BAYLE, PIERRE (1647–1706)

BAYLE, PIERRE (1647–1706), French philosopher and critic. Pierre Bayle counts among the most influential and yet most enigmatic thinkers in history. Richard Popkin has described him as the key intellectual figure at the turn of the eighteenth century, and he has come to be known as the "Arsenal of the Enlightenment," the source of its ideas on toleration, secularism, and a host of other issues. Despite the relative clarity of Bayle's effect on his immediate successors, there is very little agreement on what Bayle himself might actually have believed. He is thus in the curious position of having an influence that he himself might not have fully recognized or intended.

Although he was to become one of the brightest luminaries of French culture, Bayle was born and raised far from its Parisian epicenter, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and spent almost the whole of his adult life outside France, as a refugee. Conversion to Catholicism under his Jesuit schoolmasters shocked his staunchly Protestant family, but he reconverted upon completion of his studies. Thus regarded by the overwhelming Catholic majority as not just a heretic but a relapsed heretic, Bayle faced a nearly impossible life, and he fled France for Switzerland. Then, after a brief period spent clandestinely in Paris and at the Protestant Academy at Sedan, he fled again, not long before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, settling permanently in Rotterdam amid the relative freedom of the Netherlands. Through this early period he eked out an existence from menial teaching jobs, which, however necessary, kept him from the scholarly life that was his only interest (he was later to reject otherwise attractive offers of marriage and a university appointment as inconsistent with that life). The commercial success of his publications finally made total devotion to scholarship possible.

Bayle's influence should not be surprising since he was both enormously prolific and widely read. Indeed, his Historical and Critical Dictionary was the most popular work of the eighteenth century. Shelf-counts of private libraries from the period show this work appearing far more frequently than anything from distant competitors such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Newton, or Locke. Accounting for its undeniable popularity, or even describing the nature of this work, is not easy. Its only principle of organization is the alphabetical order of its entries. Bayle wrote of people of every sort—philosophers, kings, clowns, some famous, many obscure, often real, of course, but sometimes from myth—and not just people, but rivers, islands, towns, everything under the sun, it would seem. And he did so in a way that furthers the uniqueness of the work. Almost all of his interesting writing occurs not in the actual text of the entries but in the double columns of smaller-print footnotes that occupy most, and sometimes all, of the pages. These notes often contain the utterly unrelated digressions into philosophy, church history, religious polemic, literary criticism, pornography, curious trivia, and other areas that so obviously delighted Bayle. Clearly, this was not a work to be read from cover to cover over its several in-folio volumes but to be dipped into for unconnected episodes of fascinating yet instructive entertainment. No wonder that it had a broad readership from Leibniz, Hume, Voltaire, and Jefferson to many lesser lights.

The Dictionary is a very long work that Bayle seemed prepared to expand indefinitely in further editions. But it represents less than half of his total output. The rest of his works are devoted almost entirely to religious polemic in defense of Protestantism's attempted reform of Christianity against Catholicism's Counter-Reformation and in defense of his version of Calvinist Protestantism against his more conservative and more liberal coreligionists. A key to this work is Bayle's advocacy of toleration based on the inviolability of conscience even when objectively it is in error. Bayle discusses an actual case that had taken place in the next town from his birthplace; the wife of Martin Guerre is beyond blame and punishment in yielding to an impostor husband so long as she genuinely believes him to be her husband. What is true of her, moreover, is true mutatis mutandis of the religious heretic whose belief, though mistaken, is sincere. In neither case should conscience be forced.

In the history of philosophy, Bayle is typically regarded as a skeptic. But if he was a skeptic, he was not of the Pyrrhonian sort that advocates suspension of belief, for Bayle in his work expressed more beliefs than perhaps anyone in history. In addition, the texts in which he sets out skeptical arguments are very few in number (most notably in the Dictionary article on Pyrrho) and his attitude toward them is at best ambiguous. Nor does he seem to have been even a religious skeptic, however much his arguments on a number of topics might point in the direction of atheism. If anything, he practiced academic skepticism, whose defining feature is the virtue of intellectual integrity—of respecting perceived truth not only in one's own voice but also in reporting the views of others. Such a virtue might partially explain why it is that so many different and competing views come across on Bayle's work, which is otherwise so enigmatic.

See also Philosophes ; Skepticism: Academic and Pyrrhonian .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Bayle, Pierre. The Dictionary Historical and Critical. New York, 1984. Translated by Pierre Desmaizeaux. London, 1734–1747. 5 vols. A photo-offset edition of a colorful, but complete and accurate, translation of Dictionnaire historique et critique (Rotterdam, 2nd ed., 1702; 1st ed, 1697).

——. Œuvres diverses. Hildesheim, 1964–1968. A photo-offset edition of the same title (The Hague, 1st ed., 1727–1731; 2nd ed., 1737). Almost the whole of Bayle's work beyond the Dictionary, to which several volumes are being added.

Secondary Sources

Labrousse, Elizabeth. Bayle. Oxford, 1983. An impeccable, accessible introduction and summary.

——. Pierre Bayle. Vol.1, Du pays de Foix á la cité d'Erasme. Vol.2, Hétéroxie et rigorisme. The Hague, 1963–1964. The standard reference work, by the acknowledged doyenne of Bayle scholarship. The first volume is a biography; the second, an analysis of Bayle's thought.

Thomas M. Lennon