Like Savonarola, Gianfrancesco [Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s nephew & follower of Savonarola] points to sacred scripture as the sole, exclusive and absolutely infallible source of true knowledge: the certainty given by absolute faith in the Bible, down to the smallest iota, is thereby placed in sharp opposition to the uncertainty of any conclusions based upon the weak instrument of human reason. Hence the peculiar combination of skepticism and fideism, very similar to what we will find much later in the work of Cornelius Agrippa.
[…]
[…] Pico understood that a “history of truth” is self-contradictory. It follows that the proper domain of historiography, in contrast, must consist in describing the development of merely human and hence fallible opinions. From the perspective of absolute biblical truth, any proper history of thought is therefore necessarily a history of error. We will see that this crucial insight became the very foundation from which emerged the history of philosophy as a modern discipline.
– Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (2012), pp. 81-3
It was from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards that German Protestant historians began to mount a systematic attack against these traditional approaches and, in so doing, developed a novel theoretical perspective from which was to emerge the history of philosophy as a modern academic discipline. This development will prove to be crucial for my argument: while the concept of a “history of truth” discussed in the first chapter was ultimately grounded in the apologetic tradition of Roman Catholicism, these Protestant historians reciprocated with a “history of error” based on a radical rejection of that same tradition. Hence their approach has usefully been labeled “anti-apologeticism”: a term which emphasizes their ambition of developing a radical alternative to the patristic apologetic tradition, which they held responsible not only for the pernicious “Hellenization of Christianity” since the first centuries, but (eventually) for a parallel degeneration of philosophy into pseudo-philosophy as well. In analyzing the anti-apologetic current, we will find that its main representatives systematized the anti-pagan, anti-platonic and anti-patristic perspectives, sketched in the earlier sections of this chapter, into a logically coherent narrative based upon a peculiar combination of critical historiography and a rigorous insistence on the exclusive truth of Protestantism as opposed to pagan error in all its forms.
– Ibid., p. 102