The Issue of Reformation Scepticism Revisited: What Erasmus and Sebastian Castellio Did or Did Not Know

Richard Popkin in his classic study argues that the Reformation debates about the rule of faith instanced the more general problem confronted by Scepticism, that of justifying the criterion of truth. He therefore postulates that it is thanks to the Reformation that Scepticism became an extremely important issue in modern thought. He polarises the issue of the Reformation debates as taking place between those who thought that the church of Rome and its tradition con¬stituted the only criterion of truth in cases of disagreement about a point of Scripture and those who thought that faith and individual conscience made up the only criterion of truth. If Popkin were correct in his basic assumption, this would indeed mean that the problem faced by sixteenth century theologians was the Pyrrhonian problem of justifying a criterion of truth for, as is well known, the Pyrrhonians argue that another criterion is necessary to justify any criterion of truth, and that this implies either a circularity of argument or falling into infinite regress. However, recent studies on Luther's and other reformers' recourse to church tradition in their polemic against the Catholics and on the specificity of the Catholic understanding of tradition have shown that reformers relied on tradition in the sense of fathers and councils as interpreters of Scripture just as much as Catholics did. Thus both parties agreed on what the rule of faith was-Scripture as interpreted by tradition — and disagreed only about how it should be interpreted and applied. In other words, the rule itself “Scripture interpreted by tradition” was ambivalent and could imply either that the papacy was the legitimate spokesman for the tradition or that the tradition was confined to early doctors of the church who were closer to the original purity of the apostolic period. If we take the major protestant church history of the period, The Cen¬turies of Magdeburg, the authors' argument is just that Luther was not to be hailed as discounting the tradition but as resurrecting the very earliest tradition, close to apostolic purity in its interpretation of the Sacred Word. The Catholic response to the Centuries, the Annals of Caesar Baronius, did not argue for the legitimacy of interpreting Scripture via tradition but for the power of the papacy to act as spokesman for the tradition. Luther himself never denied the impor¬tance of tradition and would not countenance any suggestion that he was alone with the Scripture. In his dispute with Erasmus Luther refuted strongly Eras¬mus' contention that he (Erasmus) had the entire tradition on his side whereas Luther relied on the Bible alone with only Valla and Wycliff as his non-scriptural guarantors for the truth of the Scripture. Nothing would have been easier for Luther (or more natural, if Popkin's thesis were sound) than to claim at this stage that individual conscience was the criterion of truth in Scripture interpre¬tation. However, what he did instead was to appropriate the tradition and try to show that Erasmus and the Catholic church were usurping it. Luther thus argued that none of the fathers alleged by Erasmus and the Catholic church in defence of freedom of the will did in fact defend free will. Therefore the church with the pope at its head was an impostor as spokesman for tradition.