Panagiotis Kondylis

"We shall approach far more closely the specific character of modern scepticism if we consider the age of the Reformation and the religious wars from the standpoint of the emerging modern state. In order to bring to an end the chaos of the religious wars, the absolutist state had to decisively set aside the question of truth. Religious tolerance and the peaceful co-existence of citizens, aiming at the preservation and increase of state-organised power of the community against other communities, only become possible from the moment the state abstains from the attempt at imposing the only "true" religion on its subjects. The state's authority does not lie in finding "the" truth and making it binding, but on the contrary, in by-passing the truth, declaring it a private matter. Hobbes's proposition: "auctoritas non veritas facit legem" 342 is anticipated, as is known, by the positions of the French Politiques, who theoretically base in the elimination of the question of truth the pacification of the state 343. This elimination results in the essential point of contact with scepticism - and it is no coincidence that some of the fiercest supporters of the absolutist state were precisely scepticists, 344 who stressed the relativity and transitoriness of each morality and truth, or the finiteness and sensory determinedness of the human intellect." (ARNR, pp.130; ED, pp.159-60)