The philosopher, history critic, and religious inquirer Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), a Huguenot refugee who fled France's religious tyranny, was one of the most misunderstood thinkers of his, or any, age. He piqued and puzzled not only his contemporary but also modem scholars. Though admired by Diderot and Voltaire, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Frederick the Great and David Hume, his preoccupation with Christian dogmatists produced as much confusion as his condemnation of state and clerical persecution (eventually) produced admiration. He distinguished between good religious dogma and good citizens, insisting that the former does not necessarily produce the latter, an insight that scandalized many who thought him an atheist. This work is an historiographical analysis of Bayle's view of the Reformation and the Europeans it affected.

Bayle was not, like Voltaire and Diderot, a Deist, nor like Hume, a religious skeptic, for he adhered to the Calvinist Reformed faith and died in his church. Yet, he gave the world a paradigm in his Critical and Historical Dictionary for regarding all customs, including religious ones, skeptically and critically. He did that by separating faith from reason, the modern solution. Although the last third of the twentieth century witnessed a revival of Bayle scholarship, only Bayle's philosophy, religious belief, and historical method has attracted scholars. His views on modern religious history are scarcely treated, and those on the Protestant Reformation are assumed positive without systematic examination. The present work meets that need. Here are the careers of thirteen of the major religious reformers as presented in Bayle's Dictionary articles and other works. The reformers include two Catholics (Erasmus and Loyola) as well as Lutherans, Calvinists, and Radicals.

Tinsley constructs a new view of Bayle's response to reform, not one of qualified approval but of extreme disapproval because of the enmities and coercion perpetrated by reformers and magistrates. She has translated and incorporated long passages of Bayle's writings into her text so readers enter effortlessly into Bayle's rhetoric. Excessive zeal, persecution, and violence in the defense of church organization, discipline and governance, dogmatic polemic, and sectarian rivalry made Bayle think that the Reformation, like the papal church, perpetrated intolerable constraints of conscience. The author exposes the intellectual and spiritual environment of one of the pre-Enlightenment's most penetrating intellects, revealing a pioneer in the matter of religious tolerance, and the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and pre-Enlightenment eras as formative periods in shaping our modern culture.

Bayle adumbrated important concepts of what would become modem constitutional government--universal religious toleration, separation of church and state, and respect for individual conscience. Like Michel de Montaigne, whose Essays he admired, Bayle's skepticism, satire, ingenuousness, and disingenuousness antagonized and charmed a wide audience. His readers were at risk, but the hazards were never greater than the rewards--the realization that ordinary people could direct their own conscience, even when they did not know the answers or even all the questions.

LC 00-058369 ISBN 1-57591-043-8 Printed in the U.S.A.