Pierre Bayle (review)

Given the controversy surrounding Bayle’s person and writings in his lifetime and our own, it is easy to forget that he was first and foremost a best-selling author whose work was sought after not only for its content but also, and perhaps just as much, for its style. Admirers frequently commented on the ‘agréments’ to be found in Bayle’s books, and not only on his inimitable ability to ‘rendre aisées et sensibles les matières du monde les plus abstraites’ (quoted on p. 593, n. 43). This quotation might be adduced to sum up the portrait that Hubert Bost draws of an engaging author, driven by a sense of vocation as a philosopher, and for this reason either unable or unwilling to opt for prudent silence when faced with the entrenched traditionalism and hostility of those who were threatened by his more adventurous mind. This very well-informed biography is aimed at an educated but non-specialist readership; for that reason, apparently, it is overly dependent on lengthy quotations in order to ‘donner à entendre sa [i.e. Bayle’s] musique singulière’ (p. 10). However, it is difficult not to wish for more synthesis and analysis, particularly in the chapter devoted to the Dictionnaire historique et critique, for example, where twenty-five out of forty-one pages are filled with quotations loosely organized around key themes that are not actually investigated. Biographies are interesting only if, in addition to telling a life story, they are also arguing a case. Bost’s case is persuasive but not innovative. He accepts that Bayle’s work resists systematic interpretation and that certain questions are undecidable, such as the sincerity of Bayle’s expressions of faith. Yet, like Élisabeth Labrousse before him, Bost is committed to situating Bayle in the context of the French Reformed tradition that shaped him, and to explaining his work in terms of his Protestant background, education, and experience. Bost has a theological background himself and this enables him to explain clearly some of the major religious controversies and debates of the time. Indeed, pedagogical clarity is one of the great strengths of this book, which takes the reader systematically and chronologically through all of Bayle’s published works, summarizing many of the principal topics treated in them. There is an underlying preoccupation here with the application to Bayle, by critics desirous of finding atheism lurking between the lines, of Leo Strauss’s theory concerning the connection between persecution and the art of writing. Bost ably demonstrates the shortcomings of this approach and the way it selects from Bayle’s wide-ranging work only those passages and propositions that concur with its own preconceptions. Yet Bost also reads between the lines, penning a portrait of a ‘philosophe chrétien’ (Bayle’s last description of himself) whose intellectual evolution is explained in terms of a desire to establish an unassailable basis for toleration. A persuasive argument, but can it be the last word on this most enigmatic, and indeed provocative, of authors?