Pensées diverses sur la comète (review)

The comet observed through telescopes in Europe between November 1680 and March 1681 was merely the pretext for this vast miscellany published by Bayle in Holland in 1682, with a second, revised edition in the following year. It was an immediate success, laying the foundation for the reputation for great learning and wit that he quickly acquired throughout Europe in the 1680s. His model in this work is Montaigne and possibly also La Mothe Le Vayer, whose meandering reflections and conversational style Bayle adapts to his own polemical ends. His miscellaneous thoughts are communicated in a series of letters – presented as real but of course fictional – written by one Roman Catholic to another, the destinataire being a doctor of the Theology Faculty at the Sorbonne, a guarantor of orthodoxy. This disguise allows Bayle to advance daring criticisms of astrology, superstition, credulity and the structure of belief more generally, in the name of Cartesian mechanism. But it also enables him to make covert attacks on Catholicism, which he associates with paganism and idolatry, and which is made to condemn itself out of its own mouth, in a manner reminiscent of Pascal's Provinciales. It is also in this work that Bayle argues for the first time that virtuous atheists are less of a threat to society than immoral believers or idolaters. In their introduction, the editors identify the main themes of the Pensées diverses and, while they point out how daring and paradoxical some of them are, they nonetheless insist that those themes express concerns typical of the Reformed tradition that shaped Bayle. They are right, of course, but their perspective is narrower than that of Bayle, who was also influenced by the freethinkers and sceptics of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, not to mention those of Antiquity. They have chosen to reproduce the text of the Pensées diverses printed in the first edition of the Oeuvres diverses (1727), some twenty years after the author's death – because it was usefully annotated – rather than that of the 1699 or 1704 editions, which Bayle himself revised for publication. In the final analysis, however, it matters little, since spelling, punctuation and capitalization have all been modernized to accommodate the general reader. The editors have retained Bayle's own footnotes, expanding them to include the complete bibliographical details for the many books he cites (added oddly between square brackets), and French translations of his Latin quotations. At the end of the text, they append a second set of notes of their own devising, flagged by the letters of the alphabet, which elucidate matters obscure. While such cautious layering of the annotation is typical of Bayle, it is a bit out of place in a text that has been modernized, and it also makes for cumbersome reading. Sadly, the index promised on the title page does not materialize; instead there is a biographical list of people mentioned in the text (with a one-line biography), but with no page references, which undermines the usefulness of this otherwise excellent edition. Aficionados will undoubtedly welcome this compact, intelligently presented text, which may provide a point of entry into the perplexing maze of Bayle's thought for a whole new generation of readers.