Justified True Belief

(●) The Huguenot refugee who pressed the problem of evil harder than anyone before him, and concluded that faith must stand on revelation rather than on proof. + Pierre Bayle, a French Protestant of the sort called Huguenots, spent the last twenty-five years of his life in a rented room in Rotterdam, writing. He had been driven out of France, his father had died at home while he was in exile, and his elder brother Jacob had died in a French dungeon for a book that Pierre had written. Out of that room came a reference work in two enormous folio volumes, the Historical and Critical Dictionary, which looks at first glance like an ordinary encyclopedia of names and dates and is nothing of the kind. Each entry at the head of an article is short. Underneath it run columns of footnotes in smaller type, sometimes swallowing the sheet whole and running on for several more, and the footnotes are where Bayle actually worked. Two things about him pull in opposite directions, and the pull between them is what makes him worth a Christian reader’s time. The first is that he stated the problem of evil, the difficulty of squaring a world like this one with a God who is both perfectly good and able to do anything, more powerfully than any writer before him, and he concluded that no argument can answer it. The second is that he was, by his own repeated profession, a member of the Reformed church, who drew from the failure of argument the conclusion that a Christian should stop arguing and believe what God has revealed. Readers have been divided ever since over whether he meant it. One fact fixes his standing among the philosophers. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz brought exactly one book of philosophy to press in his lifetime, the Theodicy of 1710, and he wrote it to answer Bayle.

(●) 1647 AD: He was born in a village in the Pyrenean foothills, the middle son of a Reformed pastor with a good library and no money. + Pierre Bayle was born on 18 November 1647 at Le Carla, a small town in the county of Foix in the far south of France, sitting between Pamiers and Rieux. His father Jean was the minister of the Reformed congregation there; his mother was Jeanne de Bruguière. He had an elder brother, Jacob, who would follow their father into the ministry, and a younger brother, Joseph. The household was poor and the schooling was late. Bayle was taught at home by his father for years, and illness interrupted him more than once, so that he did not begin to study logic until he was twenty-one, a fact he complained of in print long afterwards. What he did instead was read, and the two authors he came back to were Plutarch, the Greek biographer, and Montaigne, the French essayist who had made doubt into a literary form. In 1666 he was sent at last to the Protestant academy of Puylaurens. A Reformed family in the France of the 1660s lived on a permission that was being withdrawn a little at a time. The Edict of Nantes of 1598 had granted the Huguenots, as French Protestants were called, the legal right to worship; Louis XIV spent his reign narrowing it. The Bayles knew what it cost to be on the wrong side of that, and they were about to find out exactly.

(●) 1669 AD: At Toulouse he lost an argument and became a Catholic, and seventeen months later he went back, which made him a criminal. + In 1669 Bayle went to the Jesuit college at Toulouse. A Catholic priest lodged in the same house, they argued about religion, and Bayle found he could not answer the arguments put to him. He was twenty-one, he had been reading controversy since boyhood, and he took the honest course as it looked to him at the time: on 19 March 1669 he converted to the Roman Catholic Church. He did not do it quietly, and the news devastated his father. The bishop of Rieux took an interest in the new convert. Pierre, for his part, wrote to Jacob, begging his elder brother to come up to Toulouse for a few days so that the two of them could talk it through, and setting out at length why a private man should expect the church to correct him rather than the reverse. It is a strange letter to read, knowing what came later: the future champion of the individual conscience arguing that individuals do not reform churches. Within a year and a half the arguments had stopped working. On 21 August 1670, a fortnight after he finished his studies, he abjured Catholicism at Mazères in the presence of his brother and four ministers, and returned to the Reformed church. Under French law that made him a relaps, a relapsed heretic, one who has gone back to a heresy he had formally renounced, and the penalties were severe. So he left the country. He reached Geneva on 2 September 1670, and there he did one more thing that marked him: he set aside the Aristotelian philosophy the Jesuits had taught him and took up the new philosophy of René Descartes, who had proposed that a man should begin by doubting everything that could possibly be doubted and rebuild his knowledge out of whatever was left standing. Bayle would spend the rest of his life finding that less and less was left standing.

(●) 1675 AD: He won a chair of philosophy at Sedan, and when Louis XIV closed the academy under him six years later he crossed to the Dutch Republic for good. + The years after Geneva were years of tutoring other people’s children, some of them in Rouen and Paris under an assumed name, because a relaps on French soil was a man with something to hide. He was miserable at it and said so. Then a piece of news came his way. His friend Jacques Basnage had heard that the Protestant academy at Sedan meant to appoint a successor to an aged professor of philosophy, and he told Bayle to try for it. Another friend, Pierre Jurieu, already a professor of theology there, pushed his case hard. Bayle sat the competition in October 1675 and won the chair. Hold on to Jurieu’s name. He was, at this point, the man who had made Bayle’s career. Sedan lasted six years. In 1681 Louis XIV suppressed the academy by decree, part of the same slow strangling of Protestant institutions that would end four years later in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the withdrawal of the last of the protection the Huguenots had been living on. Bayle and Jurieu both left for the Dutch Republic, where the magistrates of Rotterdam founded an École Illustre, an "Illustrious School," and gave the two refugees chairs in it. Bayle was appointed professor of philosophy and history. He turned thirty-four that November, he had published nothing but a sheet of student theses, and he would never see France again.

(●) 1682 AD: A comet gave him his first book, and within two years he was writing a monthly review of everything Europe printed. + A great comet hung over Europe in December 1680, and people were frightened of it in the way people are frightened of things they have been told mean something. Comets were read as portents, warnings of war, plague and the death of kings. Bayle wrote a book about it. It came out in March 1682 as a letter addressed to an unnamed doctor of the Sorbonne, the theology faculty of Paris, and the following year it was reissued under the title it has kept ever since: Pensées diverses, "Various Thoughts," written to a doctor of the Sorbonne on the comet of December 1680. It is not really about comets. Having disposed of the astronomy in a few pages, Bayle turns to the question of what people believe and why, and arrives at the two claims that made his name: that superstition is worse for a society than unbelief, and that a society of atheists could be as orderly as a Christian one (T4). The same year he published an anonymous attack on the Jesuit Louis Maimbourg’s history of Calvinism, which was burned by the public hangman in Paris and sold well. From March 1684 to February 1687 he also edited the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, "News from the Republic of Letters," a monthly review of new books from every country and every discipline, written almost single-handed. It was one of the first journals of its kind in Europe, and it made him a figure whom scholars all over Europe wrote to. A disease of the lungs forced him to give it up.

(●) 1685 AD: The year that broke French Protestantism took his father and his brother, and produced his case for toleration. + On 18 May 1685 Bayle learned that his father had died at Le Carla on 30 March. Worse news followed. The French authorities had worked out who had written the attack on Maimbourg, and since they could not reach Pierre they took Jacob. The minister of war, Louvois, gave the order. Officers came to the house, dragged Jacob out of his loft, and carried him to the prison at Pamiers in June; in July he was moved to Bordeaux and shut in the Château Trompette. Every effort was made to get him to convert, and he would not. His health gave way instead, and he died there in November 1685, after five months in prison, for a book his brother had written in another country. In October of that same year Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes outright. Protestant worship became illegal in France, ministers were expelled, and a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand Huguenots got out of the country however they could. Bayle was already out. His family was not. What he wrote next, in 1686, was the Commentaire philosophique, a book-length argument that no one may be compelled in religion, hung on the one sentence of Scripture that had been used for centuries to justify compulsion (T3). He published it as a translation from the English of a "John Fox of Bruggs," a person who did not exist, printed at "Canterbury" by a printer who also did not exist. Everyone who mattered knew who had written it. Grief did not make him shrill: the book argues for the toleration of the people who had killed his brother.

(●) 1693 AD: Jurieu, the friend who had made his career, had him stripped of his chair, and he answered by finishing the Dictionary. + The friendship with Jurieu had curdled into the bitterest quarrel of the refugee community. Jurieu was a millenarian, a man who expected the imminent overthrow of Rome and the return of the Huguenots in triumph; Bayle thought the hope was a fantasy and the politics dangerous, and said so in print. Jurieu replied that Bayle was a secret unbeliever and an agent of France, and set out to prove it from Bayle’s own books. Pamphlet followed pamphlet through 1691 and 1692. It worked. Jurieu got the Walloon consistory, the governing body of the French-speaking Reformed congregation in Rotterdam, to examine Bayle’s writings, and once the charge of unsoundness had been laid the magistrates who paid him acted on it: in 1693 they suppressed his chair. He lost his salary and his students at forty-five, and he never taught again. By then he had already begun the work that would outlast the quarrel. A first sketch, the Projet of 1692, proposed a dictionary that would consist of other people’s mistakes (T5). The public did not care for the idea, so he rebuilt it as a historical dictionary with a critical commentary attached. Printing finished on 24 October 1696, and the Dictionaire historique et critique appeared under the date 1697 in two folio volumes. The consistory examined this too, and Bayle answered it in the second edition, the one whose printing finished on 27 December 1701 and which is dated 1702. To that edition he added four Éclaircissements, or "Clarifications," on his praise of unbelievers, on the Manicheans, on the sceptics, and on obscenity. His article on King David was censured and rewritten. His printer Leers, pressed by subscribers who wanted the real thing, put the original at the back of the volume anyway.

(●) 1706 AD: He died at fifty-nine, alone, with a reply half-corrected on the table. + The last years were spent answering the theologians who had answered him. Isaac Jaquelot and Jean Le Clerc were both Protestant ministers of a rationalist cast, which is to say that they expected the truths of religion to stand up under examination like any other truths, and they held that reason could defend the faith against the objections Bayle had raised. Bayle wrote volume after volume to show that it could not, in the Réponse aux questions d’un provincial and the Entretiens de Maxime et de Thémiste. He knew he was dying. The disease was in his lungs, he believed it hereditary and incurable, and he refused to take remedies for it. To Lord Shaftesbury he wrote that he had expected the loss of society to make him miserable and found instead that it suited him, since his complaint made speaking painful, so that he neither made nor received visits and amused himself by answering Mr Le Clerc and Mr Jaquelot. He turned down an invitation from the Earl of Albemarle to come and live with him, and went on working. His printer Leers told the story of the end. On the evening of 27 December 1706 Bayle handed over copy for the answer to Jaquelot and said he was very ill. At nine the next morning his landlady came into his room. He asked her, in a dying voice, whether his fire had been lit, and died a moment later, with nobody in the house who knew him. He was fifty-nine.

What He Taught

(T1) Reason cannot show why a good and almighty God permits evil, and pretending otherwise weakens the Christian’s position. + Bayle had lost his brother to a dungeon at Bordeaux, for a book he himself had written, and so far as anyone can tell he never once used that in an argument. He put the difficulty in the mouth of a dead heresy instead. The Manicheans were the followers of Mani, a Persian teacher of the third century after Christ, who held that the universe runs on two eternal and independent principles, one good and one evil, at war with each other. Augustine belonged to the sect for nine years before his conversion and spent decades refuting it, and by Bayle’s day nobody held it. In the articles "Manichees" and "Paulicians" Bayle lets a Manichean come back and argue, and the argument goes better for him than a reader expects. The trick of it is a distinction Bayle uses constantly. An argument a priori reasons from a principle down to what must follow from it: God is perfectly good, therefore the world he makes will be good. An argument a posteriori reasons backwards from what is actually there: here is the world, now what accounts for it. Bayle’s Manichean concedes the whole a priori case without a fight. Then he points at the world. War, torture, plague, and the ordinary meanness of families. One principle of pure goodness does not obviously predict that; two principles at war predict it rather well. Bayle’s advice to his own side, then, was to give up the ground that cannot be held, and he put it in the language of a siege. - "They should have abandoned all the reasons a priori, as the outworks of a place, which may be insulted, and cannot be maintained; they should have contented themselves with reasons a posteriori, and placed all their forces behind this entrenchment." The outworks of a fortified place are the low defenses thrown up outside the walls, and to be "insulted" in the older military sense is to be stormed. Bayle is saying: stop defending the outworks. The entrenchment he wants his readers behind is the authority of Scripture itself, which says both that God is good and that evil is here, and which therefore settles by testimony what argument cannot settle by inference. Christian philosophers since have divided over whether he was right, and the division is not between belief and unbelief. Some have held that the difficulty is answerable and have set out to answer it. Others have agreed with Bayle that no theodicy succeeds, a theodicy being an attempt to show why a good God would permit the evil we actually find, and have argued that a believer does not need one. What nobody has managed to do is put the question back the way it was before he asked it.

(Q) "The manner of introducing evil, under the empire of a sovereign being, infinitely good, infinitely holy, and infinitely powerful, is not only inexplicable but incomprehensible; and all that is objected against the reasons why this being has permitted evil, is more agreeable to natural light, and the ideas we have of order, than these reasons are." + Source: Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, article "Paulicians," remark E (Des Maizeaux translation, London, 1734–1738). The Paulicians were a medieval sect the Byzantines treated as revived Manicheans, which is why Bayle files the hardest version of the argument under their name. "Natural light" is his standard phrase for what any honest mind can see without revelation. The sting is in the second half: it is not merely that the answers fail, it is that the objection fits our sense of how things ought to be better than the answers do (T1).

(T2) What reason cannot establish, faith receives, so reason is not the measure of what a Christian believes. + There is a moment familiar to anyone who has argued long enough about anything that matters. You win a point, and then notice that the principle you won it with would need defending too, and that the defense of that would need defending. The floor keeps receding. Bayle spent his life in that condition and made a doctrine of it. The doctrine has a name, fideism, from the Latin fides, faith: the position that religious belief rests on faith rather than on proof, and does not need proof to be in good order. Bayle’s version is the strong one. He does not merely say that reason falls short; he says that reason, pushed hard, undermines itself, and that the discovery is good news, because a person who has stopped expecting satisfaction from his own reasoning is far readier to ask God for the truth than one who still hopes to argue his way there. He was not inventing this. In the same passage he quotes Pascal, who thought the way to convert a sceptic was to show him how weak reason is, and he quotes Calvin’s own liturgy for baptism, which tells the candidate that regeneration means "captivating our understandings" to the wisdom of God. Behind both stands Paul, who writes of taking every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). He also knew the obvious objection and printed it. Some learned men, he says, hold that nothing could be more opposed to religion than this, since a scepticism that dissolves reason dissolves faith along with it, and there is no way to reason a thoroughgoing sceptic back to anything at all. Bayle sets the objection out at length and does not really answer it. That silence is the reason readers have argued about him for three hundred years.

(Q) "It seems therefore, that this unhappy state is the fittest of all to convince us, that our reason is the way to wander, since when it displays itself with the greatest subtilty, it throws us into such an abyss. What naturally follows from thence, is to renounce that guide, and beseech the cause of all things to give us a better." + Source: Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, article "Pyrrho," remark C (Des Maizeaux translation, London, 1734–1738). Pyrrho of Elis was the ancient Greek founder of systematic scepticism, and his name became the label for it: Pyrrhonism. The "unhappy state" is the one Bayle has just described, in which even the reasons for doubting turn out to be doubtful, so that a man must doubt whether he ought to doubt. Bayle’s conclusion is not despair but petition: ask for a better guide than the one that brought you here (T2).

(T3) A conscience that is mistaken still binds the person who holds it, so no one may be forced in religion. + Jesus tells a story about a man who gives a banquet. The invited guests all make excuses, so the host sends his servant into the streets for the poor and the lame, and there is still room, and he sends him out again: "Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled" (Luke 14:23). Augustine, pressed by the violence of the Donatist schism in North Africa, a split in the African church over whether clergy who had buckled under persecution could be received back, applied that sentence to the coercion of heretics, and for thirteen centuries afterwards Christian rulers who burned or exiled their subjects had a text ready to hand. Bayle’s book takes its title from it: Compel Them to Come In. His central move is a rule about reading. Any interpretation of a passage of Scripture that obliges us to commit a crime cannot be the right interpretation, since the same God gave us the moral sense by which we know it is a crime. Then he turns to the parable itself and asks what compulsion could possibly accomplish. Religion, he argues, lives in the judgments of the mind and the motions of the will. Threats, fines, prisons and beatings can produce an outward act; they cannot produce a judgment or a love. A man dragged to Mass who believes nothing honours God no more than a statue blown over by a gust of wind honours a king by falling down in front of him. Then comes the part that made even his allies uneasy. Everyone in the argument agreed that a man must follow his conscience; that was common ground between Catholic and Protestant. Bayle asked the question nobody wanted, which is what follows when the conscience a man is following happens to be wrong, and he answered that an erring conscience, one sincerely persuaded of something false, carries the very same obligation as a true one. A man who believes a doctrine is God’s revealed truth is bound to act on it, and sins if he does not, even when the doctrine is false. From there the persecutor’s case collapses of its own weight. If the right to compel belongs to whoever is convinced he holds the truth, then the heretic, equally convinced, has it too, and persecution turns into a right that every party can claim and no party can settle. This is not relativism, and Bayle is careful about it. Error gains no privileges of its own; what the mistaken man is owed follows entirely from what truth is owed. And it went further than most of his contemporaries were willing to go. John Locke, writing his Letter Concerning Toleration in the same country in the same decade, would not extend toleration to atheists, nor to a church whose members owed their allegiance to a foreign prince, which every reader took to mean the Roman Catholics. Bayle extended it to both.

(Q) "Error dress’d out in the Vestments and Livery of Truth, is justly entitl’d to all that Homage which we owe to Truth it self; as a Messenger who comes with the Orders of a Master, is entitl’d to as much respect from his Servant, as the honestest Man, tho perhaps he’s no better than a Cheat or Sharper at the bottom, who has surreptitiously come by the Master’s Orders." + Source: Bayle, A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke XIV. 23, Compel Them to Come In, Part II, chapter 10 (English translation, London, 1708). A livery is the uniform a great house puts on its servants, so that anyone in the street can see whose messenger is coming. A "sharper" is a swindler. The servant at the door cannot see behind the uniform and the sealed orders; he can only obey what appears to him to be his master’s will, and he would be a bad servant if he did not. That, says Bayle, is the position every one of us is in (T3).

(T4) People do not act on their creeds, so a society of atheists could keep order as well as a Christian one. + Start with what everyone in 1680 agreed on. A comet appears, and it means something: God is warning a kingdom. Bayle wanted to take that apart, and the astronomy was the easy half. The hard half was the assumption underneath it, that people’s conduct is governed by what they believe about God. Look, he says, at Christians. Here is a population that sincerely believes in a God who sees everything and in a judgment with eternal stakes, and its members lie, cheat, fornicate and go to war at roughly the rate everyone else does. If belief actually drove conduct, that could not happen. So conduct must run on something else: temperament, upbringing, habit, appetite, the wish to be well thought of and the fear of being caught. Doctrine sits above all that, sincerely held and largely inert. Turn the point around and you get the claim that scandalised Europe. If Christians behave no better than their neighbours despite their beliefs, then atheists might well behave no worse despite their unbelief; and a society composed of them, with severe laws and a strong sense of public honour and disgrace, could be a decent place to live. He was not recommending it, and he never said an atheist was right. He was denying a premise that had been used for centuries to justify treating unbelievers as public enemies, and denying it was a necessary step toward tolerating them (T3). Alongside it ran the companion claim: superstition, which attributes to God things unworthy of him, insults him worse than plain denial does. A Christian answer has to hand him a good deal of this before it disagrees with him. Bayle is largely right about what actually moves people from hour to hour, and Scripture agrees with him that knowing the good is a different thing from doing it; Paul says as much of himself in Romans 7, where he finds himself doing the very thing he hates. What does not follow is that the moral standard people fail to keep needs no source. A society can run for a long time on inherited habits of honour and shame without ever asking where the inheritance came from, in the way a man can live in a house for years without wondering who built it, and the question of where it came from is not answered by pointing out that it is inherited.

(Q) "Now we see how probable it is a Society of Atheists wou’d observe all Civil and Moral Dutys, as other Societys do, provided Crimes were severely punish’d, and Honor and Infamy annex’d to certain Points." + Source: Bayle, Miscellaneous Reflections, Occasion’d by the Comet which appear’d in December 1680, section 172 (English translation, London, 1708). The heading of the section asks whether a society of atheists would lay themselves under rules of honour and civility. Bayle’s answer turns on the two levers he thinks actually move people, punishment and reputation, neither of which requires a belief in God to operate. Note the hedge he builds in: "how probable it is," not how certain (T4).

(T5) The real work of a reference book is correcting what the other books got wrong. + Anyone who has looked something up, found the answer, and then discovered that the answer was wrong knows the particular anger Bayle built a career on. The book he was angry at was Louis Moréri’s Grand Dictionnaire historique, the standard historical reference of the age, which was full of errors that other books then copied. His first plan, published as a sample in 1692, was simply a catalogue of Moréri’s mistakes. Readers found it petty, and he rebuilt the project: a historical dictionary in the ordinary way, with a commentary attached in which the errors could be hunted at length. What resulted is the form the book is famous for. A short entry at the head of the article, and beneath it lettered remarks that quote the sources against each other, weigh which witness was in a position to know, follow a rumour back to the first person who printed it, and quite often wander off into philosophy for twenty columns. Two habits of mind in that are worth a Christian reader’s attention, because they are the habits any honest handling of evidence requires. The first is that a claim is worth exactly what its source is worth, and that the way to find out is to go and look at the source. The second is that the same standard has to be applied to your own side. Bayle applied it to his own side relentlessly, which is why his church came after him, and why his book was still being consulted a century later by people who agreed with him about almost nothing.

(Q) "My design was to compose a Dictionary of errors: the perfection of such a work consists in observing all mistakes, great or small; for doubtless it would be a perfection in a Geographical Dictionary, and in a Map, to specify every town and village." + Source: Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, preface to the first French edition (Des Maizeaux translation, London, 1734–1738). He is explaining, a little ruefully, why the book in the reader’s hands is not the book he first advertised. The public had told him that most of the mistakes he proposed to correct were too small to matter; he answers that in a work of this kind there is no such thing as a mistake too small, any more than a village is too small for a map (T5).

(Q) "I never advance, as my own opinion, any doctrine, which is repugnant to the articles of the Confession of Faith of the Reformed Church in which I was born, and of which I make profession... our reason being so weak as it is, ought not to be the rule or measure of our faith." + Source: Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, "Explanations concerning certain things dispersed in this Dictionary," preliminary observation, fourth point (Des Maizeaux translation, London, 1734–1738). This is Bayle answering his own church. The Walloon consistory of Rotterdam had gone through the Dictionary and found four things to object to, and he prefaced his four Clarifications with a general defense: that he writes as a historian reporting what can be said on both sides, that he is a layman and not a pastor teaching from a pulpit, and that whenever he grants the unbeliever a point he draws the same conclusion from it, the conclusion the Reformed had always urged against the rationalists (T2). Whether the defense was sincere is the one question about Bayle that has never been settled.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Leibniz published one book of philosophy in his life, and wrote it to answer him. + Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was the most productive philosopher of the age and the most reluctant to finish anything; he left tens of thousands of pages in manuscript and released a single book of philosophy. That book is the Essais de Théodicée of 1710, and Bayle is its antagonist from the preface onwards. The word Leibniz coined for its title has stuck: a theodicy, from the Greek for "God" and "justice," is an attempted justification of God’s ways given the evil in the world. Leibniz’s answer was that this world, taken whole, is the best of all possible worlds, and that the evils in it are the price of goods that could not otherwise exist. Bayle would not have accepted it and did not live to see it. He was not the only one at work on the question: William King, then Bishop of Derry and afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, published De origine mali in 1702, which Bayle took apart in his turn, and Isaac Jaquelot and Jean Le Clerc kept up a running battle with him until his death. The shape of the modern discussion still follows the line Bayle drew. On one side are Christian philosophers who hold that the difficulty admits of an answer and set about giving one. On the other are those who hold, with Bayle, that no theodicy succeeds, and argue instead that a believer need not have one, since the evidence for God does not depend on our being able to see why he permits what he permits. Both camps are inside the church, and both are working on a question Bayle sharpened.

(†) The Dictionary became the reference shelf of the next century, and everybody used it. + Books of that size do not usually travel, and this one travelled everywhere. It went through edition after edition in French, was translated into English twice, and turned up in private libraries all over Europe, generally as the most substantial thing on the shelf. It was read for the scholarship and for the footnotes, and different readers took different things out of it. Voltaire, Diderot and the makers of the French Encyclopédie mined it, and the technique of the long sceptical footnote is one they learned from him. David Hume read it closely, and the articles on the Manicheans and the Paulicians stand behind the handling of evil in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Protestant scholars read it too, kept it on the shelf next to Moréri, and used it exactly as Bayle intended, to check whether a thing everyone repeated was actually so. The habit of checking is his most durable legacy and the least contested part of it. Christian apologetics runs on evidence: what a manuscript actually says, which witness was in a position to know, whether a story can be traced to anyone who was there. Bayle did not invent that discipline, but he did more than any writer of his century to make it the ordinary expectation of an educated reader.

(†) His argument against persecution won, and the churches that censured him now teach it. + In 1686, when the Commentaire philosophique appeared, the proposition that a magistrate may not punish a man for his religion was a minority view held mostly by the people being punished. Three centuries later it is the settled teaching of Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox bodies alike, defended from Scripture and from the nature of faith itself in very much the terms Bayle used: that a coerced profession is not faith, and that God asks for the heart or nothing. Bayle was not alone in the argument. John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration came out of the same Dutch exile in 1689, and the two men moved in overlapping circles in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. But Locke drew a line that Bayle refused to draw. Locke thought atheists could not be trusted to keep oaths and so could not be tolerated, and that Roman Catholics owed a loyalty abroad that made them dangerous subjects. Bayle, who had lost his brother to a Catholic king, extended the argument to Catholics and atheists without a flinch, and did it on Christian grounds: the conscience is God’s territory, and no magistrate has jurisdiction there. What he could not settle, and what the church has had to settle since, is the question his own argument raises. If a sincerely held error binds the man who holds it, the question of which convictions are actually true does not go away; it becomes more urgent, because nothing but persuasion is left to decide it. Bayle, having removed the sword from the argument, doubted that persuasion could do the job. The church that took his conclusion has generally not shared his doubt.

(†) Where his own work parts company with the Christian case: he made reason the enemy of faith, and he read Scripture’s characters as a prosecutor. + Bayle professed the Reformed faith to the end and asked to be taken at his word, and the fair thing is to take him at it and then say where he was wrong. - Reason and faith. Peter tells Christians to be "always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you" (1 Peter 3:15), and Paul treats the created order as evidence that leaves people without excuse (Romans 1:20) and argues from it to the Athenians on their own ground (Acts 17:22–31). None of that requires a proof that settles every difficulty, and Bayle is right that no argument dissolves the problem of evil. But he went further, to the claim that reason pushed hard destroys itself, and a faith held on those terms has no way of telling itself apart from any other conviction sincerely held. That is a serious cost, and it is sharpest for him, since his case against persecution needs some way of deciding who is right that is not the sword (T3). - The article on David. Bayle set out to show that the king’s faults went well beyond the three everyone admitted, the adultery with Bathsheba, the murder of Uriah and the numbering of the people, and he assembled the case with the relish of a man cross-examining a witness. The difficulty is not that he noticed the sins. Scripture names them first and names them harder: the prophet Nathan walks into the palace and tells the king to his face, "You are the man!" (2 Samuel 12:7), and the Psalms preserve David’s own confession. A book that convicts its heroes is not concealing anything, and Bayle wrote as though he had caught it out. His own consistory censured the article; he rewrote it, and the original went into the back of the volume all the same. Neither point touches what he got right, and what he got right is substantial: that the problem of evil is harder than the confident answers of his century allowed, that force cannot make a believer, and that a claim is worth what its evidence is worth. The church took all three.