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

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.

Notes

1. See Erika Rummel, Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 55–61; Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 7–10.

2. Erasmus’s preferences for simple piety over rational argumentation are exhibited in both the Moriae Encomium (1511) and the Paraclesis (1516). In the latter, for instance, he argues that “the Christian philosophy is seated more deeply in the emotions than in learned syllogisms; for it, life is more than logic, inspiration is more than erudition, transfiguration more than argumentation. Very few can be learned, but no man is denied permission to be a Christian, no man is forbidden to be pious.” Later in the same work, Erasmus follows Augustine: ‘In these sacred writings alone, what I cannot understand, I adore.” Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Robert M. Adams, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1989), 123, 126.

3. Rummel, Confessionalization, 57.

4. Rummel, Confessionalization, 6, 54, 151.

5. Popkin contends that Gentian Hervet, François de Sales, Jacques du Perron, François Véron, and other French Catholic polemicists (in addition to Montaigne) embraced a program of skeptical fideism that Erasmus inaugurated, even if Erasmus never became the thoroughgoing pyrrhonist with respect to certainty that these exponents of the French Counter-Reformation did. See Popkin, Scepticism, 7–9, 16, 65.

6. It was the humanist scholar Henri Estienne who published the first Latin edition. The second was produced seven years later by Gentian Hervet, who was a delegate to the Council of Trent and secretary to the Cardinal of Lorraine. These texts reconstructed the Pyrrhonist tradition of ancient skepticism, which held that there was insufficient and inadequate evidence to determine if any knowledge was possible. The Pyrrhonists labeled the Academic skeptics “negative dogmatists,” since they definitively concluded that no knowledge was possible. See Popkin, Scepticism, xvii.

7. For this principle of the skeptic, see Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), bk. 1, chap. 4, §8–10, 7–9; henceforth the book number and standardized section numbers (§) will be given. For the French Counter-Reformers, see Popkin, Scepticism, 55, 58–60, 67–79.

8. Sextus, Pyrrhonism, 2 §19–20; Popkin, Scepticism, 5, 54, 67–79.

9. See Popkin, Scepticism, 47, 65–67, 75–79. According to Popkin, the core of fideism is that all things can be doubted unless at least one thing is accepted on unquestioning faith (xx–xxiii). In the case of Cardinal du Perron and François Véron, for instance, this one thing would be the authority of the church. Hence, French Catholic fideists fully incorporated a skeptical philosophy. The major sixteenth-century polemicists studied here employed skeptical modes of argumentation without concluding that their own doctrinal epistemologies were uncertain.

10. Popkin, Scepticism, 11–13, 65–66.

11. Popkin, Scepticism, 208–18. See also David Katz, God’s Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 118–19. Katz argues that that the Church of England did not seriously confront skeptical challenges to scriptural authority until the late seventeenth century, when the Latitudinarians addressed the conjunction of French Pyrrhonism with rationalist biblical criticism.

12. See Popkin, Scepticism, 11–16, 53–56, 66, 216–18. For an earlier critique of Popkin’s paradigm, see Pierre-François Moreau, “Les arguments sceptiques dans la lecture de l’Ecriture sainte,” in Le scepticisme au XVIe et au XVIIe siècle, ed. Moreau (Paris: A. Michel, 2001), 382–90. Andrew Murphy questions the necessary relationship between skepticism and tolerance with evidence from the late-seventeenth-century British Atlantic world, in Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), esp. 2–21. In the introduction and conclusion to her recent magisterial study of the putative sixteenth-century epistemological crisis, Susan Schreiner recognizes that skepticism did not always beget tolerance, and that it sometimes could breed repression, too. She credits Richard Tuck’s Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) for establishing that fact. Despite that proviso, she continues to rely on the traditional understanding that skepticism “functioned as a cautionary corrective, an attempt to halt various forms of religious violence.” See Susan Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), x, xii–xiii, 392–93.

13. Schreiner’s Are You Alone Wise? multiplies examples of epistemological challenges employed by both Catholic and Protestant contemporaries of Erasmus: Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and Tyndale on one side; Eck, Henry VIII, More, and Pighius on the other. All were determined to show how the other’s rule of faith could not establish certain knowledge of the truth. Determining then whether Bellarmino and Whitaker were intentionally or unintentionally borrowing from Erasmus is unnecessary and is not the aim of this paper. Schreiner proceeds to describe how these epistemological debates spilled over to essays (Montaigne), drama (Shakespeare), and spiritual literature (Loyola, Avila), rather than tracing their continued influence and adaptation in theological polemic much beyond the first generation of reformers. This article seeks to advance the narrative of theological controversy that Schreiner began to sketch.

14. Popkin associated Bellarmino with the French Jesuit controversialists who sought (1) to “undermin[e] Calvinism on its own grounds by raising a series of skeptical difficulties”; and (2) “to advocate Catholicism on a fideistic basis.” See Popkin, Scepticism, 67. He does not offer any references to Bellarmino’s work. On du Perron and de Sales lauding the Controversies, see James Brodrick, Robert Bellarmine: Saint and Scholar (London: Burns & Oates, 1961), 85–90.

15. “De Verbo Dei” spanned pages 1-256 of the first folio volume of Bellarmino’s work, first printed as Disputationes Roberti Bellarmini Politiani, Societatis Iesv, De Controversiis Christianae Fidei, Adversvs Hvivs Temporis Haereticos, Tribus Tomis comprehensae. ... INGOLSTADII, Ex Officina Typographica Davidis Sartorii. Anno Domini M.D. LXXXVI. The Ingolstadt printer David Sartorius released the second and third volumes in 1588 and 1593, respectively. Over the course of the following century, the Controversies were reprinted frequently in Ingolstadt, Lyon, Venice, Paris, and Cologne.

16. William Whitaker, Disputatio de Sacra Scriptura, contra huius temporis papistas, inprimis Robertum Bellarminum Iesuitam, pontificium in Collegio Romano, & Thomam Stapletonum, regium in Schola Duacena controversiarum professorem... à Guilielmo VVhitakero Theologiae Doctore, ac Professore Regio, & Collegij D. Ioannis in Cantabrigiensi Academia Magistro. Cambridge, 1588. Early English Books Online, at: <http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:173125>. Unless otherwise indicated, English quotations that appear in the text are from William Fitzgerald, ed. and trans., A Disputation on Holy Scripture, against the papists, especially Bellarmino and Stapleton. By William Whitaker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849). Bellarmino is said to have acknowledged how formidable an opponent Whitaker was by placing a picture of him over his desk. See C. S. Knighton, “Whitaker, William (1547/8–1595),” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, September 2004; online edn., January 2008). Peter Lake argues that Whitaker’s polemics endowed him with so much prestige in the Church of England that even the most eminent conformists avoided opposing his zealously puritan activities, including the “godly” reorganization of St. John’s College. See Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 57–76.

17. Bellarmino, Whitaker, and other leading French controversialists claimed to be drawing their epistemological arguments from Augustine and earlier Christianized ancient philosophers (e.g., Cicero and Aristotle), and not from Sextus Empiricus, whose authority did not carry any theological weight. Moreover, a key objective in using the skeptical techniques of Sextus was to show how the opponent’s epistemology (or rule of faith) required that one become a desperate pyrrhonian. To admit the charge would be to declare defeat. So, while the positions of Sextus will be compared with those of Whitaker and Bellarmino, determining what exactly the latter two drew from Sextus is less relevant than understanding how they aimed to destabilize each other’s rule of faith and then to reconstruct their own without leaving certainty behind.

18. The skeptical arguments marshaled in each period were not identical. The rationalist biblical critics argued that the Bible should be interrogated not as a divine book but rather as a human product that is not exempt from the errors of its fallible human authors. Bellarmino and his co-polemicists levied doubts primarily about the capacity of human reason to ascertain true doctrine out of the scriptural text, given its divine profundity.

19. Bellarmino, “De Verbo Dei,” 1. All quotations from Bellarmino’s “De Verbo Dei” and “De Summo Pontifice” (see below), are from the 1st edition of the Disputationes (Ingolstadt: Sartorius, 1586), available at the Mullen Library of the Catholic University of America. Translations are mine.

20. F. J. Crehan, “The Bible in the Roman Catholic Church from Trent to the Present Day,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. S. L. Greenslade, vol. 3, The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 199. The phrase “pari pietatis affectu ac reverentia” comes from the fourth session, April 1546, on the Decree of Canonical Scriptures: Aemilius Richter, ed., Canones et Decreta Concilii Tridentini (Leipzig, 1853), 12.

21. Bellarmino, Disputationes, “Praefatio,” f.**6r.

22. The “magisterial” Protestants of the Reformed and Lutheran traditions will be distinguished from Anabaptists, Schwenkfeldians, Familists, or (later on) Quakers, who relied on spiritual illumination apart from scripture. Whitaker himself distinguished these “Superilliuminati” from “real Christians.” See Whitaker, Disputatio, 216; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 298.

23. Whitaker, Disputatio, 197–99; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 275–78. The centrality of Bellarmino to religious controversy in England can be gleaned from Whitaker’s own perceptions, which he no doubt magnified in his preface in order to market his refutation: “But beyond them all, in the largeness wherewith he hath treated these controversies, is Robert Bellarmine, the Jesuit at Rome, whose lectures are passed from hand to hand and diligently transcribed and read by very many. ... But many copies of these lectures fly about everywhere among the papists, and sometimes, in spite of their precautions, fall into our hands. … We must take measures for the security of these persons and especially at the present time, when so many, partly by the reading of such books as are every day published by our adversaries, partly by too great a familiarity with papists, have fallen under a deplorable calamity, and deserted from us to the popish camp” (Fitzgerald, Disputation, 15–16).

24. Whitaker, Disputatio, 232: “Augustinus ait: Ego non crederem Evangelio, nisi me Ecclesia Catholica authoritas commoveret.” Fitzgerald, Disputation, 319.

25. Whitaker, Disputatio, 232; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 320.

26. Whitaker, Disputatio, 197, 199; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 276, 277–78.

27. Whitaker, Disputatio, 235, 264; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 322–23, 358.

28. Compare Whitaker’s Disputatio, 211–13 (Fitzgerald, Disputation, 293–94, discussed below), with Bellarmino, “De Verbo Dei,” 4–5. Bellarmino does not marshal probable evidence for the divine inspiration of the canonical books of the Bible primarily to disarm magisterial reformers like Whitaker. His principal opponents in this first section are ascriptural illuminationists (e.g., Schwenkfeldians) who denied both the authority of the scriptures and the church. He realized that his appeal to reason could not produce certainty, but he considered it the only standard of judgment that both he and his opponents, the illuminationists, would accept.

29. For this pyrrhonian modus operandi, see Sextus, Pyrrhonism, 1 §8, 12, 202–5.

30. For Bellarmino’s efforts to cast doubt on the rationality of the biblical canon, see “De Verbo Dei,” 3–6, 207–12. For instance: “How indeed can we gather from Scripture that the gospels of Mark and Luke are true and that those of Thomas and Bartholomew are false? For reason would suggest the opposite—that more belief should be put in a book with the name of an apostle than of a nonapostle. And how do I gather that the epistle to the Romans is really of Paul and the epistle to the Laodiceans, which now circulates, is not of Paul? Both bear the name of Paul on the front, and Paul himself says in the epistle to the Colossians, in the last chapter, that he wrote to the Laodiceans, but he never says he wrote to the Romans” (209).

31. See Sextus, Pyrrhonism, 1 §61, 165–69.

32. Bellarmino, “De Verbo Dei,” 209. See also Whitaker, Disputatio, 207 (Fitzgerald, Disputation, 288) for Whitaker’s management of a parallel argument expressed in Pyrrhonian logic by Thomas Stapleton.

33. Whitaker, Disputatio, 198; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 277. Whitaker attributed these arguments both to Bellarmino and to the Silesian theologian Johann Cochlaeus.

34. Whitaker, Disputatio, 4, 10–17, 21–30; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 29, 39–49, 54–66.

35. Like Bellarmino’s list, it included testimonies both internal (e.g., improbable concordance of narratives) and external (e.g., historical fulfillment of prophecies): Whitaker, Disputatio, 211–13; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 293–94.

36. Whitaker, Disputatio, 200; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 280.

37. For Whitaker, see Disputatio, esp. 334–35; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 448. For the magisterial reformers, see Susan Schreiner, “‘The Spiritual Man Judges All Things’: Calvin and the Exegetical Debate about Certainty in the Reformation,” in Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation: Essays Presented to David Steinmetz in Honor of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Richard Muller and John Thompson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 189–98.

38. Whitaker, Disputatio, 215–16; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 297–99.

39. Schreiner has shown how proving the judgments of the Holy Spirit was an especially vexed issue for Luther and Zwingli given the former’s emphasis upon deceiving spirits and the latter’s equation of the invisible church with the church that cannot err. See Schreiner, “Spiritual Man,” 200–206.

40. Whitaker, Disputatio, 213; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 295. This central tactic of counter-Reformation polemic—that disagreement about biblical interpretation means the Bible cannot judge itself—was employed long before the publication of the first Latin edition of Sextus Empiricus. Nevertheless, Sextus also relies upon disagreement among dogmatists as proof that dogmas are neither self-evident nor probable. See Pyrrhonism, 1 §85, 112, 135.

41. Whitaker, Disputatio, 214; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 296.

42. Whitaker, Disputatio, 214, also 30, 74–75, 224; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 296, also 66, 105–6, 309.

43. Whitaker, Disputatio, 217; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 299.

44. Whitaker, Disputatio, 215; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 297.

45. Whitaker, Disputatio, 215; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 297.

46. Sextus, Pyrrhonism, 1 §116–17, 122–23, 164–172, 176–77, 179, 186; 2 §19–20, 51–54.

47. Popkin does not interrogate Pyrrhonian discourse in Elizabethan England. He cites two brief studies that show that (1) “Pyrrhonian themes” occupied some of the disputations at Oxford; and (2) several copies of the Latin editions of Sextus were found in English libraries starting in the late 1570s. He follows the spread of Pyrrhonism more closely in the seventeenth century to the extent that it appears to be a bridge to Latitudinarianism. See Popkin, Scepticism, 64–66, 322–23 nn.1–12. While it appears that Whitaker did not study the texts of Sextus directly, he developed his epistemological and ecclesiological positions in conversation with other Catholic apologists who did.

48. Bellarmino, “De Verbo Dei,” 156.

49. In the Summa Theologica (2a2ae. 1, 9–10), Thomas Aquinas held that “the truth of faith is contained in Holy Writ, but diffusely, in diverse ways, and sometimes darkly. The result is that to draw out the truth of faith from Scripture requires a prolonged study and practice not within the capacity of all those who need to know the truths of faith.” Other errors arose “because wicked men have wrested apostolic teaching and the other Scriptures to their own destruction.” See T. C. O’Brien, ed. and trans., St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae (New York: Blackfriars, 1974), 31:50–51, 55. Aquinas quotes 2 Peter 3:16. Accordingly, creeds, catechisms, and decrees were expedient because sinfulness or other business intervened, preventing some individuals from extracting the true meaning of the scriptures on their own. But those properly disposed and prepared to read scripture would not require creedal statements to identify the truths of faith within it. Whitaker approved similar reasoning in the Summa 2a.2ae.1,1, and, moreover, rebuked Bellarmino for commenting on this very section without integrating it into his theological epistemology. See Whitaker, Disputatio, 235, 264; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 322, 358.

50. Whitaker, Disputatio, 287; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 388.

51. Bellarmino, “De Verbo Dei,” 157.

52. Bellarmino, “De Verbo Dei,” 157. Bellarmino here uses scriptural prooftexts to prove the unclarity of the Bible—an apparent conflict not at all lost on Whitaker. See Whitaker, Disputatio, 297; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 401.

53. Bellarmino, “De Verbo Dei,” 157.

54. Bellarmino, “De Verbo Dei,” 187.

55. Bellarmino, “De Verbo Dei,” 187–88.

56. Bellarmino, “De Verbo Dei,” 188.

57. Whitaker, Disputatio, 377–84, 425–58, 502–4; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 504–13, 564–610, 664–67.

58. Whitaker, Disputatio, 307, 335; Fitzgerald, Disputatio, 448–49, also 413.

59. Compare Whitaker’s argument with Sextus, Pyrrhonism, 1 §89: “Moreover, he who maintains that we ought to assent to the majority is making a childish proposal, since no one is able to visit the whole of mankind and determine what pleases the majority of them; for there may possibly be races of whom we know nothing amongst whom conditions rare with us are common, and conditions common with us rare.” Also 2 §45: “Individual men are innumerable and we are incapable of investigating and expounding the judgments of all of them—what it is the majority of all mankind affirm and what the minority. Thus, on this showing also, the preference given to men’s judgments on the ground of their numbers is absurd.”

60. Rummel, Confessionalization, 51–57; Popkin, Sceptism, 44–56.

61. On Bellarmino’s preoccupation with the religious context in England, see James Brodrick, Robert Bellarmine: Saint and Scholar (London: Burns & Oates, 1961), 68–72.

62. Bellarmino, “De Verbo Dei,” 170.

63. Bellarmino, Controversies, “De Summo Pontifice,” 974.

64. Bellarmino, Controversies, “De Summo Pontifice,” 982.

65. Bellarmino, Controversies, “De Summo Pontifice,” 971.

66. Bellarmino’s promotion of papal authority was not unqualified. He did maintain that the pope’s temporal authority was limited, following other contemporary theologians. For whom see J. H. M. Salmon, “Catholic Resistance Theory, Ultramontanism, and the royalist Response, 1580–1620,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, ed. J. H. Burnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 236–37. Bellarmino’s proposition that the pope was permitted to intervene in foreign politics only “indirectly” by virtue of his spiritual authority did not appeal to his erstwhile patron Sixtus V. As a result, the De Summo Pontifice, the very tract that set out Bellarmino’s position on papal infallibility, was condemned and would have been banished to the Index if not for Sixtus’s sudden death. Bellarmino’s simultaneous efforts to enhance the pope’s spiritual authority and limit his temporal authority can be best understood in light of his epistemological agenda. Furthermore, the doctrine of papal infallibility can be recognized as a form of papal constraint. Brian Tierney has outlined how even medieval proponents of the theory conceived the doctrine as the inverse of sovereignty; that is, the head of an infallible monarchy would be bound necessarily by all the infallible pronouncements of predecessors, while a sovereign would not be bound by the decrees of any predecessor. See Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150–1350 (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 2–6. What was most important about the doctrine for Bellarmino was its capacity to limit the scope and especially enhance the certainty of papal judgments on matters of faith and morals. See Terry Tekippe, ed., Papal Infallibility: An Application of Lonergan’s Theological Method (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1983), 54–57. See also See Peter Godman, Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 189–90, 228–32.

67. That is not to say that Bellarmino abandoned tradition (Book IV of his first general controversy was entitled “De Verbo Dei non scripto”), or that he was the first Catholic polemicist since the Reformation started to tout papal infallibility (so had Eck and Catharinus, see Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise?, 164, 171–72). Explicit notions of papal infallibility had been advanced at least as early as the thirteenth century by mendicant theologians, but these theories were not as widely held as they were in the sixteenth century. See Tierney, Origins, 270–71. One indication of Bellarmino’s crucial role in the development of this doctrine is that when it finally was declared an article of faith during Vatican Council I (1869–70), a contemporaneous scholar dryly observed that “it was nothing other than a definition of Bellarmino’s views.” See Brodrick, Bellarmine, 87–88.

68. Bellarmino, “De Verbo Dei,” 167.

69. Whitaker, Disputatio, 276; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 373.

70. Whitaker, Disputatio, 266–67; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 361–62.

71. Whitaker, Disputatio, 203–4; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 283–84.

72. Whitaker, Disputatio, 224; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 309–10.

73. Whitaker, Disputatio, 243; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 333.

74. Whitaker, Disputatio, 353; also see page 464 for a prior expression of this argument. Fitzgerald, Disputation, 472.

75. Whitaker devoted the whole fourth section of his polemic to a defense “of the Perspicuity of Scripture.” See Fitzgerald, Disputation, 359–401.

76. Whitaker, Disputatio, 280; Fitzgerald, Disputation, 380.

77. See Lake, Moderate Puritans, 225.

78. The title of the first edition was A Short Sum of Christianity. Delivered by way of Catechisme by that Reverend and famous Divine, William Whitaker, Dr. in Divinity. Una salus cunctis unam sperare salutem, Uni Christi quam docet Una fides. London, 1630. The page references noted above are the same in both editions.

79. See Richard Ashcraft, “Latitudinarianism and Toleration: Historical Myth Versus Political History,” in Philosophy, Science and Religion in England 1640–1700, ed. Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), esp. 302–3, 310–11.