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Sincerity and Skepticism in Pierre Bayle: Navigating the Bayle Enigma

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Sincerity and Skepticism in Pierre Bayle: Navigating the Bayle Enigma Sincerity and Skepticism in Pierre Bayle: Navigating the Bayle Enigma Patricia Easton The philosophical writings of Pierre Bayle are not only voluminous they are riddled with what appear to be inconsistent claims within and across his corpus. Scholars on all sides admit to puzzlement and have given the name “The Bayle Enigma” to the special difficulties of interpreting Bayle’s work.1 The Enigma is janus-faced: on one side there is the question of the nature and scope of Bayle’s skepticism and on the other is the question of the sincerity of his avowals as a faithful Calvinist. Some take his skepticism to lead him to fideism, others away from it; some take his avowals of faithfulness as insincere and ironic, and others as expressions of his Ciceronian integrity. There are two general interpretive strategies in Bayle scholarship. The first might be called the “Enlightenment Interpretation” of Bayle as philosophe, deist or even atheist and irreligious skeptic.2 By contrast, the second might be called the “Revisionist * I thank the participants of the University of California at Irvine Scientia Workshop, May 14, 2010 for a thorough discussion of my paper. For discussion of an earlier and related paper, I thank the participants of the 31st Annual Philosophy of Religion Conference, “Skeptical Faith, On Faith, Belief, and Skepticism,” held at Claremont Graduate University, February 12–13, 2010. In particular, I thank my commentator Eric Hall for his remarks on Bayle’s Calvinism, and John Cottingham for his helpful comments on the concept of the natural light. I am greatly indebted to Michael Hickson for his careful written comments, corrections, and suggestions, and to Kristen Irwin for discussions on Bayle on common sense and skepti- cism. And finally, thanks to Tom Lennon for inspiring my interest in this worthy thinker. 1 Richard Popkin refers to the “Bayle Enigma” and has “[. .] found the attempt to define the actual beliefs and the actual religion of Bayle quite baffling.” (xxix, xxii) see Bayle, Pierre. Pierre Bayle: Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections. Translated by Richard H. Popkin. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1965. 2 Richard Popkin discusses the “Enlightenment Interpretation” of Bayle as philosophe, deist/ atheist and irreligious skeptic and the “Revisionist interpretation” of Bayle as a seventeenth- century skeptic and fideist, see his “Review of At the Crossroads of Faith and Reason, An Essay on Pierre Bayle.” Journal of the History of Philosophy. Vol. 7(1), 1969, 93–94. Adherence to the “Enlightenment Interpretation” is nearly universal among interpreters from Bayle’s day to the twentieth century. For recent defenses of this interpretation, see Mori, Gianluca. Bayle: philosophe. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999; Wootton, D. “Pierre Bayle, Libertine.” In M.A. Stewart, ed., Studies in Seventeenth-Century European Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997, pp. 197–226; and O’Cathasaigh, Sean. “Bayle’s Commentaire philosophique, 1986” in © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/97890043059��_0�3 Sincerity and Skepticism in Pierre Bayle 247 interpretation” of Bayle as seventeenth-century skeptic and Christian thinker.3 Since the 1960’s, the revisionists have been hard at work reconstructing the his- torical Bayle and resurrecting his sincerity and integrity as a Christian thinker, perhaps even a fideist. The only point close to consensus among and between interpreters is that Bayle was some kind of skeptic.4 However, the nature and scope of that skepticism remains widely debated.5 Was Bayle a religious skep- tic, a Pyrrhonian skeptic, an academic skeptic, or a philosophical skeptic? Or, was Bayle a forerunner of the “radical enlightenment” as one commentator has recently argued, and not a skeptic in any of these senses?6 In this paper I do not attempt to rehearse nor do justice to the various argu- ments on each side for they are multiple and nuanced; rather, I briefly review what I take to be the strongest argument on each side.7 Lennon and Maia Neto advance the revisionist position that Bayle was an Academic Skeptic Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth century. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1989, No. 260, pp. 159–182. 3 Adherents to the “Revisionist Interpretation” include W.F. Barber, H. Bracken, C. Brush, P. Dibon, E. Haase, E. Labrousse, W. Rex, R.H. Popkin, T. Lennon, J. Maia-Neto, M. Heyd, J. Kilcullen, and K. Sandberg. For a recent advancement and defense of the revisionist thesis see Lennon, Thomas M. “What Kind of Sceptic Was Bayle?” In Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXVI (2002): 258–279. 4 Todd Ryan’s book, Bayle’s Cartesian Metaphysics. Routledge, 2009, breaks to some extent with the others in framing the “Bayle Enigma,” by showing the role of Bayle’s several unquestioned concrete metaphysical commitments. Nonetheless, skepticism remains a common rubric, as Ryan writes that his, “principal aim . to provide the detailed analysis that might help lay the groundwork for resolving the Bayle enigma, [the] choice of topics being guided by the conviction that Bayle can be thought of as a Cartesian skeptic” (p. 5). 5 Bracken, Harry M. “Bayle’s Attack on Natural Theology: The Case of Christian Pyrrhonism.” In Scepticism and Irreligion in The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Edited by Richard H. Popkin and A. Vanderjagt. Brill: Leiden, 1993, pp. 254–266; Bracken, Harry M. “Bayle not a Sceptic?” Journal of the History of Ideas. Vol. 25, No. 2, (1964), 169–180; Popkin, Richard. “The High Road to Pyrrhonism.” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 2 (1) (1965), 18–32; Lennon. “What Kind of Skeptic was Bayle?”; Mori, Bayle: philosophe; Mori, Gianluca. “Pierre Bayle on Skepticism and ‘common notions’.” In The Return of Scepticism: From Hobbes and Descartes to Bayle. Edited by Gianni Paganini. Boston: Kluwer Press, 2003, pp. 393–413. 6 Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 160–1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 7 Lennon discusses and reviews multifarious interpretations in his Reading Bayle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, especially see pp. 14–28; see also Sutcliffe, A. “Spinoza, Bayle, and the Enlightenment Politics of Philosophical Certainty.” History of European Ideas 34 (2008) 66–76, see especially p. 71..
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