the end of Maccabees and the beginning of the New Testament with long
extracts from Flavius Josephus.^32
His biblical endeavours, and especially his Latin Bible of 1551, and the way
he harmonizes pagan and Christian thought were enough to displease Calvin
and Theodore Beza even before Castellio declared his very hostile attitude to
the execution of Michael Servetus in 1553,^33 thus making clear his position as
partisan of religious toleration. Already in his preface toMoses latinus,^34
Castellio defines philosophy as the study of things human and divine. By
‘divine’ he means God and his angels; by‘human’all things to do with
creation.
He explains that we are incapable of knowing creation if we do not know
God because it is He who has created and governs everything. This is why true
philosophy or love of wisdom is the ardent desire to know God. This desire
leads automatically to piety. For Castellio, similarly to Salutati, there are two
ways to acquire the knowledge of God: either by studying the created universe
or by studying oracles and sacred teaching. However, he considers Moses to be
a better philosopher than Plato because he spoke to God directly, and, acting
on God’s command, he revealed to us all the knowledge of the divinity that he
had acquired. Castellio avoids distinctions between philosophy and theol-
ogy rather like Salutati, but he goes further than the fourteenth-century Italian
scholar in not taking recourse to the fathers as intermediaries and calling
directly upon Moses. From this we can deduce that Castellio does not distin-
guish between sacred and profane sciences. Throughout his work, he views the
two as complementary in helping us acquire the knowledge of God. The Bible
in his view is a document composed by humans in the same way as any other
philosophical treatise. That means that the Bible is not the sole source of
divine inspiration, as God can inspire any text, sacred or profane, or indeed
inspire anyone directly via the Holy Spirit. And biblical expositors shouldfirst
and foremost explain and interpret the letter of the Bible. This is why he makes
the effort to present Moses not as a prophet but as a writer, historian, and
philosopher. This designation of Moses does not stop Castellio, however, from
viewing Moses as superior to all pagan writers in that he talks about God more
clearly than they. Moreover, pagan writers are to be read and commented on
the same level as Moses. They are not an aid to the understanding of the Bible
but represent another way of talking about God.
(^32) See Irena Backus,‘Moses, Plato and Flavius Josephus: Castellio’s Conceptions of Sacred and
Profane in his Latin Versions of the Bible’, in Bruce Gordon and Matthew McLean (eds),Shaping
the Bible in the Reformation(Leiden: Brill, 2012), 143–66.
(^33) See Robert White,‘Castellio against Calvin: The Turk in the Toleration Controversy of the
Sixteenth Century’,Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance46 (1984), 573–86, and the litera-
ture cited there.
(^34) Cf. Guggisberg,Castellio, Bibliography.
The Church Fathers and the Humanities 45