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Philosophical Controversies - Pierre Bayle, A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14.23, ‘Compel Them to Come In, That My House May Be Full’ [1686]

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A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14.23, ‘Compel Them to Come In, That My House May Be Full’, edited, with an Introduction by John Kilcullen and Chandran Kukathas (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005).

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Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Philosophical Controversies

Bayle was an admirer of the philosophy of Nicolas Malebranche; he makes constant use of Malebranche’s key moral concept, “order” (see for example pp. 100, 129, and 259). “Order” is equivalent to the medieval idea of the “eternal law,” binding on God himself; see p. 130. Malebranche was in turn an admirer of Descartes, as were also the Jansenists Arnauld and Nicole. These “Cartesians” (and others) were exponents of the “new philosophy,” so called in contrast with medieval Aristotelianism. According to the new philosophy material things have only the qualities recognized by mathematics; other apparent qualities such as color, taste, etc. (“secondary” qualities) exist only in the perception of a human being on whom the mathematical qualities impinge. Descartes attempted to reconcile our tendency to suppose that secondary qualities exist in material things with his principle that God would not deceive us by postulating (a) that assent is voluntary, and (b) that there is a duty to withhold assent from anything that is not absolutely clear (see Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, “Meditation VI”). God gives us sensation of secondary qualities, for example taste, not to reveal the real natures of things but to guide us in preserving our bodies. Thus it is our fault of precipitate judgment, and not God’s deception, if we think that secondary qualities are real, since their reality was never absolutely clear, and we ought to have withheld assent. Nicole argued that this duty implies that Protestants’ beliefs are illegitimate (rash, temerarious), since they cannot be based on evidence that meets Descartes’s standard.

Bayle refers to these tenets of the new philosophy in various places. He comments that Descartes’s postulated duty to withhold assent in the absence of indubitable evidence is useful in natural science, but not in religion (see p. 494). He models his account of conscience on Descartes’s account of the function of the senses, such as taste: conscience does not necessarily reveal the true moral qualities of things, but is given to us as a practical guide for the preservation of our souls (see pp. 270–71). He remarks that the new philosophy’s thesis that assent is voluntary should not obliterate the distinction between culpable and nonculpable error, which the Aristotelian philosophy made in terms of a distinction between voluntary and involuntary error: even if all error is in some sense voluntary, some errors are nonculpable (see pp. 486, 487).

Bayle points out on several occasions the great difficulty of reaching reasonable conclusions on many important questions (see, for example, Supplement, chapter XXIV, p. 531). In his Historical and Critical Dictionary the arguments for skepticism became a major theme; see for example the article “Pyrrho.” (Pyrrhonism is the assertion—if a Pyrrhonist can assert anything—that nothing can be asserted even as merely probable, at least on speculative questions.) Bayle points out that skepticism and Christian faith are inconsistent, since a Christian must assent to doctrines on some of these difficult questions (see HCD, art. “Pyrrho,” rem. B, and art. “Nicolle,” rem. C; see also RQP 770 b51–771 a48, EMT 42 a40–61). Arguments for skepticism are therefore objections to Christianity, but Bayle, though he presents the skeptical arguments, rejects Pyrrhonism (e.g. p. 75) and affirms the doctrines of Calvinist Christianity. He objects to Nicole’s arguments on temerity that they lead to Pyrrhonism and destroy Christianity (see pp. 390–91).

For more on these topics see the relevant articles in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), The New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967–79), and The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: The Universal Knowledge Foundation, 1913–14; on-line at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/).