 On the other hand – and in a sort of ironic twist – the counter-Reformation also launched a defense of Catholicism that some historians have described as fideistic. The Protestant Reformation coincided with the re-discovery in Europe of the ancient skeptical arguments of Sextus Empiricus, Cicero, and Diogenes Laertius, and as Richard H. Popkin has demonstrated, these arguments were quickly appropriated by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholic philosophers and theologians – including Erasmus, Montaigne, Pierre Charron, and Petrus Gassendi (as well as by Protestant thinkers like Pierre Bayle) – who deployed them in the religious controversies of the  period.[3]  Their contention was simple, if something of an ignoratio elenchi: since skepticism undermines any reason for becoming a Protestant, one should remain a Catholic on the basis of faith alone (Popkin 1992, 122–123).