Pierre Bayle

I

Introduction

Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), French philosopher, religious polemicist, critic, and scholar. He was the author of the most widely read work of the 18th century, the Dictionnaire historique et critique (Historical and Critical Dictionary). Whether in the way Bayle intended or not, this work provided many of the arguments driving philosophical and political thought over the next century, with the result that Bayle eventually became known as the “arsenal of the Enlightenment”.

II

Life

Bayle was born on November 18, 1647, in Le Carla (now Le Carla-Bayle) a small town in the foothills of the Pyrenees. His family was Protestant, or Huguenot, which is to say that it belonged to a minority of 5 per cent of the otherwise almost entirely Catholic population of France. Being Protestant meant severe disadvantages. The Edict of Nantes (1598) sought to put an end to the horrors of the century’s wars of religion, guaranteeing certain civil rights to the Protestants. The rights were minimal, however, and in practice hardly respected. Bayle aggravated his own situation when, at the Jesuit school that he chose to attend, he abjured Protestantism only to return to it upon graduation, thus leaving him in Catholic eyes not just a heretic, but a relapsed heretic. He was thus persona non grata in France for the rest of his life.

Bayle first fled to Calvinist Geneva, where he eked out a living as a tutor. He eventually slipped back into France for a teaching position at the Protestant Academy at Sedan, which he held until its closing in 1681. Not long before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), which erased what remained of Huguenot rights, Bayle arrived in Rotterdam, where he taught at a school for Protestant refugees. The financial success of the Dictionary finally enabled Bayle to devote himself entirely to the life of scholarship that he always craved. Not to be distracted from that life, he rejected an attractive offer of marriage as well as a university chair. He never left Holland. Never blessed with robust health, and often afflicted with migraine, Bayle died on December 28, 1706, probably due to a heart attack brought on by tuberculosis.

III

Works

The Dictionary appeared in two editions during Bayle’s lifetime, first beginning in 1696, and then in a much-expanded version of 1702. It is a huge and strange work, 9 million words on all manner of topics, with footnotes, in double columns, that make up over 90 per cent of the whole. There is no discernible principle of inclusion for the entries, which range over historical personages, philosophers, theologians, some famous, many obscure; fictional literary figures; rivers; et cetera. The footnotes often bear little or no real connection to the exiguous text, and seem designed to allow Bayle to pursue whatever caught his scholarly interest, in whatever direction that suited him, including salacious stories, for example, amid the most exacting textual scholarship. Bayle claimed that the purpose of the work was to correct the errors in previous works of this kind, but his own turned out to be the only one of its kind. The upshot is a pot-pourri of intellectual curiosities and other delights, whose disconnected presentation made scattered reading an irresistible treat for a very wide audience throughout the 18th century and beyond.

The Dictionary represents less than half of Bayle’s literary output. He was the editor of one of the first of the learned journals, Les Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, in which capacity he wrote many critical reviews of scholarly publications, including upon occasion his own works. The major thrust of the rest of his work was directed to a defence of his co-religionists, particularly on two topics: the doctrine of the real presence of Christ on the sacrament of the Eucharist, which the Huguenots denied; and, secondly, toleration, the right to which Bayle based on an inviolable conscience. These were the themes of Pensées diverses (1682), Critique générale (1682), Nouvelles lettres (1685), and La France toute catholique (1686). Bayle found that he also had to defend his views on faith against his co-religionists, in particular his erstwhile friend Pierre Jurieu, a conservative firebrand with whom he exchanged acerbic polemical works over a long period. At the end of his life, Bayle tried to answer such liberal critics as Jean Leclerc in Réponse aux questions d’un provincial (1706-1707), and Entretiens de Maxime et de Thémiste (1707).

IV

Influence

In the narrowly philosophical domain, Bayle either influenced or anticipated in various ways John Locke, George Berkeley, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and many others. His greatest precise influence was probably on David Hume, who recommended the Dictionary as one of four works to be consulted for a proper understanding of his own Treatise of Human Nature (1739). There are many technical issues on which Bayle was a source book for all of these philosophers: scepticism; the problem of evil; the distinction between primary and secondary qualities; the nature of space, time, and matter; and the unity of consciousness are just some of these issues. His greatest influence, however, was the one alluded to at the outset above. Bayle’s sceptical attacks on systematic reason set loose a great engine of criticism in every domain. In particular, Bayle mounted arguments emphasizing the incompatibility between religion and reason, ostensibly to show the impotence of reason and the necessity of faith. But it was faith that was eliminated by later thinkers because of the very incompatibility that he had argued.