Pierre Bayle dans la République des Lettres: philosophie, religion, critique (review)

Twenty-five chapters in this collection revisit topics such as Bayle and the Republic of Letters; his social and intellectual networks; activity as a journalist; religious preoccupations (the Reformation and the Jews, his critique of Stratonism, Socinianism, millenarianism, and rationalism); ‘philosophical contexts’ (his representation of the Middle Ages; textual dialogues with La Mothe Le Vayer, Naudé, Cudworth, and Newton); themes such as his representation of women, anthropology, political thought, dialogue with atheism, and defence of toleration; and some of the ways in which subsequent thinkers interacted with Bayle — namely Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Mandeville, Vico, and Hume — or read his work in Germany and England. According to the editors, this volume is not intended to promote ‘une lecture d’ensemble’ of Bayle’s work but rather to offer a mosaic of different interpretations. So it is strange to find that only Gianluca Mori was granted the right of reply to another chapter in the volume (by Jean-Luc Solère), which provides a well-argued alternative to Mori’s view that Bayle was a disguised atheist. Such an editorial decision implicitly promotes the ‘new orthodoxy’ in Bayle studies, which acknowledges that his work emerged in a context of embattled Protestantism, yet concludes that he was indirectly promoting atheism or free thought — although this is discernible only by reading between the lines in the manner of Leo Strauss (p. 13). There is nothing new about this debate, which has divided readers of Bayle from the seventeenth century to the present day. But it is a pity that the volume’s editors should promote only one side of the argument in pursuit of ‘une interprétation correcte de la pensée baylienne’ (p. 14). Elements of a more fruitful critical debate emerge from some of the contributions. The first is that Bayle’s thought (like Montaigne’s) comes in layers; it is not static but in movement. Consequently, context, discursive strategies, and targets are crucial to the task of interpreting an author who also delighted in narrative disguises and, indeed, the art of ridicule. The second is that one of Bayle’s central concerns seems to have been to promote the separation of theology (and religion) from morality and politics, thereby laying the basis for a social bond that is non-religious (Jean-Michel Gros, p. 438) —which, in a sense, makes what Bayle personally believed irrelevant to his arguments. Finally, it seems more likely that toleration (rather than atheism or Protestantism) is the key to interpreting Bayle, with regard both to form and content. On the one hand, his predilection for ‘la forme contradictoire’ (Hubert Bost, p. 61) from which another truth emerges that cannot be claimed by either party, and, on the other, his unrelenting sceptical critique of theological and other dogmatisms (Gianni Paganini, p. 560) point to more persuasive connections between persecution and the art of writing that are not unproblematic and therefore merit further research.