II.4 - Virtuous Atheism, Philosophic Sin, and Toleration

Summary

This chapter returns to the start of Bayle’s publishing career, and the famous argument for the possibility of virtuous atheism in the Pensées diverses. Bayle’s sources and modes of argumentation are identified. Ultimately, the work was a relatively trivial piece of haute vulgarisation; to the extent that the book had an underlying message, it was to outline an anti-Pelagian anthropology. The book proved entirely uncontroversial until it was incorporated into the anti-Bayle campaign waged by Jurieu in the early 1690s. Only at this point did Bayle come up with the elaborate historicisation already discussed in II.1, which also served to expand greatly the canon of (moral) ancient and Asian atheists. But this argument also served another purpose: to further elaborate Bayle’s case for toleration, based on the rights of the errant conscience. This involved Bayle in the theological controversy over ‘philosophic sin’ that had been stirred up by Antoine Arnauld. It led him to develop his mature position. Philosophy had historically been valuable in morality, but disastrous when it came to conceptualising the divine. Christianity had resolved the situation by providing solutions to otherwise insoluble theological problems via its doctrine of creation ex nihilo by a transcendent creator deity (rather than a metaphysical first principle), and by supplying the common people with a set of moral doctrines clearer than those of any philosopher.