SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY Modern historians of logic can Wnd little merit or originality in Ramus’ work, but for long after his death debates raged between Aristotelians and Ramists, and there were even groups of semi-Ramists campaigning for compromise Ramus became a Calvinist in 1561 and was killed in the massacre of Protestants on St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572 His status as a martyr gave his writings a prestige they could never have earned in their own right, and his inXuence lasted through the centuries John Milton, for instance, published a volume of Ramist Logic Wve years after the completion of Paradise Lost The popularity of Ramist works impoverished logic for a long period No further progress was made in formalizing the logic of modality and counterfactuality that had fascinated medieval logicians, and much of their own work passed into oblivion Scepticism, Sacred and Profane It was not only Catholics who killed heretics In 1553 Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician who had discovered the pulmonary circulation of the blood, was burnt in Calvin’s Geneva for denying the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus A French classicist teaching at Basel, named Sebastian Castellio, was shocked at the execution of Servetus and wrote a treatise Whether Heretics are to be Persecuted (Magdeburg, 1554) in which he pleaded in favour of toleration His arguments are mainly quotations of authoritative texts or appeals to the example of Christ ‘O Christ, when thou didst live upon earth, none was more gentle, more merciful, more patient of wrong Art thou now so changed? If thou, O Christ, hast commanded these executions and tortures, what hast thou left for the devil to do?’5 But in a later work, The Art of Doubting, Castellio developed more epistemological arguments The diYculty of interpreting Scripture, and the variety of opinions among Christian sects, should make us very cautious in laying down the law on religious matters To be sure, there are some truths that are beyond doubt, such as the existence and goodness of God; but on other religious topics no one can be suYciently certain so as to be justiWed in killing another man as a heretic Castellio, in his time, was a lone voice; but later supporters of toleration looked back to him as a forerunner Quoted by O Chadwick, The Reformation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p 402 13