Pierre Bayle's Reformation: Conscience and Criticism on the Eve of the Enlightenment. (Reviews).

Barbara Sher Tinsley, Pierre Bayle's Reformation: Conscience and Criticism on the Eve of the Enlightenment

Selinsgrove, PA and Cranbury, NJ: Susquehanna University Press, 2001. 476 pp. $65. ISBN: 1-57591-043-8.

Those who have wrestled with the problems of Bayle's philosophical thought and religious belief have paid less attention to his Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697) than they have to his other writings. Barbara Sher Tinsley describes it as "a unique tool of the greatest value" (130), and uses it "to capture Bayle's view of the Reformation and its consequences or effect on European culture down to his own time" (23). In pursuit of this aim she has not only underlined his preoccupation with liberty of conscience, but has also shed new light upon the arcane combination of fideism and skepticism in the mind of the philosopher of Rotterdam.

Tinsley provides separate chapters analyzing Bayle's articles on five major Protestant reformers (Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, Martin Bucer, John Calvin, and Theodore Beza), six Protestant outsiders (Melchior Hoffman, Sebastian Franck, Sebastian Castellio, Bernardino Ochino, Francesco Stancaro, and Faustus Socinus), and two mutually contrasting Catholics (Desiderius Erasmus and Ignatius Loyola). She checks Bayle's sources, discusses references to the main characters in his articles on other personalities and topics, and sets his views of them beside those of both modern scholars and sixteenth and seventeenth-century theologians and historians. Same important reformers are not given chapters on their own, but are mentioned in terms of their interactions with others. Tinsley explains that in some cases (Huldrych Zwingli, Thomas Muntzer) this is because Bayle failed to write an article about them, and in others because his articles afford no insight into his own opinions or because the articles lack speci ficity. Surprisingly, the article on Heinrich Bullinger is placed in the latter category when in fact it displays Bayle's admiration for those who sought compromise.

Tinsley is aware of structural problems in her book that reflect the ungainly, if intriguing, arrangement of the Dictionary itself. She advises the reader to scan the overview in her conclusion before attempting the body of the work, and she provides an appendix containing short biographies of 162 figures briefly mentioned in her text.

Bayle is shown to have felt particular sympathy for Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Castellio. In contrast, he was bitterly opposed to the policies of persecution pursued by Calvin and Beza, although, as with other magisterial reformers, he hid his criticism of the founders of his own church in his elucidations, while bestowing formal accolades in the body of his text. It was Bayle's practice to refute libels against both Protestants and Catholics and to use the works of writers of opposing creeds to correct historical errors. While paying lip service to Luther's achievement and acknowledging its necessity, he criticized the reformer's harshness to Christians of differing views and his softness to the bigamy of Philipp of Hesse. Franck and Hoffman are treated by Bayle as fanatical false prophets. Because of his distaste for Franck's pantheism, Bayle failed to recognize his own affinity with both the spiritualist's advocacy of universal toleration and his fondness for objective history. Hoffman's association with An abaptism involves Bayle in some contradiction due to his acceptance of its past persecution and his desire to rehabilitate the Anabaptists and Mennonites of his own day. Ochino's skepticism is treated with sympathy, but Socinus, despite his piety and pacifism, is criticized for being over-rational on the mystery of the Trinity. Stancaro, on the other hand, is credited by Bayle with more arrogance than piety in his treatment of the same subject. Bucer, whose motives are praised, is held to be too accommodating in his search for reconciliation between the churches. Tinsley's chapter on Loyola does not fit easily into her book. Bayle, as she points out, was more interested in the Jesuits than in their founder.

There may be some superficiality in Tinsley's treatment of Bayle's view of resistance theory and of his personal political stance. The secular political ideas of the Huguenots and the Catholic League during the Wars of Religion had not been forgotten in Bayle's own time, as she suggests. On the contrary, they had been renewed in the controversies surrounding the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and are evident in the writings of Pierre Jurieu, Bayle's former patron and subsequent opponent in a number of exchanges. In this respect one of the few relevant modern works omitted from Tinsley's bibliography is Elisabeth Israels Perry's From Theology to History: French Religious Controversy and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1973).

In contrast to his political ideas Bayle's religious and philosophical assumptions emerge clearly from Tinsley's analysis, Mysteries such as the Eucharist, the Trinity and Grace were beyond human comprehension and dispute about them led only to division and social turmoil. Conscience should never be forced, and the individual should be allowed to accept by faith what could not be understood by reason. In natural phenomena and practical human affairs a skeptical approach would lead to better understanding. Not for nothing was Bayle a Cartesian. At the level of human behavior the ethics associated with a religion were more important to Bayle than its spiritual beliefs. It is not surprising that the Enlightenment should claim him as its own, but Tinsley, unlike some modern scholars, firmly depicts him as a Christian believer of the Reformed camp.