Pierre Bayle

From Philosopedia

Bayle, Pierre (18 November 1647 - 28 December 1706)

Bayle, called by some the skeptic who was the father of the Enlightenment, was born at Carla-le-Comte, near Pamiers (Ariège), in southern France. He was the son of a Protestant minister at a time when Huguenots endured severe persecution and Protestant schools had been closed. He was therefore educated at a Jesuit college in Toulouse. Under pressure Bayle dallied with a conversion to Roman Catholicism but ultimately rejected it, thereby becoming a relaps under French law - a person who becomes a heretic after abjuring heresy, and was subject to punishment. Bayle decided it was safer to study philosophy in Calvinist Geneva.

He became professor of philosophy in 1675 at a Protestant academy in Sedan, until it was closed down by Catholic authorities in 1681. Bayle joined the community of French Protestant refugees in Rotterdam, where he taught at the École Illustre.

In a 1682 paper, "Thoughts on the Comet," he worked into its content the comment: "No nations are more warlike than those which profess Christianity," followed by a critical account of a Jesuit history and a defense of Cartesianism. He edited one of the first academic journals, Nouvelles de la republique des lettres (1684-1687) and corresponded with intelligentsia such as Leibniz and Locke, making rejection of superstition and intolerance a centerpiece of his writings. His masterpiece was a philosophical analysis of the words of Jesus: "Constrain them to come in." Bayle protested conversion by force and was the first to argue for complete religious toleration and freedom of conscience, including for Jews, Muslims, and atheists. He quipped that he was a Literal Protestant, protesting against everything. His writings, including biblical criticism and his denial that religiosity necessarily inspires moral behavior, were collected in The Historical and Critical Dictionary, published in Rotterdam in 1692 and translated into English in 1736.

While successful, his dictionary was banned in France and even condemned by the Huguenots. Bayle continually updated it to answer attacks, writing that no religious beliefs were supported by reason. Voltaire later called it "the Arsenal of the Enlightenment." As freethought historian Joseph McCabe noted:

There are no articles on "God," "Christ," or "Immortality," that although Bayle's opinions are not fully known they may be inferred. The caustic and elaborately polite thrusts at both Catholic and Protestant doctrines, the vindication of Greek and Roman thought, and the firm advocacy of toleration and of the independence of ethics, gave the Dictionary, of which very numerous editions and translations appeared, a large share in the spread of Rationalism.

His Critics

Although he never left his Calvinist church, many friends, future freethinkers, and nearly all his critics regarded the man who was first a Protestant, then a Catholic, then a Protestant, as a "secret atheist."

Voltaire liked him, believing he was secretly an atheist while appearing to be a Calvinist. Edward Gibbon acknowledged his indebtedness to the “celebrated writer,” calling him “the indefatigable Bayle.” In one of his early works, Bayle wrote that a society of atheists could be as moral as or more moral than a society of Christians. During the French Revolution, Pierre Maréchal cited Bayle as being only a “possible atheist.” J. M. Robertson believed that no greater service was rendered in that age to the spread of rational views than that embodied in his grand Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697), in which he wrote that “in matters of religion, it is very easy to deceive a man, and very hard to undeceive him.”

Chased from France because of his freethinking, and persecuted even in Rotterdam, Bayle through his consummate scholarship produced, according to Robertson, “a virtual encyclopedia for freethinkers in his incomparable Dictionary, baffling hostility by the Pyrrhonian impartiality with which he handled all religious questions.” David Berman describes Bayle’s rather curious ad hominem argument:

• The most evil and depraved being is the most complete practical atheist. But if such a being believes firmly in the existence of God (and probably also has an adequate understanding of God), then there can hardly be a necessary connection, or any firm link, between theoretical and practical atheism. And these conditions are indeed fulfilled, since Satan is the most complete practical theist, but he is also a convinced believer in God.

Bayle’s attempt to break down the connection between theoretical beliefs and practical consequences, Berman holds, “is derived from an essentially empiricist source.”

In 1953, Arnold Toynbee in An Historian’s Approach to Religion, reprinted Bayle’s “If Christian Theology is True, God is a Monster.”

His Last Years

Elisabeth LaBrousse, his biographer, wrote that Bayle became a kind of tourist attraction during the last years of his life. He greeted his visitors affably and with a loquacity unheard of in his younger days.

He assured the Abbé de Polignac that he was “a good Protestant” inasmuch as he was in the habit of protesting “against everything anyone says or does.”

Des Maiseaux is quoted as saying that Bayle “saw death approaching without either fearing or desiring it.”

Two months before his death, Bayle wrote to Lord Shaftesbury,

• I should have thought that a dispute with Divines would put me out of humor, but I find by experience that it serves as an amusement for me in the solitude to which I have reduced myself.

According to Nouvelle Biographic Générale, “He died in his clothes, and as it were pen in hand.” A friend, M. Seers, said Bayle died “with great tranquillity and without anybody with him. At nine o’clock in the morning his landlady entered his chamber; he asked her, but with a dying voice, if his fire was kindled, and died a moment after, without M. Basnage (author of the first History of the Jews) or me, or any of his friends with him.”

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