rational views than that embodied in the great Dictionnaire Historique
et Critique [653] of Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), who, born in France,
but driven out by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, spent the
best part of his life and did his main work at Rotterdam. Persecuted
there for his freethinking, to the extent of having to give up his
professorship, he yet produced a virtual encyclopedia for freethinkers
in his incomparable Dictionary, baffling hostility by the Pyrrhonian
impartiality with which he handled all religious questions. In his
youth, when sent by his Protestant father to study at Toulouse,
he had been temporarily converted, as was the young Gibbon later,
to Catholicism; [654] and the retrospect of that experience seems
in Bayle's case, as in Gibbon's, to have been a permanent motive
to practical skepticism. [655] But, again, in the one case as in
the other, skepticism was fortified by abundant knowledge. Bayle
had read everything and mastered every controversy, and was thereby
the better able to seem to have no convictions of his own. But even
apart from the notable defence of the character of atheists dropped by
him in the famous Pensées diverses sur la Comète (1682), and in the
Éclaircissements in which he defended it, it is abundantly evident
that he was an unbeliever. The only alternative view is that he
was strictly or philosophically a skeptic, reaching no conclusions
for himself; but this is excluded by the whole management of his
expositions. [656] It is recorded that it was his vehement description
of himself as a Protestant "in the full force of the term," accompanied
with a quotation from Lucretius, that set the clerical diplomatist
Polignac upon re-reading the Roman atheist and writing his poem
Anti-Lucretius. [657] Bayle's ostensible Pyrrhonism was simply the
tactic forced on him by his conditions; and it was the positive
unbelievers who specially delighted in his volumes. He laid down no
cosmic doctrines, but he illuminated all; and his air of repudiating
such views as Spinoza's had the effect rather of forcing Spinozists
to leave neutral ground than of rehabilitating orthodoxy.
On one theme he spoke without any semblance of doubt. Above all
men who had yet written he is the champion of toleration. [658] At
a time when in England the school of Locke still held that atheism
must not be tolerated, he would accept no such position, insisting
that error as such is not culpable, and that, save in the case of
a sect positively inciting to violence and disorder, all punishment
of opinion is irrational and unjust. [659] On this theme, moved by
the memory of his own life of exile and the atrocious persecution
of the Protestants of France, he lost his normal imperturbability,
as in his Letter to an Abbé (if it be really his), entitled Ce que
c'est que la France toute catholique sous le règne de Louis le Grand,
in which a controlled passion of accusation makes every sentence bite
like an acid, leaving a mark that no dialectic can efface. But it was
not only from Catholicism that he suffered, and not only to Catholics
that his message was addressed. One of his most malignant enemies
was the Protestant Jurieu, who it was that succeeded in having him
deprived of his chair of philosophy and history at Rotterdam (1693)
on the score of the freethinking of his Pensées sur la Comète. This
wrong cast a shadow over his life, reducing him to financial straits
in which he had to curtail greatly the plan of his Dictionary. Further,
it moved him to some inconsistent censure of the political writings of
French Protestant refugees [660]--Jurieu being the reputed author of a
violent attack on the rule of Louis XIV, under the title Les Soupirs de
la France esclave qui aspire après la liberté (1689). [661] Yet again,
the malicious Jurieu induced the Consistory of Rotterdam to censure
the Dictionary on the score of the tone and tendency of the article
"David" and the renewed vindications of atheists.
But nothing could turn Bayle from his loyalty to reason and toleration;
and the malice of the bigots could not deprive him of his literary
vogue, which was in the ratio of his unparalleled industry. As a mere
writer he is admirable: save in point of sheer wit, of which, however,
he has not a little, he is to this day as readable as Voltaire. By
force of unfailing lucidity, wisdom, and knowledge, he made the
conquest of literary Europe; and fifty years after his death we find
the Jesuit Delamare in his (anonymous) apologetic treatise, La Foi
justifiée de tout reproche de contradiction avec la raison (1761),
speaking of him to the deists as "their theologian, their doctor,
their oracle." [662] He was indeed no less; and his serene exposure
of the historic failure of Christianity was all the more deadly as
coming from a master of theological history.