Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment

8. Baylean Liberalism: Tolerance Requires Nontolerance

8 Baylean Liberalism: Tolerance Requires Nontolerance John Christian Laursen MANY OF PIERRE BAYLE'S WORKS contain arguments for freedom of conscience and of intellectual inquiry. They deepened and developed a strand of liberalism that has been largely overlooked in recent scholarly work on the history of political ideas. That strand can be reconstructed as an alternative to the prevailing view that liberalismhas its deepest roots in one or more of the traditions of social contract, natural law, and civic republican theory. "Baylean liberalism," to coin a term, was fundamentally Calvinist and at the same time committed to the valuesof the cosmopolitan "republic of letters." It defended religious toleration by what Bayle described as "nontolerance" of what he considered superstition and enthusiasm when their effects carried over into politics. Bayle's contribution to the history of political theory has been widely neglected. One reason for this may be that, on the litmus test ofresistance theory, most readers have accepted Pierre Jurieu's charge that Bayle took the backward-looking position (from the Whig point of view) of passive obedience to absolutism.1 Yet this would not account for the relative neglect of his treatment of toleration, more robust in some respects than almost anyother of his time. Here a reason for neglect may be the Calvinist foundation of some of his ideas about toleration, no longer shared (oreven understood) by many scholars. Nevertheless elements of his vision were shared, for example, by American public philosophy until quite recently. Yet another reason for neglect of Bayle may be the practical difficulty of studying his political theory. One problem is that there is no one 198 The Seventeenth Century compact work on obligation or resistance or any other topic; no single Essay concerning Toleration. Rather, Bayle's style was to write and write and write, touching on many topics, returning to old topics again and again with different nuances, building up his case rather like a fugue with variations on a theme. Not only was this Bayle's style, but it can be read as a deliberate strategy. The medium is part of the message: toleration of many viewpoints is justified from many viewpoints. There is no single path of argument toward Bayle'ssort of liberalism.There is no single theory of toleration , but rather a subtle and refined complex of recommended practices and justifying theories. The result is that each reader may have been massaged toward a belief in tolerance by a different set of arguments inBayle's writings. Therefore the discussion below of his ideas will have to draw on many of his books and attempt to pull together a variety of strands. It is organized into sections dealing with several works at a time, in roughly chronological order. One of the complexities of Bayle's treatment of toleration is that he was well aware that a simple theory of tolerance without an understanding of its proper limits might lead to an extreme position of tolerance of the intolerant, and thus of complicity with intolerance and persecution. But there were definite limits to Bayle's toleration. Although this point is much less discussed in the literature on Bayle on toleration, he could be vicious in his attacks on certain opponents. A special feature of this chapter will be an exploration of his intolerance of figures ranging from Savonarola through Jan Comenius to Pierre Jurieu, who came under fierce fire from our author. It will emerge that the chief reason for Bayle's intolerance was his belief that certain forms of superstition and enthusiasm threatened to blur the line between religion and politics and might lead to persecution. His intolerance can thus be explained as intolerance of intolerance. Bayle is best understood as a controversialist, responding to particular issues of his day.2 But he drew on virtually all the history of ideas available in Latin and French in response to those issues, and his responses often generated general arguments and theories of wider application than the crisis of the moment. For our purposes, the most important point for setting the context is that Bayle had plenty of personal and intellectualexperience with persecution and intolerance. Born in the south of France in 1647 into a Protestant family, he was persuaded by the Jesuits at school in Toulouse to convert to Catholicism in 1668, which resulted in a rupture with his family. Eighteen months later Laursen / Baylean Liberalism 199 he abjured...