Lucci, Diego
Senior Fellow: June-July 2024
Research Project: Sceptical Challenges and Strategies in the Inter-Confessional Debate on Transubstantiation, the Trinity, and the Rule of Faith in Late Seventeenth-Century England
This project, which will result in a 10,000-word journal article, deals with the debate of 1686-87 between English Catholic polemicists and Anglican divines about transubstantiation, the Trinity, and the rule of faith. Drawing on anti-Trinitarian arguments on the impossibility of deducing the Trinitarian dogma from Scripture alone, Catholic apologists criticized the Protestant doctrine of “sola Scriptura” as leading to the denial of not only transubstantiation but also the Trinity. Thus, they insisted on grounding biblical exegesis in ecclesiastical tradition. Protestant theologians replied that the Trinity was a “truth above reason” revealed in Scripture. But this solution, implying that the Trinity was not plainly comprehensible to reason, involved sceptical challenges and elicited sceptical arguments, as doubt was cast on the role of rational inquiry in biblical hermeneutics, on the comprehensibility of Scripture, and on the doctrinal authority of ecclesiastical institutions. Catholics indeed denounced the fallibility of individual interpretation of Scripture, while Protestants argued that Church Councils were not exempt from mistakes. Thus, those two parties accused each other of spreading scepticism about the scriptural and ecclesiastical foundations of religious truth.
Diego Lucci is Professor of Philosophy and History at the American University in Bulgaria.