in all of them; i.e., that the people “[are] never superstitious enough”.
- 35.
It is considered to be “politically degenerated”, particularly due to the persecutions and bigotry caused in places where it exerts its dominance. In fact, according to the manuscript, Christian priests. “in order to make people believe more easily… attack with iron and fire anyone that dares to deny it. It is a sure way to impose silence upon those that would want to speak against their illusions and, thus, they make even more progress. The others, who make up the majority (the plebs), kindly and easily believe everything that is imposed on them, strange though it may be. This blind belief greatly strengthens the priests, who are encouraged to be unscrupulous and to pursue the death of those that have a different opinion to that accepted by the priesthood” (Doutes, p. 79).
- 36.
Cf. Louis Le Comte, Nouveaux mémoires sur l’état present de la Chine, 2nd. ed., Paris, 1697, II, 145.
- 37.
Cf. Ibid., II, 146–147.
- 38.
Cf. Pierre Bayle, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet , op. cit., p. 200: “Conjectures on the Morals of a Society without Religion”.
- 39.
This was highlighted in relation to the Sixth Doubt: the problem of evil is that of injustice and oppression among men, which is unrelated to God, in as much as It is not related to “plagues, wars, floods and other harmful alterations of the elements that are also consequences of the natural order” (Doutes, 25). This idea is repeated even more strongly, if possible, in the Eighth Doubt: “It [God] wants killings and robberies to exist, and that people do what they do, but It also wants men to pass laws and rules of life, and that judges have those that disrupt society hanged or punished. It is a misfortune to be bad tempered or have similar inclinations than cannot be stopped through fear of the punishments, in the same way it is a misfortune for the snake and the toad to be what they are, and that every man wants to wipe them out. However, the extermination of the snake, the toad and the evil man has no consequence for the world and constitutes a great benefit for the society. Similarly, God does not need advocates to excuse It for what happens. It wants wars as well as plagues. It wants foreign nations to be flooded, and that the lands and empires other people previously had be occupied. It wants earthquakes and floods, among other things, and It wants that the voracious and stronger animals eat the weaker and meeker ones, and, in brief, every other action, given that It is indifferent to them and they happened as It has established” (Doutes, p. 110). Gianni Paganini has drawn attention to the similarities between this passage and paragraph 3 of Chapter IX from L’Examen de la Religion (cf. G. Paganini, “Du bon usage du scepticisme: les ‘Doutes des pyrrhoniens’”, La philosophie clandestine à l’Age classique, 1997, pp. 296–297, n. 9) In said clandestine text, attributed to Du Marsais, it is also claimed, among other things, that “every creature is good in relation to God”, since “they are completely dependent on it (…) and consequently (…) there is nothing to punish or reward”. This is illustrated with examples similar to the one of snakes or of thieves (César Chesneau Du Marsais, Examen de la religion ou Doutes sur la religion dont on cherche l’eclaircissement de bonne foi, ed. Gianluca Mori, Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 1998, pp. 196–197).
- 40.
We found this phrase in a passage the author takes as his own and which should therefore be thought of as an expression of “moderate Pyrrhonism”: “Even though it is plausible that the aim of religion is good as it tends to impose fear on those that stop observing the principles and regulations of their country, we will clearly prove hereunder that the other two parts of religion, the knowledge of the First Being (the so called God) and the cult offered to It, arise out of the mere caprice of men, thought of in different ways, and the popular superstition, which, with time, corrupts all things no matter how good they originally are” (Doutes, p. 62).
- 41.
G. Paganini, Les philosophies clandestines à l’âge classique, op. cit., p. 94.
- 42.
It is true that our manuscript, unlike the others quoted herein, concludes unexpectedly, that is, with a long quote from the Apology for Raymond Sebond (Michel de Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, trans. Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, Indianapolis/Cambridge, Hackett Publishing Co., 2003, pp. 73–74), which the author describes as “an overview of most of what I have just mentioned” (Doutes, p. 111). This seems to provide it with a less doctrinal aspect. However, when we carefully read Montaigne’s passage, we realize the main issues in it are two: the fantastic ability of human reasoning, showed particularly in the religious and philosophical inventions that have been devised; and the distinction between truth and usefulness, with the consequence that sometimes it is necessary to prefer the latter to the former. In this light, the passage is in effect an overview of our manuscript. Nevertheless, it does not increase its “skeptical” nature because of this. In any case, what it does show is the great productivity of Montaigne when it comes to endorsing ideas that maybe were not part of the author’s spirit, but which under said spirit would gain greater visibility (or concealment).
- 43.
Henri Busson, Le rationalisme dans la littérature française de la Renaissance (1533–1601), new edition, Paris, Vrin. 1957, p. 15.
- 44.
I am thinking specifically in the letter that Gentian Hervet wrote to the Cardinal of Lorraine and that he published as the preface to his translation of Adversus mathematicos by Sextus Empiricus (1569). Hervet states, among other things, that the work of Sextus “clearly shows that no human discipline was established so rigorously as to be unbreakable, that no science is certain enough as to be able to stand if contested by an arsenal of reasoning and arguments” and that, therefore, “if we refrain from those human sciences that do not contribute value , we will devote ourselves to study the discipline and science appropriate for Christians in order to embrace charity, basing our faith on the revelation that Christ made us, using the hope of the goods He promised and abiding by the principles of God” (Sexti Empirici Adversus mathematicos Gentiano Herveto Aurelio interprete, Antverpiae, 1569, second page). Regarding the complex reception and interpretation of skepticism in the sixteenth century, the studies of Emmanuel Naya are highly recommended. See, for example, E. Naya, “Le ‘coup de talon’ sur l’impiété: scepticisme et vérité chrétienne. au XVI siècle”, Les Études philosophiques, 2008 (2), pp. 141–160 (I owe this observation to Vicente Raga).
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Bahr, F. (2021). Skepticism and Clandestine Literature: Doutes des Pyrrhoniens. In: Rosaleny, V.R., Smith, P.J. (eds) Sceptical Doubt and Disbelief in Modern European Thought. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 233. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55362-3_7
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