The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715
Page 14
The ideas to which Jean Le Clerc, the Arminian, the Socinian, thus gives expression are those which were destined to prevail throughout the whole of the first half of the eighteenth century. Past and gone are the days when Descartes, conscious that his views were calculated to bear him away into vague, uncharted regions, voluntarily imposed on himself some prudent restraints. “The first was to render obedience to the laws and customs of my country, always keeping firm hold on the religion in which God’s grace had suffered me to be instructed from my childhood upwards, and regulating my conduct in all other matters in accordance with such moderate ideas as were approved and adopted by the most level-headed of those with whom I had to live.” The day of heterodoxy has dawned, of every kind of heterodoxy, the day of the malcontents, the rebels who during the reign of Louis XIV had multiplied out of sight and had been awaiting the hour of their emancipation; of learned men, who declined to accept tradition at its face value, and insisted on enquiring into its credentials; of the Jansenists, who were to kindle new fire from their dim but never wholly extinguished embers; of the Biblical exegetists; of the philosophers; the day of Pierre Bayle!
[1]Bossuet, Conférence avec M. Claude touchant l’infaillibilité de l’Eglise, 1682. [n the Réponse au livre de Monsieur l’Evêque de Meaux intitulé Conférence avec M. Claude, Quévilly et Rouen 1683 (p. 485 et seq.), Pastor Claude explains his position as follows: “I will begin with the proposition advanced by this Prelate namely, that according to us (Protestants) anybody, however ignorant, is bound to believe that he may more truly interpret God’s word than the most universal of Synods and the whole of the Church put together. This proposition may be taken in two ways, one, that every individual, no matter how ignorant, is obliged to hold that he may understand the word of God better than the most universal of true synods made up of good, devout, wise and learned people together in the name of Jesus Christ and than all the rest of the Church. The other is that every believer, whom God attends with his Holy Spirit, is bound to hold that he will understand the word of God better than the most universal of false synods made up of worldly self-seekers and hypocrites, that is to say of people to whom God does not communicate his Spirit, and better than all worldly folk together, albeit they falsely call themselves “The Church!” The first meaning, says Claude, is an unwarranted assertion which Protestants repudiate; the second expresses an obvious truth from which Bossuet can hardly derive much comfort.
[2]Writings of B. Franklin, Smith’s edition, vol. VI, pp. 86–7.
[3]Les plaintes des protestants cruellement exilés du royaume de France, Cologne, 1686.
[4]Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, Catalogue des Écrivains Français.
[5]A report dated 1699 and quoted by H. J. Reesink, L’Angleterre et la littérature anglaise dans les trois plus anciens périodiques français de Hollande, 1931, p. 93.
[6]February, 1719; article XV.
[7]Défense de la tradition et des Saints Pères, Preface (Ed. Lachat, p. 8).
[8]Fénelon, Sermon for the Feast of the Epiphany, 6 January, 1685.
[9]Leibniz to Bossuet, 18 April, 1692.
[10]Bossuet, Premier avertissement aux Protestante, 1689. See also the Abbé Prévost in Le Pour et Contre, vol. I, No. 10.
[11]Le P. Maimbourg, Histoire du Luthéranisme, 1680, p. 268.
[12]R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, London, 1926. Preface.
[13]Extrait des articles résolus dans le Synode des Églises wallonnes des Pays-Bas, assemblé à Rotterdam (1686), Article VI, quoted by Frank Puaux, Les précurseurs de la Tolérance en France au XVIIe siècle (1881). See also in the same work, the Délibérations du Synode d’ Amsterdam (1690).
[14]Letter of 17 December, 1691.
[15]Richard Simon, Lettres choisies, vol. III, 1. 3.
[16]See A. Rébelliau, Bossuet historien du Protestantisme, 3rd edn., 1909, p. 571.
V
PIERRE BAYLE
PIERRE BAYLE came from the county of Foix, and was one of the host of Southerners who were driven by fate to the North and who brought with them their quick-wittedness, their passion for ideas, their sturdy character, and their astounding vitality. He was a Protestant, his father being a minister. He had learnt Latin and Greek at school, and then went on to continue his studies at the Academy of Puylaurens. But just as he was entering on the path he had chosen, the path which was to lead him far afield, so far that he was fated to leave all his companions behind, and to journey on in almost utter loneliness; the path along which we shall fare beside him, so that we may note the stages of a pilgrimage which began with religion and ended on the very borders of scepticism—just as he was setting foot on that path, he came to a sudden halt. He had been delving into works of theological controversy, and the result was that he became a convert to Catholicism, and went to read his philosophy with the Jesuits at their College at Toulouse. But, anon, “recollections of his early schooldays resuming their sway,”[1] he went back again to the Reformed Church, “happy as one who, after a long sojourn at the Pole, beholds the sun before him once again.” In 1670, he set out for Geneva. “At that time, I was a pretty good hand at argument. I had been tutored in the Schoolmen’s art of verbal jugglery, and I am not exaggerating when I say I was not at all a bad performer.”[2]
One step more; it brought him from Aristotle to Descartes. A course of philosophy lectures which he prepared on being appointed to a professorship at the Sedan Academy reveals him to us as a disciple of the clear-thinking, evidential school. Ideas of that kind always engender a zeal for converts. Would he have been content with his teaching work? Would he have gone on, year in, year out, drumming in the same old lessons, over and over again? We doubt it. While he was at Sedan, he sent the Journal des Savants a letter dealing with the subject of comets and omens. The editor flatly declined to print it. A revised and greatly augmented version of this same letter was published in 1682, and it loudly proclaimed that he had cut the painter.
He felt within him that a voice was calling. His nature insisted that he should ever be seeking, enquiring, probing into things. He must needs be always weighing the for and against, taking nothing for gospel until it had satisfied the tribunal of his own reason. When the Sedan Academy was closed down on religious grounds, when, incertum quo fata ferrent, he was looking round for a means of earning his daily bread, the worthies of Rotterdam offered him a post in their own illustrious seat of learning. This must have looked like the handiwork of a beneficent Providence, if, indeed, he still retained any belief in Providence and its watchful care. He would go on with his teaching, then, because he had to do so, in order to live; but his real work, his real calling, should be journalism, because, by that means, he could direct people’s minds towards those relentless truths which had already laid their spell upon him.
There, then, in his study at Rotterdam, let us picture him, frail in body but ardent in spirit; a solitary, far removed from all material preoccupations. Certainly, he nourished strong family affections, but a lover he was not. Books, books, piles of books! Of books he could never get enough. And news—he implored his friends in the various capitals of Europe, if they had any love for him at all, to send him news. “I recognize quite plainly that my insatiable craving for news is one of those inveterate diseases that set all treatment at defiance. It’s dropsy; that’s what it is. The more you give it, the more it wants.”[3] But books are another matter. They present a definite idea, something tangible, something you can get hold of, something that won’t slip through your fingers. Books stimulate the mind, they provoke ideas. You’ve got your adversary right in front of you, with all his arguments drawn up in order of battle. Oh, the joy of encountering him with some of your nimblest troops—replies, rejoinders, reasoned arguments. Through a man’s book you can get at the man himself, tell him where he stands, show him the poverty of his land. But the author is only the corollary, as it were, of the actual book, and it is books that Bayle attacks in force. Henceforth, the only things that
counted in life for Bayle were things intellectual. Reading, writing, discussing, that was what life meant to him. He found in study as much of pleasure and delight as the common run find in gambling and the tavern. The libido sciendi had got its grip upon him. Learn first, all you can; and then form your judgment, and criticize.
When he started journalism, he did not at first fully show how formidable he could be in argument. “We think you are like a good Italian wine, dolce piccante; but we are rascally fellows, and would much rather you put the accent on the piccante.” That is what Bernier wrote him on the 11th April, 1686. But even when he goes out of his way to impose some restraint on himself, the tone and substance of the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres are evident enough. He invites the reader to bring his mind to bear on questions of the gravest import; could there be anything more important than knowing what you believe, what you do not believe, and your reasons for doing the one and the other? Therefore, let all ideas, wherever they come from, be allowed a hearing; a fair field and no favour! And let those ideas which have been of set purpose kept in the background, let the infidels, the revolutionaries come out into the open, and take an honoured place among us. Heterodoxy, smothered and hushed up elsewhere, shall here come into its own. Let everyone have his say, and let the boldest of them bear themselves like heroes. Those who gird and complain about the toleration of heresy and heretical publications must understand that what is sauce for the Inquisition is not sauce for everyone. The orthodox in particular should look heresy fearlessly in the face, unless of course they would rather put the gag on their opponent, and then brag that they have reduced him to silence.[4]
There was a touch of the febrile in his nature; else how could he have managed to get through such an enormous amount of work? He wrote the “copy”, he corrected the proofs, but he did not mind that; printer’s ink smelt sweet in his nostrils. No; but those captious readers with their finicking objections, each believing that he had the whole truth on his side, gave one a pretty good idea of the depths to which human stupidity could sink; the endless correspondence he had to enter into—that was what wore him down. When you are writing a book you can leave it for a while, if you want to, and then take it up again; you can do a little reading, for example, for there is no recreation like a change of occupation. But letter-writing! When you’ve got that to do, you have to keep hard at it, all the time. That is what takes it out of you. He carried on at this feverish rate for three years, from March, 1684, to February, 1687; then he put on the brake.
But before that happened, he had already got on his own proper road again, and it had brought him to a notable stage. He held a foremost place among the champions of Protestantism. With a prodigious flow of words, with the force of a torrent that sweeps all before it, with a spate of argument and invective, he had dealt faithfully by le Père Maimbourg. When the persecution had become more ruthless than ever, it happened that he lighted on a book which had come from France, a book in which the author sang the praises of Louis XIV for having used his power to render the country wholly Catholic again.[5] Thereupon Bayle took up his pen. He, Bayle, would give that monarch to understand what he thought of him. “If people only knew the force and present significance of the expression, no one would ever envy France the distinction of being ‘wholly Catholic’, under Louis the Great. It is now a long time since those who arrogate to themselves the name of Catholic par excellence, have been perpetrating deeds that excite such horror in every human heart that any decent person must regard it as an insult to be called a Catholic. After the evils you have wrought in that most Christian kingdom of yours, it is evident that to speak of the Catholic religion and the religion of the unrighteous is one and the same thing.”[6]
In the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke we may read the parable of how a certain man made a great supper, and how the guests who had been bidden to it with one consent began to make excuse. Then the master of the house being angry said to his servant, “Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind.” And the servant said, “Lord, it is done as Thou hast commanded, and yet there is room”. And the Lord said unto the servant, “Go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come, those whom thou shalt find there”.
Compel them to come in; compelle intrare. Those are the words which St. Augustine employed when exhorting the Donatists to return to the African Church. And since then, Catholic apologists have quoted them time and again to show how right it had been to use force against the Protestants.[7] This roused Bayle to an unexampled pitch of fury; it was an outrage on the deepest and the dearest of his convictions.[8] To use force in a matter of conscience—the thing was monstrous, horrible. And from his armoury Bayle discharged volley after volley of denunciation, vituperation and invective. The Roman Church, which claims to speak with infallible authority; which would govern the souls of men by the law of the strong right-arm; which is not ashamed to employ “converters”—dragoons shall we call them, or fiends?—is nothing but a fury and a whore. There can be no dealings with the Catholics. Have done with them! They are always harping on the same old string: “We are the Church and you are rebels; therefore, while we may chastise you, you have no right to do the like unto us.” What intolerable effrontery! Ah, let divided Europe remain divided, and may the nations who have shaken themselves free from the tyranny of Rome never fall again beneath her yoke. Doughty, heart-stirring words, these, for his co-religionists, and they owed him some gratitude. But now the whole business is once more in the melting-pot. The right to coerce, which you deny to the Catholics, you can scarcely concede to the Protestants: from the point of view of pure reason, a mystery is never anything more than a temporary obstruction, no matter how many priests or pastors may accept it. Sooner or later, the broad light of day will replace the dim religious lamp that glimmers tremulously before the tabernacle, be it in a Catholic church or a Protestant bethel. Thus, with the very weapons which he used to rout his foes, did Bayle procure the undoing of his friends. He said that the conscience is answerable only to itself; that if, in good faith, you believed what your conscience told you was the truth, no one had a right to interfere with you. If, with the best intentions in the world, one’s conscience misleads one, sin must not be imputed to it, nor must force be applied to correct it. An atheist who believes it his duty to be an atheist is in no wise to be accounted less worthy than the most orthodox of Protestants. And that word orthodox—it really ought to be suppressed, seeing that it implies the interference of authority with freedom of thought and belief. When he heard these words, Jurieu veiled his face. “Bayle”, he cried, “Bayle is a Socinian.” A Socinian he was, and something more as well, if we are to take him at his word in this apology of his: “God forbid that I should extend the jurisdiction of human intelligence and the domain of metaphysical speculation as far as do the Socinians, who lay down that any interpretation of Scripture which does not square with the said human intelligence and metaphysical ideas is to be set aside, and go on to declare that, in the light of this rule of theirs, they reject the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. No, no; I do not commit myself to any such sweeping and unqualified statements. I am fully aware that there are axioms which the clearest and most categorical denials in Scripture itself would be powerless to discredit. I mean such things as, ‘If equals be taken from equals, the remainders are equal.’ or ‘Of two contradictory statements both cannot be true’ or that ‘the essence of a thing can survive the destruction of the thing itself’. Even if Scripture proclaimed a hundred times over that those propositions were not true; even if more miracles than Moses or the Apostles ever wrought were performed to support a doctrine opposed to these universal conclusions of our natural intelligence, man, being what he is, would refuse to believe it. Rather would he say, either that Scripture was expressing itself by way of metaphor and paradox, or that the said miracles were the work of the Devil. He would, I s
ay, rather take that line than believe that man’s natural intelligence had erred in regard to the matters in question.
“I repeat: God forbid that I should wish, in such matters, to go as far as the Socinians. But if limits are to be assigned to speculative truths, I think there ought to be none in respect of the ordinary practical principles which have to do with morals. What I mean is that we ought always and without exception to refer moral laws to that natural conception of equity which, no less than the metaphysical light, illumines every man that comes into the world.
“That is the conclusion we are bound to come to, the conclusion, I mean, that any particular dogma, whatever it may be, whether it is advanced on the authority of the Scriptures, or whatever else may be its origin, is to be regarded as false if it clashes with the clear and definite conclusions of the natural understanding, and that more particularly in the domain of Ethics.”[9]