## 1. Life and Works



Pierre Bayle was born on the 18th of November, 1647, in Le
Carla (now Carla-Bayle), in the south of France. The Bayles were
Huguenots (French Protestants), and Pierre's father Jean was the
minister of Carla. Although Jean and his wife Jane de Bruguiere
descended from good families, they were poor. Pierre had two brothers,
Jacob his senior and Joseph his junior, and he had to wait for the
former to complete his studies at the Protestant Academy of Puylaurens
before the family could afford to send the next son to school. So, to
his lifelong chagrin, Bayle did not start his formal education until
around the age of twenty.



Despite his lack of early formal training, Bayle flourished but also
grew bored at the Protestant Academy. He would complete the work
assigned, and then in his leisure time delve into the writings of
Plutarch and Montaigne, his favourite authors. Puylaurens could not
satisfy his desire to compensate for what he perceived as a wasted
youth, so Bayle set his sights on the nearby Jesuit university in
Toulouse, one of the best schools in France. He enrolled there at the
age of twenty-one, and soon thereafter converted to Catholicism. This
was not required of Bayle; many Protestants studied at Jesuit
universities. The conversion seems to have been sincere, the logical
consequence in Bayle's mind of losing so many theological
debates to Catholics upon arriving in Toulouse. This conversion was
considered a great acquisition by the Church; when Bayle defended his
master's theses, the most distinguished people in the city
attended and celebrated his (and their) achievement. But their pride
would be short-lived. Bayle's debate skills apparently improved
at Toulouse and he found replies to the Catholic objections that had
once embarrassed him. He abjured the Catholic faith mere days after
completing his studies. This made Bayle a "relapse", and
rendered him subject to severe penalties in France. He therefore fled
to Geneva, where he took up the mind-numbing work of tutoring.



In 1675, Bayle cautiously returned to France to take up a more
stimulating post as Professor of Philosophy at the Protestant Academy
of Sedan, a position he owed in part to the support of Pierre Jurieu,
who was Professor of Divinity. Bayle labored day and night to compose
his *System of Philosophy* (OD IV: 199-520), the course in
Logic, Ethics, Metaphysics, and Physics that Bayle delivered to his
students in Sedan. The course is traditional in its structure, but
contains some content that foreshadows aspects of Bayle's later
distinctive thought. However, Bayle's first original
philosophical work is his 1679 *Objections* *to Pierre
Poiret's* *Rational Thoughts on God, the Soul, and
Evil* (OD IV: 146-161). In his *Objections*, Bayle engages
for the first time with the issue that would dominate much of his
career: the intractability of the problem of evil.



The Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed some limited freedom of
religion to Protestants in France since 1598, was not formally revoked
by Louis XIV until 1685, but it was undermined by the Sun King
repeatedly for years before the Revocation. One strategy for
persecuting Protestants involved closing their Academies. Louis XIV
started with Sedan, dissolving it by formal decree in 1681, leaving
Bayle and Jurieu out of work. Both fled to Rotterdam where the city
established an "Illustrious School" for them. Shortly
after arriving in Rotterdam, Bayle published the first edition of the
work that would eventually be known as his *Various Thoughts on the
Occasion of a Comet* (*Pensees diverses sur la
comete*; OD III: 3-160), which attacks superstition and
proposes the possibilities of a virtuous atheist and a society of
atheists. Like nearly all of his works, it was published
pseudonymously, but soon it was known widely that Bayle was its
author, and he earned the moniker, "Philosopher of
Rotterdam". Initially, Jurieu praised the work; years later, he
would use its arguments on behalf of virtuous atheists as the basis
for accusing Bayle himself of atheism.



As the situation of Protestants in France worsened, Bayle focused his
literary efforts on attacking religious intolerance and developing
arguments for freedom of conscience and toleration. His major works on
these topics are the *General Critique of Maimbourg's History
of Calvinism* (1682; OD II: 1-160); *New Letters by the Author
of the General Critique of Maimbourg's History of Calvinism*
(1685; OD II: 161-335); *The Condition of Wholly Catholic France
under Louis the Great* (1686; OD II: 336-354); and his
masterpiece, *A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of Jesus
Christ: Compel Them to Enter* (1686-88; OD II: 355-444). The
King himself ordered the first of these works to be burned. In 1685,
Bayle's older brother Jacob was imprisoned on account of this
same work, since the French authorities could not find Pierre. Soon
thereafter, Bayle's father died of natural causes, then Jacob
died in his prison cell from its poor conditions. Bayle learned of all
of this around the same time he learned of the Revocation. Many Bayle
scholars note a shift in tone and focus in Bayle's works before
and after this crisis year of 1685; some believe he lost all faith in
God in these dire months.



The last twenty years of Bayle's biography are indistinguishable
from his bibliography. He wrote and published literally millions of
words on nearly every philosophical topic. His international
reputation was secured early in this period by the establishment of
his journal of literary criticism, one of the first of its kinds, the
*News from the Republic of Letters* (*Nouvelles de la
republique des lettres*; OD I: 1-760), which he edited, and
authored nearly single-handedly, from 1684-1687. But just as
Bayle's star was rising, his once friend and soon-to-be enemy
Jurieu did everything in his power to eclipse it. The late 1680s and
early 1690s saw Bayle embroiled in bitter disputes with the jealous
and vindictive Jurieu, whose accusations ultimately led to the
suppression of Bayle's Chair at the Illustrious School in
1693.



Bayle's freedom from the burden of teaching threatened his
financial security but allowed him to concentrate on the work for
which he is most well-known today: the *Historical and Critical
Dictionary* (first edition 1697). It was, and remains, unlike
anything ever written before or after. Across the top of each page of
this six-million-word encyclopedia, one finds short factual articles
on topics arranged alphabetically, dealing mainly with ancient and
modern authors, which display the vastness of Bayle's mastery of
history and literature. But roughly 80% of the work is contained in
two-columns of footnotes that take up most of each page and that offer
critical remarks on the slim factual content above. These footnotes,
or "remarks", give free rein to Bayle the revolutionary
philosopher. In these remarks we find original objections to
Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz; arguments on behalf of ancient
skepticism; strong reformulations of Zeno's paradoxes;
metaphysical foundations for religious toleration; refutations of all
known answers to the problem of evil; as well as obscene stories,
hilarious anecdotes, feigned dialogues, and endless quotations of
minor authors that Bayle thought his readers would simply enjoy. The
work was a commercial success but also a scandal. The last five years
of Bayle's life were spent writing works that defended his
character against various accusations against it made on the basis of
the *Dictionary*. The influence of the work on subsequent
Enlightenment philosophers, from Voltaire and Hume to Rousseau and
Kant, is well established.



Bayle died in December, 1706, pen-in-hand, putting the final touches
to his *Dialogues of Maximus and Themistius* (posthumous 1707;
OD IV: 1-106), an apology of Bayle's life and works in general,
but in particular a defence of his most notorious thesis, that there
is no solution to the problem of evil. Bayle allegedly declared
shortly before dying that he was "a Christian
philosopher". Whether or not this confession was sincere, one
thing that is beyond doubt is that Bayle's philosophical
reflection challenged the rational foundations of Christian thought
more strongly than the reflection of any philosopher before him.


## 2. Society of Atheists



The philosophical work that earned Bayle an international reputation
is the *Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet* (1682),
completed shortly before Louis XIV closed the Protestant Academy at
Sedan where Bayle was employed as a Professor. The manuscript of the
book accompanied Bayle in exile to Rotterdam and was soon published
there. Bayle feared that the strange and complicated plan of the work
would cause it to fail, but the opposite happened: the book's
originality and freshness led to a wide readership and an
international reputation for Bayle. It is, nevertheless, a very
strange and complicated book.



The nominal goal of the work is to refute superstitions about comets.
The book is written as a series of letters to an unnamed Sorbonne
theologian, each of which is dedicated to reasons for or against
interpreting comets as signs of divine anger and forthcoming
vengeance. Bayle offers a quick battery of purely philosophical
arguments against interpreting comets as anything other than natural
events, and then turns to his seventh "theological"
argument, which is the focus of the bulk of the work. The main thrust
of the argument is to show that *if God sends comets as punishment
or signs of his anger*, then God is responsible for causing the
most serious evil, idolatry, which God has said in the Bible in the
worst of all sins. Since the entire world can see comets, and since
comets do not communicate any clear message, each nation will
interpret the comet in its own way. As a matter of historical fact,
most nations will fall into some divine interpretation of the event,
where "divine" refers to the local religion's
conception of the divine. The result is that if comets are indeed
intended as divine messages, then their appearance will lead to a
surge in global idol worship for which God will be responsible. If, on
the other hand, comets are natural events, and it is human folly to
interpret comets as divine messages, then God is innocent of any idol
worship that results from the passing of space rocks.



In a surprising but logically seamless fashion characteristic of
Bayle, all of this turns into an impassioned defence of the virtues of
atheists and the possibility of founding a purely secular
(non-religious) society. The *Various Thoughts on a Comet* is
indeed about superstition, but it is not really about comets. The
superstitions that Bayle spends the vast majority of the book
targeting are, first, that belief in God is necessary to live a moral
life, and second, that religion is necessary to keep society peaceful
and lawful. Just as Bayle refuted superstitions about comets by
demonstrating that they are purely natural, predictable events, so
too, Bayle refutes superstitions about atheists by demonstrating that
morality and law can and should be treated as purely natural,
predictable aspects of human behaviour, based largely in education and
temperament.



Bayle's refutation of superstitions about atheism relies on a
mix of historical fact, common sense, and philosophical argument. The
relevant historical facts are that there have been, in every age,
atheists noted for their virtue. In antiquity, Bayle points to
Diagoras, Theodorus, Euhemerus, Nicanor, Hippo, and Epicurus. Closer
to his own time, Bayle's favourite example is Lucilio Vanini,
renowned for his virtue, but who was tortured and then burned at the
stake in 1619 for denying the existence of God. This leads to the
ultimate principle of Bayle's naturalized morality: people do
not act on the basis of their principles. Whether these are religious
principles or secular moral principles makes no difference: actions do
not spring from belief or faith. Bayle takes this as an empirical fact
and backs it up with historical examples. The real motives of human
action are custom, education, and passion, all of which manifest
themselves as hard-to-shake habits.



> 
> 
> Thus we see that from the fact that a man has no religion it does not
> follow necessarily that he will be led to every sort of crime or to
> every sort of pleasure. It follows only that he will be led to the
> things to which his temperament and his turn of mind make him
> sensitive. (OD III: 113)
> 
> 
> 



Atheists can live just as calmly, wisely, generously, courageously,
and in general, virtuously as religious believers because all of these
character traits spring from temperament, education, and custom, not
from principles or judgments or faith. Therefore, a society comprised
entirely of atheists can be a lawful, well-ordered place, assuming the
atheist citizens are raised and educated properly. In fact, Bayle
suggests in the most controversial passages of the *Various
Thoughts on a Comet* that an atheist society may even be
*more* peaceful than any religious society. That is because
religion has a natural tendency to inflame the worst passions in human
nature:



> 
> 
> We know the impression made on people's minds by the idea that
> they are fighting for the preservation of their temples and
> altars...; how courageous and bold we become when we fixate on
> the hope of conquering others by means of God's protection, and
> when we are animated by the natural aversion we have for the enemies
> of our beliefs. (OD III: 84)
> 
> 
> 



Nobody can deny that religion has been an important motive of war and
violence in human history. Since atheists lack religion, they should
live quieter lives.



The *Various Thoughts on a Comet* has been interpreted as a
disinterested refutation of various widespread (then and now)
superstitions about atheism, as a focused attack on the Catholic
persecution of Calvinists in France (Rex 1965), and as an apology for
atheism (Mori 1999 [2020]). Bayle insisted in his sequels to the work,
the *Addition to the Various Thoughts* (1686; OD III: 161-186),
and the *Continuation of the Various Thoughts* (1705; OD III:
187-417), that the goal of the work was simply to prove that atheism
is no worse than idolatry, and that religious believers do not have a
monopoly on moral behaviour. These were, from Bayle's point of
view, obvious historical facts that intellectual integrity requires us
to admit.


## 3. Freedom of Conscience



Everything that Bayle wrote on religious toleration is either a
defence or an elaboration of the following argument, which first
appeared in Bayle's *General Critique of Maimbourg's
History of Calvinism* (1682):



> 
> 
> [I]f the true religion has some right to oppress others, then every
> religion has this same right, provided that it is persuaded that it is
> God's True Church. But it is false and impious that every
> religion has the right to oppress, so it follows that God has not
> given to his Church any way other than persuasion and peaceful
> instruction to bring people to the true faith. Consequently, Christian
> Princes do not have any greater or lesser right to torment people over
> matters of religion. (OD II: 105)
> 
> 
> 



This argument was originally intended as an objection to
Maimbourg's argument that Catholic Sovereigns have the right to
oppress Protestants in their realms, but not vice versa, and therefore
the persecution of Calvinists by Louis XIV was just, while the
persecution of Catholics elsewhere was unjust. Despite this narrow
original purpose, Bayle's claim eventually grew in scope to
become the foundation of two of Bayle's most well-known theses:
the universal right to freedom of conscience, and the necessity of
religious toleration.



Bayle's fullest and clearest defence of the right to freedom of
conscience appears in his sequel to the *General Critique of
Maimbourg's History of Calvinism*, namely the *New
Letters by the Author of the General Critique of Maimbourg's
History of Calvinism* (1685). In the Ninth Letter, Bayle expands
and defends the first part of the argument quoted above, namely
that



> 
> 
> if the true religion has some right to oppress others, then every
> religion has this same right, provided that it is persuaded that it is
> God's True Church.
> 
> 
> 



Bayle reports that this claim was considered an "impious
paradox" by many readers. Bayle defends the claim in two steps.
The first step is to demonstrate that individuals have the right and
the duty to espouse any proposition that appears true to them after a
careful examination. The second step is to demonstrate that everyone
has the right and the duty to act on the basis of whatever apparent
truths they have espoused. In other words, individuals have the right
and the duty to form and to act on the basis of *conscience.*
Following a Medieval tradition, Bayle understood conscience to be
first, a set of intuited moral truths (*synderesis*), and
second, practical judgments made on the basis of these moral truths
(*conscientia*).



Bayle employs an example to illustrate these steps of his argument for
freedom of conscience. He imagines a master who leaves his home for a
long time in the care of a servant, and who orders the servant not to
allow anyone to enter the home unless they produce a certificate with
a particular insignia: anyone who produces such a certificate must be
given entry, but anyone who lacks the certificate must be turned away.
The example is an analogy meant to represent the human mind's
relationships to God and the truth. God has left minds in the care of
God's servants, individual humans. We have been ordered by God
to allow into our minds--to believe--only those propositions
that bear the criterion of truth, which Bayle always considered to be
a certain clarity and distinctness, or "evidence" as he
called it. In order to obey God, we must accept all evident
propositions as true and reject all non-evident propositions as false.
Just as the servant has the right and duty in the master's
absence to decide what is an authentic certificate and what is not, so
too individual humans have the right and duty to decide what is
evident and what is not. This is the right and duty to form our
individual consciences, to decide what is morally good and true. And
just as the servant has the right and duty subsequently to act on
their inspection of certificates, so too humans have the right and
duty to act on the basis of whatever has appeared true to them. This
is the right and duty to act conscientiously. The Cartesian roots of
Bayle's epistemology and ethics of belief are clear.



The problem arises when, for example, the master's own son
arrives at the home, but lacks the required certificate; or when a
bandit arrives at the home bearing a certificate that he found or that
he forged. In other words, what should we do when the objective truth
does not appear evident, or when falsehoods appear evident to us?
Bayle takes it to be a historical fact that these cases arise
frequently, and he answers that we must reject the truth and believe
the falsehood:



> 
> 
> [T]he rights that God has given to the truth depend on a condition
> that is so absolutely necessary, that in the absence of this condition
> one could not render the least homage to the truth without committing
> a crime. Since by this condition we can mean nothing other than that
> God demands that we love and respect the truth provided that we know
> it, it is evident that, if the truth is unknown to us, it loses all
> its rights over us; and that, if error appears to us in the form of
> the truth, then it acquires all rights over us. For, since it would
> displease God if we respected the truth that we thought was a lie,
> therefore it would also offend him if we did not respect a lie that we
> believed was the truth. (OD II: 219)
> 
> 
> 



During the absence of the master, the servant has a duty to obey the
master's orders: to admit those with a certificate, and to
reject those without a certificate. The servant must do due diligence
to ensure the certificates are authentic. However, if after the
servant has inspected the certificate, he is convinced that a forged
certificate is authentic, or that an authentic certificate is forged,
then the servant has no recourse: he must act on his own best judgment
until the master returns. Even though it is objectively bad to allow a
bandit into the home, nevertheless, if the bandit's certificate
is authentic or a compelling forgery, then the servant has the duty to
grant the bandit entry into the home. So too, human beings must act on
the basis of their individual judgment--their conscience--as
long as God is invisible and silent, which God always seems to be. In
the master's absence, the servant is effectively the master. So
too in God's apparent absence, individual human beings are
masters of their own minds and actions, for there is nobody else who
can decide for us what is evident and what is not. Evidence, as Bayle
conceives it, is an inherently individual matter, since it is a kind
of appearance to an individual mind. Since the individual authority
over one's mind and actions is based in a command of God, and
since God is a higher authority than any Sovereign, the Sovereign must
respect the individual's freedom to obey God's commands as
they see fit. The Sovereign must respect human autonomy, because it is
God's will. Bayle's argument for freedom of conscience
provides a clear link between Cartesian epistemology and later Kantian
moral autonomy.


## 4. Religious Toleration



Bayle's argument for freedom of conscience does not provide a
sufficient reason for sovereigns to tolerate minority religions in
their realms. Freedom of conscience establishes that everyone has the
same right and duty to believe whatever appears true to them, and to
act on the basis of apparently true beliefs. However, it is possible
that many religious people will believe that persecuting other
religions is a morally good action. Perhaps the Sovereign believes
that it is their own God-given duty to persecute others. It will
follow from Bayle's argument for the freedom of conscience that
all of these religious people will have the same right and duty to
persecute one another. The result will be a morally justified war of
all against all. Bayle devotes his *magnus opus* on religious
toleration, *A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of Jesus
Christ: Compel Them to Enter* (1686-88), to forestalling
this unhappy consequence of his doctrine of freedom of conscience.



A universal religious war will result from Bayle's doctrine of
freedom of conscience only if religious believers think they have a
right and duty to persecute other religions. This will happen only if
believers think that God has commanded persecution, or in the absence
of any clear direction from God, that the proposition
"persecuting other religions is morally good" is evidently
true after careful rational inspection. Bayle's
*Philosophical Commentary* therefore argues that God has not
commanded persecution, and that persecuting other religions cannot
appear good to any sincere rational person after careful examination.
The argumentative strategy of the book is in fact to use the second
claim to support the first: because persecution cannot appear good to
any sincere rational person, therefore God has not commanded
persecution.



The problem with Bayle's argument is that there is a long
tradition within Christianity of interpreting the Gospel of Luke,
chapter 14, verse 23--which contains the words "Compel them
to enter"--as a divine command to persecute. The context of
this passage is the parable of the banquet, in which a master commands
his servants to invite guests into his home to enjoy a feast. The
servant reports that the invited guests are too busy. So, the master
orders the servant to go out into the highways and byways and compel
people to enter his home to enjoy the feast. The passage had been
taken by Catholics since St. Augustine to justify forcing
non-Catholics to join the Church.



Bayle responds to this argument for persecution by insisting that
Scripture requires careful interpretation, and interpretation requires
a criterion. The first chapter of the *Philosophical
Commentary* establishes that the only possible criterion of the
interpretation of Scripture is individual conscience and rational
examination:



> 
> 
> I am very persuaded that before God made Adam hear any voice to teach
> him what he should do, God had already spoken to Adam interiorly, by
> making him see the vast and immense idea of a supremely perfect Being,
> and the eternal laws of justice and equity. (OD II: 369)
> 
> 
> 



Therefore, in order to decide whether Luke 14:23 is a divine command
to persecute, Bayle proposes to investigate whether persecution is
consistent with our perception of the eternal laws of justice and
equity. In other words, the question of whether God has commanded
persecution boils down to the question whether an obligation to
persecute can be considered an evidently good command from the
perspective of reason.



Bayle anticipates Kant once again in the first chapter of the
*Philosophical Commentary* where he establishes a test to
determine what should be considered an eternal law of justice:



> 
> 
> [A]nyone who wants to know distinctly the natural light with respect
> to morality should elevate himself above his own personal interest,
> and above the customs of his country, and should ask himself in
> general whether the action is just by considering this: if the action
> in question were proposed in a country where it had never been the
> custom, and where people were free to adopt or not to adopt the
> proposed action, would the people in that country find, upon careful
> examination, that the action was just enough to merit adoption? (OD
> II: 368-369).
> 
> 
> 



Like Kant's categorical imperative, this test requires us to
consider morality as a form of legislation over a possible kingdom of
people who are guided by reason and examination. Moral laws that pass
this test will be universal: anyone in any land will be capable of
appreciating their worth and will find the laws worthy of adoption.
Whether or not a moral command is evident or not depends on whether or
not it can be adopted universally by all people. In order to apply
this test, a clear maxim must be articulated. The maxim Bayle
considers throughout the *Philosophical Commentary* is this:
"Compelling religious heretics to enter the true Church is
just". The meaning of "compelling to enter" that
motivates Bayle's arguments is one that he learned first-hand
while living in France: Compulsion is violence. It is dragooning. It
is forced conversions. It is imprisonment. It is confiscation of
material goods. It is expelling one from home and country if they
continue to refuse the "invitation". It is barring certain
people from employment, school, or office. It is Bayle's brother
dying in a damp basement after being imprisoned unjustly by Catholics.
It is Bayle himself needing to change the spelling of his last name
while in France and eventually to live as a refugee in Rotterdam for
thinking twice about Catholicism. When put this way, one hardly needs
an argument against such compulsion. To some extent, that's
Bayle's point: persecution is evidently bad, not good. But he
offers nine arguments against persecution anyway.



Religious persecution does not pass Bayle's proto-Kantian
categorical imperative test, and therefore Luke 14:23 must not be
interpreted as a command to persecute. Why not? The First Part of the
*Philosophical Commentary* offers nine reasons why persecution
fails the test. What most of these arguments have in common--and
again the proto-Kantian tone of the arguments cannot be
overstated--is the claim that persecution is morally wrong
because it leads Christians to contradict themselves. The essence of
Baylean morality that emerges from these arguments is integrity:
consistency in one's beliefs and between one's beliefs and
actions. Persecution is morally wrong because it necessarily entails
internal inconsistency: a lack of integrity. The first argument that
Bayle offers against persecution in Part 1, chapter 2, of the
*Philosophical Commentary* is also the best. Persecutors wish
to bring people into the one true Church, presumably because they want
these people to love God properly. To love God properly is to form
correct judgments about God and to have the right movements of the
will toward God (such as love). However, the actions of persecutors in
Bayle's day, like "threats, imprisonment, exile, beatings,
torture" (OD II: 371), cannot possibly give rise to true
knowledge and sincere love of God; on the contrary, persecutors'
actions are far better suited to making people hate God. Persecutors
cannot possibly report sincerely that they are motivated to persecute
by the desire to spread the love and knowledge of God. Persecutors lie
to themselves, to their victims, and to God.



Bayle scholars have grappled for a long time with this seemingly
dogmatic assertion of Bayle, who is usually more circumspect, if not
downright skeptical. What if there was a sincere persecutor who, after
long examination of Luke 14:23 and the tradition of biblical
commentary surrounding it, came to the conscientious conviction that
God wished him to use force to bring heterodox people into conformity
with what the persecutor believes is the one true Church? Then does it
not follow from Bayle's doctrine of the freedom of conscience
that the persecutor *must* persecute? This is known as the
"Persecutor Paradox" or "Sincere Persecutor
Aporia" (see Solere 2016). Some scholars believe that
this objection undermines the foundation of Bayle's moral
argument for toleration, and requires Bayle to have recourse to a
legal or political solution to intolerance (Mori 1999 [2020]). Others
believe that Bayle offers a valid response to the objection, or that
the objection is not very strong in the first place. The debate
remains open.


## 5. Criterion of Truth and Skepticism



Bayle never referred to himself as a skeptic, he never defended
skepticism or skeptics at any length in his own voice, and his works
establish far more positive theses than you would expect from the pen
of a skeptic. Nevertheless, the oldest interpretation of Bayle is that
he was a skeptic. In Bayle's day, the title
"skeptic" or "Pyrrhonist" was usually an
insult only slightly less offensive than another one frequently hurled
at Bayle: "atheist". However, even Bayle's first and
greatest admirers freely admitted there was a skeptical character to
Bayle's writings. In his *Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake*,
Voltaire said of Bayle:



> 
> 
> Wise enough and great enough to live without a system, Bayle destroys
> all systems and then turns against himself. He is like Samson, buried
> with his enemy Philistines under the rubble of a Temple toppled by his
> own hands.
> 
> 
> 



Later admirers, like Richard Popkin, also view Bayle as a skeptic, but
praise him for his ingenious use of this ancient philosophical
methodology (Popkin 2003). Most recent debates focus on the particular
kind of skepticism employed by Bayle: Pyrrhonian, Academic, or other
(Maia Neto 1999). A few Bayle scholars deny that Bayle was a skeptic
of any sort (McKenna 2015).



Putting labels aside, the clearest view of Bayle's connection to
skepticism comes from focusing on what he wrote concerning the
criterion of truth. The skeptical interpretation of Bayle gets support
from the article "Pyrrho" in the *Historical and
Critical Dictionary*. A famous footnote to this article features a
discussion between two Catholic abbots about the possibility of
defeating skeptics in debate. The "philosophical abbot",
who is really a skeptic, argues that victory can never be won over
skeptics:



> 
> 
> Right away the philosophical abbot declared to the other that in order
> to hope for some victory over a skeptic, it is necessary to prove to
> him before anything else that the truth is recognizable with certainty
> by some marks. We usually call these marks the criterion of truth. You
> will rightly claim that evidence is the criterion of the truth; for if
> evidence is not this criterion, then nothing would be. "So be
> it", the skeptic will respond, "I have been waiting for
> you here all along; I will show you that there are things you reject
> as false that possess the highest degree of evidence".
> (*Dictionary*, "Pyrrho", remark B)
> 
> 
> 



The philosophical abbot proceeds to demonstrate that the clearest,
most evident axioms of metaphysics are proven false by certain
fundamental tenets of the Christian faith, which proves that evidence
and truth do not always go hand-in-hand. For example, the Trinity
forces us to reject the proposition that "if two things are
identical to a third, then they are identical to each other",
because both God the Father and God the Son are identical to God, but
the Father is not identical to the Son. Therefore, propositions can be
both supremely evident and false, thereby undermining the claim that
evidence is the criterion of truth.



There are two reasons not to accept the article "Pyrrho"
as definitive proof that Bayle was a skeptic. First, the rejection of
the criterion of truth in this passage requires the assumption that
the Trinity, and other Christian dogmas, are true. At best, therefore,
the article demonstrates that there is a conflict between faith and
reason, not that there is no certainty in philosophy. Many religious
thinkers, including many Calvinist theologians, have held this same
position without being considered skeptics. The second reason is that,
in various later works, Bayle revisits the issue of the criterion of
truth in his own voice and, rather than reject the criterion like the
skeptical abbot did, supports a more nuanced view that evidence is a
reliable, but merely probable criterion of truth. Like Descartes,
Bayle argues that one should not assent in the absence of evidence.
But unlike Descartes, Bayle argues that evidence comes in degrees and
its presence does not guarantee the truth. These issues were the main
focus of the debate between Bayle and Jean Le Clerc in Bayle's
last years, and are dealt with at length in the first part of the
*Dialogues of Maximus and Themistius* (Bayle 1707 [2016]).
Bayle defends his position on the criterion of truth against the
accusation of skepticism, so there is good reason not to consider him
a skeptic, and not to align his own views with those of his imagined
philosophical abbot in the *Dictionary*.


## 6. Problem of Evil



If a perfectly good and all-powerful God alone created everything in
the universe, then why do pain, moral wickedness, and so many
varieties of imperfection exist? Philosophers today refer to the
family of issues raised by this question as "the problem of
evil". There is perhaps no thesis for which Bayle is more
well-known than the skeptical claim that there is no rational solution
to the problem of evil. The centerpiece of any discussion of Bayle and
the problem of evil must be the *Dictionary*, particularly the
articles "Manicheans" and "Paulicians" of the
first edition, and the "Clarification on the Manicheans"
of the second. It is in these texts that Bayle attempts to refute
every theodicy he had yet encountered, thereby demonstrating the
incapacity of reason, especially within the confines of Christian
dogma, to explain the origin of evil in a way that does not make God
its sole author. The suggestion that reason leads us ineluctably to
the conclusion that God is morally responsible for all evil was found
so scandalous that Bayle was forced to spend the last decade of his
life defending himself against charges of atheism and even sedition on
account of it. The Rationalist theologians Jean Le Clerc and Isaac
Jaquelot were Bayle's principal adversaries, and their
objections to Bayle, as well as their attempts at theodicy, prompted
him to expand his skeptical reflections on evil in subsequent books,
including the *Responses to a Provincial's Questions*,
and the posthumous *Dialogues of Maximus and Themistius*. These
final works were the occasional cause of Leibniz's
*Theodicy* (1710), as well as the inspiration for (and source
for many of the arguments of) Voltaire's satirical novella,
*Candide* (1759), several chapters of Hume's
*Dialogues concerning Natural Religion* (1779), and possibly
Kant's late essay, *On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical
Trials in Theodicy* (1791).



Bayle's controversial "doctrine" on the problem of
evil that caused so much commotion was carefully summarized by Bayle
himself in three points:


1. The natural light and revelation teach us clearly that there is
only one principle of all things, and that this principle is
infinitely perfect;
2. The way of reconciling the moral and physical evil of humanity
with all the attributes of this single, infinitely perfect principle
of all things surpasses our philosophical lights, such that the
Manichean objections leave us with difficulties that human reason
cannot resolve;
3. Nevertheless, it is necessary to believe firmly what the natural
light and revelation teach us about the unity and infinite perfection
of God, just as it is necessary to believe by faith and submission to
divine authority the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation. (OD
III: 992b-993a)



The first principle was a common supposition in Bayle's day, and
so obviously caused no controversy. Nevertheless, Bayle argued on
behalf of the principle in "Manicheans", remark D, in
passages that render more precise the nature of Bayle's
skepticism about theodicy. Bayle imagines a monotheist philosopher,
Melissus, arguing with a dualist philosopher, Zoroaster, over the
origin of evil. The dispute begins with a contest over *a
priori* arguments. In other words, the first question raised is
whether one principle of creation or two is most in accord with ideas
of pure reason. Melissus wins this particular debate, in Bayle's
view, because it is more agreeable to *a priori* reason to
suppose that there is just one necessary and infinitely perfect being
responsible for the creation of the universe than to suppose that
there are two warring gods, one good and the other evil (which is the
view of Bayle's fictionalized Zoroaster). Melissus'
monotheism is, in short, simpler and more elegant than
Zoroaster's dualism.



The contentious elements of Bayle's doctrine begin to surface
when the debate then turns to *a posteriori* reasons; that is,
once the question shifts away from the beauty of the theory to its
ability to account for the observable phenomena. In this debate
Melissus fares worse than his interlocutor, since human reason
finds



> 
> 
> the manner in which evil was introduced under the empire of a
> sovereign being, infinitely good, infinitely holy, and infinitely
> powerful ... not only inexplicable, but even incomprehensible;
> and everything that is opposed to the reasons why this being permitted
> evil is more agreeable to the natural light and to the ideas of order
> than these reasons are. (*Dictionary*,
> "Paulicians", remark E)
> 
> 
> 



Simplicity and elegance are now on the side of Zoroaster (and the
Manichean tradition that followed him, if Bayle's history is
correct), for whom all the good in the world is traceable to a
perfectly benevolent deity, while all the evil is the effect of his
malevolent enemy. Therefore, whereas *a priori* reason and
Christian Scripture point toward monotheism (Bayle's first
principle), *a posteriori* reason raises perpetual difficulties
for this picture in light of the way the world actually is
(Bayle's second principle).



Some of the most notorious remarks in the *Dictionary* are
those in which Bayle details how a dualist could refute the
traditional Christian accounts of the origin of evil, most of which
begin from the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of
Eden. Bayle begins his critique by asking how such a Fall was even
metaphysically possible. If Adam and Eve were created wholly good,
then they should not have had the capacity to sin, since such a
capacity is hardly a good quality. But supposing an answer to this
worry could be given, Bayle moves on to demand why God would permit
the possibility of sin to reduce to an actual sin, considering the
terrible consequences that befell humanity as a result of it. The most
common response to this question was that God had given human beings
free will, the most generous divine gift of all, and the autonomy of
which God willed to respect in order to make true worship and love of
him possible. Bayle's response again focuses on the metaphysical
possibility of the explanation: can a creature that derives all its
being from God ever act in a manner that is truly free? Even supposing
an account of freedom could be offered to answer this question, Bayle
still finds the free-will defence unsatisfying on account of
God's alleged omniscience. Surely God foresaw the first sin of
humankind from all eternity, yet he created humans with freedom
anyway. Is this not comparable, Bayle asks, to supplying a criminal
with a knife knowing full-well that he will commit murder with it? If
so, the responsibility for the murder falls at least partially on the
supplier of the weapon. But perhaps God allowed humans to fall so that
he could send his Son to redeem them. To this last resort of the
Christians--the *felix culpa* theodicy--Bayle
observes that God in this case would resemble a father who allowed his
son to break his arm (though he could have prevented it) just so that
he could display his skill at cast-making to the neighbors. Or God
would be like a king who permitted a deadly uprising just so he could
demonstrate his ability to quell it. God would not appear
*infinitely* perfect on any of these hypotheses.



Such reflections demonstrate the need for Bayle's third
principle (assuming that one is interested in upholding Christian
monotheism). The origin of evil, like the Trinity, is a mystery
fraught with endless difficulties. On Bayle's view of religious
mysteries, which he lays out at the beginning of his *Clarification
on the Manicheans*, philosophical objections to mysteries are
nothing troubling, but merely serve to confirm that God's mind
infinitely surpasses human minds. If there were no insoluble
philosophical objections to mysteries, then there would be nothing
mysterious about the doctrines in question-reason could answer every
difficulty, and could claim equality with God's own mind. For
these reasons Bayle conflated the traditional categories of
"above reason" and "against reason", claiming
that mysteries were necessarily both. Reason is consequently useless,
even pernicious, as a basis for belief in the mysteries, and so must
be replaced by simple faith (Bayle's third principle).



Bayle's most able philosophical critic on these issues during
his lifetime was Le Clerc, who argued that Bayle's doctrine on
the problem of evil was intentionally subversive of religion. The
basis of Le Clerc's accusation of atheism against Bayle was his
claim that it is not psychologically possible to continue to believe
some doctrine after one has conceded that it is met with insoluble
difficulties. If this psychology of belief were true, then the second
principle of Bayle's doctrine would destroy belief in monotheism
because, by supposition, it would be impossible to believe in the
unity of God after acknowledging the irresistible force of the
Manicheans' objections. In response to Le Clerc, Bayle argued in
his posthumous *Dialogues of Maximus and Themistius* that it is
not only psychologically possible to believe in a proposition that has
been defeated in argument, but also very common. Bayle points to the
debate over the continuum to illustrate his thesis. Those engaged in
the debate over whether lines are infinitely divisible or ultimately
reducible to points of finite size recognize that there are insoluble
paradoxes opposed to each point of view. Yet there are adherents of
both views all the same, which demonstrates, by historical fact, that
it is possible to believe in a proposition (e.g., "lines are
infinitely divisible") despite recognizing unanswerable
difficulties (e.g., Zeno's paradoxes). Far from a recommendation
of adopting irrational fideism in response to the problem of evil,
Bayle therefore believed he was urging the same rational retreat from
certain debates that philosophers are commonly forced into when they
argue about labyrinthine philosophical topics like the continuum.


## 7. Bayle Enigma



There are few authors in the early modern period whose works are more
difficult than those of Bayle to interpret on even the most basic
level. What is the ultimate conclusion of any particular work by
Bayle? What are the main arguments? When is Bayle writing in his own
voice and when is he writing in the voice of an imagined character?
What are the appropriate contexts in which to read Bayle's
works? Who were the intended audiences? These can be straightforward
questions to answer when reading philosophical authors; most authors
answer the questions themselves in a Preface. However, Bayle usually
wrote books anonymously for fictional audiences with explicit aims
that were often mere pretences for the real purpose behind his books.
If there is any single, overarching thesis of any of his works, it is
buried very deeply indeed. Taking Bayle's *oeuvre* as a
whole, the interpretive difficulties are even more challenging. Thomas
Lennon gives the most memorable statement of this problem that is
known as the "Bayle Enigma":



> 
> 
> To take just the twentieth-century literature, the suggestions are
> that Bayle was fundamentally a positivist, an atheist, a deist, a
> skeptic, a fideist, a Socinian, a liberal Calvinist, a conservative
> Calvinist, a libertine, a Judaizing Christian, a Judaeo-Christian, or
> even a secret Jew, a Manichean, an existentialist...to the point
> that it is tempting to conclude that these commentators cannot have
> been talking about the same author, or at least that they have not
> used the same texts. There can be overlap among these classifications,
> so that not all of the interpretations entirely exclude one another.
> Implausible as it may seem, moreover, all of these suggestions have at
> least some plausibility. (Lennon 1999: 15)
> 
> 
> 



"The Bayle Enigma" is the term used to denote the
difficulty one faces when trying to label or to categorize or to
interpret Bayle's works as a whole or individually. The
difficulty arises from the fact that numerous labels seem to fit
Bayle's writings, but some of these labels are mutually
exclusive. It is tempting to dismiss the Enigma on the basis that all
great authors are complex and write works with multiple layers of
meaning: why do we need to label authors anyway? But in the case of
Bayle, the problem is that his works are not just complex, but
seemingly self-contradictory. In one and the same book, and even in
one and the same argument, Bayle might be advocating faith in God or
he might be undermining belief in the existence of God--it
depends how you read him. Some engagement with the Bayle Enigma is
therefore necessary just to enter into Bayle's works on the most
elementary level.



Four global interpretations of Bayle's works have recurred since
his death over three centuries ago: the atheist reading, the skeptical
reading, the Christian-fideist reading, and the Rationalist reading.
These are by no means the only possible interpretations of
Bayle's writings; they are just the most common readings because
they are the most plausible. Bayle's enemy Jurieu was the first
to launch the accusation of atheism against Bayle in his own lifetime,
making his case largely on the basis of the *Various Thoughts on a
Comet* with its elaborate defences of the virtuous atheist and the
Society of Atheists. The most recent and influential interpreter to
find a commitment to atheism in Bayle's works is Gianluca Mori,
whose 1999 *Bayle philosophe* argues that "[a]ll the
roads of the philosophical reflection of Bayle lead to atheism"
(Mori 1999 [2020: 189]). The main evidence of Bayle's atheism,
according to Mori, is his obsession with the problem of evil
throughout his life, and in particular his contention that there is no
system of Christian thought that can resolve this problem. The
everyday experience of every human being, no matter how privileged
they are, provides ample evidence that the universe is not the work of
an infinitely good creator. Any theodicy that attempts to reconcile
the experiences of pain and sin with the existence of an infinitely
good creator will have to limit that creator in some way, either in
its power, its knowledge, or its uniqueness, to the point that the
creator will cease to resemble anything worthy of the name
"God". According to Mori, the simplest way to read
Bayle's hundreds of thousands of published words devoted to the
problem of evil is to read them as an argument that God does not
exist.



Mori's interpretation of Bayle is compelling, especially today
when the problem of evil is routinely viewed not only as an argument,
but as the most powerful argument, against the existence of the
Abrahamic God. However, there are at least two problems with
Mori's interpretation taken broadly. The first is that Bayle was
consistent and adamant throughout his career that the conclusion of
his reflection on the problem of evil is not that God does not exist,
but that reason is too weak to reconcile the existence of a perfect
God with the human experience of evil. This conclusion is, on the
surface at least, skeptical rather than atheistic. For Bayle, the
problem of evil is just another example of human reason's
incapacity to resolve problems involving the concepts of infinity and
unity. Intractable difficulties relating to infinite divisibility,
like Zeno's paradoxes, and persistent problems in explaining the
union of mind and body in a single human person are non-theological
examples in Bayle's thought of the failure of reason in matters
relating to infinity and unity. The problem of evil, on the skeptical
reading of Bayle, is just Bayle's favorite theological argument
for the limits of reason.



According to the Christian-fideist reading, the problem of evil is
Bayle's main tool for displaying to readers the need for faith
in addition to reason. Calvin and Jurieu were two thinkers whose
commitments to Christianity were never questioned and who, prior to
Bayle, argued in print that human reason could not resolve all the
difficulties relating to evil. Seen in this context, Bayle's
writings on evil are not original attacks on theism, as Mori reads
them, but rather traditional Calvinist attacks on reason with the aim
of pointing the way to faith. Elisabeth Labrousse (1964) and Walter
Rex (1965) demonstrate the ways in which all of Bayle's writings
can be illuminated by reading them in the context of Christian
polemics, mainly between Calvinists and Catholics. According to
Labrousse and Rex, Bayle was an opponent not of Christianity in
general, but only of one branch of Christianity--Roman
Catholicism.



Another clarifying context for understanding much of Bayle's
philosophical reflection is Rationalism. Todd Ryan (2009) and Antony
McKenna (2015) have shown that Bayle was not skeptical of all
philosophical dogmas. He remained committed, in Ryan's view, to
a variety of specific Cartesian metaphysical doctrines, like mind-body
dualism, the ontology of substance, and matter as extension,
throughout his career. In McKenna's view, Bayle remained
committed to the rational certainty of "common notions" of
reason, especially in the domains of metaphysics and morality. These
are first principles that form the basis of all other reasoning,
including theological reasoning; without these principles, human
reason is not only weak but entirely silent. Bayle was, therefore, a
Rationalist on this reading.



What do we make of an author who might have been an atheist or a
Christian, depending on how you read him; or who might have been a
skeptic or a Rationalist, depending on your perspective? This is the
main outstanding problem in the Bayle literature. One compelling
solution is provided by Lennon's 1999 *Reading Bayle*.
Lennon, following the pioneering work of Jose R. Maia Neto
(1999), interprets Bayle's *oeuvre* in the light of a
commitment to Academic integrity as it was expressed by Cicero in his
writings on the Academic skeptics. The goal of this integrity is to
keep one's power of judgment untrammelled; it is to keep an open
mind. The method the Academics used to achieve this kind of
intellectual freedom was the rigorous presentation of both sides of a
debate; to express competing positions not as a lawyer would do, with
the goal of making one side look weaker than the other, but as a
reporter would do, allowing each side to make its best case in its own
words. Lennon finds a commitment to these goals and methods especially
in the *Dictionary*, where Bayle quotes like a reporter far
more than he argues like a lawyer. The power of this Academic reading
of Bayle is that it explains why Bayle appears to contradict himself.
The problem arises because readers of Bayle fail to recognize that
Bayle did not personally believe everything he wrote; sometimes he was
merely laying out somebody else's position for the sake of
balancing arguments and promoting Academic freedom of judgment. Just
as God, the author of creation, allows creatures to conflict with each
other and even to oppose God's owns plans for creation, so too
Bayle, the author of a vast *oeuvre*, allows the characters and
philosophical theses in his works to conflict with each other and even
to oppose Bayle's own stated aims in his works. The Bayle
enigma, just like Bayle's beloved problem of evil, may well be
insoluble because of the role played in each by the conflict between
authorial design and human freedom.