The culmination of sceptical critiques of philosophy and theology appeared in the writings of the last seventeenth-century sceptic, Pierre Bayle, a supersceptic who attacked a vast variety of theories and opinions in his many, many writings.
Pierre Bayle was born in 1647 in the tiny town of Carla (now Carla-Bayle), near the Spanish border south of Toulouse, where his father was a Protestant minister. He lived in the troubled atmosphere of the persecuted Huguenots, whose status as a powerful minority was being undermined by Louis XIV.
Throughout the seventeenth century, from the time of Richelieu’s capture of La Rochelle onward, Protestant power and rights were being eroded. The situation grew worse and worse in the second half of the century, with severe governmental pressure to force the Calvinists to convert to Catholicism, resulting in the closing of Protestant schools and chrches and the quartering of unruly dragoons in Protestant homes and finally culminating in 1685 with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which withdrew all legal rights and privileges from the Protestant minority. Throughout this period hundreds of thousands of people fled their native land to the freer atmosphere of the Netherlands, England, Germany, Denmark, the New World, and elsewhere, while others suffered terrible hardships and oppressions in France.
Young Pierre Bayle was sent first to a Calvinist school at Puylaurens and then to the Jesuit college at Toulouse for his education because there was no adequate Protestant institution left in the area. The problems raised in the controversial literature of the time and the dialectical prodding of the skilled disputants at Toulouse led him to abandon Protestantism for Catholicism on the basis of intellectual considerations. Having committed the most horrendous sin possible for the son of an embattled Calvinist minister, he then redeemed himself in the family’s eyes by his second conversion a few months later, again apparently on the basis of intellectual considerations, this time abandoning Catholicism to return to the faith of his family. (The intellectual journey from Protestantism to Catholicism to Protestantism was undergone by Chillingworth before Bayle, and Gibbon after him, with equally fascinating results.) By this second change of religion, Bayle became, technically, a relaps, that is, one who has returned to heresy after having once abjured it and who hence was subject to severe penalties, such as banishment or imprisonment, in the France of Louis XIV. For his protection and reintegration into the Calvinist world, he was sent in 1670 to the University of Geneva to complete his studies in philosophy and theology. There he was thoroughly indoctrinated in Cartesian philosophy by the philosophers at this Calvinist university.1 He then returned to France in 1674, in disguise, and was a tutor in Paris and Rouen. We find him visiting with the Basnages, a prominent Protestant family in Rouen; he was also known at Justel’s salon in Paris, where he met Bishop Huet on one occasion. In 1675 he competed for the post of professor of philosophy at the Calvinist academy of Sedan, which he won as the protégé of the very orthodox theologian, Pierre Jurieu, who was later to become his bitterest enemy. Bayle and Jurieu remained at Sedan until 1681, when the institution was closed by the authorities. This was the last Protestant institution of higher learning in France. They each left Sedan separately for the free air of Holland and were reunited as faculty members of a new academy in Rotterdam, the Ecole Illustre, and as members of the French Reformed Church of that city. The Ecole Illustre was a school for French-speaking people, both Dutch and refugees, where the lectures were given in Latin. Bayle brought the manuscript of his first book with him, the Lettre sur la comète (Letter on the Comet), reissued later as Pensées diverses sur la comète (Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Comet), in which he began his public attack on superstition, intolerance, bad philosophy, and bad history. The success of this first entry into the intellectual world was soon followed by other publications: Critique génerale de l’histoire du Calvinisme du P. Maimbourg, a critical attack on the former Jesuit father Maimbourg’s history of Calvinism; Recueil de quelques pièces curieuses concernant la philosophie de M. Descartes, a collection of articles on Cartesianism (in answer to Jesuit attacks) by Malebranche, the abbé Lanion, Bayle, and others. In the latter work Bayle was already developing a view that was to appear in the Dictionnaire, namely, that the basic concepts of physics—place, time, and motion—have not yet been comprehended in an adequate or coherent way by any of the schools of philosophy, be they Scholastic, Cartesian, or any other.
During this period, some personal events and decisions seem to have taken place that greatly affected certain aspects of Bayle’s life. The first was the decision not to marry a young lady whose hand was offered to him by the Jurieu family. The theme, which occurs and recurs throughout the Dictionnaire, of whether the scholar should marry seems to have been a live problem for him at this time; Bayle apparently made his life commitment, that his work was more important than any personal satisfaction or gain he might have obtained by becoming a family man. He dedicated himself to the lonely monastic life of the seeker-after-truth from then on. He also refused the offer of a professorship at Franeker, seeming to prefer staying in Rotterdam, where he was committed to writing a monthly journal and to pursuing a larger public career in the academic world. The deaths of his brothers and father in France in 1684–85 as a result of the religious persecutions (his brother Jacob died in prison) seem to have been decisive in committing Bayle to a lifetime allegiance both to Calvinism and to toleration.
During 1684–87, Bayle published and edited the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (News of the Republic of Letters), in which he reviewed and commented on books of all kinds. His acute judgement soon made him one of the central figures in the intellectual community and put him in contact with many of its leading figures—Leibniz, Malebranche, Arnauld, Boyle, and Locke. In 1686, Bayle published one of his most masterful works, his Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jesus-Christ, Contrain-les d’entrer (Philosophical Commentary on the Words of Jesus, “Constrain them to come in”).2
In this period, Bayle’s relations with Jurieu became more and more strained. Jurieu grew more and more rigid and saw himself as the leader of and spokesman for orthodoxy, fighting against all sorts of heresies and backsliding tendencies, and leading the struggle for political justice and revenge against Louis XIV. His political views became more and more radical while his theological ones became more and more intolerant. His erstwhile protégé Bayle found himself often disagreeing with Jurieu’s views and policies, and he dissociated himself often from the latter’s doctrines, politics, and actions. Bayle’s letters from 1684 onward indicate that they saw less and less of each other and became more and more critical of one another, while Bayle moved more and more into the circle of Jurieu’s enemies.3 From Jurieu’s point of view, the publication of the Commentaire philosophique was the last straw. Though Bayle tried to hide his authorship of the work, Jurieu quickly guessed that it was by him and saw that they were in complete and total ideological disagreement. As a strong defender of orthodoxy against the incursions of liberalism and rationalism, Jurieu announced that his protégé, his colleague and fellow parishioner, was a menace to true religion, a secret atheist, and so on.4 Bayle kept making matters worse, with his ridicule of Jurieu, his attacks on intolerance, his attacks on Jurieu’s hopes for regaining control of France, and then with the Dictionnaire, where Jurieu was to turn up in the most unlikely places as the villain, while Bayle was to insist until his dying day that he, Bayle, was in the direct line of John Calvin, due to the lessons he learned from Jurieu’s thoroughly antirational theology. At first, the liberals—Jaquelot, Saurin, and others—whose theology Jurieu attacked saw in Bayle an ally in their struggles against rigid Calvinism and intolerance. They were soon to be as disillusioned as Jurieu was. Bayle used all his brilliant critical faculties to decimate their rationalism about theology and to drive home his contention that there could be no reconciliation between the world of rational and “scientific” ideas and several articles of the Christian faith. The bewildered liberals then found themselves committed to a lifetime of defense of their views from the furious barrage unleashed from the critical, sceptical mind of Pierre Bayle. From 1686 until his death in 1706, Bayle fought Jurieu on the one hand and the liberals on the other, piling one controversial work upon the other. The Bayle-Jurieu controversies, covertly starting in 1686–87, often went far beyond the genteel level of polite dispute, especially in the furious pamphlet exchange of 1690–92, centering around the authorship and the content of the notorious Avis important aux réfugiez sur leur prochain retour en France (Important Advice to the Refugees on Their Next Return to France), concerning which Bayle managed to befuddle the evidence so much that even twentieth-century scholars are not willing to attribute the work definitely to him even though the manuscript is in his handwriting. In 1693 Bayle’s academic career ended with the dismissal from his post at Rotterdam, and this, fortunately, left him with time enough for the Dictionnaire and all his later controversies.
The spirit that pervades the Dictionnaire was alive and active long before its writing. Bayle had been collecting errors he had found in various historical works for years. His letter of 1675 to Minutoli shows he was already seriously interested in scepticism by then. His Rotterdam lectures show that he was devoted to analyzing and attacking all sorts of theories. The critical and the sceptical attitudes fused in the Dictionnaire. Bayle’s original intention in 1690 was to publish a critical dictionary that would contain a list of all the errors in other available dictionaries, especially the earlier one of the Catholic Louis Moréri.5 The fights with Jurieu delayed this project until 1692, when a sample appeared to ascertain whether the public was actually interested in such a work. In the preface, addressed to Bayle’s friend Du Rondel, who was professor at Maastricht, the author described the work as “a book filled with the sins of the Latin country [i.e., the learned world], and a heap of the filth of the republic of letters.”
The lack of public interest led to a change of plans, that is, a historical and critical dictionary that would offer factual accounts and criticisms of errors, with commentary, and philosophical discussions. Originally Bayle had planned to deal with persons and things. The final version became almost exclusively devoted to persons, with a few articles on places as “Japan” and “Rotterdam.” Those persons who were adequately dealt with elsewhere, especially in Moréri, were omitted, and many, perhaps far too many, people who had been ignored either through ignorance or insignificance were to find their place in the Dictionnaire. On Plato, St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Richelieu, Charlemagne, Columbus, and Shakespeare Bayle wrote no articles, while on such obscure figures as Jean Fernel, Armand de Gontaut, Pierre Jarrige, Acidalius, Hermolaüs Barbarus, Dejotarus, René le Pays, Rorarius, and Zueris, Bayle wrote fairly substantial ones.
Despite the ever-constant problem of fighting back against Jurieu’s violent attacks, and despite his migraine headaches, Bayle worked feverishly preparing his magnum opus. In 1696 he wrote a friend:
You would excuse my silence, if you knew how overwhelmed I am with work for the printing of my Historical and Critical Dictionary. The publisher wants to get it done this year, no matter what the cost, so that I have to furnish him incessantly with new copy and have to correct proofs every day, in which there are hundreds of faults to eliminate, because my original, full of erasures, and footnoting, does not allow either the printers or the proofreaders to extricate themselves from such a labyrinth. And what delays me much is that since I do not have all the books at hand that I have to consult, I am obliged to wait until I have them sought after, if someone in this city possesses them…. I am happy that your migraines have left you. Mine would have given me the same pleasure, if I had been able to live without studying; but stubborn work keeps them going and makes them return very often. I lose several days each month on account of this, which then requires me to work harder to make up for lost time.6
In spite of all the difficulties, the first edition appeared in 1697 and was a great success. It appeared with Bayle’s name on it, because of legal problems caused by the publishers of Moréri’s Dictionnaire. The work was attacked by Jurieu and was brought to the attention of the Consistory of the French Reformed Church of Rotterdam by his coterie. It was also banned in France. Both of these events no doubt helped to make the work notorious and more popular. Bayle was grateful for the ban in his homeland, since it saved him from the charge of not having been sufficiently pro-Protestant and anti-Catholic.
Bayle began working on the second edition as soon as the first was finished, adding many additional articles and remarks, answering such critics as Leibniz, Locke’s friend Jean Le Clerc, Jurieu, and a host of others, thereby enlarging the text by a couple of million words. This second edition, almost as complete as the work was ever to be, wore Bayle out. For relaxation, he followed this with his Réponse aux questions d’un provincial (Reply to the Questions of a Country Gentleman), in which he defended his views and attacked his opponents of the right, like Jurieu, and those of the left, like Le Clerc, Bernard, Jaquelot, and Leibniz.
Prior to Bayle there had been a century-long tradition of Catholic thinkers who labeled themselves “Christian sceptics.” This group, starting with Montaigne and Pierre Charron and ending with Bayle’s contemporary, Pierre-Daniel Huet, bishop of Avranches, had combined the classical sceptical arguments questioning the possibility of gaining absolutely certain knowledge of the real world with an advocacy of pure fideism, that is, the acceptance of fundamental truths solely on faith and not on the basis of any rational evidence. They had employed the materials in the rediscovered treasury of Greek Pyrrhonism, the writings of Sextus Empiricus, to undermine the claims of knowledge by the Calvinists, Scholastics, Platonists, Renaissance naturalists, and so on. They argued in old Pyrrhonian style about the unreliability of our senses and reason in the search for truth, and about our inability to discover or employ any indisputable criterion of truth. This humiliation of human reason, by showing its total and complete inadequacy for acquiring any truths in science, philosophy, or theology, was taken as the preparation for receiving the faith from God (at least this is what the Christian sceptics said, whether they were sincere or not). With the appearance of Descartes on the intellectual stage, they refurbished the epistemological weapons of Sextus Empiricus to attack the new dogmatism of Descartes and to show that he also had not managed to find absolutely certain and indubitable truths.
Bayle, however, was not content just to restate the classical sceptical problem of knowledge and to continue the tradition of Montaigne against the latest dogmatic opponents—Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz. As soon as the “incomparable” Isaac Newton turned up, Bayle attacked him. When John Locke appeared in print, Bayle proceeded to work on his theories, and so on.7 And, in the article “Rorarius,” where Bayle expressed his delight with the efforts of his friend Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, it was mainly because the German genius had developed a new theory, that of the preestablished harmony, that gave Bayle a new chance for destructive analysis.8
His overall tactic was to analyze and dissolve any theory on its own terms, be it metaphysical, theological, or scientific. In so doing, he relied much more on the antimetaphysical sections of Sextus’ writings than on the earlier epistemological ones. No matter what subject is being discussed—the souls of beasts, the nature of matter, Newtonian physics, the nature of truth—the same dismaying result ensues: Each time Bayle takes a different theory and examines it in order to point out the logical consequences entailed by its assumptions, problems, questions, doubts arise everywhere. In the style of one of his heroes, “the subtle Arriaga,” the last of the great Spanish Scholastics, Bayle employed the critical technique he learned at the Jesuit college in Toulouse to show le fort et le faible, the strength and the weakness, of every human effort to make sense out of any aspect of human experience.9 Bayle tackles intellectual issues in the style of the “subtle” Arriaga, rather than in the style of the heirs of Montaigne. Every theory in any area whatsoever is of interest, not just Cartesian theories. Each theory is inspected and examined and questioned, and in the course of this process, it disintegrates into contradictions and paradoxes. Pursued long enough, this approach exhibits the sad fact that rational effort is always its own undoing. What at first looks like a way to explain something soon becomes a way to generate perplexity. Rational endeavor, in any area whatsoever, is “the high road to Pyrrhonism,” to complete scepticism. In remark G of the article on Uriel Acosta, Bayle summed up man’s sad intellectual plight:
It [reason] is a guide that leads one astray; and philosophy can be compared to some powders that are so corrosive that, after they have eaten away the infected flesh of a wound, they then devour the living flesh, rot the bones, and penetrate to the very marrow. Philosophy at first refutes errors. But if it is not stopped at this point, it goes on to attack truths. And when it is left on its own, it goes so far that it no longer knows where it is and can find no stopping place.
Leibniz describes in the Théodicée what an argument with his friend Bayle was like. Leibniz reports that if one asserted something, Bayle would proceed to analyze the assertion, and question it, until one was ready to give up and assert its opposite, and Bayle would then proceed to analyze this assertion and question it, and so on. This critical analysis never ended as long as the opponent remained present.10
In each case, Bayle is not solely or merely concerned to challenge a theory but to use the occasion to generalize the attack to all theories and to show the hopeless abysses to which all human intellectual endeavors lead. When, in article “Pyrrho,” remark B, he starts with the Cartesian theory, he quickly generalizes the critiques of the previous sceptics into an attack on the entire rational world and raises the horrendous possibility, which no previous sceptic had entertained, that a proposition could be self-evident and yet demonstrably false—that there might be no criterion of truth whatsoever. Up and down the folio columns, Bayle plays the role of the “subtle” Arriaga, attacking, destroying, and dissolving. Basically his method is the same as that of Leibniz in analyzing problems. Their texts read much the same when they start on a consideration of someone else’s theory. They proceed as if they were peeling an onion, tearing off layer after layer of contradiction and absurdity. They both love to do this, especially with metaphysical theories about the nature of matter, or motion, or the relation of the soul and the body, or theological theories about the nature of evil or transubstantiation. Leibniz claimed that by starting with the doubts of Sextus Empiricus, and this kind of sceptical analysis, one would end up with the essential kernel of truth (“des belles principes”) from which to reconstruct the “true” rational world.11 Unlike his friend Leibniz, Bayle did not expect to find rational truth at the center of which he could reconstruct the outer layers. The onion is peeled until nothing is left.
Bayle announces over and over and over again that when man realizes the inadequacy and incompetency of reason to resolve any question, he should seek another guide—faith or revelation. The term “guide” suggests another of Bayle’s favorites, Maimonides, the author of The Guide for the Perplexed, a work frequently referred to in the Dictionnaire. The French translation of “perplexed” in Maimonides’ sense is usually les égarés, and over and over again Bayle speaks of the rational truth-seekers, the philosophers, the theologians, and the scientists, as ending up as égarés, or in égarements (“perplexities”), and needing a new “guide.”12 In this sense, one might say that the Dictionnaire was really intended as a new Guide for the Perplexed. Maimonides had tried to show how people became perplexed by failing to distinguish what can properly be known by reason, what by faith, and what by both. Their misuse, or use in the wrong areas on the wrong questions, would lead to utter confusion, contradictions, and perplexities. Maimonides left reason great areas to work in before it reached its limits and intellectual chaos set in. Bayle reduced the size of this area to just about zero, so that any and all rational inquiries led to perplexity, which could only be overcome by finding a guide other than reason. Bayle’s “guide” for such unfortunates, the rational animals of this world, points out the need for faith and the acceptance of revelation, without reason, lest one return to or remain in the instability of the world of the perplexed.
No matter what the context of his remarks, whether sacred or secular, Bayle makes it clear that reason fails to make the real world intelligible. The revealed world, he insists, is in direct opposition to the most evident maxims of reason and morality. From Genesis onward, faith involves claims that reason cannot understand, endorse, or live with. For example, Bayle contended that rational man finds that the causal maxim “Nothing comes from nothing” is the clearest, most evident, most indubitable principle of human reason, and it is completely shattered by the unintelligible news that God created the world out of nothing. The most evident, rationally justified moral maxims are undermined by the biblical accounts of the heroes of the faith, the Old Testament prophets, patriarchs, and others. Bayle always asserted, having posed this complete dichotomy, made as bald and as blunt as possible in the “Clarification on the Pyrrhonists,”13 that he was advocating revelation as the only secure and satisfactory haven for man.
Bayle’s antirational and not very moral picture of the revealed world is not quite as strange as it looks at first sight. There are striking parallels between it and the versions of Christianity offered by later irrational fideists like Lamennais, Kierkegaard, and Chestov. In addition, the view expressed by Bayle in the Dictionnaire, and defended in the Clarifications (described hereafter) and in his later writings, is very much like those parts of the extreme antirationalist theology advocated by Pierre Jurieu, in which Jurieu dealt with why there can be no rational evidence for the faith, and with the incomprehensible and amoral character of revealed truth. For example, Jurieu’s view that grace alone can reveal the message and divine character of Scripture could easily lead to some shocking views about how the text would appear to nonbelievers.14 And it is worth noting that Bayle speaks at length only about figures in the Old Testament and the postbiblical Christian heroes and heroines but not about anyone in the New Testament, except for a brief, insignificant article on St. John the Evangelist. There is a ribald article on St. Mary of Egypt but not one on St. Mary Magdalene, who would seem to be an excellent subject for Bayle.
But, in spite of all Bayle’s protestations, Jurieu insisted that he and Bayle did not share either the same fideism or the same faith. And herein lies the heart of the matter. Was Bayle, in his forceful, sceptical way, trying to lead people to faith, or was he secretly trying to destroy it, as Voltaire and many others have since suspected, by making it so irrational, so lacking in morality, and so ridiculous?15 Jurieu knew Bayle and hated him for a host of personal reasons, so his suspicions may not be the best guide. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury, who lived for a while under the same roof with Bayle, called him “one of the best of Christians,” saying, “Whatever opinion of mine stood not the test of his piercing reason, I learned by degree either to discard as frivolous, or not to rely on with that boldness as before; but that which bore the trial I prized as purest gold.”16 The text and texture of Bayle’s writings certainly suggest an absence of a crucial religious element, found in Pascal, Kierkegaard, and others in this tradition, namely, that of ultimate concern. If one compares Bayle’s calm and tepid statement on the debacle of reason and the need for divine guidance in remark C17 of article “Pyrrho” with Pascal’s passionate and desperate pensée 434 (on which Bayle’s passage seems to be based)18 or with Hume’s anguished finale to the first book of A Treatise of Human Nature, where he could find no faith and no way of overcoming Bayle’s ultimate doubts, then one definitely finds that some feature is absent. Bayle suffered, apparently, from no angst, no fear and trembling. Unlike his nineteenth-century admirer Herman Melville, Bayle was not desperately seeking God or trying to pierce the heart of Moby-Dick. Unlike Kierkegaard, Bayle wrote no stirring positive religious works, although he certainly wrote negative and antirational ones similar to Kierkegaard’s Assault on Christendom and Training in Christianity. The total absence of mystical or fervent religious expression in Bayle’s writings makes one wonder what he really intended.
Although Bayle was a systematic, philosophical teacher, when he gave his courses, first at Sedan and then at Rotterdam, he never wrote a normal philosophical work. He wrote polemics about events of the time, and he made his most philosophical effort in the footnotes to the Dictionnaire. A text that may serve as his way of focusing on the difficulties of finding any certainty or truth by philosophy or science may be the text in article “Pyrrho,” remark B. What is presented here is a discussion between two abbés on whether scepticism is more dangerous to the Christian faith now than it was in ancient times. Bayle first points out neutrally that scepticism by itself is just a way of dealing with problems, raising questions, and looking for hypotheses. In this sense, it would not be a danger to science. Further, since the sceptics suspend judgment about moral and political beliefs but accept the rules and laws of their society, they are no danger to a civil order.
The point where scepticism becomes a problem is when it is opposed to the foundations of religious belief. One of the abbés says that this should have gone away once the truth of the Gospel was revealed to mankind. The other then points out that scepticism today is much more of a problem for religious belief because religious belief has become so intertwined with rational philosophy. Scepticism, as opposed to the new philosophy of the seventeenth century, principally that of Descartes, undermines any positive views we might have about the nature of the external world. Bayle tells us that Gassendi made people aware of the arguments of Sextus Empiricus and the Abbé Foucher had applied such arguments to Cartesianism and undermined any arguments for the real existence of primary or secondary qualities in the real world. (Bayle’s use of Foucher’s arguments became the way they were passed on into the eighteenth century to readers of Bayle’s Dictionnaire such as George Berkeley and David Hume.) Thus in terms of the Cartesian approach, all that we could know about are ideas in our own minds. We could not tell if these corresponded to the world outside of us.
If this did not cause enough scepticism, Bayle then had one of the abbés proceed to show how the notion of self-evidence, which is so central to seventeenth-century thought, could be questioned. The abbé showed the other abbé that supposed self-evident truths of logic and metaphysics could produce false conclusions.19 This startling claim, which Bayle saw would undermine all rational procedures, was displayed in terms of applying basic rules of logic, such as things equal to the same thing are equal to each other, and to principles of theology, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the real presence in transubstantiation, and so on; even though non-Catholics might not be so impressed at Bayle’s dialectical tricks here, the very thought that self-evident truths could lead to false conclusions startled Leibniz, Le Clerc, Jaquelot, and others. They saw that this was one of the places where they had to take a stand against Bayle’s scepticism. Bayle ends remark B by showing that nobody is in the position to prove that they have continuous personal identity and suggests that the way of avoiding these problems is to turn to faith. Remark C, which follows, is a rather tepid version of Pascal’s solution to the problems.
Bayle took on various questions of metaphysics about space, time, motion, and matter in various articles in the Dictionnaire. He sought to show that every attempt to give a coherent explanation in space, time, motion, and matter leads to paradoxical results of the form that Zeno had produced in ancient times or to incredible explanations such as those of Leibniz or Malebranche. Over and over again Bayle offers the same solution—that one should turn from philosophy to faith. He suggests often that sceptical doubts will erode all rational convictions. Faith, Bayle says many times, is built on the ruins of reason.
This motif was one of the matters criticized by the French Reformed Church of Rotterdam. The examination by the Consistory of the church led to Bayle’s agreement to remove certain parts of the text, especially in the article on King David, and to explain his meaning more clearly in the second edition of the Dictionnaire in 1702 on what he had said about the possibility that atheists might be moral, about the inability of orthodox Christianity to answer rationally the Manichean objections concerning the problem of evil, and about the relationship of scepticism and faith and to explain why so much obscene material appeared in his work. These matters are dealt with in the famous four Clarifications, appended to the second edition, and a special section dealing with obscenities, in which Bayle makes his case even more striking than it was at first.
The Consistory urged Bayle to explain how his sceptical views could be compatible with those of a true and believing Christian. The third Clarification that was added to the second edition was supposed to take care of this point. Instead, it was the strongest statement he had made on the incompatibility of faith and reason. In some ways his presentation is stronger than that of Pascal or Kierkegaard but is put forth in the obviously ironic manner. The conclusion of his exploration of the irreconcilability of faith and reason is a long quotation from the libertine poet and essayist Charles Saint-Evremond, who has a character saying, “‘Away with reason.’ What a extraordinary grace has heaven bestowed upon you.”20 Having the spokesperson for this extreme fideism be the libertine poet rather than Pascal reinforced suspicions about Bayle’s actual beliefs.
Bayle also added a Clarification to account for his claim that Manicheanism was more plausible than any Christian explanation of the problem of evil. The Manichean issue was made a central one for religious thinkers at the end of the seventeenth century. The heresy of course had been condemned long, long ago, and supposedly its adherents had been destroyed in the crusade against the Albigensians. Bayle devoted much ingenuity to constructing arguments for the Manicheans, contending that their view of a good and an evil deity made much more sense in terms of everybody’s life experience than the Christian view that a good god has created and is responsible for the events that go on in human history.21 He sought to show that every attempt to separate God and God’s omnipotence from the results in human affairs was bound to end in contradictions and absurdities. Bayle himself came from the area where the Manicheans had existed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It is even possible he came from a family that was still Manichean. The view was not a real live one until Bayle’s articles on the Manicheans and the Paulicians appeared. Then suddenly theologians had to prove that they were not Manicheans or that they had an answer to Manicheans or they would be forced to accept Bayle’s view that Manicheanism was more plausible on empirical grounds.
As Bayle said, “The history of mankind is nothing but the lies, misfortunes and miseries of the human race.” The article on King David was a startling case history of the miseries caused by such an important religious figure. Bayle managed to present the story in the most negative way, while still following the biblical narrative. At one point he said, to disarm his critics, that he is not making this up but that this is what it says chapter and verse in the Bible. By the time he got done, he had completely discredited the ancient Israelite king and had him condemned as a murderer, sex offender, and one who had committed many other crimes.22 In the explanation about obscenities, Bayle said that as a historian it was not his fault that people did such terrible things. He was just reporting what had happened, and, he insisted, there is no way of explaining certain events without the reader getting obscene images in his or her mind. Bayle offered the case of explaining why a royal marriage was called off. He offered dozens of versions of how one could explain the situation, from the most elegant to the most crude. But they all amounted to the same explanation, that the princess had been impregnated by a coachman. Such things happened, and it is not the historian who should be blamed for reporting it. If one were totally honest, Bayle was suggesting, one would have to regard the world of the biblical patriarchs as barbaric and immoral, and if one were totally honest one would have to see that human history in secular terms from ancient times to the present was also barbaric and immoral. All of this was to be ammunition for his thesis that a society of atheists could be more moral than a society of religious people.
Bayle’s Clarification on atheism is another intensification of his theory in which he said he just did not happen to know any immoral atheists, and he asked readers if they had any information please send it to him and he would consider it. Next, he started presenting his thesis that there was a society of atheists in the world in his time that was getting on much better than any European society. Bayle had been following the information coming to Europe about China and accepted the picture that China was, in fact, a society of atheists, was a highly moral society, and was much more stable and ethical than any European society. He even thought that Spinoza’s view was a sort of Chinese philosophy. With China as the positive model, Bayle could insist that any society that had a religious structure would soon have religious schisms, religious dogmas, religious persecutions, religious wars, and all the ills of mankind. The advocacy of the moral atheist society could be a way of holding up a mirror to the immorality of Europe as was done in the whole series of works such as the Persian Letters. Or it could be a serious claim that morality was independent of religion and that there was something about religion that made it antagonistic toward morality. In the moral sphere, this would suggest one could find positive principles that would not be undermined by sceptical reasoning. Some present-day commentators, like Antony McKenna and Gianluca Mori, have been developing this picture of Bayle as a complete sceptic in epistemology and metaphysics and as a positive moralist in human affairs. Some see something like this already in Montaigne, Charron, and La Mothe Le Vayer.23 This side of Bayle, separating religion and morals, was to become all-important in the French, English, and American Enlightenments. Sally L. Jenkinson has recently published a new translation of several articles of Bayle dealing with political philosophy and has given a fine analysis of what might constitute Bayle’s political philosophy in the context of his time.24
An area in which Bayle displays his separation of sceptical philosophizing and positive moralizing appears in the articles on various prophetic and millenarian thinkers and on millenarian expectations, such as the conversion of the Jews. In the article on Savonarola, the figure with whom I began this book, Bayle showed little interest in the friar’s thought but was mainly concerned to straighten out the historical record, which clearly showed, according to Bayle, that Savonarola was not really a prophet at all; his predictions did not come true. He also, according to Bayle, was not particularly heroic and was certainly not a proto-Protestant, a view that was being touted by Bayle’s opponent, Jurieu. He just turns out to be a determined fanatic who got condemned due principally to his own nasty actions. By the time Bayle finished the article, there was really nothing left in Savonarola’s story to excite any moral approval. It was just a sad case of one more fanatic getting his just desserts.25
This fits with a series of articles in which Bayle deals with the millenarian theories of Joseph Mede and others and shows that these theories have no merit as predictions of what is happening in the world and that the people who believe these prophetic systems are mentally unbalanced. In some cases, Bayle was too outraged about the views of figures like John Dury to be able to do more than just dismiss them as having some sort of mental illness.26
A prime case of this transference of religious thought to simple natural examination is Bayle’s views on the conversion of the Jews. Pierre Jurieu had made a big fuss about the importance of this event in presaging the culmination of world history. Jurieu was insistent that the conversion should and would occur in the early eighteenth century and offered lots of evidence from the Bible and from current events to make out his case. Bayle had several articles on people who converted to Christianity and just treated this as part of the social scene, signifying nothing more important than an individual’s weakness giving in to social pressure. Bayle sought to show that converts gain nothing by their conversion—nobody trusted them, either among their original group or their new group. When one considers that Bayle himself was a convert and he knew what the process involved, in terms of how his Protestant community regarded his actions, and how the group he converted to had treated him, he could easily apply this to other cases. Bayle’s second conversion back to Calvinism was never offered as an important theological step taken by the author but as a correction of a earlier mistake, the earlier conversion.
Taking the discussion of conversion out of theological context and making it an affair of a subgroup of human beings and an example of social pressure by the dominant group in society, Bayle opened the door to considering so-called religious phenomena in terms of the human sciences. One could then judge some human actions better than others on the basis of a common moral attitude shared by nonfanatical human beings of any persuasion. Bayle thus set the stage for the development of the social scientific explanations and naturalistic moral evaluations that were to characterize much of eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought.
Month after month, the French Reformed Church of Rotterdam considered expelling Pierre Bayle as a member. Jurieu led the attack. Bayle defended himself and kept insisting that his views were those of John Calvin and also of Pierre Jurieu. When various liberal Protestants tried to defend Bayle, he turned on them because they were using reason to defend their faith. For the last years of his life Bayle answered one critic after another and died with pen in hand, having just an hour before finished his last work against Jurieu and Jaquelot. A note written to a friend the day he died says, “I feel that I have no more than a few moments to live. I am dying as a Christian philosopher, convinced of and pierced by the bounties and mercy of God, and I wish you a perfect happiness.”27 The note contains no specifics as to what a Christian philosopher believes, no mention of Jesus or any Christian doctrines. As Elisabeth Labrousse said, people could not be sure if they were burying a true and believing Christian or one of the first deists, or maybe even an atheist.28
Bayle’s polemical activities continued until the day of his death, December 28, 1706, when he put the final touches to his last work, the Entretiens de Maxime et de Themiste (Conversations between Maxime and Themiste). He fought long and hard “against everything that is said, and everything that is done.”29 Despite all his destructive efforts, his good friend Shaftesbury could say in tribute: “Whatever he might be in speculation, he was in practice one of the best of Christians, and almost the only man I ever knew who, professing philosophy, lived truly as a philosopher; with that innocence, virtue, temperance, humility, contempt of the world and interest which might be called exemplary. Nor was there ever a fairer reasoner, or a civiler, politer, wittier man in conversation.”30 Bayle’s staunch enemy Jurieu launched another attack entitled Le Philosophe de Rotterdam, accusé, atteint, et convaincu (The Philosopher of Rotterdam, Accused, Indicted, and Convicted). The Catholic Mémoires de Trévoux observed sadly, “What a good fortune for the literary world it would be if all those who have read much knew how to give their compilations the charming turn he gave to his! What a misfortune it is that, having possessed in the highest degree the precious talent to embellish what is most dry and in the sciences, he was content to cultivate it only on the edges of precipices, where he could not be followed without danger.”31 And Locke’s friend Le Clerc, after piously announcing that he would not argue with a dead man who could not defend himself any more, could only express dismay when Bayle’s posthumous attack appeared, showing that, even with the author resting in his grave, his pen could still do its damage.
The writers of the eighteenth century used the endless arguments of Bayle as the “Arsenal of the Enlightenment” and thereby wrought monumental changes in the intellectual world. Many of the philosophes and nineteenth-century figures concerned with intellectual history assumed that, since Bayle had provided the Age of Reason with so much critical ammunition to be employed against unenlightened theologians and metaphysicians, he must also have shared the avantgarde views of the Enlightenment. They interpreted him as a precursor of the irreligious, empirical, and scientific tendencies that were to destroy the ideology of the ancien régime.
But, regardless of the effects of Bayle’s work, we can ask if this was what the author was actually trying to accomplish. From Jurieu and Voltaire, to Feuerbach, down to the present, there has been a wide range of interpretation. Bayle has been seen as an atheist, as a critic of traditional religion, an enlightened sceptic, an advocate of complete toleration, a fideist, a true believer, a man of faith. The task of reading the heart and soul of Bayle has intrigued and baffled many, and I would be foolish if I pretended to be ready with the answer. I shall briefly offer my own answer as a possibility. This is close to some of the interpretations offered from the middle of the twentieth century onward, and now, in the twenty-first century, my interpretation, like that of Elisabeth Labrousse, Walter Rex, and Harry Bracken, is being challenged by new interpretations, such as those of Gianluca Mori and Antony McKenna, among others.32
There are enough biographical and theoretical details to make it very difficult to assume that Bayle was insincere in his almost lifelong adherence to Calvinism. It has always seemed to me that there must have been some degree of sincerity in Bayle’s adherence to the French Reformed Church of Rotterdam. He attended it week after week for twenty-five years. In the tolerant atmosphere of the Netherlands, he could easily have dropped out of that church, joined a more liberal one, or remained unchurched.33 At one point he was looking into moving to England, where he could have dropped out of the Huguenot world. Labrousse has stressed that he was temperamentally a Huguenot through and through. He came from a persecuted family of martyrs and probably had a strong, automatic defensive reaction to the non-Huguenot world. This could explain the years of membership but not the intellectual battle that he carried on against opponents of the Right, the Left, and the Center.
But there are too many peculiarities in his views, his interests, his interpretations, to make it easy for me to accept the thesis that he really was a Calvinist in belief. Perhaps religion had no expressed or expressible content for him but was only “in the heart” in some quite unemotional way, and when he tried to think and reason about it, he found too much plausibility in Manicheanism. When he went back to pious study, he could preserve his composure as a “Christian philosopher” while destroying every form of intelligible Christian theology.
If Bayle was the supersceptic I have been portraying, there seems to be a point at which he suspended his scepticism and adopted positive moral views. Bayle has been seen as the father of modern toleration, especially for his early work the Commentaire Philosophique, where he argued against the Catholic persecution of the Huguenots by defending everyone’s right to his own personal beliefs. He offered the doctrine of the rights of the erring conscience; as long as one conscientiously believes something, one should be allowed to hold the belief. Basing one’s faith on one’s consciousness was a basic Calvinist view, in contrast to accepting any authority as the rule of one’s faith. So Bayle had some basis for claiming that his analysis was in keeping with the views of Calvin and his followers.
He further argued that there was no way of telling an erring conscience from a nonerring one. Hence all views should be tolerated. This outlook was more radical than that proposed by John Locke, since Bayle included every view as a tolerable one, including those of Jews, Muslims, Socinians, Hindus, Spinozists, and any other view. All this was developed in the first book of the Commentaire Philosophique. In the second volume he came face to face with the problem of what one should do about beliefs that entailed the destruction of others. If an erring conscience led one to believe that all redheaded people should be destroyed, should one be allowed to hold this belief and be allowed to act on it? Bayle was coming very close to the situation envisaged by John Stuart Mill a century and a half later, namely, that all thoughts could be tolerated but not all actions. And if thoughts would lead to actions it might be necessary to have some social and civic restraints. The case that Bayle began to build up was that some sort of positive natural morality should be protected from those who might want to destroy it. This came out more forcefully in a claim he had been making over the years that a society of atheists could be more moral than a society of Christians. He had been pointing out historically that Christian societies from ancient times to the present were full of evildoers, corrupt persons, sex maniacs, liars, and cheats. As he presented the history of Christianity, it was a terrible picture of man’s inhumanity to man. His picture of the religious society of ancient Israel was, in some ways, even worse, as depicted in his article on King David.
On the other hand, the few atheists he discussed, such as Diagoras and Spinoza, lived exemplary lives, helped their fellow creatures, and showed no signs of the terrible behavior of religious people. The article on Spinoza is by far the longest in the dictionary. I think there is much to be figured out about its real message. Bayle made a strenuous effort to find out the actual facts of Spinoza’s life. He read a manuscript of an early biography that no longer exists, he questioned people who knew Spinoza, he challenged the hagiography that had grown up about Spinoza by questioning the so-called nobility of Spinoza’s rejection of a proposal of a post at Heidelberg and his refusal to visit the prince of Condé. A work that was circulating at the time called La Vie de M. Spinoza, attributed to one Jean Maximilien Lucas, apparently a Huguenot who had been in the circle around Spinoza, presented a picture of Spinoza like those of the lives of the saints. Two of the wonderful items that showed his true spiritual character were that he was offered a post at the great university at Heidelberg and he nobly said that it was more important for him to have freedom of conscience and that he did not want to cause trouble to the university if he expressed his true views and they came under pressure to silence him. So he thanked them for the offer and said that, in good conscience, he could not accept it. Second, Spinoza had been accused of being in contact with the great enemy of the Dutch Republic, the prince of Condé, who had conquered the Netherlands in 1672. Spinoza said that he had been contacted by the prince and that he, Spinoza, had refused to visit him because he was too busy philosophizing to deal with worldly affairs.
Bayle found evidence that would suggest that Spinoza only refused the post at Heidelberg after the offer was withdrawn. Bayle tracked down courtiers who had been involved in the affair and got from them statements that indicated that Spinoza made his noble speech only after the job had disappeared because the authorities had been warned against Spinoza. On the matter of the prince of Condé, Bayle found witnesses who had seen Spinoza going into the prince’s quarters in Utrecht. A bookseller who had a bookshop across the street from the palace the prince was inhabiting was one witness. Another was the prince’s surgeon. The prince had broken his leg and was restricted in his movements for six weeks. He wanted intelligent people to talk to, and that is why he sent for Spinoza. The surgeon told Bayle that he saw Spinoza come in day after day. Bayle’s friend, Pierre Coste, Locke’s secretary, wrote a life of the prince at the time, in which it just boldly says in the English edition that Spinoza visited the prince.34 Spinoza was supposed to have returned from Utrecht with lots of presents from the prince but still insisted he had not seen him. In Bayle’s Letters, his editor, Pierre Desmaizeaux, tracked down a couple more people from the prince’s entourage and gave more details of the prince having offered Spinoza a post in Paris, Spinoza having discussed the offer with friends, and finally deciding not to go.35
However, while trying to destroy the picture of Spinoza as a noble man, Bayle was, at the same time, intent on defending him as a person above moral reproach, an atheist who did not commit moral errors. Bayle insisted that Spinoza’s life was pure, that he was a saintly figure, and that he was an atheist. In fact, Bayle’s greatest praise for Spinoza was that he was the first modern to make atheism into a system.
At the same time that the article dealt at length with Spinoza’s character, it made a complete mess of the discussion of Spinoza’s philosophy. Unlike any other of Bayle’s discussions of philosophical questions, Bayle misunderstood Spinoza’s assertions over and over again and made no effort to find a clear meaning to what Spinoza was proposing. In the second edition, when people had complained that he had missed Spinoza’s point, he said he had sat down with a Spinozist and they went over the text very carefully. Then Bayle came up with the same misreadings as well as some new ones,36 so that Spinoza’s superrational philosophy became just a maze of contradictions and absurdities. In the case of every other philosopher, Bayle strained his ingenuity to find a consistent and plausible version of what the thinker intended and would only launch his criticisms when he had given his opponent his best possible standing. With Spinoza he just made nonsense out of his views without trying at all to see what could be the point.
Unlike his friend Jacques Basnage, who went to various people in the Jewish community to find out what they made of Spinoza’s theory, Bayle just relied on his own skewed reading. Basnage, whose History of the Jews came out about the same time as Bayle’s Dictionnaire, portrayed Spinoza as a central figure in modern Jewish philosophy, who had presented the Kabbalah in Cartesian terms. Basnage said he had talked to the chief rabbi, Isaac Aboab de Fonseca, who is probably the same rabbi who read the excommunication against Spinoza. He asked the rabbi what he thought of Spinoza’s views, and the rabbi said, he just plagiarized from our kabbalists and tried to make himself appear original by using Cartesian terminology. Basnage then proceeded to try to interpret the Spinozistic system as some sort of philosophical Kabbalah.37 Bayle, who had zero tolerance for anything like the Kabbalah, made no such effort and instead just distorted Spinoza’s texts to make them come out ridiculous.
It is curious that Bayle added to the discussion of Spinoza the news that a Dutch theologian, Johannes Bredenbourg, had set out to refute Spinoza’s Ethics. Bredenbourg was going to challenge each step of Spinoza’s argument. Instead, he became convinced that there was no way of answering the arguments, so he reproduced Spinoza’s system and just added that by faith he knew it was wrong. This became another example of the opposition of faith and reason, and Bayle seemed to describe himself in the notes here about the person who is unable to sustain the same truths in his mind as in his heart.
believe that one can also say that there are people who have religion in their hearts, but not in their minds. They lose sight of it as soon as they seek it by the methods of human reasoning. It escapes from the subtleties and the sophisms of their dialectic. They do not know where they are while they compare the pro and con. But as soon as they no longer dispute, and as soon as they listen only to the proofs of feeling, the instincts of conscience, the weight of education, and the like, they are convinced of a religion; and they conform their lives to it as much as human weakness permits. Cicero was like this. We can hardly doubt this when we compare his other books with that of the De natura deorum where he makes Cotta [the skeptic] triumph over the other interlocutors who maintained that there are gods.38
Bayle’s completely unemotional statements about faith would indicate that he did not have “religion in the heart” in Pascal’s sense, although he may well have had it in his own terms. When he tried to justify or understand it, all became doubtful and perplexing. When he could give up such rational endeavors, then a kind of tepid, unemotional religion held sway.
In the interpretation I am offering (which is in disagreement with many others, ranging from those who see Bayle as a crypto-atheist or a deist to those who see him as a fervent orthodox Calvinist), it is in the article “Bunel, Pierre”39 that Bayle’s statement of faith appears. Pierre Bunel, the Renaissance scholar from the area of Toulouse who aided the development of modern scepticism by giving Montaigne’s father a copy of Raimond Sebond’s Natural Theology, is portrayed as the perfect Christian because he lived the lonely, quiet life of the scholar, caring not for worldly rewards. Bayle’s dedication to the religious cause was the same as Bunel’s. He spent his whole life revealing man’s intellectual state through the most accurate scholarship and the most sceptical argumentation of his day. Bayle’s version of the Christian life contains none of the fervor of the mystics, such as St. Francis of Assisi, San Juan de la Cruz, or Madame Guyon, and none of the anxiety of Pascal, Kierkegaard, or Dostoevski. The quiet Erasmian scholar, living out his days in the city of Erasmus, examining man’s intellectual heritage and intellectual world, could, by his patient erudition, undermine man’s intellectual frame of reference, while remaining secure and tranquil in his unemotional religion of the heart.
Until we can actually decide what Bayle did in fact believe and adhere to, we cannot ascertain the degree to which he was sincere, and the degree to which the next generation, the philosophes, understood or misunderstood him. The avowed, the constant, and the continual statement of Bayle’s message was that of the inadequacy and incoherence of man’s intellectual endeavors, of the need for a different guide—faith and revelation—and of the picture of the Christian life in terms of the Erasmian goal of pious study. If this is, as I have assumed, at least part of what he believed, then he was certainly misunderstood by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. His destruction of certain views was transformed by the Age of Reason into a positive affirmative of other views: into a new theology—scientism— that was to prove no more coherent or adequate than those Bayle had already denuded of all their pretensions and glory. Bayle had said at one point, “I know too much to be a sceptic and too little to be a dogmatist.”
Bayle’s all-out attack on everything that is said and everything that is done carried scepticism to its ultimate extreme. The other sceptics of the seventeenth century undermined the Cartesian revolution to prepare the way for a philosophy and a science without metaphysics. Bayle undermined all of man’s intellectual efforts and left an incoherent shambles as the legacy of the new philosophy and the science. He showed that all approaches to all problems soon dissolve into meaninglessness and incoherence. The problem was not just the inner structure of the Cartesian theory of knowledge but the basic irrationality of God’s world that exhibited itself in all efforts at theorizing. Bayle’s method was not just that of the other sceptics, the various tropes of Sextus Empiricus, but was a method of analysis, in the style of the “subtle” Arriaga and of Leibniz, a method that, in Bayle’s hands, led only to utter confusion, bewilderment, and perplexity, not to an admiration of empirical study. Every problem and every theory, Bayle showed, ended in contradictions, absurdities, and paradoxes. Only a new guide—faith and revelation—could lead man out of this morass. But Bayle, like Bunel, could find this faith only in the mind and could exhibit it only in a quiet life of interminable scholarly endeavor, instead of in a life of entire religious commitment, like Kierkegaard’s knight of faith.
In terms of this picture, Bayle has less in common with his Enlightenment heirs than do the other seventeenth-century sceptics. Gassendi, Sorbière, Foucher, Huet, and the French translation of John Locke provided the Enlightenment figures with a science without metaphysics, a via media between scepticism and dogmatism, that was to answer all of man’s problems by destroying the Cartesian enterprise of a science based on metaphysical knowledge. Bayle, while providing the arsenal of the Enlightenment, the weapons and the ammunition that were to be fired at all of the opponents of the Age of Reason, had no illusions, himself, about what man’s reason could accomplish.
Bayle’s scepticism was passed on to avant-garde figures of the eighteenth century. His folio volumes were studied by most philosophers and theologians. The thinker who carried on the most sceptical side was the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who went off to write his sceptical masterpiece, entitled A Treatise on Human Nature, with eight volumes of Bayle in his luggage. He took these volumes to the Jesuit college at La Flèche where Descartes had started from. There he pored over Bayle’s arguments and modernized them and mostly took them out of a theological context. Bayle had said he was destroying reason to make room for faith. Hume, after presenting a range of sceptical arguments in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, had his sceptical spokesperson declare that to be a philosophical sceptic in a man of letters was the first and most essential step in becoming a true and believing Christian. By Hume’s day nobody took this as a serious avowal of faith, and those who knew Hume were pretty sure he never became a true and believing Christian but was rather, as they called him, the great infidel. Scepticism had come out of any religious or theological context and was now a critique of human reason alone. The history of scepticism, post-Bayle, was to take a much more secular form, though some attempts to restate the fideistic motif by J. G. Hamann, Félicité Robert de Lamennais, Søren Kierkegaard, and Lev Chestov, among others was a cry to find religious truth out of immersion in scepticism.40
This history will end here. Many have written on scepticism in the Enlightenment, including myself, and some are beginning to reexamine nineteenth-century and twentieth-century thinkers in terms of scepticism. In fact, a recent issue of Magazine littéraire devoted to “le retour des sceptiques” portrays the emergence of sceptical ideas in the beginning of the twenty-first century and sees scepticism as the most vital force of our time.41 It is, of course, too early to tell if any new forms of scepticism will emerge and whether twenty-first century scepticism will prove an enduring antidote to the many ideological dogmatisms that surround us.