SEXTUS EMPIRICUS ON

RELIGIOUS DOGMATISM

máté veres

In the third book of his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus

presents an ambitious case for withholding assent from any account
of the conception, existence, and providential activity of god (PH
3. 3–12).1 The parallel discussion in the first book of Against the
Physicists—which, by an accident of transmission, has become
widely known as Book 9 of Adversus Mathematicos—breaks down
into a section on the origin of the concept of god (M 9. 14–48) and
a broad-ranging survey of the opposition between theists and athe-
ists which motivates suspension of judgement about the existence
of god (M 9. 50–191). Sextus adds in both works the caveat that his
polemic against dogmatic theology does not amount to a rejection
of religious cult; in fact, Pyrrhonians will engage in the relevant
practices of their respective communities without breaching their
suspensive policy (PH 3. 2, M 9. 49).
It has been argued, however, that Pyrrhonists will have trouble
acquiescing in the religious practices of their compatriots, since
those practices depend on beliefs that are supposedly eliminated by
suspension of judgement.2 According to this objection, unless
Sceptics abandon their suspensive stance, the Sceptic’s religious
behaviour will be inescapably disingenuous. As a way out of this
predicament, some interpreters have suggested that the sort of

1
In the relevant cultural and philosophical context, the singular ‘god’ and the
plural ‘gods’ are more or less interchangeable.
2
In the words of R.  Bett, ‘Against the Physicists on Gods (M IX. 13–194)’
[‘Gods’], in K.  Algra and K.  Ierodiakonou (eds.), Sextus Empiricus and Ancient
Physics, Proceedings of the 2007 Symposium Hellenisticum (Cambridge, 2015), 33–73
at 65–6: ‘Sextus does not, in the end, have an acceptable story to tell about the rela-
tion between his approach to everyday religion and his sceptical discussions about
God.’ See also R. Bett, ‘Sextus Empiricus’ [‘Sextus’] in G. Oppy and N. Trakakis
(eds.), The History of Western Philosophy of Religion, vol. i: Ancient Philosophy of
Religion (Durham, 2009), 173–85 at 174, 178, 182–3; R.  Ziemińska, ‘Scepticism
and Religious Belief: The Case of Sextus Empiricus’ [‘Case’], in D. Łukasiewicz
and R. Pouivet (eds.), The Right to Believe: Perspectives in Religious Epistemology
(Frankfurt, 2011), 149–60 at 154–9.

Máté Veres, Sextus Empiricus on Religious Dogmatism. In: Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy
Volume LVIII. Edited by: Victor Caston, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Máté Veres.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198858997.003.0007
240 Máté Veres
religion that Sextus was familiar with did not require the kind of
belief that is subjected to Sceptical examination.3 This, however,
acquits Sextus of the charge of insincerity at the price of taking
religious behaviour to be a culturally contingent exception to,
rather than a standard case of, Pyrrhonian conduct.
Another worry concerns the fixity of Sextus’ philosophical agenda.
The argument in PH 3 concludes that, if one goes by what dog-
matic philosophers have to say, one will be forced to think that god
is inconceivable. By contrast, the first part of the M 9 section on
theology argues not for suspension of judgement across the board,
but only for the more modest claim that several noteworthy explan-
ations of the emergence of religious belief are unsatisfactory.
Insofar as this is the case, M 9 fails to live up to the standard set by
PH 3, a failure due either to authorial incompetence or to a differ-
ence in philosophical objective.4 If that is the case, then the two
discussions cannot be read as successful examples of the same
philosophical outlook.
In this paper, I argue for a comprehensive reading of Sextus’
take on religious matters that responds to these worries. In the first
half of the paper, I present the two caveats as formulating a uni-
form agenda concerning theology (Section 1) which is further con-
sistent with the Pyrrhonian stance as presented in PH 1 (Section 2).
I show not only that Sextan Sceptics are able to engage in ordinary
religious practices, but also that they can do so whether or not their
cultural environment takes these practices to depend on holding
dogmatic beliefs. In the second half of the paper, I argue by way of
a detailed analysis that both PH 3 and M 9 are intended to motivate
suspension of judgement about highly specific dogmatic tenets,
and while their sources and targets might change, their intended

3
For the most developed version of this reading, see J. Annas, ‘Ancient Scepticism
and Ancient Religion’ [‘Religion’], in B.  Morison and K.  Ierodiakonou (eds.),
Episteme, etc.: Essays in Honour of Jonathan Barnes (Oxford, 2012), 74–89. For ges-
tures towards a similar reading, see also L.  Couloubaritsis, ‘Réflexions de Sextus
Empiricus sur les dieux (Adv. Math., IX)’, Kernos, 2 (1989), 37–52 at 45, 51–2;
S.  Knuuttila and J.  Sihvola, ‘Ancient Scepticism and Philosophy of Religion’, in
J. Sihvola (ed.), Ancient Scepticism and the Sceptical Tradition (Helsinki, 2000), 125–
44; J. Sihvola, ‘The Autonomy of Religion in Ancient Philosophy’, in V. Hirvonen,
T.  J.  Holopainen, and M.  Tuominen (eds.), Mind and Modality: Studies in the
History of Philosophy in Honour of Simo Knuuttila (Leiden, 2006), 87–99.
4
Bett, ‘Gods’, 46: ‘But the inconceivability of God does not follow from what he
has just argued; from the fact that no good explanation has been given of how we
came to have a conception of God, it does not follow that there is not or cannot be
any such conception.’