Today, the political relevance of religion seems obvious.
When Christianity first started to spread throughout the Roman Empire,
Roman commentators were worried, not just
because they simply refused to award any special significance to the Bible
as a source of divine revelation or fail to see what Christian morality had to offer
to an empire struggling to maintain its power.
What was new about Christianity, from a political perspective,
was they claim to follow a king of kings, that it obeyed a God of gods.
Roman religion had always been part of the Roman state itself.
To become a priest, as Julius Caesar had been as a young man, was to serve the state.
Religious officers were part of the Cursus Honorum,
the series of public offices to be held by aspiring politicians.
And in a very real way, the object of the Roman cult was the history of Rome itself,
the mos maiorum, the ways of our ancestors.
Christianity, on the other hand, presented itself as a religion
that was a force of its own.
As a matter of fact, it's autonomy from the state
that was Rome ensured its survival when Rome collapsed in the course of the fifth century.
It was even able to fill the gap left in Western Europe once the Pax Romana,
the rule of Rome, evaporated.
The ubiquity of the Church cemented the continuity of what was soon called the Latin West.
Today, the Latin West is largely secular.
In Western Europe, Christianity is in decline,
which is far from clear how this has come about.
Most people appear to believe in some variety
of Max Weber's views on the inevitability of secularization during World War I.
This German sociologist launched a theory about the so-called disenchantment of the world.
In German, "Die Entzauberung der Welt."
According to Weber, human beings are rational and, gradually,
their rationality will come to replace pre-rational accounts of the world,
including religion.
According to this theory, Christianity has slowly collapsed.
Once rational, that is, skeptical questions were raised about the credibility
of some of the main claims of the Christian religion.
As a matter of fact however, it was only during the late 18th century
that a major skeptical philosopher appeared
to undermine the intellectual foundations of Christianity,
and it was only following Darwin at the latter half of the 19th century
that science came to serve as an alternative to religion.
Scientists such as Galileo, who had been condemned previously
by the Church, never aimed to overthrow its authority.
As a rule, Roman philosophers facing the rise of Christianity
and questioning its truth claims were no skeptics themselves.
They just failed to see why the Bible should be regarded a divine book.
They saw no reason to prefer faith over reason.
They felt the notion that God's son had been born in faraway Bethlehem
to an obscure Jewish couple highly improbable.
They were not impressed by the son's reported miracles either.
The more so has all the accounts available derived from Christ's disciples,
and they simply refused to be impressed
by the moral philosophy expounded by this new religion.
What's so wonderful about poverty?
How will we be able to maintain our empire
once we embrace the pacifism taught in the Sermon of the Mount?
And isn't Christian morality just too easy?
Once you've sinned, all you have to do is beg forgiveness, and you're off the hook.
It's easy to see how the average second century Roman gentleman must have felt
about these new sect.
By the fourth century, Christianity came to dominate the Roman Empire.
Pagan philosophers were fighting a losing battle and, during the Middle Ages,
skeptical arguments about the desirability,
let alone the truth of Christianity, simply vanished.
Philosophy no longer opposed faith.
Learning and scholarship became the exclusive domain of the Church.
It's monastery served as custodians of the literary heritage of antiquity,
although for obvious reasons, the anti-Christian polemics of Roman philosophers,
such as Celsus, failed to survive.
Once pagan philosophy was rediscovered during the 13th century in particular.
It was, of course, supposed to support the authority of Christianity,
for instance, by demonstrating the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.
By the Renaissance, however, it became increasingly clear
that only parts of Plato and Aristotle could serve the cause of Christianity.
But many philosophers and theologians active prior to the 18th century
felt skepticism mainly serve to bolster the claims made by Christianity.
For if reason is indeed unable to reach truth,
does this not go to show that man is in urgent need of faith?
Just read the Acts of the Apostles 17,
the first recorded encounter between a Christian theologian
and a Greek philosopher, in which Paul, by the middle of the first century,
addressed the philosophers he met in Athens.
Add to this, Paul's first letter to the Corinthians and his letter to the Colossians
and it's quite clear how Paul tried to demonstrate the failure of philosophy.
The fact that philosophy consists of such a large variety of schools
of thought demonstrated that natural reason alone is unable to reach the one,
ultimate truth revealed in Scripture.
Soon, fideism became a popular ally of Christian apologetics.
The absence of shared ground among philosophers exclusively referred to natural reason.
Theologians were only too happy
to stress the suprarational nature of Christian truth claims.
And during the Renaissance, this way out became especially popular
with the rise of the so-called skeptical crisis of the 16th century.
While it is true that skepticism enjoyed the late medieval Renaissance
once theologians started exploring such issues as God's omnipotence.
If God is truly omnipotent, why is it that he doesn't change,
for example, the laws of nature?
And what if he does?
It was only by the late 16th century that skepticism came into its own.
Following the republication of Sextus Empiricus,
a major classical skeptical philosopher, in a short span of time,
educated Europeans saw so many changes that it was only natural they started wondering
whether they could be sure of anything.
In a short period of time, their world had increased dramatically,
both in time and in space.
Classical antiquity had turned out to be even more impressive
than medieval scholars could fathom.
The voyages of discovery had demonstrated
that human beings had build civilizations across the globe.
The invention of the printing press dramatically accelerated the speed
with which new insights reached scholars in Europe.
The Reformation had split the one self-evident authority of the Church of Rome,
while the scientific revolution was undermining the authority
of both Aristotle's natural philosophy and his metaphysics.
"Que sçay-je?" As the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne
put it in his essays of the 1580s.
"What do I know?"
So, by the end of the 16th century, skepticism became highly fashionable,
especially among French men of letters,
and soon it would come to threaten the heart of Christianity.
