Journal of the History of Ideas

Pierre Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary (1686–87), a Huguenot exile’s response to the Revocation of Nantes, established its author as a defender of free conscience for pagans, Muslims, Jews, atheists, Catholics, Protestants, Anabaptists, and Socinians. ¹ The virtues of Pagans and Atheists are most fully treated in Bayle’s work on the comet. ² In this work pagans, Catholics (whom Bayle equated with pagan idolators), and atheists were compared to the advantage of the latter, a conclusion that caused widespread scandal and for which Bayle was obliged by his church to write an apology or clarification found in his Dictionary. ³ In toleration there was no juste milieu. ⁴ Everyone must act according to conscience no matter how errant. Bayle reiterated a position taken in his criticism of the Jesuit Louis Maimbourg’s History of Calvinism. ⁵ In it Bayle first enunciated the principle that he noted frightened readers and caused a scandal, namely, that error disguised as truth must be allowed all the privileges of truth, i.e., must be permitted to be believed by those convinced they had found truth. This doctrine of errant conscience was basic to Bayle’s understanding of God and man’s search for Him; and after his death it became basic to concepts of individualism, free [End Page 609] inquiry, free speech, and inalienable rights, concepts which were all made concrete during the Enlightenment. Forcing conscience was wrong. ⁶

Bayle’s lack of partisanship in treating religious history invited criticism from Calvinists in Holland. He wrote to Mr. Pecher, a minister at Emmerick, that in his Dictionary he had avoided passionate prejudice with respect to Jesuits or to any other subject. ⁷ But had he also avoided an indifference to dogma? Not according to his chief critic who was his erstwhile patron turned enemy, Pierre Jurieu, Pastor of the Reformed church of Rotterdam and theologian in the Ecole Illustre. This school, founded expressly for Bayle and Jurieu by the city council of Rotterdam, ⁸ allowed Bayle to teach philosophy and history. Since Jurieu thought Bayle “indifferent” to dogma, he believed him to be a covert Socinian or atheist. In 1693 he managed to have Bayle dismissed from his teaching post.

Indifference was a concept that started with the ancients, particularly Stoics, Skeptics, and Cynics, who regarded everything except virtue as matters of indifference, a posture with which many of Bayle’s writings, though not all, seemed to agree. In scholastic logic indifferentism meant that things were neither particular nor universal but indifferently so according to the viewpoint from which they were regarded. Jurieu made the charge of indifferentism in 1687. ⁹ He remarked then of Bayle’s concept of the erring conscience that it was “developed with a view to establishing tolerance and a general indifference of all sects and even of all religions.” ¹⁰ Bayle was not indifferent to doctrine. He remained loyal to the Reformed faith, defended orthodoxy, and in a letter to his cousin protested that he was ready to show that his work on comets contained nothing that was contrary to right reason, Scripture, or the Confession of faith of the Reformed Church. ¹¹ Paul Dibon noted that Bayle was especially consistent in his concern for divine transcendance rather than indifference. ¹² Henry Kamen wrote that Bayle wrote in “complete theological indifference,” ¹³ a statement ignoring Bayle’s disapproval of much theological heterodoxy, the orthodoxy of others. While Bayle was usually non-partisan, he was never indifferent. Kamen’s remark contrasts [End Page 610] with Theodore Rabb’s, who wrote that Jean Bodin and Bayle took their stand on “the equality of all beliefs” ¹⁴ a statement suggesting indifference, but in a positive rather than negative way.

Bodin’s own religion was particularly problematic. Tolerant for his age, a whole century before Bayle, Bodin, a Carmelite friar for several years, had already repudiated forcing conscience. In his book on the state he warned that those who do so merely create more intransigence among their already alienated subjects. ¹⁵ He also insinuated that a multiplicity of religions—“all the religions of all people”—including natural religion, Jupiter’s...