Pierre Bayle

For more information on Pierre Bayle, visit Britannica.com.

The French philosopher and skeptic Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) was the author of the "Historical and Critical Dictionary". This unique philosophy source book was one of the most influential works during the 18th-century Enlightenment.

Pierre Bayle was born in the village of Carlat near the Spanish border. His father was a Calvinist minister. As a young man, Pierre was educated by the Jesuits at Toulouse, and under their influence he converted to Catholicism for a brief period. When Bayle returned to Calvinism, he traveled to Geneva to escape persecution as a heretic. There be became acquainted with the philosophy of René Descartes. In 1674 Bayle returned to France incognito and tutored in Paris and Rouen. The following year he became professor of philosophy at the Protestant University of Sedan, and when this school was suppressed in 1681, Bayle settled in Rotterdam, Holland, where he taught philosophy until his death.

With a certain irony Bayle insisted that he was a genuine Protestant in that he protested everything that was said and done. This skeptical attitude was a major motif of contemporary philosophy. Rationalism, as a new system of thought, consistently undermined the notion of authority both in ecclesiastical matters and in the philosophic opinions of the ancients. Positively, skepticism presented itself as the guardian of faith by showing the futility of all human reason. Derivatively, skepticism became aligned with humanism as a proponent of toleration in matters intellectual, political, and religious.

Famous Dictionary

Scholarship then was not what it is today. More than a few of the great minds of the 18th century owed all or much of their knowledge of the history of philosophy to Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; Historical andCritical Dictionary). Very early in his career Bayle conceived the notion of correcting errors in previous encyclopedias and of supplying information missing in standard reference works. The two volumes of the Dictionary contained more than 2, 500 pages of primarily biographical information arranged in alphabetical order, together with occasional articles on general subjects. By modern standards the Dictionary is a capricious, polemical, debunking work filled with long quotations and literary allusions in which there is little relation between the topic under discussion and the content. The texts are generally brief and accurate, with numerous citations of authorities in the margins.

The heart of the work is the critical notes that Bayle appended in small print at the bottom of the pages. These footnotes and notes on the notes often were 10 times as long as the original article. They include philosophical and theological digressions, attacks against personal enemies, and thorough skepticism. Bayle justified his attitudes by an appeal to the professional impunity of the scholar: "Let an historian relate faithfully all the crimes, weaknesses, and disorders of mankind, his work will be looked on as a satire rather than history. "For example, Bayle wrote a factual account of the life of the biblical king David. In the notes he pointed out that although David's life was divinely inspired his behavior by ordinary standards was completely immoral. The reader was left with a dilemma concerning the infallibility of Scripture, since "Either those actions are not good or actions like them are not evil."

The reaction to the Dictionary was instantaneous; Bayle was both famous and infamous. The work was placed on the Index by the Roman Catholic Church and condemned by the Dutch Reformed Church. Promising revision, Bayle amended the work, and a second edition appeared in three volumes in 1702. Printers incorporated the original articles with the amended versions, and by 1720 the work had grown to four volumes. It became, in the words of one critic, "the Bible of the eighteenth century."

Further Reading

A full-length study of Bayle in English is Howard Robinson, Bayle, the Skeptic (1931). Additional studies which relate him to his milieu or to other figures include Leo Pierre Courtines, Bayle's Relation with England and the English (1938); Paul Hazard, The European Mind, 1680-1715 (trans. 1953); H. T. Mason, Pierre Bayle and Voltaire (1963); Walter Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy (1965); and Karl C. Sandberg, At the Crossroads of Faith and Reason: An Essay on Pierre Bayle (1966). For the intellectual background of the period see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951), and Lester G. Crocker, An Age in Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century Thought (1959).

Additional Sources

Labrousse, Elisabeth, Pierre Bayle, Dordrecht; Boston: M. Nijhoff: Distributors for the U.S. and Canada, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1985.

Bayle, Pierre (1647-1706). Huguenot moralist and pre- Enlightenment thinker, unsurpassed as a spokesman for religious toleration. He was the son of a Protestant minister in the remote south of France, but a brief conversion to Catholicism, then a return to Calvinism, made him a lapsed Catholic; at a time of growing official intolerance of the Huguenots, it was safer for him to leave his home region. Having tutored in Switzerland and Paris, he taught at a leading Huguenot academy, in Sedan, where he was befriended by Jurieu. When the academy was officially shut down in 1681 both men emigrated, like the thousands of other refugees who formed the Huguenot diaspora [see Refuge], and obtained posts at a French college in Rotterdam, where Bayle remained, never marrying, for the rest of his life.

In Holland, publishing flourished in comparative freedom from censorship. Bayle made his name as a writer with the Pensées diverses sur la comète (1682-3), a rational attack on the superstition that comets portend disaster, full of digressions and provocative arguments, many of which are covertly anti-Catholic. Bayle asked, for instance, whether atheism was better than superstition—a word inextricably associated, for Protestant readers, with the Catholic religion. A history of Calvinism by Maimbourg, an ex-Jesuit, had portrayed it as subversive zealotry; Bayle published a Critique générale of Maimbourg in 1682. In Paris the Critique, urbane and effective, was officially banned and burned, but its success led to the arrest of Bayle's brother Jacob in 1685, just when the campaign against the Huguenots reached its height with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Jacob died in prison. Bayle's distress can be sensed in his angry descriptions of a France freed from ‘heresy’ in Ce que c'est que la France toute catholique sous le règne de Louis le Grand (1686), followed (still in 1686) by the first volumes of a cooler, more cogently argued attack on intolerance, Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jésus-Christ, ‘Contrainsles d'entrer’. The words in question were the scriptural basis, according to St Augustine, for enforced conversion.

In 1687 a nervous breakdown made Bayle abandon the important journal he had begun for a Dutch publisher in 1684, Nouvelles de la république des lettres, which did much to foster the conception of a non-sectarian, international community of scholars and intellectuals. In the second period of his life his targets were more abstract: immoral behaviour in the name of religion and over-confidence in the religious powers of reason. He also quarrelled with Jurieu, first over tolerance, which Jurieu could not accept, then over the politics of the Huguenot diaspora. A pamphlet, Avis aux réfugiés, in which Bayle counselled loyalty to Louis XIV, brought the final rift.

Jurieu's enmity eventually lost Bayle his teaching post, thus allowing him to devote himself to the preparation and publication of his greatest work, the Dictionnaire historique et critique (2 vols., 1697; 4 vols., 1702), an easily used and readable guide, on biographical lines, to figures and ideas of religious and philosophical importance since antiquity. The neutral main text is dwarfed by the enormous columns of notes, often outspoken. Bayle had to publish defensive Éclaircissements, notably for the article ‘David’, which emphasized the bad side of the Israelite king's conduct. Elsewhere he seems to delight in proving the incompatibility of faith and reason, always concluding that reason can prove nothing; only faith brings certainty. The most farreching arguments come in the relentlessly pessimistic exposition (especially in ‘Manichéens’, ‘Pauliciens’, and ‘Marcionites’) of the problem of evil; God's behaviour has to be accepted on faith, being rationally incomprehensible. Bayle's position, which prompted the composition of Leibniz's Théodicée, remains controversial; it was within a certain Calvinist tradition, but has often seemed unconvincing from a writer so critical of dogmatism in general. In his last works he indefatigably elaborated previous arguments, for instance, against the rationalist Jean Le Clerc in the Réponse aux questions d'un provincial (1703). During the Enlightenment his influence was enormous but one-sided, the Calvinist inspiration being neglected, while his scepticism and moral concern were used as weapons against religion and his arguments for tolerance served to foster indifference rather than the rights of conscience.

[Christopher Betts]

Bibliography

• E. Labrousse, Bayle (1983)

Bayle, Pierre (1647-1706) French philosopher and sceptic. Born of Protestant parents in the south-west of France, Bayle was educated at Toulouse, became Catholic, lapsed, fled to Geneva, and then became professor in the Protestant academy at Sedan in northern France from 1675 to 1681, in which year he again fled from religious persecution to Holland. He lived in Rotterdam for the rest of his life, writing and corresponding with the philosophers and theologians of his time. His personal experience made him an impassioned defender of religious toleration, and an opponent of pretensions of reason in theological and metaphysical matters. Much of his energy was spent undermining the orthodox Calvinism of his time, represented by his one-time teacher, Jurieu, ostensibly on behalf of a true Calvinism based on revelation, but arguably in favour of religious scepticism. His attitude is captured in the remark quoted by Gibbon: ‘I am most truly a Protestant; for I protest indifferently against all systems and all sects.’ Bayle's critical and sceptical attitudes gained full expression in his masterpiece, the Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695-7, trs. as An Historical and Critical Dictionary, 1710). In this work, the ‘arsenal of the Enlightenment’, Bayle combines historical treatments of religious and philosophical figures (most notably secondary and neglected ones) with a pervading scepticism. The dictionary is often witty and profane, and in its own time was notorious for advocating the complete separation of religion and morality, and for gleefully depicting the immoral lives of many people important to the Church. But its more substantial philosophical content made the Dictionary a sourcebook for all 18th-century discussions of difficulties with the Cartesian world view. It contains many of the arguments later deployed by Berkeley and Hume, and is undoubtedly the most important contribution to scepticism since Sextus Empiricus. Famous articles included those on Pyrrho, Rorarius (which heads an attack on Leibniz's theory of pre-established harmony), and Zeno of Elea (see Bayle's trilemma).

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.

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

Pierre Bayle.

French literature
By category
French literary history
Medieval 16th century · 17th century 18th century · 19th century 20th century · Contemporary
French writers
Chronological list Writers by category Novelists · Playwrights Poets · Essayists Short story writers
France portal
Literature portal This box: view • talk • edit

Pierre Bayle (18 November 1647  – 28 December 1706) was a French philosopher and writer.

Bayle was a self-pronounced Protestant and as a fideist he advocated a separation between the spheres of faith and reason, on the grounds of God being incomprehensible to man. As a forerunner of the Encyclopedists and an advocate of the principle of the toleration of divergent beliefs, his works subsequently influenced the development of the Enlightenment.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Editions 3 Further reading 4 References 5 External links

Biography

He was born at Carla-le-Comte (later renamed Carla-Bayle in his honor), near Pamiers (Ariège), France, and was educated by his father, a Calvinist minister, and at an academy at Puylaurens. He afterwards entered a Jesuit college at Toulouse, and became a Roman Catholic a month later (1669). After seventeen months, he returned to Calvinism and fled to Geneva. There he became acquainted with the teachings of René Descartes. For some years he worked under the name of Bèle as a tutor for various Parisian families, but in 1675 he was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the Protestant University of Sedan.

In 1681 the university at Sedan was suppressed. Just before that event, Bayle had fled to the Dutch Republic, where he almost immediately was appointed professor of philosophy and history at the Ecole Illustre in Rotterdam. There he published his famous Pensées diverses sur la comète de 1680 in 1682, as well as his critique of Louis Maimbourg's work on the history of Calvinism. The great reputation achieved by this critique stirred the envy of Bayle's Calvinist colleague of both Sedan and Rotterdam, Pierre Jurieu, who had written a book on the same subject.

Between 1684 and 1687, Bayle published his Nouvelles de la république des lettres, a journal of literary criticism.

In 1686, Bayle published the first two volumes of Philosophical Commentary, an early plea for toleration in religious matters. This was followed by volumes three and four in 1687 and 1688.

In 1690 there appeared a work entitled Avis important aux refugies, which Jurieu attributed to Bayle, whom he attacked with great animosity. After a long quarrel, Bayle was deprived of his chair in 1693. However, he was not depressed by this misfortune, especially as he was at the time engaged in the preparation of his massive magnum opus, the Historical and Critical Dictionary, which actually constituted one of the first encyclopedias (before the term had come into wide circulation) of ideas and their originators. Bayle's attempt at impartial presentation of these ideas was instituted within a non-partisan framework of thoughtful consideration of both sides of any dispute. In his articles e.g. on the "Mahomet" and "Savonarola", Bayle displays his penchant for judicious assessment of highly controversial figures and philosophies, while eschewing partisan interpretations.

The remaining years of Bayle's life were devoted to miscellaneous writings, arising in many instances out of criticisms made of his Dictionary. He remained in Rotterdam until his death on 28 December 1706 and was buried there in the Waalse Kerk where Jurieu would be buried as well, 7 years later. Already in 1706 a statue in his honor was erected at Pamiers, "la reparation d'un long oubli" ("the reparation of a long neglect"). In 1959 a street was named after him in Rotterdam.

Bayle's erudition was considerable.^{[clarification needed]} As an original thinker, he was not outstanding^{[clarification needed]}; but as a critic he was deemed second to none in his own time^{[clarification needed]}, and even now the insight and skill with which he handled his subject is notable.^{[clarification needed][citation needed]}

The Nouvelles de la république des lettres (see Louis P. Betz, P. Bayle und die Nouvelles de la république des lettres, Zürich, 1896) was the first thorough-going attempt to popularize literature, and it was eminently successful. His multi-volume Historical and Critical Dictionary, however, constitutes Bayle's masterpiece. The astute English translation of "The Dictionary", by Bayle's fellow Huguenot exile Pierre des Maizeaux, was named by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson as one of the one hundred foundational texts that formed the first collection of the Library of Congress.

Editions

• Historical and Critical Dictionary (1695-1697; 1702, enlarged; best that of P. des Maizeaux, 4 vols., 1740)
• Selections in English: Pierre Bayle (Richard H. Popkin transl.), Historical and Critical Dictionary - Selections, Hackett Publishing Company Inc, 1991. ISBN 0-87220-103-1.
• Les Œuvres de Bayle (3 vols., The Hague)

Further reading

• Pierre des Maizeaux, Vie de Bayle
• Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, Pierre Bayle (1838)
• Damiron, La Philosophie en France au XVIIIe siècle (1858-1864)
• Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, “Du genie critique et de Bayle" (Revue des deux mondes, 1 December 1855)
• A. Deschamps, La Génèse du scepticisme erudit chez Bayle (Liege, 1878)
• J. Denis, Bayle et furleu (Paris, 1886)
• Ferdinand Brunetière, La Critique littéraire au XVIIIe siècle (vol. 1, 1890), and La Critique de Bayle (1893)
• Émile Gigas, Choix de to correspondance inédite de Pierre Bayle (Paris, 1890, reviewed in Revue critique, 22 December 1890)
• de Budé, Lettres inédites addressées a J. A. Turretini (Paris, 1887)
• J. F. Stephen, Horae Sabbaticae (London, 1892, 3rd ser. pp. 174192)
• A. Cazes, P. Bayle, sa vie, ses œuvres, etc. (1905).

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle (La Haye: M. Nijhoff, 1963) Elisabeth Labrousse, Bayle, trans. Denys Potts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983)

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Pierre Bayle

• The Pierre Bayle Homepage
• "Pierre Bayle" article by Thomas M. Lennon in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The Pierre Bayle Collaborative Translation Project
• The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge

v • d • e Figures in the Age of Enlightenment by country   Notable figures British Colonies Benjamin Franklin · Thomas Jefferson · James Madison · Thomas Paine Prussia and Saxe-Weimar Immanuel Kant · Gotthold Ephraim Lessing · Johann Gottfried von Herder · Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · J.C.F. von Schiller · Moses Mendelssohn England Edward Gibbon · Samuel Johnson · Mary Wollstonecraft · John Locke  · Isaac Newton · Thomas Hobbes Scotland Joseph Black · James Boswell · Adam Ferguson · David Hume · Thomas Reid · Adam Smith France Montesquieu · François Quesnay · Voltaire · Buffon · Jean-Jacques Rousseau · Denis Diderot · Helvétius · Jean le Rond d'Alembert · Baron d'Holbach · Marquis de Sade · Condorcet · Étienne Bonnot de Condillac Italy Cesare Beccaria Spain Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos · Benito Jerónimo Feijoo · Antonio de Ulloa Portugal Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Marquis of Pombal Poland Hugo Kołłątaj · Ignacy Krasicki · Samuel Bogumił Linde · Adam Naruszewicz · Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz · Józef Maksymilian Ossoliński · Stanisław August Poniatowski · Stanisław Staszic · Jędrzej Śniadecki · Franciszek Zabłocki   Related topics Atheism · Capitalism · Civil liberties · Critical thinking · Deism · Democracy · Diafotismos · Empiricism · Enlightened absolutism · Free markets · Haskalah · Humanism · Liberalism · Natural philosophy · Rationality · Reason · Sapere aude · Science · Socialism · Secularism · French Encyclopédistes · German Classicism

Persondata
NAME	Bayle, Pierre
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	French writer and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH	18 November 1647
PLACE OF BIRTH	Carla-le-Comte, near Pamiers (Ariège)
DATE OF DEATH	28 December 1706
PLACE OF DEATH	Rotterdam

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)