11 - Christianity and Criticism

Summary

This chapter will survey a variety of intellectual movements in the time of the Roman Empire which are related to criticism, complementing what has been said in the previous chapter about neo-Platonism and extending the range into the writings of Fathers of the Church before Augustine and Jerome and the Latin grammarians and rhetoricians of late antiquity. Some of this material provides background for Medieval criticism, to be discussed in volume II; some developments are also of interest in that they seem to foreshadow critical issues of the twentieth century.

The search for meaning through interpretation

Greek intellectuals of the Roman Empire discussed epistemology and adumbrated semiotic and hermeneutic theories of interpretation. There was, however, wide difference of opinion among them. At one extreme lies the tradition of Pyrrhonian scepticism, which had begun at the end of the fourth century BC and influenced the Academic school of the Hellenistic period in its controversy with Stoic belief that certainty could be obtained from sense perception. Among surviving works of the Classical period, scepticism is best represented in Cicero's Academies. The fullest exposition of a radical scepticism is, however, found in the writings of Sextus Empiricus in the late second century of the Christian era. Sextus rejected sense perception as a basis of knowledge, and with it all claims for certainty in logic, physics, and ethics. The sceptical principles set forth in Sextus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism are applied in detail in Against the Dogmatists to undermine the validity of teaching in grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, astronomy, and music.