Pierre Bayle

Pierre Bayle (b. 1647–d. 1706) was a philosopher, professor, Huguenot refugee, historian, literary critic, journalist, encyclopedist avant la lettre, and polemicist. According to some scholars, Bayle was also a profound Protestant theologian, while according to others, he was an atheist. Most readers have found Bayle at least skeptical, and many consider him an outright skeptic. In short, it is difficult, if not impossible to classify Bayle’s thought simply, to ascertain his motives clearly, or even to find the intended conclusions of his dozens of works with any certainty. Much of the Bayle scholarship of the past three centuries has been devoted to this problem that is referred to in the literature as the “Bayle enigma.” At least we can say that his most well-known philosophical works treat the topics of superstition, freedom of conscience, religious toleration, rationalist metaphysics, and the problem of evil. In only a few short years, Bayle wrote one of the longest and most complex books ever composed by a single author: the six-million-word Dictionaire historique et critique. The Dictionaire is arranged like an encyclopedia, with discussions of hundreds of topics—mostly people—arranged alphabetically. But unlike an encyclopedia, the Dictionaire is full of critical, philosophical—sometimes obscene—footnotes that make up over 80 percent of the total volume of the work. These footnotes made Bayle notorious in his day, famous and beloved in the centuries after, and guaranteed his place in the histories of literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. Philosophers of the 18th century mined these footnotes for arguments against every traditional authority and dogma, to the point that historian Ernst Cassirer referred to the Dictionaire as the arsenal of the Enlightenment.