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Teachers' Resource Web The Restoration and the 18th.-Century: Skepticism Richard Kroll, UCI See Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. The Renaissance: The Renaissance, beginning early in the fourteenth century, was distinguished by the rebirth, (hence the term "renaissance") of classical learning after the medieval period. This rebirth was as much a question of rereading and reinterpreting texts as anything else, though it stimulated the beginnings of what we now call textual criticism, the unearthing and establishment of the most accurate texts from antiquity. One of the most important objects of attention was the writings of Cicero, who is himself something of a sceptic, especially in his dialogue, The Academica, in which he recommends probable over certain forms of knowledge. Because one of the reasons for the new interest in ancient texts was to find a way to justify the political practice of the Italian city states, Renaissance thinkers also began to encourage notions of what we now call nationalism. The notion of an independent republic like Venice already suggests the possibility of self-determination, something also encouraged by the emergence of a print culture, which removes the control of knowledge from rare and centralized sources of production. The Reformation: The Reformation can thus be seen as a product of forces within the Renaissance. It can be seen as a reaction against authority, especially the great authority of the Catholic Church, for it attacked the centralized Catholic power. Vernacular literatures emerged because the Bible was now translated from the Vulgate (Latin) into German, English, and so forth. National identities also emerged, with the English in the forefront of this tendency. In theological terms, the twin cries of sola scriptura and sola fides ("the scriptures alone" and "faith alone") were designed to erode the Catholic claims to absolute control over the life and soul of every believer. If the Reformed believer could obtain a readable copy of the Bible (thus the importance of the vernacular), he or she could come to belief by the process of an individually-exercised act of faith. This dispensed of the Catholic clergy, who claimed the power to mediate between the believer and God. The sixteenth century, when all these developments came to a head, also saw the publication of the texts of Sextus Empiricus, a Greek writer who described the Hellenistic philosophy of scepticism. The Pyrrhonistic sceptic argued that when we examine all claims to truth, we find that in many and various ways they are mutually contradictory, paradoxical, or impossible. The Pyrrhonian argued for the total suspension of judgment, whereas the Academic sceptic (see Cicero's Academica above) argued that while there were no certain grounds for knowledge, we should behave as if there were enough bases of knowledge for us to function from day to day. The sceptical crisis in Europe occurred partly in consequence of the Reformation, because the Catholics attacked the Protestants by pointing out that neither the Scriptures nor the inward movements of the soul, mind, or conscience could guarantee whether and how the individual could know truth. This argument had greater power because the Protestant reliance on the Bible also encouraged the Reformers to realize that there was no single, stable text of Scripture, but a series of texts like other ancient texts that had to be patched together. The Catholics said this proved the need for some absolute court of appeal like the Church or Papacy. The Protestants countered with sceptical arguments about how the believer could possibly know how the Pope's deliberations were or could be infallible. Montaigne: The crisis gained peculiar political force because the emergence of Protestantism created political dissent that resulted in prolonged and tragic civil wars, especially in France. Thus, it is no surprise that it was a Frenchman, Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), a Catholic who, in his almost universally influential Essais (1580), distilled the sceptical arguments and gave them a powerful literary and cultural authority. England: The power of sceptical arguments applied as much to English culture as to that of other nations. England had experienced its own Reformation; and by the end of the sixteenth century, the Elizabethans were dealing with grave crises in how to run the national church, and were also aware that because Elizabeth had no children, the country was living with a potential power vacuum. James I succeeded Elizabeth I in 1603, but the tensions that were to break out in the English Civil War were already detectable. The Civil War occurred for a number of complicated reasons, not all of which are economic. Indeed, one of the central issues involved the control and nature of the national church. One precipitating crisis involved the determination of Archbishop Laud to retain, in a Reformed version, the formalities derived from the old Catholic practices. The "Puritans" are partly so called because they sought to "purify" the Church of England from what they saw as idolatrous church practices, such as the use of vestments. The outbreak of the Civil War resulted in three things that leaders and thinkers of the Restoration were to remember: the increasing fragmentation of the various dissenting sects--of which the Presbyterians were among the more moderate; a growing conflict between parliament and the army, ultimately headed by Cromwell; and the execution of Charles I in 1649. The Republic declared in 1649 quickly sank into political chaos, a chaos that was only restrained by vigorous army rule under Cromwell, and that reemerged the moment Cromwell died in 1658. Although Richard Cromwell succeeded his father, the resulting vacuum led to calls that Charles II--Charles I's son--return from exile on the Continent. He returned in 1660, and we call his assumption of power "the Restoration."
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