Besides Huet, the main French philosophers in the second half of the seventeenth century who presented views skeptical to some degree and scope were Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), Simon Foucher (1644–1696) and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). Huet ignored the first, was a friend of the second and had an indirect relationship with the third in the Republic of Letters. This chapter deals with his personal and philosophical connections to them. In Sect. 5.1, I show 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. In Sect. 5.2, I argue that although Foucher’s Critique de la Recherche de la Vérité was much appreciated by Huet, who incorporated some of its criticism of Malebranche’s Recherche, and that both were inspired by Descartes’s methodological doubt to present skepticism—mainly Academic—as the genuine philosophical method,1 their views on reason and faith and on ancient skepticism, and their respective relations to Cartesianism were quite different. Finally, in Sect. 5.3 I show that Bayle followed with interest Huet’s intellectual endeavors and suggest that the famous abbé in note B of the article Pyrrho of the Dictionary was inspired by him.
5.1 Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
I did not find a single mention of Pascal’s name in Huet’s corpus. The mathematical genius is never cited in his books, manuscripts, letters, and marginalia (except in his copy of the Pensées, examined bellow). This absence, like that of La Mothe Le Vayer, is intriguing given the fact that Huet enjoyed publicizing his broad relations in the Republic of Letters, in particular with its most famous members and probably no French contemporary—except Descartes and Gassendi—was as famous as Pascal. One possible reason for the absence of both is an apparent similarity of projects which hides deeper differences; after all, the three philosophers use, in one way or another, skepticism in Christian apologetics. One reason pointed out in Chap. 2, Sect. 2.4, for Huet’s omission of La Mothe Le Vayer does not hold for Pascal, namely, his fear of having his views associated with those held by thinkers whose religious faith were considered suspect. No suspicion of this kind was seriously raised against Pascal and Huet (before the posthumous publication of the Traité) who both worked on apologies for Christianity. Although both wanted to persuade libertine and atheists, their religious views were quite distinct and this was connected to the opposing religious French Catholic circles they belonged: Huet the Jesuits, Pascal the Jansenists.
There are curious similarities in Huet’s and Pascal’s intellectual trajectories. Both, though Pascal more than Huet, moved from a worldly period, turned to science and Parisian salons, to lives devoted to religion whose main goal—realized by Huet and left unfinished by Pascal because of his early death—was to elaborate new apologies for Christianity which took into account the latest modern philosophical developments and threats to Christian faith. The occasions of their respective religious turns were different. While Huet was growing in the Republic of Letters during the ‘50s and the ‘60s, meeting famous scholars in Paris, Leiden, Amsterdam, Utrecht and other European cities, and coming and going between Caen and Paris where he attended scientific and literary gatherings,2 Pascal strongly severed his worldly ties after his religious experience on 23 November 1654. Two and a half years earlier (June, 1652), Pascal had sent his calculating machine to Christina of Sweden when Huet was in his way to Stockholm. Pascal’s conversion was sudden and meant retirement from worldly affairs (though not absolute for he still occasionally engaged in mathematical activities). Huet’s was gradual. He says in his Memoirs that in the mid ‘50s he was divided between the desire to dedicate his life to God and a strong attachment to the world. His early professor and adviser, the Jesuit Pierre Mambrun, dissuaded him from becoming a Jesuit arguing that the discipline of the order was incompatible with Huet’s “disposition and manners.”3 This was the occasion of Pascal’s heart-felt conversion and engagement in the Jansenist party by defending Arnauld, who was about to be condemned by the Sorbonne, and denouncing Jesuit lax morals in his Provincial Letters. Much later, in the early ‘70s, when Huet began working in Demonstratio, the readings he had to do in order to develop his apology revived his religious vocation and he began gradually to take up religious habits until taking holy orders in 1676.4 According to Huet, the scientific activity as an ancient scholar need not be—as Pascal thought—derived merely from libido sciendi. Once directed to Judeo-Christian literature, it could inspire religious piety. Another difference between their move towards religion is that while Pascal adhered to a persecuted party, Huet’s religious career was entirely within French official politics (related to Louis XIV) and religion (he is nominated bishop few years after becoming a priest) and close to the Jesuits.
Huet’s association with the Jesuits began when he studied in their college in Caen and became attached to some of his teachers, Pierre Mambrun in particular.
Another Jesuit who played an important role in Huet’s life was René Rapin. He became one of his closest friends when he began to visit Paris after his majority in the ‘50s. Rapin was in the frontline of the Jesuit battle against the Jansenists and Huet collaborated with him in the ‘60s. Rapetti examined a letter of 1662 from Rapin in Paris to Huet in Caen in which the former asks the latter to send him reports on the Jansenist controversy in Caen for his Mémoires sur l’église et la société, la cour, la ville et le jansénisme.5 In 1667, Huet secretly publicized in Caen—for the polemic was prohibited at the time—Rapin’s clandestine letter to the King denouncing four Jansenist bishops who refused to sign the formulaire stating that the famous five propositions were present in Jansenius’ Augustinus in their heretical sense.6 Pascal was among those at Port-Royal who were against the signature.7
Huet’s three major works had close connections either to the Jansenist controversy or to Pascal’s apology. The first, the Origenis Commentaria (1668) contests Jansenius’ view that Origen is the main source of Pelagianism, the heresy combatted by Augustine which denied or mitigated (semi-pelagianism) the damage caused by Original Sin. The second is the Demonstratio Evangelica (1679) for the plagiarism of which Huet accused the Jansenist Nicolas Filleau de la Chaise (1631–1688) who published discourses expounding and developing Pascal’s unfinished apology. Finally, the first book of original Alnetanae Quaestiones (written in 1685 but only published posthumously as Traité philosophique) has three of its skeptical arguments (including one which Huet considers crucial) extracted from Pascal’s Pensées. In what follows I examine each of these connections.
5.1.1 Origenis
Huet attacks Jansenius in section seven, chapter 2, book II of his Origenis Commentaria in Sacram Scripturam (1668). Jansenius claims Origen does not distinguish Adam’s pre- and post-lapsarian freedom. Huet claims that he does, though not as sharply as Jansenius’.8 The law of nature God wrote in the hearts of human beings enables the virtuous ancient pagans to perform good actions, though useless for salvation.9 This support of the virtue of the pagans against the Jansenists’ view using Molinist theology recalls La Mothe Le Vayer’s Vertu des païens.10 Against Jansenius’ charge that Origen denies predestination, Huet argues that God gives grace not according to foreknowledge of future merits but in order that the conjunction of human free will and Christ’s grace together, without the latter damaging the former, affect salvific action (p. 125–126). Shelford (2007) and Rapetti (2012) point out Huet’s general line of defense of Origen from Jansenius’s attack. The future bishop argues that Jansenius’ reading is not based on solid scholarship. Jansenius does not use all of Origen’s texts, fails to distinguish authentic from spurious parts, and does not take into account the different contexts of Origen’s texts (aimed at Gnostics who denied free will) and of Augustine’s anti-pelagian works (aimed at heretics who denied Original Sin).11 Huet also argues that Jansenius’ reading of Augustine is partial, citing only passages which corroborate attribution of Pelagianism to Origen. Rapetti places Huet’s Originis Commentaria in the context of Jesuit scholarly effort to contravene Jansenism.12 Both Rapetti and Shelford call attention to a manuscript on Grace with views similar to Molina’s (1588) written by Huet probably at this occasion but which he did not publish. Its non-publication reveals Huet’s desire to abstain from religious polemics which would deviate him from his scholarly work.13 Nothing could express better Huet’s contrast with Pascal’s combative personality, who also left unpublished—because unfinished—four Écrits sur la Grace—supporting anti-humanist views contrary to Huet’s.14
5.1.2 Demonstratio
Although Huet finished his Demonstratio Evangelica by 1675 or 1676, it was published only in 1679 because of the difficulty to obtain the permission from the Sorbonne censor Edme Pirot. One year before (1678), Filleau de la Chaise published a short book whose title was Qu’il y a démonstrations, d’une autre espèce, et aussi certaines que celles de la géométrie, et qu’on peut en donner de telles pour la religion Chrétienne. Huet charged the author with plagiarism. “As I was conversing about it with my friends, and freely stating its design, plan and arguments, the matter occasionally copied by stealth from my mouth was put together and published in the form of a little book, which was a direct abridgment of my performance, made by persons who fraudulently arrogated to themselves the praise of invention.”15
Tolmer cites a letter of 20 April 1678 from the Sorbonne censor Du Bois to Huet in which the former replies to Huet’s complaint about the publication of La Chaise’s Qu’il y a démonstrations, included as an appendix to the second edition of Pascal’s Pensées. He tells Huet he went to the publisher (Desprez ) who told him that one year before (1677) he showed La Chaise’s work to Pirot who told him that it would greatly upset an author of a “lengthy work in which he believed he was the first to discover this geometric manner with respect to religion.” Du Bois says he would testify that he saw Huet’s plan of Demonstratio “seven or eight years before,” that is, in 1670 or 1671, and the work was under press waiting for 15 months for permission to publish, that is, since January 1677.16 While attesting that Huet’s Demonstratio precedes Filleau de la Chaise’s 1678 work, Bossuet reverses the charge, insinuating that Huet, not Filleau de la Chaise, may be the plagiarist.17
Filleau de la Chaise was secretary of the Duke de Roannez, a nobleman very close to Pascal and the Jansenists and a neighbor of Port-Royal des Champs. He attended the famous conference of Pascal’s there when he presented his apologetic plan. The Preface of the Port-Royal edition of the Pensées (1670), written by Pascal’s nephew Étienne Périer, was partially based on Filleau’s minutes of the conference. In his copy of the Pensées, Huet marked with a vertical trace Périer’s claim, reproducing Filleau de la Chaise’s, that “Pascal attempted to show that the Christian religion had as many marks of certainty and evidence as those things which are received in the world as most indubitable.”19 Antony McKenna shows that besides the Pensées (1660), another source for both Filleau de la Chaise and Huet’s historical proofs of Christianity is Arnauld’s and Nicole’s Logique ou l’Art de Penser (1662) in which were used long sections of Pascal’s, at this point still unpublished, De l’Esprit Géométrique, in particular chapters 12 and 13 of part 4, where the authors deal with human and divine faith and suggest rules for regulation of belief in historical facts.20 The epistemology of Huet’s demonstration of Christianity is stated in the preface of the work, specifically in its third section: probari potest Religionis Christianae veritas eo genere demonstrationis, quod non minus certum sit, quam demonstrations ipse geometricae. The title of Filleau de la Chaise’s work charged by Huet with plagiarism looks almost like a French translation: Qu’il y a démonstrations, d’une autre espèce, et aussi certaines que celles de la géométrie, et qu’on peut en donner de telles pour la religion Chrétienne.21 However, as McKenna points out, Huet owned a copy of Filleau de la Chaise’s earlier (1672) Discours sur les Pensées de Pascal. Huet could thus read Filleau de la Chaise’s claim that had Pascal not passed way so soon, he would develop his apologetic arguments “grounded on principles as incontestable as those of the Geometers,” employing moral and historical proofs, based on “certain sentiments which spring from [human] nature and experience,” “recognized in the world as the most certain ones.”22I will always happily testify as you wish to the truth. I clearly recall hearing from you what you believe to have been taken from you more than six years ago and quite before I read it in your book. It remains to be clarified if it is certain that something similar has been found in Pascal’s papers. If it is only a title put by those in charge of the edition [of the Pensées, namely, Arnauld and Nicole], then it seems that it was taken from you and I will talk as you wish and as is fair. I am looking forward more than ever to seeing your book published and the rash criticisms rebutted by a man of your strength.18
McKenna correctly points out that both Filleau de la Chaise and Huet develop Pascal’s apology outline. But we can go backwards and show that they all—Huet more consciously—develop Augustine’s reaction to Academic skepticism. The crucial point is the acknowledgement of a nonintellectual ground of belief. In Confessions, The Utility of Belief, On Faith in Things Unseen and in other writings, Augustine dialogues with Academic skepticism, attacking its principle of intellectual integrity. This principle, that reason is the supreme criterion of belief, is supposedly held by all philosophers, not only skeptics. If a doctrine is self-evident or can be demonstrated it should receive assent, if not, assent must be suspended. Skeptics and dogmatists differ only on the issue of whether there are (dogmatists) or not (skeptics) adequate rational grounds for a doctrine. Augustine claims in Confessions that the Academics freed him from Manichean dogmatism by helping him realize that Manichean doctrines were not well justified. However, this same Academic principle of intellectual integrity, which made him withdraw assent from Manicheanism upon verification of its lack of rational justification, became an obstacle to his conversion to Christianity whose historical tenets could no longer be witnessed (for they happened in the past) nor could its doctrines be demonstrated since they are above human reason. Augustine says he solved the problem when he reflected on the many historical things one must believe in order to live a normal life without directly perceiving or rationally deducing them.23 Huet points out that while Academics and Skeptics contested the principles of geometry, they “agreed that dictates of nature and moral precepts, which are fit for daily life, should be observed.”24
Augustine restricts the principle of intellectual integrity to these things in principle capable of either demonstration or direct perception. On these he might agree that reason should precede assent. But most of our ordinary beliefs concerns past events—like Christianity—for whose trust we must rely on witnesses. Because Augustine, Pascal and Huet are all engaged in arguing for the truth of Christianity, they attribute epistemic value to these beliefs we find ourselves incapable of doubting even though we cannot directly perceive or give demonstrative evidence of their truth. Huet’s elaboration of this point shows his use of Augustine’s argument updated by Pascal’s skeptical attack on Descartes. Huet gives a list of examples of this kind of belief, numbered bellow in order to indicate his probable source for each.
The first example [1] is probably inspired by Filleau de la Chaise’s Discours sur les Pensées de Pascal, as well as Huet’s claim [10] of how adamantly everybody assents to the truth of these historical facts unlike—and here he diverges from the Jansenist—assent to geometrical truths [11], for while Filleau claims they are as certain as the geometrical truths (the difference being only the way we acquire them),26 Huet cites the ancient skeptics and others, including Hobbes, who questioned the latter.27 Huet’s aim is to argue that his historical proofs of Christianity are as certain as the geometrical ones. This is also what Filleau de la Chaise claims for Pascal’s proofs. But because the latter are considered more certain than the former by the public targeted by his apology, he argues the contrary in order to establish epistemological equivalence.[1] That August once held the empire of Rome is avowed by everybody although no men alive saw it; we know the fact only from books and hearsay. [2] No man is so rough or stupid, nor so opinionated and stubborn, to the point of not admitting his fingertip would burn in contact with fire. [3] Who would doubt that Spring comes after Winter and Fall after Summer? [4] Who would be so stubborn and quarrelsome, so barbaric, to the point of not recognizing that the sun will set and that he someday will die? [5] that he thinks, [6] that he is, [7] that he is a human being, [8] that he was born from a woman, from that particular woman, [9] that he has a body, equipped with a head, feet and hands. [10] We believe so much these things that we would bet our wealth and life that they are true. … [11] On the contrary, only sharp and subtle men recognize the Geometric principles as true, most ordinary men do not understand—and some even deny—them.25
Examples [3] and [4] illustrate the role of habit in inculcating beliefs about future contingents as strong as those in things directly perceived. Example [4] is given by Pascal in La 821.28 Examples [2], [5], and [6] are likely inspired by a passage in the Port-Royal edition of the Pensées in chapter 21—“Contrariétés étonnantes qui se trouvent dans la naute de l’homme...” Among other passages which I will show in the next section crucial for Huet’s skepticism in the Traité philosophique, the bishop marks with a marginal trace the following one (I cite the English translation of the Lafuma edition): “Is he to doubt … whether he is being pinched or burned? Is he to doubt whether he is doubting, to doubt whether he exists?”29 Huet replaces “doubting” with [5] “thinking,” adding a note at this point of his copy of Pascal’s Pensées which reads: “M. Descartes, however dogmatic he is, taught that in order to philosophize it was necessary to begin with this doubt.”30 The astonishing contrarieties pointed out by Pascal in this section of the Pensées are radical (Cartesian) doubt on the one hand and, on the other, the certainty of some basic beliefs which cannot be removed despite epistemologically unsolvable doubts. As pointed out in Chap. 4, Huet accepts Cartesian radical doubt on the philosophical level, therefore disagreeing with Pascal who considers it impossible to be held but, agreeing with Pascal, against Descartes, holds that the certainty of the cogito (“thinking”) was not a certainty of reason but a feeling of our nature not unlike belief in our body [9].
Examples [7] and [8] are extracted from Augustine’s Confessions. Indeed, immediately after citing these examples Huet recalls Augustine’s report of his conversion. Augustine was uncertain, floating between Christianity and the Philosophorum dogmata. Augustine had abandoned Manicheanism thanks to Academic skepticism but the former’s commitment to intellectual integrity precluded him from converting. It was at this point that he realized how many things we believe and have to believe in order to survive, as Huet cites Confessions VI.7.5, whose final phrase is example [8].
Augustine interpreted as providential the tremendous expansion of the Christian faith occurring in his time. He interpreted the testimony of an increasing number of believers as sign of the historical truth of Christianity which, being historical, could not be demonstrated otherwise. Accordingly, Huet endeavored to prove in published Quaestiones II and III that the Christian dogmata are implicitly believed by the believers of all known religions in the world, the first step of which was to show in propositio IV of Demonstratio the universal belief in Moses.I took into account the multitude of things I had never seen, nor been present when they were enacted—such as many of the events of secular history; and the numerous reports of places and cities which I had not seen; or such as many relations with many friends, or physicians, or with these men and those—that unless we should believe, we should do nothing at all in this life. Finally, I was impressed with what an unalterable assurance I believed which two people were my parents, though this was impossible for me to know otherwise than by hearsay.31
One important difference between Huet on the one hand, and Augustine, Pascal, and Filleau de la Chaise on the other, is Huet’s skepticism about natural knowledge.32 Augustine is partially skeptical about sensitive knowledge but not about mathematical and metaphysical knowledge.33 Pascal holds that the principles are felt rather than known by reason—a view Huet agrees with—but acknowledges the plain validity of reason when it works within its legitimate domain.34 Huet holds that human beings on earth cannot reach certain truth through natural reason. Examining the preface of Demonstratio, Shelford noticed the intentional distortion Huet made of Aristotle’s view on dialectical reasoning. “He ascribed to dialectical reasoning the same level of certainty as demonstrative reasoning, though Aristotle clearly assigned differing degrees of certainty to each.”35
Huet relates the dictate naturae, according to him recognized even by the ancient skeptics, to Aristotle’s probabilibus (eudoxa) introduced in Topics I.1, implicitly identifying them with the Academics’ pithanos, translated by Cicero as probabili. Huet says that what Aristotle says there of the probable can also be said of the truth [de veris merito dici possit]. He then says “that truth is what is believed by everybody, or by most men, or by those who are wiser.” But as Shelford points out Aristotle clearly opposes probable opinions, which are the premises of the dialectical syllogism, to scientific principles, which are ascertained truths. Huet denies such truth outside the realm of doxa, so the consequence for him is that the more accepted a belief is, the more grounded it is, and therefore—in a vicious circle—the more it should be accepted. To the extent that he provides compelling historical evidence in Quaestiones II that Christian dogmata are universally accepted, only pertinacious unbelievers would remain so.36
5.1.3 Traité Philosophique and Concordia Rationis et Fidei
Huet’s general evaluation of Pascal’s Pensées is dismissive.37 But Pascal’s skeptical reappraisal of Descartes’s metaphysical doubts was crucial for Huet’s own skepticism. In the Sixth Meditation, when the meditator recalls the doubts raised in the First, he says that to the occasional external and internal sense errors which “gradually” lead him to lose confidence in the senses, “I recently added two very general ones” (CSM, II, 53/AT, VII, 77), namely, the dream and deceiver arguments. Pascal’s skeptical reappraisal of these two doubts, which he qualifies as the “strongest of the sceptics’ arguments” (La 131), is the source of Huet’s eighth and ninth proofs of the weakness of human understanding.38
Pascal’s rendering of “the skeptics’ strongest arguments” was crucial for Huet’s thesis that only faith can overcome the uncertainty provided by the dream and deceiver arguments.39 In Chap. 4, Sect. 4.5, I pointed out that although Huet claimed that Descartes’s doubt was taken from the ancient skeptics, he annotated no source for Descartes’s two metaphysical doubts in his marginalia of his copies of the Meditations and Principles. His marginalia in his copy of the Pensées, which he read when he was working on the Traité philosophique, suggest that La 131 influenced his reappraisal of Descartes’s doubt. The dream argument, the main ground for his questioning evidence as a criterion of truth in the eight proof, derives from Cicero’s Academica and Descartes’s First Meditation. The first is the source of Huet’s claim that although when we are awake we realize that we were mistaken in previously considering the dream evident, the latter remains doubtful for “we could never be sensible of it, whilst the fit of sleep.”40 Descartes’s version of the argument appears right in the sequel: “we sometimes question in our sleep, whether we are dreaming or awake.”41 Descartes refutes the argument in the Sixth Meditation by claiming that memory of past events—present in awake and absent in dream experiences—enable the distinction of these two mental conditions. Huet’s rebuttal of Descartes’s argument—“for if they should happen to have any relation to them, we shall have no token left to distinguish the one from the other” (Weakness, 61/Traité, 81)—probably derives from Pascal: “we often dream we are dreaming, piling up one dream on another” (Pascal 1966, La 131).
The deceiver, Huet’s following proof,42 is crucial for it brings down the last resource of dogmatists—Huet follows Sextus’ five modes—to avoid infinite regress and circular reason, namely, to pretend that some principle must be accepted without justification.
Huet underlines the following italicized passages of section XXI of the Port-Royal edition of the Pensées (La 131): “Les principales raisons des Pyrrhoniens sont que nous n’avons aucune certitude des principes, hors la foi et la révélation … n’y avant point de certitude hors la foi, si l’homme est créé par un Dieu bon, ou par un démon méchant … De plus, que personne n’a d’assurance, hors la foi, s’il veille ou s’il dort.”44 Huet follows Pascal in holding Descartes’s hyperbolic doubts (the dream and the deceiver) as stronger than the skeptical ten modes.45 He also follows Pascal in denying Descartes’s philosophical resolution of them and in claiming that only faith in revelation, not reason, can ultimately justify assent to the beliefs doubted.ce doute est de telle importance pour empêcher nos esprits de recevoir aucune proposition comme certaine, tant que nous ne nous servirons que de notre raison, que tant s’en faut que Descartes l’ait détruit, mais même qu’il ne peut aucunement être détruit, si la raison n’emprunte le secours de la foi (Traité, 86-87).43
In the Port-Royal edition in which Huet read the Pensées, Pascal’s skeptical appropriation of Descartes’s metaphysical doubts is located in section XXI: “Astonishing contrarieties in the nature of human beings concerning the truth, happiness and many other things.”46 This section contained one of the longest developments (La 131) of Pascal’s “proof from the doctrine” (La 402).47 Concerning truth, in which Huet was more interested, Pascal points out the contrariety of dogmatists and skeptics. Skeptics show, correctly, that we cannot ultimately justify our beliefs but they cannot avoid believing them anyway. Dogmatists argue, correctly, that human beings cannot avoid accepting these principles as true but they cannot provide rational justification for their assent. So the only two logically possible philosophical positions fail partially and cannot be reconciled since they are contrary to one another. Only the doctrine of the Fall of Man explains the human epistemological predicament, reconciling what each philosophical position has correctly acknowledged. It has been revealed that human beings have a double nature, the pre-lapsarian one in which plain truth was enjoyed, and the fallen one, in which the original desire for truth remained but corruption of the faculties preclude human beings from attaining plain truth naturally. Skeptics take into account only the Fallen state and therefore cannot explain why we do assent even in the absence of rational justification, while dogmatists presume no Fall happened and therefore wrongly assume that we are still capable of fully possessing naturally the truth. Although human corruption is more visible in the Pensées than the reminiscences of the pre-lapsarian state, the proof requires that both dogmatists and skeptics are equally half wrong and half right, for Pascal holds the view that both states must equally be acknowledged. In his Writings on Grace, Pascal claims that Calvinists and Molinists are equally wrong, because the latter mitigates the fallen state and the former the innocent state.48 However, in the Pensées Pascal developed much more the strength of the skeptics than that of the dogmatists. This led the anti-skeptic Cartesian editors of the Port-Royal edition of the Pensées, Arnauld and Nicole, to insert fragment La 110, in which Pascal makes an explicit criticism of skepticism, in the passage of La 131 in which Pascal claims, after presenting the “strongest of the skeptics’ arguments,” that the only strong point of the dogmatists is that “we cannot doubt natural principles if we speak sincerely and in all good faith.” The problem for the editors is that La 110 also criticizes the dogmatists. This is precisely the passage underlined by Huet in his copy: “our inability [to prove the principles] proves nothing but the weakness of our reason,” which is Huet’s thesis presented in his Traité philosophique, and leaves unmarked the continuation of the phrase in which Pascal argues for the half-strength of dogmatism: “and not the uncertainty of all our knowledge, as [the Pyrrhonians] maintain.”49 A little further in Pascal’s text, Huet remarks: “Our inability must therefore serve only to humble reason, which would like to be the judge of everything,” leaving unmarked Pascal’s pro-dogmatist counterpoint in the continuation of the phrase: “but not to confute our certainty.”50 In both cases, Huet underlines Pascal’s statements of the weakness of reason, but not those of the certainty of the principles. Huet therefore, through Pascal, deploys Descartes’s skeptical arguments in a way even more skeptical than Pascal does, although the latter also rejects Descartes’s rational refutation of them.51
Huet rejects the unique force Pascal concedes to the dogmatists, namely, that although reason is incapable of rationally justifying assent to the principles, this incapacity does not diminish the feeling that they are truth and therefore does not lead to suspension of judgment. Pascal claims that this shows the weakness of reason. Huet, like the ancient skeptics, is more rationalist than Pascal on this point. He agrees with the mathematical genius that reason is too weak to establish principles, but holds that it is strong enough to doubt them. And here Huet adds the marginal note cited above in which he appeals to Descartes’s authority in favor of his position (contrary to Pascal’s): even the dogmatic Descartes said one needed to begin doubting what Pascal thought impossible to doubt, namely, one’s own existence. Huet is aware that Descartes considers his hyperbolic doubt not viable in ordinary life. Pascal profits from this hyperbolic nature of Cartesian doubt to argue that the “Pyrrhonians” cannot sustain themselves at the point they are stronger. As it was argued in the previous chapter (Sect. 4.5), Huet rejects Descartes’s use of doubt as a way to detach the mind from the body and thereby founding Cartesian science. Descartes also disregards the ancient skeptics’ purposes in his use of skeptical doubt. Pascal’s purpose is different from Descartes’s and Huet’s. He aims at showing the insufficiency of dogmatism (destroyed by his skeptical reappraisal of Descartes’s doubt) and of skepticism (destroyed by the practical unviability of this doubt). On the one hand he argues for the insufficiency of any possible philosophical position and, on the other, for the strength and cognitive excellence of Christian doctrine, according to him the only doctrine capable of explaining these contradictions. Huet’s purpose is quite different from Pascal’s, whose philosophy he uses for his own purposes (as Descartes used the skeptics’ and Pascal Descartes’s). Huet’s aims at showing the weakness of reason to establish truth, including the truth of the revealed Christian doctrine, whose proof is only historical. Huet’s weak reason is not only the a priori reason of Pascal’s (that is, reason’s weakness to autonomously demonstrate non-mathematical truths) but also of Pascal’s a posteriori reason, namely, a reason capable of showing that Christian doctrine is the best explanation for the human epistemological contradiction.
Huet’s rejection of Pascal’s “proof from the doctrine” or “argument of the true religion” is related to their different views of the raison-faith distinction. Although Huet agrees with Pascal that Christianity cannot be proved by reason, that such an effort would be deist and would ultimately fail, Pascal attributes to reason a more relevant role in Christian apologetics than Huet’s. According to Pascal, unaided reason can show that Christian revelation—basically, the account of the Fall of Man—can explain human epistemic and moral contradictions. In the section on “Submission and use of reason,” Pascal claims (fragment 4 of section V of the Port-Royal edition) that Augustine holds that “Reason would never submit unless it judged that there are occasions when it ought to submit. It is right, then, that reason should submit when it judges that it ought to submit.”52 Huet adds the following critical note at the margin:
Rapetti (1999, 182) notes that in Concordia Rationis et Fidei Huet presents a different view in which reason submits to faith, recognizing its own weakness and, therefore, without any violence and constraint. I think that for Huet such recognition is incompatible with Pascal’s attributing to reason the role of recognizing the doctrinal superiority of Christianity as an explanation of human nature. Huet denies Pascal’s view that only Christianity describes self-love as “a sin, that it is innate in us, or that we are obliged to resist it, let alone thought of providing a cure” (La 617). Huet comments: “this is not true. The Greeks’ and Romans’ morals, which is grounded on and is part of their religions, forbids nothing more severely. Look at Plato and Aristotle, and Cicero’s Offices, and above all Marcus Aurelius.”54 Whereas Pascal holds that Christianity is unique in its doctrines—in particular that of the Fall of Man—which alone explains human nature and behavior, Huet believes that the basic content of the Old Testament is disseminated in ancient philosophy and all other religions. The work of reason in Christian apologetics is to unveil this origin through philological, geographical and historical research. Christianity is true not because it is the only epistemically true religion, but on the contrary, because it is reproduced—although imperfectly—in all other religions. Another reason for Huet’s rejection of Pascal’s “proof from the doctrine” lies in his disagreement with Pascal’s view of skepticism as the epistemological consequence of original sin. Huet is a humanist, both in the sense of the erudite work he pursued throughout his life, and in the sense of his view of human nature, contrary, as pointed out above (Sect. 5.1.1) to the Jansenist view. He took very little interest in Pascal’s analysis of the “wretchedness of man without God” (La 6). It is noteworthy that he left just one single reading mark in the sections on human vanity (XXIV), weakness (XXV) and misery (XXVI) of his copy of the Pensées.55He assumes that this submission depends on reason and I think, on the contrary, that the submission of reason to faith is rather the work of faith than of reason; for both are equally imperious and one will never accept being submitted to the other; if one of them must submit it will be out of force and constraint. Because one of them must conquer the other, it is up to faith to submit reason and not reason to submit faith.53
Huet could have said about Pascal’s fragments on man’s misery what he says of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims:
This search of the defects of corrupted man, which the author undertakes with such sagacity, is not done with enough equity; he is not always just with this man that he condemns, and he wants to depict him as more corrupt than he is, interpreting with much prevention and a bit of malignancy, and turning innocent actions and inclinations in the wrong way.56
5.2 Simon Foucher (1644–1696)
Huet was informed of Foucher’s death by Claude Nicaise. In his reply, he says he used to meet Foucher regularly but had lost contact in the last years.57 Indeed, the last known letter between the two skeptics dates from 23 September 1690. Although a friend of Huet’s, Foucher did not belong to the bishop’s inner circle. Crucially, unlike Fathers de la Rue, Du Hamel, and Le Valois, he was not close enough to be kept informed by Huet that he was writing his skeptical system, finished by 1685. There are only three known letters between them, all from Foucher to Huet. Huet does not mention Foucher in his Memoirs and did not cite him in any of his works. However, he appreciated Foucher’s Critique de la Recherche de la Vérité. He owned a copy of the work and added a marginal note in the front fly-leaf of his copy of the first volume of Malebranche’s Recherche, defending Foucher from Malebranche’s reaction to the Critique.58 Huet illustrates his view of Malebranche’s arrogant dogmatism (“air hautain et décisive”), injurious towards those who criticize his views, with the latter’s reaction to Foucher: “With what superiority and contempt has he responded to the author of the Critique, a moderate man by whom he was treated with much equity!”59 It is quite possible that Huet’s objection that Malebranche appeals to theology to solve philosophical problems was influenced by Foucher’s Critique. Huet’s point in Quaestiones I, chapter 7, that faith should play no role in philosophical issues which are not connected with faith, which seems to have Malebranche as its main target, was first and most denounced by Foucher. Foucher relates a number of presuppositions which, according to him, Malebranche takes for granted without demonstration. One of these is the “suppositions of the truths of faith” in philosophical inquiry. This procedure violates the Academic rules of philosophizing, basically intellectual integrity, the principle which must drive any philosophical search after truth.60 This aspect of the reason-faith distinction is one of the views shared by the two skeptics,61 though, as I show below, they strongly diverge on the role of reason in religious faith.
In 1685, the year of two of the three known letters from their correspondence, Huet tried to get a job for Foucher as preceptor in the family of the Duke of Montausier, powerful nobleman who had earlier hired Huet as sub preceptor to the Dauphin. But Foucher’s behavior in a dinner with the duke ruined the project.62 At this same occasion, Huet asked Foucher to produce an extended summary in French of his Demonstratio Evangelica, a task Foucher politely avoided, arguing that he had learned that this work had been done by someone else.63
In the previous letter (June 13), this same year (1685), Foucher thanks Huet for his interest in Foucher’s work in progress Apologie des Académiciens. One month later (July 13), he communicates a provisional relation of the titles of its first part, “in which it is shown that the philosophy of the Academics is the most useful for religion.”64 Foucher explains to Huet why he undertook to support the Academic philosophy against Desgabets’ traditional objections to its skepticism.65 Academic skepticism “withdraws the mind from conflict and error” and, more than any other philosophy, from prejudice.66 Foucher concludes the letter wishing that Huet “fulfills someday the promise you have made in your famous book on the demonstration of the Gospel.”67 The private exhortation becomes public, without naming Huet, at the conclusion of the first part of the Apologie des Académiciens.
In a review of Thomassin (1685), Bayle refers to Foucher’s view that the first fathers of the church, Augustine in particular, were “Academics, whose laws strongly agree with Christianity.” “Foucher concludes [the first part of his Apology for the Academics],” Bayle remarks, “hoping that Mr. Huet”—and here he cites Foucher—“fulfills the promise he has made to show that the philosophical schools which teach doubting agree better with Christianity than the others.”69 It is intriguing that Bayle calls the attention of readers of the Nouvelles de la République de Lettres to a personal hope of Foucher’s in a review of another author’s book. He thereby gives a much larger public exposition of Huet’s skeptical project than it could have with Foucher’s book, which was indeed very far from being a best seller. It must be noticed that Huet does not make any promise in Demonstratio.70 All he says in the Preface, as it was closely examined in Sect. 5.1.2 above, is that developing his view that ancient skepticism was of all ancient philosophies the most compatible with Christianity would lie outside the scope of Demonstratio. So why would Foucher made such an exhortation? And why did he make it privately and publically precisely when (1685) Huet had a finish manuscript of his skeptical system and was being exhorted by his friends’ fathers De la Rue, Du Hamel and Le Valois to give up the project of publishing it?71 This “coincidence” suggests that Foucher and Bayle were aware—probably not from Huet himself but from someone else—of Huet’s skeptical endeavors, of the opposition he was receiving from his friends and acted in the opposite direction. The two French skeptics mobilized in favor of the publication of Huet’s skeptical work which could see the light of day only after the death of them all. However, their effort may have been not completely futile, for when Huet published his Alnetanarum Quaestionum deprived of its original first, skeptical book he did refer in the preface to his paradoxical claim in Demonstratio “interpreted” by Foucher as a promise of a future work. This shows, as I pointed out in Chap. 3, Sect. 3.5, that Huet at this point still intended to publish later, but while alive, his skeptical system. I also pointed out there that one of these efforts was to publish the work in the Netherlands with Bayle’s publisher (another coincidence?), Reinier Leers, in Rotterdam, but this happened when Bayle had already passed away.72 Huet’s claim in the preface of Quaestiones is also a public statement that he was beginning to fulfill the “promise,” fulfilling it partially or in an abridged way, since in the first book of published Quaestiones he does have a chapter claiming that the philosophies that teach doubting are most useful to show that faith is a more certain path to truth than reason (Quaestiones I, VII), though he does not establish philosophically the weakness of reason in this work.It is well known that we need a good philosophy, and we have learned from long experience of many centuries that the dogmatists’ philosophies are not sufficient and, consequently, that we have to return to that of the Academics’, the most ancient one, which was used to establish the Gospel. An illustrious author has declared in favor of this way of philosophizing in his famous book de la démonstration Evangélique. I hope he soon fulfills the promise he has made to show that the philosophical schools which teach doubting agree better with Christianity than the others. His deep erudition and experience make me expect great things.68
Was Foucher right in thinking that his and Huet’s philosophical projects agreed?
Based on Demonstratio, Foucher believed their projects were similar, but probably found out they were not when he read in 1689 the Censura and in 1690 the first book of published Quaestiones, on the “laws of the agreement of reason with faith.”73 I argued (Maia Neto, 1997) that their philosophical projects were similar in the general sense that their reappraisal of Academic skepticism (in Huet’s case, also Pyrrhonian skepticism) was motivated, on the one hand by a fascination with Descartes’s method of doubt and, on the other, by a rejection of Descartes’s claim to ground his metaphysics on his doubt. Both considered the ancient skeptical way of philosophizing, to a large extent recovered and widely publicized by Descartes’s doubt, the genuine philosophical method, a method which, according to both—following the ancient skeptics—was recognized as such in antiquity. Foucher exhibits this view in the very titles of his works in which he combines “search after truth,” “Academics” and “examination of Descartes’s views.”74 In Huet’s case, the tremendous impact of Descartes’s philosophy, in particular of Cartesian doubt, in the bishop’s own skepticism is extensively exposed in Chap. 4. Furthermore, the publication of Malebranche’s Recherche played a crucial role in the two skeptics’ proposal of an alternative appraisal of Descartes, unlike Malebranche’s, giving a central role to doubt.75 Both also argued that Descartes did not follow his own (skeptical) way. Article 5 of the third part of Foucher’s Apologie reads: “On the origin of Descartes’s philosophy. That it is grounded on the Academics’ principle,” namely, intellectual integrity, “and, if Descartes afterwards (that is, after doubt) fell into some prejudices, this is because he followed the footsteps of some ancient dogmatic philosophers.”76 Huet argues in section 14 of the first chapter of Censura, whose draft was already finished when Foucher published his Apologie, that “at the outset of his philosophy Descartes joined the Academics and the skeptics, but then immediately went astray when he abandoned them” (Against, 109). However, a closer look at their skepticisms shows important differences.77
Foucher’s philosophical project is to revive (his own controversial) view of Academic skepticism as the best philosophical alternative to Aristotelianism and Cartesianism. Huet thinks this is the role of his version of ancient skepticism—which differs from Foucher’s and presents a much more radical rupture with Cartesianism and a much sharper reason-faith distinction. Foucher’s view of Academic skepticism has three main features: 1/ an implacable criticism of any philosophical pretension of claiming certainty about the external material world, concerning which only probable knowledge is possible; 2/ a continuous search after truth, which appears in the titles of most of his works and derives from his valuation of Cartesian doubt; and 3/ philosophical acceptance of metaphysical truths unrelated to the external material world such as the existence of God and of an immaterial soul. Huet agrees only with the first of these three features and indeed uses at least one of Foucher’s arguments in the Traité. He annotated in a manuscript the following passage of Foucher’s Critique—I cite Watson’s English translation—“But could one not doubt whether God might not have made us to possess only probabilities, and whether he resolved to conserve knowledge of the truth for Himself alone, or even whether he planned to give us knowledge of the truth only in heaven?”78 One of Huet’s major thesis is Foucher’s third alternative, namely, that metaphysically certain knowledge of truth is possible only in heaven. Furthermore, Huet develops, in his reply to the objection that God would be a deceiver if God had made us such as to never have certain knowledge, Foucher’s conclusion from the passage annotated by Huet, namely, that “[f]rom this one must not conclude that God would be a deceiver if He had given us no means to discover the truth.” Huet argues that God did give us the means to discover that our understanding is not naturally fit to metaphysically certain knowledge. God is not a deceiver in the same way that a reporter of fables is not a deceiver in so far as he does not pretend that the fables he tells are true. Likewise, no one would consider a deceiver someone who sells a house in a poor condition provided that he does not attempt to persuade the buyer that the house is in good shape.79 Huet’s whole effort in part one of the Traité is precisely to show the many arguments available to our faculties given by God which show our incapacity to naturally attain metaphysically certain knowledge.
Huet disagrees with Foucher’s support of features 2 and 3 above and Foucher’s attribution of [3] to ancient Academic skepticism. Concerning feature number [2], one of Huet’s disagreements with ancient skepticism is that he finds it pointless to search for something we cannot get: “We forsake … the Academics and Skeptics; because they make profession of searching after truth, and of examining everything … For what truth have they been able to find out by such a long and assiduous search?”80 Huet’s disagreement with [3] shows that the scope of his skepticism is much wider than Foucher’s. And here, unlike with feature [2], Huet argues that it is Foucher who breaks with the ancient Academic skeptics. Following Augustine, Foucher believed in the legend that Arcesilaus, Carneades and Philo were skeptics only exoterically against Stoic and Epicurean materialism. Augustine’s view, largely rejected by Hellenistic scholars, is that esoterically, for insiders, the new Academics supported Plato’s metaphysics.81 Foucher claims in the fourth part of his Apologie that the Academics can prove the metaphysical Christian truths that Descartes failed to demonstrate, namely, that the soul is known before anything else (article 2), that it is immaterial (art. 3) and immortal (art. 4), that God exists (art. 5), is unique (art. 6), maintains the world continuously creating it (art. 7) and is providential (art. 8).82 In a letter to Nicaise of 25 July 1697, Huet criticizes Foucher’s Hellenistic scholarship.83 Huet rejected Foucher’s assimilation of the New Academy to dogmatic Platonism and his distinction between Pyrrhonian and Academic skepticism derived from the latter.84 Huet saw no essential difference between the two ancient skeptical traditions.85
In Chap. 4, Sect. 4.5, I showed that Huet thought that Descartes’s use of doubt to eliminate prejudice jeopardized the two other utilities Descartes claimed for his doubt, namely, to assure that what he established afterwards was indubitable and to provide a detachment of the mind from the body which would make possible a refutation of materialism, opening a way to access and establish metaphysical truths.86 Unlike Huet, Foucher denied only the former, not the latter. He did believe, like Descartes, that doubt is the key to open the cage (the body) in which the mind is imprisoned, therefore making possible the combat against materialism. This is how he, following Augustine, articulates the New Academics (they worked with this key) and Christian Platonic metaphysics. Foucher rejected Descartes’s metaphysical proofs but followed Descartes’s footsteps closely, as the list of the metaphysical truths given above he claimed the Academics could establish makes evident.87 Huet thinks that this combat—to the extent that it is carried on by reason, and not by faith—is destined to fail and Descartes’s metaphysical way is a chimera because human beings cannot get around their bodies.
Foucher values reason much more than does Huet, for besides its critical function of eliminating prejudice according to the model of the Academic skeptics’ which both emphasize, Foucher also attributes to reason the power to establish philosophical doctrines.88 That this two uses of reason are, if not contradictory, certainly in conflict, is clear from the fact that while Foucher is at least partially successful in his criticism of Descartes, Malebranche and Leibniz since his criticisms influenced a whole modern skeptical tradition (from Bayle to Berkeley and Hume),89 his metaphysical truths are based on weak arguments.90 Rapetti and, more recently, Hickson, have called attention to Foucher’s and Huet’s different views of reason and its impact on their views on the faith-reason distinction. Although Rapetti in my view exaggerates Huet’s distrust of reason for he does attribute to reason an intrinsic value in enabling the avoidance of error,91 I agree with the following distinction she makes: “If for the Huet of the Traité philosophique skepticism is of value to the extent that it marks the self-destruction of philosophy and the need for it to be transcended, for Foucher, on the contrary, Academic philosophy represents the fulfilment of philosophy: philosophy coincides, indeed, with love of wisdom and with the search after truth in which lies human happiness and, as such, it cannot be transcended.”92 Hickson verifies in Foucher’s Histoire des Académiciens (1693) “an extended refutation of anti-Cartesian skeptical arguments that had been elaborated by Huet in Censura and that would be offered again in the Treatise. These skeptical arguments target the foundation of both Descartes’s and Foucher’s epistemology, the natural light of reason, and the criterion of evidence.”93 Consistently with their very different appreciations of reason, they disagree strongly on Descartes’s main skeptical argument, the deceiver. While Foucher rejects it saying that it destroys reason, Huet finds it one of the main proofs of the weakness of human reason.94
Foucher’s optimism about the constructive role of human reason implies relevant differences between the two friends on the reason-faith distinction. Huet’s views on this matter were published in 1690 in his book Alnetanae Quaestiones de Concordia Rationis et Fidei. As I pointed out above, one of them may have had as source Foucher’s accusation that Malebranche attempted to resolve purely philosophical issues appealing to Christian doctrines such as vision in God—to deal with the problem of how ideas could be representative of their objects—and original sin—to explain attachment to the body. Without naming Malebranche, Huet does seem to be a target in sections 1–3 of the seventh chapter of book I.95 The third known letter from Foucher to Huet is all about his reaction to the latter’s Concordia, published in this same year (1690). Concerning its first book, on the “laws of the agreement of reason with faith,”96 Foucher expresses his agreement with the second (on the superior certainty of faith) and third (on the legitimate use of reason on matters of faith) chapters,97 but politely, though “with sincerity,”98 disagrees from Huet’s claims of the weakness of reason (chapter 1) and his dealing with the case of Christian doctrines which, according to him, reason cannot support (chapters 4 and 5).99 In order not to make explicit the disagreement, Foucher tells Huet that “he believes [Huet] distinguishes natural light and Reason, I mean our reason as it usually is in men for the former is infallible and the latter doubtful.”100 Curiously, Foucher finishes the letter announcing the soon appearance of the first part of his Histoire des Académiciens, in which, as Hickson points out (see above), he reacts to Huet’s skepticism about Descartes’s natural light in Censura. While implicit in Concordia, Huet’s skepticism about the evidence of the natural light is explicit in the Traité and—at least in its Cartesian version—in Censura. In order to justify his point to Huet, Foucher cites the case of theological syllogism, which would be compromised if one of its premises—which relies entirely on the natural light—was not as certain as the other based on faith. This same objection was made to Huet by Le Valois when he examined the manuscript of the Traité, to which Huet responded in chapter 15 of the third book (Weakness, 216–217/Traité, 286–287).101 This means that Foucher’s opposition in 1685 to Huet’s friends’ opposition to the Traité would probably not resist, at least in part, his reading of Huet’s Censura in 1689 and Quaestiones in 1690.
In Books II and III of Concordia, Huet deploys his comparatist method, showing affinities between Christian and Pagan dogmata (book II) and moral precepts (book III). This was the part of the book which caused more negative reaction, not to say scandal, for it was seen as a denial of the uniqueness of Christianity and its degradation to the level of Pagan superstition. In his letter, Foucher distinguishes, in an implicit way, two kinds of comparisons. One concerning morals (book III) and the more philosophical Christian doctrines (about God and His attributes, the soul, creation, etc., presented in book II, chapters 1–10), and another concerning the miracles surrounding Christ’s birth, life, death and after life (book II, chapters 11–24). On the latter, which caused more negative reactions, Foucher defends Huet saying that the critics did not read Huet’s book carefully enough, for “you warn in the beginning that you do not intend that the reader believe in the fables of the pagans, but only to show that their religion obliged them to believe things so little credible” while “our [religion] propose us more reasonable things which are not so difficult to believe.”102 Concerning the first kind of comparison, Foucher agrees, though, purposely or not, disclosing deeper differences.
Foucher gives philosophy a much greater importance than does Huet. He disapproved, for instance, of Huet’s Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Cartésianisme (1692), in which Descartes and his disciples (Régis in particular) are ridiculed.104 In Maia Neto (2003), I examined Foucher’s moral theory and argued that it is largely inspired by Descartes’s and the rationalism he attributes to the Academic skeptics. He also attributes this view to Confucius who is used by him to indicate, on the one hand, the independence of his moral theory from Christian revelation and, on the other, its foundation on natural reason. It is this perspective that Foucher projects on his appreciation of Huet’s comparisons of Christian morals and main (philosophical) doctrines with pagan philosophy and religion. However, the indication of similarities based on reason is not Huet’s way. Huet believed in a historical and geographical transmission of ancient Jewish myths and moral doctrines to pagan regions. I claimed that “Confucius, being a kind of nonchristian Cartesian” from Foucher’s standpoint, “could carry Descartes’s morals to a point Descartes did not dare out of fear of the theologians.”105 By being cautious in expanding his rationalism to morals and religion, Descartes’s position appears closer to Huet than to Foucher.106I have read your book De concordia rationis et fidei, and I was happy to see that you have shown so well that Plato’s views agree with Christianity, in particular in respect to the mystery of the Trinity and the nature of the divine word. Everybody strongly approved of your style and admired your erudition … I assure you that I was edified by this reading, for I am the more inclined to receive truths of Christianity the more I am persuaded that the most enlightened philosophers recognized them, I love extremely being instructed by the ways of philosophy.103
Although friends and admirers of Academic skepticism, Huet and Foucher belonged to different—and opposite—intellectual worlds. Foucher came to philosophy from the Cartesian milieu. He was a student of Rohault’s and, according to some, was even designated to make the funeral speech at the occasion Descartes’s remains, brought from Sweden, were buried in the church of Saint Géneviève-du-Mont in Paris.107 Huet was an erudite scholar. He employed historical and philological tools to develop his comparative method, not natural reason which he thought quite unable to derive with certainty basic truths, of Christianity or any other religion or philosophy.
5.3 Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)
Bayle, seventeen years younger, met Huet personally in a gathering of scholars held by Henri Justel in Paris in 1675. According to Bayle’s biographers, he received the support of French Calvinists from Normandy in Rouen and Paris after his return from Switzerland.108 In Rouen, Bayle was preceptor of the children of a widow of a wealthy businessman and cousin of Moisant de Brieux’s, founder of the Caen Academy of Belles Lettres. De Brieux invited Huet to become a member of the Academy as soon as the latter returned from Sweden.109 Huet had personal connections with Huguenots from Caen and Rouen. His father was born and raised a Huguenot and only when already grown up was he converted to Catholicism by Jean Gontier.110 When he met Huet, Bayle was introducing himself in the Republic of Letters in which Huet was already a well-known citizen. Huet had by then published De Interpretatione (1661), Origenis Commentaria (1668), De l’Origine des Romans (1670) and was a member of the French Academy while Bayle would publish his first book, the Pensées diverses sur la comète, only seven years later (1682). Huet had caught Bayle’s attention at least three years before their meeting. From Coppet in Switzerland on 9 October 1672, Bayle asks Minutoli to lend him a copy of Origine des Romans, of which he heard much praise.111 After reading Huet’s book, he tells his brother Jean that its author “is Normand, a very skilled man, and one of the gentlemen of the Caen Academy,” whose main names he cites: Bochart, “le principal ornement,” De Brieux and Segrais.112
In Paris, both had the same occupation at the occasion of their meeting. Huet was sub preceptor of the son of the king, Bayle was preceptor of the sons of the king’s secretary, the Huguenot Jean de Beringher, a job he left this same year to assume a position of teaching philosophy at the Calvinist Academy at Sedan.113 Bayle describes Huet and reports his impression of his meeting with him in a letter to Louise Marconbes.
Bayle then eulogizes Huet’s Iter Suecicum (1662), the poem in which he describes his journey to Sweden: “he is a great Latin poet.”114 Bayle praises Huet’s Origenis (1668) and Interpretatione (1661) and says that Huet’s reputation in the Republic of Letters lead him to the sub preceptorship of the Dauphin and to the French Academy and wonders who was more benefited by the admission: Huet or the Academy. At this point he relates his impression of Huet at Justel’s gathering: “he speaks much and with great facility.”115Bayle is aware of Huet’s Demonstratio since it was blocked at the printer waiting the Sorbonne’s permission to publish.116 When the book was finally published he immediately read it carefully and, like Leibniz,117 expressed mixed feelings about its value. On the one hand, he was impressed by Huet’s erudition but, on the other, he found the arguments unbalanced. Bayle tells his brother Jean that Huet “indifferently presents convincing and probable arguments,” that is, only probable arguments deprived of the demonstrative force Huet claimed for his apology.118He is from Caen, one of the greatest European scholars, whose reputation is so huge that he was invited to become the preceptor of the present King of Sweden, which he visited, but declined the invitation.
Bayle was therefore disappointed with some of the numerous historical and philological arguments in Demonstratio but was most favorable to this kind of research. His praise of Huet’s erudition means that he held him genuinely in the highest regard in the Republic of Letters. Along with his approval of historical scholarship, Bayle also appreciated the skepticism Huet presented in the Preface of Demonstratio. Besides his already remarked endorsement of Foucher’s wish that Huet do what he purportedly “promised” in the Preface to show that of all pagan philosophies skepticism is the most consistent with Christianity, Bayle refers approvingly to Huet’s defense there of historical certainty—based on the dictata naturae—in contrast to geometrical and metaphysical demonstrations, combatted by Sextus Empiricus and other ancient skeptics.119 This statement was made by Bayle in the Projet of his greatest work, the Dictionary Historical and Critical. Huet is the only author cited by Bayle in the Projet in support of his defense of the certainty and utility of historical research. Bayle argues that it is easier for a historian to reach the type of certainty proper to its field than for a geometer to achieve the certainty expected in his. If there are doubtful historical facts, many can easily be established as true or false, given the available sources, whereas geometers have great difficulty to prove that geometric figures exist in the world external to the mind. The four French skeptics of the late seventeenth century considered in this chapter hold that it is impossible philosophically to overcome Cartesian skepticism about the external material world.120 Bayle concludes his introduction to the Project and Fragments of a Critical Dictionary showing the moral utility of discovering human errors in historical matters for they expose the weakness of man thereby combating pride. He also promises that the work will be objective, not biased by religion or nationality. These two features are in total agreement with Huet’s thought, Huet whose major philosophical work had no other aim and whose conception of and action in the Republic of Letters agreed with Bayle’s.121 As far as erudite scholarship is concerned, Bayle is much closer to Huet than are Pascal and Foucher.
Bayle sent a copy of his Projet, which included a sample of articles, to Huet and other scholars.122 He wanted to test in the Republic of Letters the Projet of relating in a single work the errors committed in published historical works, in particular in Moréri’s Dictionnaire historique, and also in view of receiving support and suggestions in the undertaking of the project.123 There is no indication that Huet communicated directly with Bayle. But Popkin discovered a fragment of a letter from Bayle to Madame de Tilly, a Calvinist noblewomen, who was a friend in common of the two skeptics. The letter indicates an indirect relationship, corroborates Bayle’s admiration for Huet, suggests that it had some degree of reciprocity and, most importantly, gives a possible source for Bayle’s famous abbot in note B of the Pyrrho article in the Dictionary.
The letter is not dated but Labrousse (1961, I, 221), based on a reply by Madame de Tilly from 26 March 1694, estimated Bayle’s letter between 14 and 26 March 1694. In Tilly’s reply, she says that “Mr. Huet told me very obliging things of you and which indicate that he is quite interested in things related to you.”125 She most probably refers to Huet’s interest in Bayle’s work in the Republic of Letters, more specifically the project in which he was working at the time, that of the Dictionary, in whose epistemological defense in the Projet Huet was cited.I have another favor to ask you, Madame, that the next time you write to Mr. the Bishop of Avranches you kindly assure him of the deep respect I have for him and the continuous admiration I have for his eminent qualities, his immense knowledge, his beautiful Latinity, his virtues and everything that, in summary, one day will be the subject of the most beautiful eulogy that one has ever made of a priest of the French church. I will have an incredible pleasure in signaling these sentiments in my Dictionary when the occasion of talking about and citing him will be offered me. Mr. Basnage has not failed of letting me know the esteem of this great man’s towards me.124
The first two volumes of the Dictionary, including articles until letter P, were put on sale on 24 October 1696.126 One previous edition until letter G was finished, but not put on sale, by August 1695. Because Bayle wrote the articles in alphabetical order, it was probably between early and mid 1696 that the Pyrrho article with its note B was written.
Huet appears a number of times in the Dictionary, and on a variety of topics. There are quite few on literary issues, mostly related to Huet’s History of Romances. One of these appears in the article “Longus,” in which Bayle remarks that Huet, “who is an excellent judge in all matters,” points out valuable things in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe but also exposes its defects, the main one of which is its obscenity.127 Bayle also praises Huet’s Latin verses,128 cites three times the Preface of Demonstratio in remark D of the article “Zeno the Epicurean” on the uncertainty of geometry,129 and the Censura in note B of “Leucippus.” Bayle cites Huet’s remark that the vortices theory was presented by Leucippus before Descartes.130 Although in the body of the article in which Bayle inserts note B he says that “it cannot be denied that in some respects the Cartesian theory is like that of Leucippus,” he does not dissimulate his opposition to Huet’s claim that “Descartes advanced nothing new.”131 Without naming the bishop, Bayle complains that “[p]eople try to rob [Descartes] of all the glory of invention by dividing it among several other philosophers, both ancient and modern. I shall not enter into this examination.”132
None of these references comes even close to the “most beautiful eulogy that one has ever made of a priest of the French church” promised to Madame de Tilly. Popkin (1981–1982, 194) claims the eulogy was not done, but I argue that it was through the abbé philosophique of remark B of the article Pyrrho. Popkin doubts that Bayle knew a manuscript of the Traité philosophique, for “he probably would have been very happy to find that the Bishop was a fellow ‘sceptical-fideist’.”133 Popkin’s implicit argument is that if Bayle was aware of the existence of Huet’s manuscript he would publicize it in the Republic of Letters. However, as Bayle’s review of Thomassin cited above indicates and the Projet makes plain, he was aware of Huet’s view—stated in the preface of Demonstratio—that skepticism was, of all ancient philosophies, the most compatible one with Christian faith. He also most probably knew that Huet did not want that his philosophical skeptical work be published or, more precisely, be published under his name, for Huet did attempt to published it under pseudonym in the Netherlands with Bayle’s publisher Leers around 1713.134
In the following pages of this chapter I give some indications which suggest that Huet is the model of the abbé philosophique. They are not conclusive but make together, I believe, a strong case. I have no evidence that Bayle actually read a manuscript of Huet’s Traité philosophique, but find quite likely that he was aware of its existence, the circumstance of its production and the general line of its arguments. These are all he needed to have Huet as a model to his abbé philosophique.
I begin by distinguishing two texts: the article “Pyrrho” as a whole and the sequential notes B and C. The article is typical of the Dictionary. Bayle presents Pyrrho based mainly on Diogenes Laertius’ Lives. He reports most of the anecdotes attributed to Pyrrho contesting those, originated mainly from Antigonus of Carystus, which put in doubt the practical viability of Pyrrhonism.135 Only notes B and C, respectively on skepticism and fideism, are philosophical digressions. Note B is introduced at the point where Bayle claims that Pyrrhonism “is rightly detested in the schools of theology.”136 This does not entail that Bayle thinks, unlike Huet, that skepticism is completely incompatible with Christianity. It is partially compatible provided ancient skepticism is modified in the way, for instance, La Mothe Le Vayer proposes its “circumcision” or Huet modifies some of its tenets such as its end.137 Bayle’s claim indicates an incompatibility of skepticism with natural or speculative theology, that is rational elaborations about God, his attributes and relation with the world. Huet, as pointed out in Chap. 4, Sect. 4.6, follows orthodoxy by recognizing the natural capacity of reason to deal effectively with such issues but is very economic—and at one time ambiguous—when dealing with the epistemic strength of speculative or rational theology.138 Bayle holds a position similar to the ancient skeptics’ on this issue,139 but goes further in Note B adding reasons why skepticism is inoffensive to religious faith.140 Huet, in the preface of Demonstratio, emphasizes that common beliefs are dictata naturae. In the Traité, he brings together Academic probability, Pyrrhonian phenomena and Cartesian provisional morals to secure the action of the skeptic’s and radically opposes—in Cartesian fashion—philosophical inquiry and practical life.141 For both Huet and Bayle the philosophical criticism of religious beliefs would hardly impact ordinary belief and life. Bayle continues his article Pyrrho claiming that Pyrrhonism “tries to gain new strength” in revealed theology (which is developed in note B), “which turns out to be only illusory. But it may have its value in making men conscious of the darkness they are in, so they will implore help from on high and submit to the authority of the faith,” with reference to note C which develops this point.142 Plain Pyrrhonism is incompatible with Christianity but it is hardly adopted by ordinary men and women and can be used by the philosopher in favor of Christian apologetics and virtues.
Note B is a dialogue between two abbots to whom, in the Entretiens de Máxime et de Themiste, Bayle attributes autonomy in relation to himself. His personal view does not coincide with either of the contrary ones held by the abbots. Although this is an interesting interpretative key of the philosophical abbot, it must be remarked that the characterization of the latter in the Entretiens differs from his characterization in note B. In the former, a posthumous publication of Bayle’s which appeared seven years after the first edition of the Dictionary, Bayle replies to objections against the skepticism of the article “Pyrrho” raised by rationalist Calvinist theologians, Jean le Clerc in particular. It is the latter who first calls “Pyrrhonian” the abbot of note B whose views he identifies with Bayle’s. The passage in the Entretiens in which Bayle distinguishes the two abbots among themselves and from him is a reply to the specific objection raised by Le Clerc that the fact that Bayle puts on the same level the mysteries of Adam’s fall, the transmission of original sin, Incarnation, Trinity and Eucharist means that he rejects them all since it is the same reason which determines the rejection of the last in the list, the only one among them rejected by orthodox Calvinists. Bayle replies arguing that Le Clerc and Jaquelot
Bayle’s remarks above are defensive against Le Clerc’s accusation of impiety. He is mainly concerned in distinguishing his from the two abbots’ different views: from the good Catholic who accepts all mysteries, including the Eucharist, and from the Pyrrhonian. The latter is described as arguing ad hominem, therefore not as a Christian but as a strictly Pyrrhonian, for whom the truth of the mysteries is not under question but only evidence as a criterion of truth for those who accept them. The truth of the mysteries is assumed by the “good Catholic” abbot and the Pyrrhonian abbot engages with him as a Pyrrhonian, that is, without assuming any belief, neither in favor nor against the mysteries. The situation is different in note B in which the two abbots are characterized as Catholic, “of whom one knew only his duties and obligations and the other was a good philosopher” (B, 196). The philosophical abbot never claims to be a Pyrrhonian nor is he so called by the other characters who figure in the note. This is crucial for if the philosophical abbot of Note B is characterized as a strict Pyrrhonian, Huet becomes an unlikely model, for Bayle knew well that he was good Catholic. By contrast, his characterization as a philosophical abbot fits in well with Huet. Bayle says that the dialogue of the two abbots was told him by someone—“a very able man”—who witnessed the exchange. I called attention above to a review of Bayle’s in the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres in which he publicized Foucher’s wish that Huet would fulfill his “promise” of showing how ancient skepticism can be useful for Christianity. I also noted that Bayle’s review appeared precisely when Huet had a finished manuscript of what later was published under the title of Traité philosophique and that he was being pressed by his friends not to publish it. Huet was the abbot of Aunay at the time. He was addressed in formal letters as Abbati until he was nominated Bishop by Louis XIV in 1685. That is, when Huet had the first version of the Traité philosophique finished he still was officially the abbot of Aunay. Bayle was au courant of Huet’s ascension in the French Catholic Church.144 Although the Traité became public only posthumously, in 1689 Huet published the Censura Philosophiae Cartesianae, surprising the Republic of Letters by revealing himself not only as the well-known erudite but also as a philosopher.145 Add to this what was pointed out above, namely, Bayle’s impression of Huet when he met him: “he speaks much and with great facility,” features which are preeminent in the philosophical abbot.The fictional setting of the first version of the Traité philosophique was the conversation of two priests in the gardens of the abbey d’Aunay, its abbé Huet and his Oratorian friend Jean-Baptiste du Hamel. After Huet decided to remove its first philosophical alnetanae question from the work, publishing it with only three books in 1690, he made a second attempt two years later to publish it as a fourth Quaestiones. He wrote a preface adjusting it to published Quaestiones in three books and sent the manuscript to the Sorbonne censor who forbade the work. In this new version, the one which he translated to French and made other modifications in order to conceal his authorship, the fictional setting, still in the gardens of the abbey d’Aunay, includes three Catholic priests: the two of the earlier version plus the Jesuit Gautruche, making a new setting with three participants more similar to that related in note B.146 Huet refers to his paradoxical claim (earlier remarked by Foucher and Bayle) that of all ancient philosophies skepticism is the most compatible with Christianity both in the preface of published Quaestiones and in the preface to fourth Quaestiones which would be expressly designed to develop the point.assume that [the Pyrrhonian abbot] wants to show that the mysteries of Christianity are false, but it is clear that they dispute over the following: that the truth of these mysteries proves that there are axioms which are at the same time false and evident, from which [the Pyrrhonian abbot] concludes that the dogmatists who hold that evidence is the mark of truth are wrong. It is necessary to remember that he disputes with a good Roman Catholic abbot and that he reasons ad hominem against him deriving consequences from the mysteries. Had he therefore explored the advantages he expected to obtain from the fact that his antagonist believed in the fall of Adam, original sin, Trinity, Incarnation, but kept silent about Transubstantiation which could give him the best arguments, nobody would fail to protest that he acted as a fool and stupid.143
If the philosophical abbot of note B was not entirely a fiction of Bayle’s but did have a model, I can figure none better than Huet and no more similar philosophical dialogue than that held in the Traité philosophique. Another possibility might be Pascal’s Conversation with Sacy . It was written by the latter’s secretary Nicolas de Fontaine between 1696 and 1700 but published only in 1728.147 It is less likely that Bayle could see this manuscript than Huet’s or, given his correspondents, that he learned from someone else about Pascal’s conversation with Sacy at Port-Royal des Champs than of Huet’s fictional philosophical conversations at Aunay. And of course Pascal was not a priest, much less an abbot. However, in favor of Pascal’s conversation with Sacy being the model one may record Bayle’s appeal to Pascal in note C to justify the use of skepticism in religious apologetics and the fact that the other abbot, the one “who knew only his duties and obligations,” fits more Sacy, spiritual director at Port-Royal des Champs, who was a poet and much learned in Christian literature but not in pagan philosophy, than Du Hamel, who was a well-known philosopher at the time.148 A stronger evidence might be that the debate in note B begins with the ordinary abbot saying “bluntly that he could pardon the pagan philosophers for having drifted into uncertainty of opinions but that he could not understand how there were still any miserable Pyrrhonists after the arrival of the light of the Gospel” (B, 196). After hearing Pascal’s exposition of Montaigne’s skepticism, Sacy tells him that “one could pardon those ancient philosophers called Academics for doubting everything. But why did Montaigne need to cheer his spirit by reviving a doctrine that Christians now consider foolish?”149 However, Du Hamel reacts to Huet’s skeptical arguments—Descartes’s deceiver in particular—in a similar way: “one can indeed say that [Descartes] does not speak of Christians or of religion. However, the obligation of not losing sight of God and of not doubting [God existence] in any way is natural; and a pagan would be blamed if he voluntarily distanced himself from Him.”150 Du Hamel is thus cautious of his friend’s philosophical project in a way softer than Sacy’s reaction to Montaigne’s: “it seems to me that is not safe to renew this sect if one does not mitigate it a lot.”151
Some affinities between the skepticism of the abbé philosophique and that of the abbé d’Aunay who presented the skeptical views in the first version of the Traité philosophique can be remarked. The former attributes to Gassendi the revival of ancient Pyrrhonism in modern philosophy. Huet was motivated to read Sextus Empiricus by the former student of Gassendi’s, Louis de Cormis to whom the second version of the Traité, the Fourth of the Quaestiones question, attributes the skepticism presented in the book.152 The new strength modern philosophy gives to skepticism according to the abbé philosophique is the discovery that a veil of ideas in our minds precludes access to the things themselves. Knowledge of the mind enables the modern skeptic to “speak more positively” than the ancient skeptic could that qualities are modifications of the mind, being impossible to determine if they correspond to external bodies.153 The proof Huet considers most decisive of the weakness of human understanding “is that we cannot apply the ideas of things, and the judgment which the understanding forms from these ideas, to the things themselves in order to examine and discover the agreement between those judgments and the external objects” (Weakness, 135/Traité, 181). Both Bayle in the strictly philosophical arguments of note B and Huet develop skepticism from the controversy around Cartesian ideas, in particular from Foucher’s criticism of Malebranche’s views.154
These affinities are general and do not indicate beyond any reasonable doubt that Bayle read a manuscript or learned about the content of Huet’s Traité for both had the same sources. But there is a more specific one. The main argument of the philosophical abbot, which introduces his exposition of the contradiction between the mysteries of Christianity and natural reason, is that every dogmatism assumes a criterion of truth and that the surest one is evidence. The criterion problem is raised by Huet in chapter 8—“That man has no certain rule of truth” of book I of the Traité, and in chapter 9 in which “the evidence of sense and reason is confuted.”155 Huet’s critique of evidence is different from the philosophical abbot’s.156 However, the positions draw closer in chapter 2 of the second book of the Traité: “Faith does supply the defects of reason, and makes those things become most certain, which were less so from reason” (Weakness, 136/Traité, 182). Citing Suarez, Huet affirms that “the light of faith” corrects “our natural light … even in those things which seem to be first principles” such as “those things which agree to a third, do agree to one another.” This principle is limited or corrected by the mystery of Trinity and by others, “especially those of the Incarnation, & [de l’Eucharistie],157 we bring several other limitations.”158 Bayle’s philosophical abbot cites these three mysteries and precisely in this order in the part of his speech which precedes the moral discussion. The independent use of precisely the same text by both skeptics would be a coincidence. Another possibility is that Bayle had access somehow to a dossier prepared by Huet’s disciple De la Rue of passages from Church authorities, probably including the one from Suarez, which tend to skepticism and fideism.159
Huet’s citation of Suarez corroborates Solère’s (2003) view that Bayle’s rejection of evidence as false in face of its contradiction with mysteries revealed in Scripture can be found even in “orthodox” scholastics. Solère makes a distinction between the “orthodox” scholastics’ and Bayle’s positions which is also relevant in the comparison of the latter with Huet: “the difference, however, is that among the [“orthodox”], this turnaround occurs only with respect to certain inexplicable doctrinaire points, and is not generalized to the whole Christian doctrine.”160 Huet, like Bayle and unlike the “orthodox,” also generalizes the limitation of certainty of the principles grounded on natural light but, unlike the Pyrrhonian abbot, he does not derive the radical conclusion that evidence is a criterion of falseness. For instance, noticing that the principle “out of nothing, nothing is made … faith has both disavowed and rejected,” Huet asks:
Huet takes the traditional case of conflict between the mysteries and reason as a further proof of his thesis concerning the weakness of human understanding, that the highest certainty it can achieve is lower than the certainty provided by faith. This is an intermediary position between that held by the “orthodox” scholastics such as Suarez according to which the principles are suspended only when human reason faces the revealed mysteries, and the philosophical abbot’s view that the principles are unconditionally false because the mysteries, which are true by faith, contradict them. Huet’s intermediary position also appears in his view favorable to the orthodoxy of eleven theses sustained by the Jesuit Pierre Mauduit at the University in Caen.161 Huet indicates the most polemical one, thesis number 6, namely that “it is not evident that there presently be on earth any true religion.”162 Huet explains that the thesis does not exclude any evidence, but only “metaphysical evidence.” He argues that to deny that Christianity has metaphysical evidence does not mean that it has no rational ground. Bringing down the epistemological status of Christianity close to that of the mysteries, Huet argues that Catholics recognize that the doctrines of the Trinity and the Eucharist are not evident and this does not turn them into libertines.163 The philosophical abbot of note B cites these mysteries to argue that their acceptance implies—if not the denial of any evidence—at least an equipollence between contrary equally evident principles, for the principle according to which what God reveals is true leads to the acceptance of mysteries which deny, among others, the principle of non-contradiction. For Huet Christianity lacks metaphysical certainty—which is limited and corrected by faith—but does have moral certainty which, as pointed out above, Bayle questions—at least as far as the bishop’s arguments in Demonstratio are concerned. One may conclude that if the philosophical abbot is modeled after Huet, Bayle’s promised eulogy of the bishop was a use of skepticism to elevate faith to a higher degree than what is presented in the “Traité philosophique de la foiblesse de l’esprit humain et de la force de la foi,” (emphasis added to indicate the part of the title of Huet’s autograph manuscript which does not figure in the published book).164 However, Huet’s view of the reason-faith distinction is not the one supported in note C and the Third Clarification in which Bayle claims things such as that “one must necessarily choose between philosophy and the Gospel.”165 As Popkin points out,166 Bayle’s extreme fideism anticipates Kierkegaard’s. Huet proposed a conciliation which, although maintaining the superiority of faith, did preserve a subsidiary role to reason.167 Unfortunately, I am not aware of any reaction from Huet to the Pyrrho article of the Dictionary. We know he read Bayle’s major work, even including a reference to Bayle’s claim that Descartes borrowed geometrical views from the English mathematician Thomas Harriot in his annotated copy of the 1694 edition of Censura.168 We do have, however, his reaction to the work as a whole. Avenel cites a letter from Huet to Graevius from May 1697, that is, the following year of the publication of the Dictionary. Graevius was one of the few friends to whom Huet communicated his working on the Traité. He kept an extended correspondence with Bayle and therefore could be a source for Bayle’s knowledge of Huet’s skeptical manuscript. Huet told Graevius that the Dictionary contained “many things skillfully thought, elegantly written and learnedly assembled.”169 However, a few months later Huet received a letter from Nicaise reacting to Huet’s disappointment with Bayle’s execution of the Projet.Why then may we not believe that the same thing may happen to all the other axioms of philosophy, by the power of God? Did not Descartes believe it possible for the power of God to make the same thing to be, and not to be at the same time? … Hence it manifestly happens, that when our reason applies itself to the first principles, though it finds in them the highest human certainty, they still want something to give them a perfect certitude and that defect is supplied by faith. (Weakness, 215/Traité, 284)
Huet’s correspondence with Nicaise about Bayle’s Dictionary corroborates Bayle’s dismay at its reception. In a letter to Du Fai from 5 February 1697 (letter 190) he expresses surprise at the attacks coming not only from religious zealots, what he already expected, but also from scholars (“pédans”). Matytsin (2016, 77–83) claims that erudite scholars, those Catholic in particular, were quite disappointed. The strength of the Dictionary, what made it the “arsenal of the Enlightenment,” was at least one of the grounds of Huet’s criticism, namely, the fact that it was a work directed to a public much larger than the erudite scholars of the Republic of Letters. This is certainly one of the reasons Bayle became much more philosophically relevant than Huet. Bayle’s Dictionary has two historical-critical axes. One erudite more properly historical and another philosophical more properly critical. If the value of the first disappointed Huet and his erudite correspondents, the geniality of the second was responsible for making the Dictionary the most important philosophical work in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As far as I know Huet pronounced only about the scholarly quality of the work, not about its philosophy of which note B of article Pyrrho was one of the main and most polemical statements. What went through Huet’s mind while he read it? He certainly would agree partially with its content and maybe saw himself as an inspiration of the philosophical abbot—if he did not know it for sure. However, Huet would never publicize his satisfaction at Bayle’s eulogy. Bayle’s abbé was violently criticized by another Catholic abbot politically influential in France, Eusèbe Renaudot,171 and Huet at this point still hoped to see his philosophical treatise published. One cannot rule out the possibility that the strong reaction to Bayle’s abbé philosophique played a role in Huet’s abandonment of his project to publish his Traité philosophique while alive, deciding to publish it only anonymously and after his death. Ironically, it was Bayle’s magnus work which made possible the posthumous publication of Huet’s Traité. The Dutch publisher paid Huet’s nephew for the manuscript with three copies of the Dictionary, of which the monetary value was high, in particular in France where it was forbidden.172What you say, Sir, of Bayle’s Dictionary is quite fair: he was capable of greater achievements, but he is not wealthy … and found that the project of correcting [Moréri’s Dictionary] was advantageous both to him and to his publisher. Most works published are more to the taste of their publishers than to their authors because of this [economic] reason.170