Recognized in his time as one of the most important citizens in the Republic of Letters, Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721) is known today only to historians. Born in Caen (Normandy, France), Huet studied at the Jesuit Collège du Mont there. After graduating, and to a large extent due to his association with the Huguenot erudite also from Caen, Samuel Bochart, he established intellectual relationships with major French scholars in Paris. With Bochart, he went to Sweden to work at Queen Christina’s court, meeting major French exiled, Dutch and German scholars on his way through the Netherlands to Stockholm and back to Caen. After establishing intellectually and politically influential connections in the Parisian salons and scientific groups and translating, editing and commenting on an unknown manuscript of Origen’s commentary on Matthew’s Gospel which he and Bochart discovered in Christina’s library, Huet was appointed sub-preceptor of the Dauphin, Louis of France. Soon after he was elected to the French Academy and took Holy Orders, dedicating most of his long life to Church affairs and above all to historical, philological, biblical and philosophical works. A polymath, Huet made valuable contributions to the study of patristics,1 the history of literature,2 classical studies in general,3 translation theory,4 the institutionalization of modern science,5 the histories of ancient and Dutch commerce,6 the Republic of Letters,7 the history of his hometown,8 and the histories of Christian apologetics,9 Cartesianism,10 and skepticism.11
This book is about Huet’s skepticism which is examined from two interconnected points of view. The main one, which serves as the axes of the book, is Huet’s various receptions of, and connections with, early modern French philosophers who also presented skeptical or semi-skeptical views. This approach comprises a study of his reception of these philosophers’ views, in particular through the examination of his reading notes and marks in his copies of their books preserved at BNF. It also deals with his personal relations with those with whom he interacted, and the influence he exerted in one of them, namely, Bayle. The second point of view is the concern to articulate Huet’s skepticism with three other philosophical views for which he was also famous at his time, namely, his anti-Cartesianism, his view of the reason-faith distinction which can be characterized as a mitigated fideism, and the philosophical aspects of the kind of Christian apologetics he developed. The treatment of these issues also takes into account his reception of Cartesian and skeptical views of the time.
Huet published two strictly philosophical works: the Censura Philosophiae Cartesianae in 1689 and the posthumous Traité philosophique de la faiblesse de l’esprit humain (1723). Two religious works also deal partially with philosophical issues: Demonstratio Evangelica in 1679 and Alnetanae Quaestiones de Concordia Rationis et Fidei in 1690. The proposition of a historical demonstration of the truth of Christianity in the former is prefaced by an epistemological defense of historical certainty as compared to geometrical certainty. The comparatist method employed in Concordia aimed at uncovering Judeo-Christian doctrines and facts in other religions is prefaced by a philosophical examination of the limited certainty provided by reason as compared to faith, so the kind of historical defense of Christianity developed in the book is vindicated in face of philosophical ones such as Malebranche’s.
The standard view is that Huet was a radical skeptic, a “pyrrhonian” as radical skepticism was called in his time, that he believed reason can provide no certainty which depends entirely on faith, that is, that he added to his philosophical radical skepticism a religious radical fideism. Huet’s radical skepticism and fideism would explain, according to the standard interpretation, his attack on Descartes whose philosophy he rejected without fully understanding. According to this view, Huet was a traditionalist in the philosophical forefront of the reaction against Descartes’s innovations which included support for religious and political censure of Cartesianism. Finally, Huet’s apologetic endeavors were inconsistent with his philosophical skepticism. His skeptical philosophy and his historical approach to religion, rather than bringing credibility to Christianity, actually contributed to discredit it.12
A careful examination of Huet’s philosophical works, the various modifications of the Traité philosophique made by Huet until its publication, the examination of Huet’s marginalia and correspondence about his philosophical and religious works, and the discovery of a syllabus of Huet’s planned Alnetanae Quaestiones, designed to be his philosophical-religious great work after the Demonstratio, shed new light on his views. The syllabus shows that Alnetanae Quaestiones was meant to have five books (not the only three apologetical ones published), the first being what later became the Traité philosophique and the second the one which was published under the title Censura Philosophiae Cartesianae. Huet’s anti-cartesianism was not an authority’s persecution of a philosophy persecuted on the occasion, nor his way to react to his inability to philosophy or to understand the new philosophy, but followed from his skepticism which required critical examination of the main dogmatic philosophy at the time. His skepticism is more Cartesian than classical and very little influenced by the main French skeptics who anteceded him, viz., Montaigne, Charron, and La Mothe Le Vayer. Huet was the most radical of the Cartesians for he radicalized Cartesian doubt with the result that no metaphysical doctrine could follow from doubt. Rather than persecutor, Huet was persecuted for holding Cartesian doubt. Concerning Ancient skepticism, he combines Pyrrhonian skepticism with Academic skepticism, the former mostly in his attack on Cartesian metaphysics and dogmatic philosophies in general, and the latter in the construction of his own kind of skepticism. He was not a plain fideist for he believed reason could provide a degree of certainty, though inferior to the metaphysical one vindicated by Descartes. The limited reason he accepted could provide the historical and philological analysis he employed in his apologetic books, namely, Demonstratio Evangelica and the second and third books of Alnetanae Quaestiones. In these two works he attempted to show that Judeo-Christian doctrines and facts were behind Pagan myths held all over the world. Although most of his comparisons were forced and indeed may have contributed to the view that Judeo-Christianity has no epistemic value above other religions, he can be credited as a forerunner of the field of contemporary archeology of myths which explains similarities by pointing out geographical historical transmissions between different cultures.
Chapter 2 points out libertine and skeptical elements related to Huet’s early secular life, from the private classes he took from Bochart in Caen (1650) to his appointment as sub-preceptor of the Dauphin (1670). It examines his private meetings with erudite scholars, first with Bochart in Caen, then with Gabriel Naudé in Paris and finally with Claude Saumaise in Leiden. Skeptical features in Huet’s various literary activities during the decade of the 1660s are next examined: in his history and theory of the modern novel, in the novel he wrote, the “Faux Inca,” and in a fictional character modeled after him in a skeptical fictional dialogue written by the French acclaimed writer Madeleine de Scudéry. The second half of the chapter is dedicated to Huet’s reception of the four most important French skeptics from late sixteenth to early seventeenth century: Montaigne, Charron, Gassendi and La Mothe Le Vayer. The chapter shows Huet’s concern to hide his personal interaction with the latter, despite important similarities in the way both associated ancient skepticism—with which both were in sympathy—and Christianity. However, the chapter shows how little these Renaissance and early modern skeptics influenced Huet’s own skepticism, mainly derived from Descartes.
Chapter 3 examines in detail the original plan and composition of Huet’s skeptical work, the Traité philosophique de la faiblesse de l’esprit humain. Finished before 1685, the work saw the light of day only forty years later, after Huet’s death. The discovery of a manuscript of this work made possible the reconstitution of its original place in Huet’s planned philosophical/apologetic work Alnetanae Quaestiones. The chapter shows the relevance of the original interlocutor of the work, the philosopher friend of Huet’s, Jean-Baptiste du Hamel who, in the last printed version of the work, becomes its fictional pseudo-author. The place the Traité occupied in Huet’s original planned work, its first formal structure, the context of its elaboration, and the objections to its first version he received from Du Hamel and other friends, shed new light on the type of skepticism present in the work as well as in its connection to Huet’s anti-Cartesianism and apologetics. By showing that Huet’s skeptical treatise, his Christian apology, and his attack on Cartesianism, which, like the Traité, was also published separately as Censura Philosophiae Cartesianae, all belonged to a single work, a number of mistakes about these works and their author, which have been sustained since the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, are elucidated.
Chapter 4 examines the crucial role played by Descartes in Huet’s philosophical and scientific works. It begins with his early fascination with the French translation of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy in 1647 which appeared to satisfy the student’s aspiration for a natural philosophy alternative to the Aristotelian one taught in the schools. Huet remained sympathetic with Descartes’s natural philosophy for about fifteen years, supporting Descartes’s view on light in an epistolary polemic with his friend, an erudite like himself, Isaac Vossius. Three main factors led Huet to become disappointed with Cartesianism and become the most famous critic of Descartes in the late seventeenth century: the attack upon ancient erudite scholarship by Descartes and other Cartesians, a closer examination of Descartes’s metaphysics, and his reading of Descartes’s letters which Clerselier began to publish in 1667 in which Huet discovered a position of Descartes’s on the reason-faith distinction quite different from the published one which separated more sharply faith from reason and elevated the former quite above the latter. The chapter concludes by examining the relation between Huet’s Demonstratio Evangelica and Alnetanae Quaestiones and Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. It is argued that rather than the Demonstratio being a reply to the Tractatus (although it does support the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch against Spinoza), Spinoza has Huet in mind in his view on the reason-faith distinction presented in chapters 14 and 15 of the Tractatus.
Chapter 5 deals with Huet’s personal and philosophical connections to three other French philosophers who presented skeptical views in the second half of the seventeenth century: Pascal, Foucher and Bayle. It is shown that although Huet and Pascal were on opposite sides in the main religious controversy in France at the time and differed on the reason-faith distinction, Pascal’s skeptical interpretation of Descartes’s doubt in the Pensées was one of the main sources of Huet’s own skepticism. Unlike Pascal, Foucher was a friend of Huet’s. Although Foucher’s Critique de la Recherche de la Vérité was appreciated by Huet, who incorporated in his own work some of its criticism of Malebranche’s Recherche, and although both were inspired by Descartes’s methodological doubt to present skepticism—mainly Academic—as the genuine philosophical method, their views on reason and faith and on ancient skepticism, and their respective relations to Cartesianism were quite different. Finally, the chapter shows that Bayle, who met Huet in a scientific gathering in Paris shortly before he took refuge in the Netherlands, followed with interest and admired Huet’s intellectual endeavors, as also Huet followed his, though more discretely. It is argued that Bayle’s famous abbé in note B of the article Pyrrho of the Dictionary was inspired by Huet.