Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A Study in Enthusiasm (review)

94 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY never explained what was to be found there. He criticized the OM Testament mercilessly in the Dictionnaire and omitted practically all discussion of the New Testament. He undermined all known rational interpretations of Judeo-Christianity and ridiculed various mystical ones. His model of a religious man was an obscure pedant, Pierre Bunel, who devoted his life to scholarship and the avoidance of bad conduct. His picture in the article "Spinoza," Rem. M., of those who lose sight of religion as soon as they seek it by the methods of human reasoning . . . as soon as they listen only to the proofs of feelings, the instincts of conscience, the weight of education, and the like, they axe convinced of a religion; and they conform their lives to it as much as human weakness permits, may, as Sandberg also suggests, describe Pierre Bayle. (Bayle said Cicero was like this.) If so, of what religion was he convinced? As I have suggested in previous discussions, he may have been a genuine Manichean, a Judaizer, or a non-Christian. He had a genius for taking the ingredients of Calvinist theological discussions, especially the views of Jurieu, and transforming them so that they became "The Arsenal of the Enlightenment." Jurieu, who saw only too well that Bayle's "shocking" views were based on his own orthodox ones, concluded that Bayle was trying to destroy Calvinist Christianity. Sandberg feels that Bayle was wrestling with fundamental religious issues within his own Calvinist context and somehow remained within it. I am not so sure. Bayle's texts seem to have little or no religious fervor at all (but much moral fervor). But I think the exploration of Bayle within the world in which he lived, rather than the Enlightenment one in which his influence flourished, is our best avenue for understanding his professed sceptical-fideism and for assessing his actual intentions. Much has been done by the "revisionists," and Sandberg's book is an important contribution. But much remains to be done. We need to know much more of the development of the positions of Bayle's opponents, i.e., Jurieu, Saurin, Jacquelot, to assess the moves Bayle was making in his various writings, and unfortunately their works are very hard to come by. (Hence they are usually known through Bayle's attacks.) We need to explore further Bayle's interests and concerns with non-Christian religious views. We need to re-evaluate the purport of the booklength article, "Spinoza." We need to examine Bayle's position in the struggles over Father Richard Simon's higher criticism of the Bible. Bayle transformed the Christian skepticism of the seventeenth century into the irreligious skepticism of the Enlightenment. Whether he did it inadvertantly or by design remains to be ascertained. That he lived and wrote in a seventeenth-century Calvinist context is beyond question. How he lived in this context, what he was trying to accomplish through his polemics, his erudition and his skepticism, is stiff somewhat mysterious. The "revisionists" have revealed a seventeenth-century Bayle rather than an eighteenth-century one. But the inner heart and soul of the seventeenthcentury one remains to be discovered. Elisabeth Labrousse, in her excellent biography of Bayle, suggests that Bayle, rather than being one of the first deists, may have been "un des derniers manich~ens de l'histoire." The true character and opinions of this fascinating intellectual , who played so vital a role in the development of the modern world, are still a mystery though Sandberg has made a significant contribution to the work of solving it. P.JC~P.RD H. POPKIN University of California, San Diego Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A Study in Enthusiasm. By Stanley Grean. (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1967. Pp. xix+296. $7.50) This companion piece to the author's edition of Shaftesbury's Characteristics (1964) makes an important contribution to the history of moral philosophy and especially to the literature about the Enlightenment. It presents the English philosophe as much more than a neoclassical humanist in the traditions of stoicism and Cambridge Platonism; it emphasizes the constructive aspects of his revolt against his tutor, John Locke, relating him on...