Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 79
Agrippa sought to present himself, as we have seen, as an Erasmian sceptic
whose purpose was to make people turn back to a simple biblical Christianity.
But, as the author of De occulta philosophia he was represented in the late
sixteenth century as a Faust figure, who had made a pact with the devil in order
to obtain a knowledge of the magical arts. This evil reputation should probably
be regarded as an almost total fabrication, as a propaganda coup by the monks to
whom Agrippa was so bitterly opposed. At the same time it is notable that one form
of magic—a natural or empirical magic—was exempted from the otherwise
complete scepticism of Agrippa’s De vanitate. This makes him appear as a Faust
figure in a more positive way, as someone who rejected established knowledge
as of no value to human beings and who sought rather to unlock the secrets of
nature so as to use natural powers for human benefit. But it may be wrong to
expect a simple consistent interpretation of the thought of such figures as
Agrippa. The existence of tensions and inconsistencies in their thought may more
fruitfully be seen as a reflection of what has been identified as the deepening
‘sceptical crisis’ 52 of Renaissance and early modern philosophy.
Montaigne’s Apologie de Raimond Sebond (1580) used the arguments of the
ancient sceptics in order to cast doubt on the reliability of the senses, to show
how human judgements are made fallible by all sorts of social and cultural
factors. Montaigne advocated the Pyrrhonian suspension of judgement and urged
that people should live in accordance with nature and custom. He professed
Christian fideism but at least part of his purpose in using sceptical arguments
seems to have been to oppose bigotry and promote greater tolerance. He seems to
have been a conservative, suggesting that people, having been led to a due sense
of the limitations of human faculties, should accept the guidance of established
authority, be it civil or ecclesiastical.
Another direction in which scepticism might be pursued was to the conclusion
that only God, strictly speaking, was capable of knowledge, if knowledge be
understood in the Aristotelian sense of giving necessary reasons or causes for
phenomena. Human beings could not hope to achieve such knowledge. This is
the conclusion, for instance, of the arguments put forward by the Portuguese
physician and philosopher Francisco Sanches (c. 1550–1623) in his Quod Nihil
Scitur. 53 One corollary Sanches drew was the fideistic one, that the Christian
religion cannot be defended by philosophy and depends wholly on faith. But he
also, and quite consistently, proposed an experimental method that would lead to
a true ‘understanding of natural phenomena’. Sanches thus anticipated one kind
of response to scepticism in modern philosophy (for instance in Gassendi and
Locke) which was to accept the impossibility of knowledge but to seek a reliable
substitute through methods which would at least give results that were highly
probable.
The arguments of the sceptics provided an important part of the intellectual
context in which Descartes (see Chapters 5 and 6) developed his philosophical
thought. Descartes sought to meet the sceptics on their own ground. Yet it is not
known that any sceptic thought he had been refuted by Descartes’s arguments.