TWO
RELIGIOUS EPISTEMOLOGY, TOLERATION, AND THE SOCIAL ORDER

Religion was the language into which political questions were cast, and men believed in their religions.
Rosalie L. Colie

2
Dryden's Religio Laici and the Politics of Scriptural Deism

On ne pouvait lire les livres sibyllins sans la permission du sénat, qui ne la donnait même que dans les grandes occasions, et lorsqu'il s'agissait de consoler les peuples. Toutes les interprétations étaient défendues; ces livres même étaient toujours renfermés; et, par une précaution si sage, on ôtait les armes des mains des fanatiques et des séditieux.
Montesquieu

ORTHODOXY AND POLITICAL LOGIC

Commentators have generally agreed that Dryden's Religio Laici is a religious poem, but they have disagreed as to the sort of religion that the poem is setting forth. Views attributed to Dryden have ranged from proto-Catholic fideistic skepticism,1 . to orthodox Anglicanism,2 to a lingering deism or crypto-deism.3

One explanation for this disagreement immediately presents itself: the poem and its preface contain individual passages that fit each of the religious views attributed to Dryden. In the face of this fact, the most common critical procedure seems to have been to assume that one set of passages predominates and that the others represent lapses or inconsistencies that are best ignored. Another approach has been to see the opposing tendencies as representing a tension in Dryden's religious outlook.4 A third conspicuous approach has been to argue that the apparent anomalies can be subsumed under a religious tradition that is sufficiently capacious to embrace all the doctrines that Dryden enunciates.

This last view, since being magisterially set forth by Phillip Harth in 1968,5 has been the most influential. Harth argues that Religio Laici is fundamentally an orthodox Anglican poem in which Dryden first rejects deism in favor of revealed Christianity and then rejects Roman Catholicism and Puritanism in favor of the Anglican via

media. Armed with a formidable command of the tradition of Anglican apologetics, Harth is able to show that virtually everything that Dryden says in the poem has an antecedent or counterpart in the Anglican tradition.

To place various elements of Dryden's Religio Laici in the Anglican tradition, however, is not necessarily to make sense of the poem. The Anglican tradition, after all, can be seen to be nothing more than the sum of the various pronouncements of the various figures who have claimed to be orthodox Anglicans and whose claims to orthodoxy have not been widely rejected. Nor does it help matters to place Dryden more specifically in the tradition of Anglican rationalism or to stress his connection to the efflorescence of rationalism among his latitudinarian contemporaries, most notably Archbishop Tillotson. For one thing, the fact that the orthodoxy of Tillotson and his latitudinarian confreres has been challenged both by his traditionalist contemporaries in the High Church party and by a succession of recent scholars only points up the inconclusiveness of attempting to establish Dryden's orthodoxy through an appeal to his latitudinarian tendencies. But even if we leave aside the question of whether Dryden's affinity to Tillotson guarantees his orthodoxy, there remains the problem of coherence. Tillotson's own position represents a gathering of theological elements whose relationship to one another, from a theological perspective, can at best be termed uneasy. Robert E. Sullivan has summed up the paradoxical theological situation in which the latitudinarians found themselves:

Like their predecessors, the Anglican rationalists did not fail to appeal either to the presumed existence of a universal moral principle or to an innate religious faculty in an attempt to demonstrate Christianity's fundamental reasonableness. They were, however, more venturesome in endeavoring to assert simultaneously that idiosyncratic Christian teachings were true and that conformity to the discipline of natural religion was sufficient for salvation.6

In the course of my analysis it will emerge that Dryden, to some extent at least, follows the "venturesomeness" of the latitudinarian divines. In this regard, Harth is perfectly justified in claiming Dryden's affinity to latitudinarian "orthodoxy." But such a theological approach to the poem allows us to conclude nothing more than

that Dryden, borrowing an incoherent set of premises from Anglican sources, had produced an incoherent Anglican poem.

I am concerned, however, not so much with challenging the orthodoxy or theological consistency of Religio Laici as with showing that the poem has a consistent and rigorous political logic and that this political logic accounts for the theological anomalies.

That the poem has, at the very least, a conspicuous political dimension is evidenced by the fact that, as Steven N. Zwicker has recently put it, "at the poem's close we discover that 'common quiet' and not salvation is mankind's concern." Zwicker is somewhat ironically alluding to the fact that, after several hundred lines in which "Dryden guides the religious pilgrim on the path to salvation [and] narrates a history of philosophical and religious beliefs," he concludes his ostensibly religious argument with an emphatically political exhortation:7

private Reason 'tis more Just to curb,
Than by Disputes the publick Peace disturb.
For points obscure are of small use to learn:
But Common quiet is Mankind's concern.8

Zwicker argues convincingly that this concluding political appeal represents no last-minute switch from religious to political concerns but is the culmination of an attack on the Puritans and the Catholics, an attack that dominates the second half of the poem and that is deeply political in nature. Zwicker, however, has little to say about Dryden's attack on deism in the first half of the poem or about its relationship to the political concerns of the second half.

Harth, on the other hand, has a good deal to say about Dryden's attack on deism. His volubility results from the fact that he finds this part of Dryden's polemic problematic and in need of detailed explanation. There is, of course, no difficulty in understanding why an orthodox Anglican would be unable to countenance deism, but Harth is initially troubled by the question of why Dryden should, in 1682, feel a need to address deism at all.

My analysis of the political logic of the poem will focus on the relationship of Dryden's attack on deism to everything that follows. This will allow me to work out the logical and rhetorical articulations of Dryden's overall argument. Harth's careful attempt to

account for the first half of the poem without any reference to the politics of deism will provide a useful point of departure.

DRYDEN'S "OCCASION"

Harth is troubled, at least temporarily, by the need to ascertain the occasion for Dryden's attack on deism in the first half of the poem. Dryden, he tells us, "habitually writes as an 'occasional' poet in the best sense of that term. He seizes upon some occasion which has aroused excitement or controversy and makes it the subject of a poem which he publishes before the public's interest has subsided."9

The discussion of Catholicism and Puritanism in the second half of the poem is, Harth observes, sparked by the publication, by Dryden's own publisher Jacob Tonson, of Henry Dickinson's English translation of Père Simon's monumental and controversial Histoire critique du vieux testament. Indeed, Dryden acknowledges the occasion by prefacing that discussion with praise of both Dickinson and Simon. But, Harth further observes, in 1682 there was no apparent occasion for an attack on deism. The published writings of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the so-called father of English deism, had appeared many years earlier. There had been no conspicuous recent publication of any deist text. The deist controversy had not yet begun. According to Harth's premise about Dryden's status as an occasional poet, the poet must have been responding to someone or something, but Lord Herbert's temporal distance and lack of prominence make him an unlikely candidate for the role: "To conclude that Dryden interrupted his activities in 1682 to launch an attack on the little noticed and long forgotten writings of a Caroline philosopher who had died while the poet was still at school is to make an unwarranted assumption about his habits as a writer for which there is no parallel in his entire career."10 What, then, is the occasional poet's occasion? Having posed this problem for himself, Harth undertakes to solve it by arguing for the existence of a clandestine deist literature, intervening between Lord Herbert's writings and Dryden's poem, and inducing the poet to enter the lists against deism.

The central exhibit in Harth's case is an undated manuscript entitled "Of Natural Religion," which Harth discovered (bound with miscellaneous printed materials) in the British Library. Harth

finds certain differences between the way in which the deistic position is formulated in this manuscript and the way in which it had been formulated by Lord Herbert in his famous five articles, or "common notions." On the other hand, certain features of the formulation in the anonymous manuscript are found to recur in Dryden's statement of the Deist's11 position in Religio Laici (ll. 43-61), leading Harth to the following equivocal conclusion: "While there is no reason to suppose that this pamphlet was the only deist tract that Dryden might have seen, the similarities in this case are so close that we are tempted to ask whether some form of the manuscript would have been available to Dryden before the middle of 1682."12 I characterize this as an equivocal conclusion because, although Harth employs the sublimely diffident locution "we are tempted to ask," he subsequently goes on with his discussion as if the tentative question has amounted to a definitive answer and the problem of the occasion for Dryden's treatment of deism has in fact been resolved.

I mention these things not because I wish to engage in a critique of Harth's rhetorical strategies but because I wish to suggest that the explicit caution with which he offers his solution is more warranted than the implicit assurance with which he allows it to play a decisive role in his argument. Without entering into the details of Harth's comparison between Lord Herbert's formulations, Dryden's, and those of the anonymous tract, we can observe that no matter how numerous or striking the similarities between Dryden's formulations and those of the tract, these similarities cannot establish that Dryden was responding to the anonymous author. For Harth's data are also compatible with other hypotheses. According to one alternative explanation, set forth by William Empson, the similarities between the deist tract and Dryden's poem are attributable to Dryden's having been the author of both.13 A second, less provocative, counterhypothesis is suggested by the fact that the manuscript tract is undated. As long as we do not know the date of the manuscript, we cannot rule out the possibility that it postdated Religio Laici and that its author—whoever it may have been—borrowed formulations from Dryden's poem.

I mention these counterhypotheses, however, only in passing. My purpose is not to argue for the preferability of one or the other of them over Harth's own etiology of Dryden's deistic formulations.

Indeed, my unease with Harth's painstaking attempt to reconstruct a line of descent between Herbert's formulation of the deist position and Dryden's own lies not so much with the reconstruction itself as with the assumption that the alleged discovery of intermediate formulations of deism is tantamount to the discovery of the reason Dryden saw fit to add an attack on deism to his timely attacks on Catholicism and Puritanism. Harth seems to assume that any heterodoxy that has been stated recently or insistently is a threat to orthodoxy and therefore a suitable target for Dryden's polemical attack. But I will show that Dryden's attacks on Catholicism and Puritanism are motivated by political rather than theological or doctrinal imperatives and that deism, far from posing a similar political threat, gave Dryden a weapon with which to respond to what he saw as the real threat. Dryden's purpose in the poem is not to engage in religious controversy but to dissolve religious controversy for the sake of public order, and Dryden's treatment of deism is subtly but indissolubly tied to that purpose. Once we understand the political logic of the poem, we will be in a position to see that the occasion for Dryden's treatment of deism is embedded in his overall argument and that Harth's laborious reconstruction of a possible line of descent from Herbert to Dryden, whatever its scholarly merits, is irrelevant to an understanding of the role of deism in the Religio Laici.

PÈRE SIMON AND THE PERILS OF PROTESTANTISM

In posing the question of the occasion for Dryden's attack on deism, Harth curiously fails to confront the fact that Dryden himself explicitly tells us something about what had occasioned his thoughts, or at least some of them, in the first, antideist, half of the poem. After offering a series of refutations of the deistic claim that a sufficient knowledge of God and of our obligations toward him could be obtained by reason alone, independently of revelation, Dryden completes his consideration of deism by answering a hypothetical "Objection of the Deist"—namely, a morally potent objection to Dryden's insistent claim that reason is insufficient. If unaided reason cannot yield the fundamental theological and moral truths of Christianity, then the countless inhabitants of newly

discovered lands, lands that the gospel had never reached, must be denied salvation:

'Tis said the sound of a Messiah's Birth
Is gone through all the habitable Earth:
But still that Text must be confin'd alone
To what was Then inhabited, and known:
And what Provision cou'd from thence accrue
To Indian Souls, and Worlds discover'd New?
(ll. 174-79)

Dryden immediately grants that "Of all Objections this indeed is chief / To startle Reason, stagger frail Belief" (ll. 184-85). Then, having acknowledged the force of the objection, he immediately undertakes to address it. His solution is to suppose, or at least to hope, that salvation will indeed be extended to those heathens:

because a Rule reveal'd
Is none to Those, from whom it was conceal'd,
Then those who follow'd Reasons Dictates right;
Liv'd up, and lifted high their Natural Light;
With Socrates may see their Maker's Face.
(ll. 206-10)

Dryden thus suggests not only that the heathens cannot be blamed for failing to follow the dictates of revealed Christianity but that, in the absence of revelation, they are nonetheless able to behave morally and thereby achieve salvation. This they can accomplish by following the "natural light" of reason. Dryden here may seem to end up accepting a good deal of what his attack on deism is ostensibly rejecting—a paradox that will recur in the poem and whose significance will become clear in the course of my analysis. In the meantime, though, I am still concerned with the question of the occasion for this series of thoughts.

After the discussion of deism, part of which I have just outlined, Dryden moves to what the marginal rubric calls the "Digression to the Translator of Father Simon's Critical History of the Old Testament." Here we have explicit reference to the book that Harth identifies as the occasion for the second half of the poem. But it is interesting to see how Dryden makes his transition from his discussion of deism to his "Digression":

Thus far my Charity this path has try'd;
(A much unskilfull, but well meaning guide:)
Yet what they are, ev'n these crude thoughts were bred
By reading that, which better thou hast read,
Thy Matchless Author's work: which thou, my Friend,
By well translating better dost commend. (ll. 224-29)

The path that Dryden's "Charity . . . has try'd" is, in the narrowest possible interpretation, the poet's answer to the Deist's objection. For Dryden had twice linked his views on the salvation of the heathens to his charity: "Not onely Charity bids hope the best" (l. 198); "Nor does it baulk my Charity, to find / Th' Egyptian Bishop of another mind" (ll. 212-13). Of course, since Dryden's charitable sentiments concerning the salvation of the heathens mark the culmination of his treatment of deism, it is possible that the phrase "these crude thoughts" refers to the entire foregoing discussion. But leaving aside the question of just how much of the discussion of deism is encompassed by Dryden's reference to "these crude thoughts," it is noteworthy that the thoughts to which Dryden refers were "bred" by his reading of the book that Dickinson, as translator, has read "better" than Dryden has and that has been enhanced by the skill with which the translator has rendered his "Matchless Author's work." Thus the publishing event that Harth has designated as the occasion for the second half of the poem is explicitly presented by Dryden as the occasion for at least part of his discussion of deism in the first half.

I have said that my interest in Dryden's treatment of deism centers on its role in the argument of Religio Laici. Accordingly, my focus on Dryden's remark that his "crude thoughts were bred" by his reading of Simon's Critical History is intended to point not to a seminal event but to the logical and rhetorical strategies by which the individual parts of the poem are made to serve Dryden's overall purpose. How, then, does Dryden's discussion of deism relate to his discussion of Simon?

A pioneer of biblical textual criticism, Père Simon is at pains to show the unreliability of scriptural transmission. Copyists and translators introduce errors and distortions; and the result, after many centuries, is a corrupt text. One might, of course, be tempted to see an attack on the reliability of the chief instrument of divine revelation as an attack on revealed religion itself, but Simon is

careful to ward off such an interpretation of his project. He turns the critique of the reliability of Scripture into a Roman Catholic argument against Protestantism. The Protestants' ability to dispense with the Church's role as mediating authority depends on the reliability and clarity of the biblical text. But Simon argues that the unreliability of the text renders the traditional exegetical authority of the Church all the more indispensable:

The great alterations which have happened . . . to the copies of the Bible since the first Originals have been lost, utterly destroy the Protestants and Socinians Principle, who consult onely these same Copies of the Bible as we at present have them. If the truth of Religion remain'd not in the Church, it would be unsafe to search for it at present in Books which have been subject to so many alterations, and have in many things depended upon the pleasure of Transcribers.14

In itself, Simon's argument requires almost no commentary. But it is worth noting that the mention of the Protestants and the Socinians in tandem—thus simultaneously distinguishing them from each other and tying them together—is a pervasive practice that takes on a strategic role in Simon's overall polemic. This practice will culminate in Simon's claim, in book 3, that the antitrinitarian extreme represented by the Socinians is a logical outgrowth of the Protestant principle of lay exegesis and that, consequently, there is no defensible Protestant middle ground between Socinianism and Catholicism: "There have . . . been very few Protestant Divines who have sufficiently answer'd the Socinians, who affirm that there can be no medium held betwixt their Religion, and the Roman Catholick; for if we take the Scripture, Reason, and Experience for our Rule, we must, say they, be of their Opinion, whereas if we follow the prejudices of Tradition, we must of necessity joyn with the Roman Catholicks."15 Thus, by propping weakened Scripture against the authority of Catholic tradition, Simon attempts to deflect the charge that his textual criticism undermines Christianity. It undermines only those branches of Christianity that think they can depend on an unmediated reading of the biblical texts—only, that is, Protestantism.

One might expect Dryden, as an avowed defender of revelation and of the Church of England, to have no sympathy for Simon's

erudite work, either in its prima facie role as an attack on the reliability of the biblical text or in the role to which the author piously applies it, as an instrument of Catholic apologetics. Indeed, since the Church of England presents itself as a via media between traditional authority and unbridled autonomy, and since Simon's scholarship and his arguments militate against the feasibility of any such middle ground, one might expect Dryden to be particularly resistant to Simon's theses.

Dryden does not, however, challenge Simon's scholarship or its general implications for the reliability of Scripture. Instead he commends Simon the scholar and adroitly turns this commendation into an attack on Simon the Catholic apologist:

A Work so full with various Learning fraught,
So nicely pondred, yet so strongly wrought,
As Natures height and Arts last hand requir'd:
As much as Man cou'd compass, uninspir'd.
Where we may see what Errours have been made
Both in the Copiers and Translaters Trade:
How Jewish, Popish , Interests have prevail'd,
And where Infallibility has fail'd. (ll. 244-51)

After granting Simon's overall claim that the biblical text has been extensively corrupted by copiers and translators, Dryden, in the last two lines of this passage, indicates that he is not going to grant that this fact in any way redounds to the benefit of Catholicism. First, the distortions of the text are attributed not entirely to simple negligence but, at least in part, to "Popish Interests." Moreover, rather than pointing to the need for reliance on the authority of Catholic tradition, the corruption of the scriptural text points to the failure of that tradition, to its fallibility. Dryden's turning of the tables on Simon, transforming an argument for a dependence on Church authority into a thrust against the reliability of Church authority, is not merely a passing jab. Rather, it heralds a lengthy argument in which Dryden begins by claiming that the same sorts of circumstances that, in the course of time, produce distortions in written texts must yield even greater distortions in the oral traditions of the Church:

If written words from time are not secur'd,
How can we think have oral Sounds endur'd?

Which thus transmitted, if one Mouth has fail'd,
Immortal Lyes on Ages are intail'd:
And that some such have been, is prov'd too plain;
If we consider Interest, Church, and Gain .
(ll. 270-75)

The argument concludes with the claim that if Church tradition were really all that reliable an authority, it would be able to employ its infallibility in establishing a correct biblical text:

But if this Mother be a Guid so sure,
As can all doubts resolve , all truth secure ,
Then her Infallibility , as well
Where Copies are corrupt , or lame , can tell;
Restore lost Canon with as little pains,
As truly explicate what still remains :
Which yet no Council dare pretend to doe.
(ll. 285-90)

Having seen how Dryden's attack against Catholicism depends upon his acceptance of Simon's critique of the integrity of Scripture, one may well wonder what ground this leaves Dryden to stand on in his role as Anglican apologist. After all, to extend Simon's textual criticism into an attack against Catholic tradition would seem to spread the destructiveness of the Critical History without in any way rescuing the scriptural bastion on which Protestantism depends.

To avoid having his own position undermined by his attack on Catholicism, Dryden, while accepting Simon's claim of extensive textual corruption, places crucial limits upon this corruption. However unreliable the biblical texts may be, they are reliable in matters necessary for salvation:

the Scriptures , though not every where
Free from Corruption, or intire, or clear,
Are uncorrupt, sufficient, clear, intire,
In all things which our needfull Faith require.
(ll. 297-300)

This solution is not presented as a bare assertion, but is premised on God's goodness. The premise is presented succinctly, and a bit elliptically, in a single line of italic print: "God wou'd not leave Mankind without a way" (l. 296). But the significance of this line would be perfectly clear to Dryden's readers: God is good, and although he

may have allowed human error and Roman Catholic deceit to distort the original revealed text, he, in his goodness, would not have left mankind without the means to attain salvation.

Dryden can afford to premise his solution on a single elliptical sentence because the premise is universally acceptable. But it is important to realize that the premise is so universally acceptable that it would be embraced even by the deists. In fact, it is a premise on which deism itself rests. The deist argues that God, in his goodness, would not allow countless heathens who, through no fault of their own, had never received the gospel to suffer everlasting perdition. By the same token, God would not allow Christians who, through no fault of their own, have received a distorted version of the gospel to suffer damnation as a result. For the deists, however, Dryden's premise points to a conclusion different from Dryden's own—namely, that God provided all humankind with the means for salvation by inscribing the needful truths in every human heart.

In putting forth his solution, the deist, it should be noted, did not need to reject revealed religion as spurious. He needed only to claim that supernatural revelation is not the sine qua non of salvation but that its "needful truths" are those that God, through other means, has made universally available. Indeed, this was precisely the tack that had been taken by Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Although Simon may have brought unprecedented erudition to bear on the textual criticism of the Bible, he was by no means the first to reveal that biblical texts were ambiguous and could give rise to violently conflicting interpretations. That fact had been amply demonstrated by the entire religious and political history of the sixteenth century. And Hooker, in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, had long since supplied the armory of Anglican apologetics with the notion that "thinges necessarie to all mens salvation . . . are in Scripture plaine and easie to be understood."16 What Lord Herbert had done was to moderate his own iconoclasm by claiming that he was not rejecting either Scripture or Hooker's principle while subsuming them under the more universal religion of deism:

It will be worth while . . . to inquire more thoroughly what in the Sacred Scriptures may be called the pure and undisputed word of

God. Not everything indeed that is contained in Scripture, or that the most absurd priest has said, is endowed with equal authority. . . . There remains the question, therefore, what in the Holy Bible is the very word of God, and further what is most necessary to salvation. And here in the first place, surely . . . we find our catholic truths, which as the undoubted pronouncements of God, transcribed within us, are to be set apart and preserved.17

Thus, according to Lord Herbert, we recognize the uncorrupted essence of Scripture because it corresponds to what God has imprinted upon our minds independently of any revealed religion· But if there had been no Scripture, or if a remote race of people had never received the Scripture, they would not have been left "without a way."

For Dryden, as for Lord Herbert, there is a core of truth in Scripture. But for Dryden, as we shall see, it is recognizable not by appeal to any extratextual criterion, such as truths inscribed in our hearts, but on the basis of the fact that it is clear enough to stand above the fray of all the competing interpretations. In a word, it is impervious to interpretation. This fact will have enormous consequences for our understanding of Dryden's poem, but for now we need to recognize merely that Dryden's "orthodox" premise, that God would not leave us without a way, can yield Lord Herbert's heterodox conclusion and that Herbert's conclusion is in fact a more comprehensive version of Dryden's own. Indeed, the only thing that allows Dryden to offer his own conclusion—that the biblical text is "uncorrupt" in all things necessary for salvation—as if it were the only one that could be elicited from his premise, is the fact that Dryden has already "refuted" deism in the first half of the poem.

Having observed that Dryden himself said that his "crude thoughts" in the first half of the poem were "bred / By reading" Simon's book, I undertook to determine how the thoughts occasioned by Dryden's reading of Simon might have given rise to his refutation of deism· For if we could see how the second half of the poem required the first half, then we could take the poet at his word and not have to follow Harth in his inconclusive search for a separate occasion. We have now found at least a part of an alternative solution to Harth's problem. Dryden wishes to turn Simon's

arguments on their head, to convert precisely that evidence of textual corruption that Simon had used as a Catholic club against Protestantism into a weapon directed against the Church of Rome. But in doing so, he needed to avoid the danger that, by accepting Simon's general case against the reliability of scriptural transmission, he would be pushed toward the deist position that the availability of salvation is not dependent on Scripture at all but is available through reason, through common notions that God, in his goodness, has engraved on the human understanding. To rule out this alternative, and to leave the field to the ostensibly orthodox notion that God, in his goodness, must provide the needful truth in Scripture, Dryden had to preface his entire discussion of Simon and Catholicism with a refutation of deism.

MINIMALISM: RATIONAL AND REVEALED

To see why Dryden needed to refute deism is, paradoxically, to see how much Dryden's alternative to both deism and Catholicism bears the imprint of deistic thought. Granted, insofar as deism is defined as allowing access to religious knowledge through the inner light of reason and Christianity as requiring scriptural revelation, they represent epistemological contraries. But insofar as the over-arching tendency of deism is toward the rejection of mystery and sectarian exclusivity in favor of the universal accessibility of religious knowledge and salvation, Dryden's version of Protestantism may be seen to carry this tendency as far as it can be carried within the arena of revealed religion.

Dryden's Protestantism, like deism, is a religion of doctrinal minimalism. After telling us that, despite the extensive textual corruption revealed by Simon, there is a core, "uncorrupt, sufficient, clear, intire," Dryden never specifies just which doctrines are included among the scriptural minima. Instead, he makes it clear that any doctrine that depends upon a disputed interpretation of Scripture is not essential. After stating the principle that the Bible is clear "In all things which our needful Faith require," Dryden gives utterance to an objection, identified by the marginal rubric as an "Objection in behalf of Tradition; urg'd by Father Simon." In keeping with Simon's actual procedures, the hypothetical objection culminates with an attempt to use the heterodox extreme of Socin-

ianism to illustrate the dangers of trying to adjudicate between conflicting interpretations without appealing to the authority of Catholic tradition:

(What one Sect Interprets, all Sects may :)
We hold, and say we prove from Scripture plain,
that Christ is GOD; the bold Socinian
From the same Scripture urges he's but MAN.
Now what Appeal can end th' important Suit;
Both parts talk loudly, but the Rule is mute ?
(ll. 310-15)

This hypothetical objection challenges Dryden to accept the consequences of his principle. If the essential doctrines that God has preserved from textual corruption are so plain that they are not subject to varying interpretations, then these essential doctrines must exclude even the doctrine of the divinity of Christ; for even so fundamental a doctrine as that has been denied by the "bold Socinians" on the basis of their interpretation of Scripture. Dryden boldly accepts the challenge:

Shall I speak plain, and in a Nation free
Assume an honest Layman's Liberty ?
I think (according to my little Skill,
To my own Mother-Church submitting still:)
That many have been sav'd, and many may,
Who never heard this Question brought in play.
Th' unletter'd Christian, who believes in gross,
Plods on to Heaven ; and ne'er is at a loss.
(ll. 316-23)

While parenthetically submitting to the Church of England, Dryden denies that the official church's doctrines—beyond those accessible to all other readers (and auditors) of Scripture and, hence, propounded by all other Christian confessions are necessary for salvation.

Dryden's scriptural minimalism is thus so skeletal as to be able to include both trinitarians and Socinians. Like deism, it requires no hierophants, no exegetical tradition, no interpretive skills. Indeed, its doctrines, like those of deism, are accessible independently of all scriptural interpretation. Although the poem never tells us what these minimal doctrines may be, it is hard to see how

they can be anything other than the doctrines of deism itself. Indeed, the affinity between the deist's rational minimalism and Dryden's revealed minimalism can be seen in the fact that Lord Herbert, in the passage quoted above, is able to present the two sorts of minimalism in the same breath. The only thing that distinguishes Dryden's position from that of Lord Herbert is Dryden's insistence that the necessary doctrines are accessible solely through Scripture. For this reason I propose to characterize the layman's religion of Dryden's poem as "scriptural deism."

THE SHIFTING POLITICS OF DEISM

Many of Dryden's orthodox contemporaries strongly embraced the principles of natural religion, which led them to stress the aspects of Christianity that are universally available to the inner light of reason and to downplay those dogmas that depend most conspicuously on biblical revelation. "Even amongst theologians who essayed the defence of revelation against the champions of natural religion," as one historian has put it, "the tendency was strong to ignore diversities of confession and church polity as things indifferent; and to concentrate on the proof of the claims of Christianity as enforcing and re-affirming the tenets of natural religion."18

In any event, the tendency was to present the relationship between natural religion and orthodox theology as one of complementarity. There was even a popular genre of late seventeenth-century theological works in which orthodox divines first argued in favor of natural religion and then moved on to argue in favor of Christianity.19 Dryden's procedure, however, is not to show that natural religion and orthodox Christianity are complementary nor to use one to supplement the other. We have already seen how, in the first half of the poem, Dryden says that heathens may be saved by dint of their ability to follow "reason's dictates." But this eminently deistic sentiment comes only after a lengthy attack on deism and is presented as an instance of Christian charity warranted by Pauline principles:

Not onely Charity bids hope the best,
But more the great Apostle has exprest:
That, if the Gentiles, (whom no Law inspir'd,)

By Nature did what was by Law requir'd;
They, who the written Rule had never known,
Were to themselves both Rule and Law alone:
To Natures plain indictment they shall plead;
And, by their Conscience, be condemn'd or freed.
(ll. 198-205)

Dryden, both here and in his scriptural deism of the second half of the poem, rather than arguing for the compatibility of Christianity and natural religion, engages in a strategy of co-optation: he explicitly rejects deism while assimilating its principles into the structure of an argument that he presents as orthodox.20

It could be objected at this point that Dryden's attack on deism does not distinguish him fundamentally from many of his latitudinarian contemporaries. Those who embraced natural religion, even if they did not make a point of attacking deism, very rarely went so far as to repudiate revealed religion or to deny the central mysteries of the Incarnation and the Trinity. Instead, these Anglican rationalists were careful to distinguish themselves from the deists, whom they depicted as claiming to have their religious knowledge exclusively through reason. Accordingly, it could be objected that modern scholars who maintain that "the distinction between orthodoxy and Deism [was] often very tenuous and sometimes only a matter of retaining the conventional theological phraseology"21 are willfully ignoring the fact that Anglican adherents of natural religion were not satisfied with reason alone and therefore rejected deism.22

One could presumably apply the same sort of objection to my foregoing analysis and assert that in introducing the designation scriptural deism I am being unduly paradoxical. After all, Dryden does not renounce Christian mysteries. Indeed, not only does he attack deism in the first half of Religio Laici, but a central feature of that attack is the assertion that deism falls short of the crucial revealed doctrines of the fall and redemption through the Incarnation (ll. 99-114).23

Such a defense of Dryden's orthodoxy would insist that we take Dryden at his word in the single passage in which he expresses the necessity of believing in Christian doctrines that transcend deistic minimalism. However, if a writer's invocation of revealed dogmas, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation, deserves to be treated as a

touchstone for distinguishing orthodox Christians from deists, we will find ourselves in a bizarre landscape full of people who are attacking deism but virtually devoid of those being attacked. For the people whom we generally declare to be at the center of English deism—such as Charles Blount, John Toland, Anthony Collins, and Matthew Tindal—have an annoying habit of declining to fly their true colors and, instead, of including in their discourses pious pronouncements regarding their belief in the Incarnation and the Trinity.24 Moreover, we have already seen that Lord Herbert of Cherbury does not overtly reject Scripture in favor of reason but simply sets up reason as the touchstone of biblical interpretation. Nor are these pronouncements palpably ironic; rather, their tone tends, in itself, to resemble and perhaps to imitate that of the most devout believers in the Christian mysteries.25 This being the case, critics and scholars have naturally tended to use an interpretive touchstone that was described, but by no means invented, by Toland himself: "When a man maintains what's commonly believ'd, or professes what's publicly injoin'd, it is not always a sure rule that he speaks what he thinks: but when he seriously maintains the contrary of what's by law established, and openly declares for what most others oppose, then there's a strong presumption that he utters his mind."26

Our tendency to discount orthodox pieties when they are surrounded by less than orthodox pronouncements is attributable to the fact that there are risks involved in deviating from orthodoxy and hence obvious prudential reasons for paying lip service to orthodox positions. But this is not to say that I am invoking Toland's principle in order to argue that Dryden was an Anglican out of prudence and a deist out of conviction. My view is that Dryden's orthodox appeal to the Incarnation and his surreptitiously heterodox scriptural deism tell us less about his personal beliefs concerning the nature of the divinity or the route to salvation than about his approach to his public duty of defending the established religiopolitical authority.27 Both the pious embrace of revealed doctrines and the appropriation of deism are ultimately products of political calculation. And although my analysis of Dryden's refutation of Simon provides the beginnings of an understanding of the poet's strategy, a full understanding will depend on a grasp of the politics of deism.

Seventeenth-century deism presents itself as both a moral and a

political argument. The moral force of deism, as we have already seen, is acknowledged by Dryden in his response to the Deist's objection. Although Dryden employs the moral argument—that without the universality of natural religion to transcend the geographic limitations of revelation, countless innocent souls must be damned—as an interlocutor's objection, a deist might have used it as his starting point. For the deist, as for Dryden, such an argument serves not merely to rescue the souls of the newly discovered heathens but also to rescue the orthodox concept of God as perfectly benevolent and devoid of cruelty or arbitrariness.

The political dimensions of deism are, at least for the modem reader, perhaps a bit less apparent. But for the seventeenth-century reader they must have been quite conspicuous. On the one hand, deism could be perceived as a threat to the political order, not only because Christianity was generally seen to provide the moral glue of society but more specifically because royal authority was commonly legitimated by an appeal to certain biblical passages. In principle, therefore, deism could be perceived not simply as heretical but also as seditious. These factors would make it extremely risky for any Englishman openly to embrace deism, and they would make it particularly unseemly for the Poet Laureate to do so.

In the light of the political history of the previous century, however, deism offered not only a strategy for achieving public peace but also a justification for imposing and enforcing political obedience. In the Religio Laici, as I will show, the usefulness of deism for conservative purposes outweighs its political risks. But Dryden tries to reduce these risks still further by using deism surreptitiously and by coupling his strategic appropriation with an explicit repudiation.

After more than a century of sectarian persecution and religious warfare, the need for religious toleration had become increasingly obvious. Deism met that need. The same religious minimalism that would allow "Indian Souls" in "Worlds discover'd New" to obtain their salvation would also dissolve the points of contention between the warring sects of Europe. A universal religion that consisted of a handful of doctrines available to the innate light of human reason would render doctrinal disputes, at worst, absurd and destructive superstitions and, at best, superfluities that were irrelevant to salvation. Since there is a universal, natural religion underlying the

vain disputes over scriptural meaning, there is no justification for persecution. Thus, when moved from the New World to the Old, deism becomes an argument for religious toleration.28

We will see in chapter 3 that Pierre Bayle bases his argument for religious toleration at least partly on the individual's right to freedom of conscience. And insofar as Bayle argues that monarchs are obliged to respect this right, one might wish to call his argument a moral one. But insofar as Bayle's moral argument represents the interests of his persecuted coreligionists, it is also, of course, a political argument. The deistic version of the argument for toleration does not require a right of conscience but can, as I have just indicated, serve the interests of oppressed groups by removing the justification for religious persecution. But with a shift of context, it can just as easily serve the interests of the established political authority. Religious differences had given rise not only to persecution but, from the point of view of established authority, to sedition and usurpation. Insofar as religious beliefs conduce to the eternal disposition of souls, they provide a strong motivation for disobedience to secular authority. If the state requires adherence to doctrines that imperil one's eternal soul, then obedience to God (and concern for one's salvation) are liable to take precedence over one's duty to the state. Deism insists that the doctrines that are disputed by rival sects are in no way essential to salvation since the necessary religious truths depend neither on Scripture nor on the interpretation of Scripture but are universally available to reason. If one's soul is in no way imperiled by submission to secular authority, then one cannot justify disobedience; and if one nonetheless persists in fomenting political disorder under the banner of religion, the state would be justified in seeing religion as a mere pretext for sedition. Thus deism removes the religious justification for political disobedience and provides a justification for political repression.

Nor does the foregoing analysis represent my extrapolation or my discovery of a potentially repressive ideology hidden beneath the benign surface of deistic toleration. Rather, it was more or less explicitly offered by Lord Herbert of Cherbury as part of his justification for deism:

That it procures for religion, and thence for the hierarchy and the state, an unquestioned authority and majesty. For since there is no

clear occasion for stealing away from this undoubted doctrine, all men will be unanimously eager for the austere worship of God by virtue, for piety, and for a holy life, and putting aside hatreds along with controversies about religion they will agree on that mutual token of faith, they will be received into that intimate religious relationship; so that if insolent spirits revolt on account of some portion of it the spiritual or secular magistracy will have the best right to punish them.29

Having already indicated that this political justification is not intrinsic to deism, I think that it is worth adding that it does not necessarily betray Lord Herbert's deepest motives. He offers other arguments against revealed Christianity—such as his argument against the tyranny of orthodoxy and his argument based on the moral unsavoriness of worshiping "a divinity which . . . for its mere good pleasure has destined the greatest part of the world to the everlasting punishments of Hell"30 —and there is no clear evidence that these are mere window dressing. Although much ideological criticism operates on the assumption that the political motive must be the primary one, this assumption does not readily translate itself into a useful methodology precisely because the absence of intrinsic political valences allows for a divergence between the political significance that an author attributes to his views and the ultimate political tendency of his text. For example, explicit statements that one's ideas serve the interests of established authority may be designed merely to placate that authority. We will see in chapter 4 that Bayle, while speaking on behalf of persecuted religious minorities, was at pains to stress the obligation and the willingness of French Calvinists to remain obedient to royal authority and that such professions of loyalty helped him to argue that religious dissent was not tantamount to political sedition. By the same token, Herbert's claim that deism provided a warrant for repressing seditious dissenters might well have been intended to protect himself from the charge that his deistic writings were themselves seditious. In short, the rejection of ideological essentialism requires us to recognize not merely that the same theory can serve divergent political interests but that even explicit statements concerning whose interests are being served cannot necessarily be taken at face value but need to be carefully examined in the context in which they are operating. Thus Lord Herbert's political justification of deism needs to be understood not as re-

vealing the essence of deism or the essence of Herbert's own political purposes but merely as revealing how, in a given context, the deistic argument for toleration could be useful to those in authority—and to their spokesmen—who wished to exhort obedience and to suppress threats to public order. My purpose in this chapter is to show that Dryden puts deistic toleration to precisely such a use and that we can ascertain this fact not by trying to demystify deism as a concept but by carefully delineating Dryden's deployment of it.31

Before he could deploy deism in the service of royal authority, however, Dryden needed first to perfume its pungent heterodoxy. The political power in England was bound to the state religion, and, however attractive deistic toleration might be as an argument for obedience and a justification for suppressing sedition, it is hard to imagine that an official or quasi-official endorsement of a religion that dispensed with Christian revelation could have been countenanced. What a diligent and skillful spokesman for the royal authority could do, however, was to assimilate the structure of deistic toleration into his version of Christian orthodoxy while at the same time explicitly rejecting deism. Dryden, the Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal, was such a spokesman, and the doctrine that I have called scriptural deism represents such an assimilation.

I have already called Dryden's procedure a co-optation, but we can now see that scriptural deism is more precisely understood as the result of a double co-optation. Insofar as royal authority was traditionally legitimated by appeal to revealed Christianity, any rejection of scriptural authority was bound to be perceived as a threat to the political order. Lord Herbert's use of deism as a weapon against sedition had the effect of attempting to transform a threat to royal authority into an Erastian argument for submission to that authority. But for Dryden's purposes, it was not enough to have deism be declared a friend to authority. For the friend was still an unsavory and unruly one that needed to be rendered socially acceptable in order to be politically useful. It was accordingly necessary for deism to be domesticated by being costumed in Christian garb and ushered into the Church of England.

Scriptural deism was useful to Dryden not simply in its general tendency to promote "common quiet" but in its specific applicability to the needs of Anglican royalism in Restoration England. In

the preface to Religio Laici Dryden depicted the threat from Catholicism on the one side and Puritanism on the other in vividly political terms:

While we were Papists, our Holy Father rid us, by pretending authority out of the Scriptures to depose Princes, when we shook off his Authority, the Sectaries furnish'd themselves with the same Weapons, and out of the same Magazine, the Bible. So that the Scriptures, which are in themselves the greatest security of Governours, as commanding express obedience to them, are now turn'd to their destruction; and never since the Reformation has there wanted a Text of their interpreting to authorize a Rebel.32

Here we see that the political danger posed by the Catholics and Puritans stems from their interpretations of Scripture. And these interpretations were underpinned, as Dryden had indicated earlier in the preface, by claims to special interpretive authority: "The Papists . . . have reserv'd to themselves a right of Interpreting what they have deliver'd under the pretence of Infalibility: and the Fanaticks more collaterally, because they have assum'd what amounts to an Infalibility, in the private Spirit: and have detorted those Texts of Scripture, which are not necessary to Salvation, to the damnable uses of Sedition, disturbance and destruction of the Civil Government."33

The traditional manner of combatting such dangerous scriptural interpretations had been to offer one's own countervailing interpretations a mode of legitimation that deism renders obsolete. There is still a trace of this sort of legitimation in Dryden's virtually parenthetical observation, in the first of these passages, to the effect that Scriptures "in themselves," rather than authorizing sedition, command obedience to the state. But the clash of competing scriptural interpretations in the service of competing political programs had conspicuously failed to maintain public order and had, if anything, promoted disorder and civil war—a civil war, moreover, in which the triumphant "Fanaticks" had used the interpretation of Scripture as a warrant for rebellion and regicide. To avoid a recurrence of such catastrophic disorder, Dryden's tack in Religio Laici is not to reiterate the scriptural interpretations that serve his political purposes but to serve his political purposes by banishing scriptural interpretation from the public arena.

DESPOTISM AND ANARCHY

Dryden needs only to show, first, that interpretation is unnecessary for salvation and, second, that it tends to be disruptive of "publick Peace." Having accomplished the first part of his task through his elaboration of scriptural deism, Dryden turns to his attack on the pernicious uses of biblical interpretation.

The Catholic Church, not content with having transmitted the Scriptures, has arrogated to itself the role of interpreting them:

yet grant they were

The handers down, can they from thence infer
A right t'interpret? or wou'd they alone
Who brought the Present, claim it for their own?
The Book's a Common Largess to Mankind ;
Not more for them , than every Man design'd:
The welcome News is in the Letter found;
The Carrier's not Commission'd to expound .
(ll. 360-67)

As we might by now expect, this usurpation on the part of the messenger is attacked not on the conventional Protestant ground that biblical interpretation should be left to those who receive the message but rather on the ground that there is no need for interpretation at all: "It speaks it Self, and what it does contain, / In all things needfull to be known, is plain" (ll. 368-69). The interpretive mediation of the Church was not simply superfluous but was motivated by tyrannical impulses. The exclusive authority to interpret was an instrument of domination:

When want of Learning kept the Laymen low,
And none but Priests were Authoriz'd to know:
When what small Knowledge was, in them did dwell;
And he a God who cou'd but Reade or Spell ;
Then Mother Church did mightily prevail:
She parcel'd out the Bible by retail:
But still expounded what She sold or gave ;
To keep it in her Power to Damn and Save .
(ll. 372-79)

Dryden's accusation against Rome is really a double one: the Church insisted on withholding the text and on interpreting it. Accordingly, the enlightened rejection of Catholicism consists of

two moments. The first is the realization that what had appeared to be expert interpretation of the text was really priestly distortion, presumably politically motivated: "At last, a knowing Age began t'enquire / If they the Book, or That did them inspire" (ll. 388-89). The second, presented as the culmination of a long string of commercial and financial images, is the laity's realization that the priestly possession of the texts represented a theft of the laity's rightful inheritance:

they [the laity] found, thô late,

That what they thought the Priest's, was Their Estate:
Taught by the Will produc'd , (the written Word)
How long they had been cheated on Record .
Then, every man who saw the Title fair,
Claim'd a Child's part, and put in for a Share. (ll. 390-95)

Dryden is careful to make the distinction between misinterpretation and misappropriation because once the Reformation wrested the texts back from the priests, Protestant fanatics would themselves insist on carrying out unnecessary and pernicious interpretation:

The Book thus put in every vulgar hand,
Which each presum'd he best cou'd understand,
The Common rule was made the common Prey ;
And at the mercy of the Rabble lay.
The tender Page with horney Fists was gaul'd,
And he was gifted most that loudest baul'd. . . .
Plain Truths enough for needfull use they found;
But men wou'd still be itching to expound .
(ll. 400-10)

Thus begins the poem's forceful attack on sectarian fanaticism. Although Dryden does not repeat the specific political charge of the preface (that the fanatical interpretation of texts unnecessary to salvation twists them "to the damnable uses of Sedition, disturbance and destruction of the Civil Government"), he brings into play the harshest imagery of the poem, imagery beside which priestly larceny and deceit seem quite tame:

While Crouds unlearn'd, with rude Devotion warm,
About the Sacred Viands buz and swarm,
The Fly-blownText creates a crawling Brood ;

And turns to Maggots what was meant for Food.
(ll. 417-20)

This, as Steven Zwicker observes, "is the manner not of spiritual quest but political condemnation."34 But Dryden does not rely on comparisons between sectarian exegetes and swarming flies to do all his denunciatory work for him. The fanatics are not only disgusting; like the Catholics, they are dangerous: "The Danger's much the same; on several Shelves / If others wreck us, or we wreck our selves" (ll. 425-26). In line with the characterization of the Catholic and Puritan extremes, both in the preface and in the poem, this couplet would seem to present the external danger of the tyranny of Rome as that of others and the internal sedition of Protestant fanatics as the danger—already realized in the Civil War and Interregnum—that "we wreck our selves."

Both of these political threats, as we have seen, come from interpreting biblical texts that are not necessary for salvation. And the logic of Dryden's scriptural deism would seem to militate against all biblical interpretation whatsoever. For if there is a core of scriptural truth that is immune from textual corruption, that is clear to all who read it and not subject to interpretive disputes, and if this core is all that is needed for salvation, then we would seem to have the basis for an argument that all scriptural interpretation is vain and dangerous. But just as practical considerations prevented Dryden from dispensing with Scripture and the official church, they also prevent him from ignoring the fact that the official church has theologians who interpret Scripture. Nor can he condemn their activities.

Thus we find that just as Dryden prefaced his propounding of scriptural deism with an attack on deism, he prefaces his attack on scriptural interpretation with a bow to "good interpretation," namely that performed under the aegis of the Church of England:

The few, by Nature form'd, with Learning fraught,
Born to instruct, as others to be taught,
Must Study well the Sacred Page; and see
Which Doctrine, this, or that, does best agree
With the whole Tenour of the Work Divine.
(ll. 326-30)

But to keep this lip service from undermining his scriptural deism,

Dryden presents this judicious mode of interpretation without contradicting his general claim that interpretation is in no way necessary and without any reference to its results—namely, those positive doctrines of belief that distinguish Anglicanism from other confessions. I said at the beginning of this chapter that Dryden follows the "venturesomeness" of the latitudinarian divines in both asserting that Anglican doctrines were true and denying that they were necessary for salvation.35 And Dryden's perfunctory praise of Anglican theologians in a passage—and, indeed, in an entire “Anglican" poem—in which the doctrinal result of their exegetical efforts is carefully suppressed serves both to remind us of this theological paradox and to highlight the political logic that generates it and the rhetoric that obscures it.36

CONCLUSIONS

As we saw earlier, Père Simon had charged that once the Protestants turned away from the authority of Catholic tradition they would be hard-pressed to keep from sliding to the Socinian extreme in which autonomous reason discards the central beliefs of Christianity. In contemporary parlance, Simon's point could be formulated as an assertion that there is no conceptual space between Catholicism and Socinianism, no middle ground between submission to the authority of the Church and the anarchic autonomy of reason.

Dryden's history of the shift in exegetical authority from the Catholic monopoly, "When want of Learning kept the Laymen low, / And none but Priests were Authoriz'd to know" to the appropriation of the text by the horney-fisted rabble, while setting up the dichotomy in terms of Catholic versus Puritan instead of Catholic versus Socinian, would seem essentially to concede Simon's point. The fact that Dryden sets UP the historical shift not in terms of doctrines of belief but strictly in terms of opposing models of exegetical authority leaves no role for Anglicanism as a via media. For, once the authority to interpret Scripture is wrested from the monopoly of the despotic few, it is hard to keep it out of the "vulgar hands" of the dangerous multitudes. Both the Church and the Puritans claim to be infallible, and there is no acceptable conceptual space between them.

Dryden's poem is occasioned by a political dilemma: he needs to protect the state and the social order against the dangers of Catholic usurpation on the one side and Puritan sedition on the other, and he has to do so in such a way as to utilize the myth of the Anglican via media and make it seem as if he is speaking from the religious center. His solution, as we have seen, is to step outside the religious continuum of exegetical authority altogether, by taking interpretive authority away from each confession and putting the Bible beyond the reach of interpretation—while rhetorically couching this Erastian shift to secular authority in the language of Anglican moderation. But this Erastian shift does not merely protect the state from disruption. It reduces the authority of all religions and thereby increases the authority of the secular power. The state, in tearing down the interpretive authority of every religion, is, in effect, arrogating all interpretive authority to itself. In that respect, the state comes to have the authoritarian structure that Dryden had decried and condemned in his attack on Catholicism.

What is ultimately being co-opted, then, is not merely deistic rationalism but also the centralized structure of Catholic authority. The state is consolidating its authority by taking on the additional role of arbiter of immortality. But whereas the Catholic church had ruled by promulgating and enforcing doctrines under the aegis of its exegetical authority, the secular state will enforce its authority by peeling away both the religious doctrines and exegetical authority of others until the doctrines required for salvation are precisely those that prevent Christians from being anything but obedient citizens.

3
Bayle's Theory of Toleration: The Politics of Certainty and Doubt

Your doubt … which contains so much anxiety and such a thirst for absolute truth is so different from the skepticism of the Greek, from the mental play of the Mediterranean Mind with its deliberate resort to sophistry as part of the game of thought; for your thought is a weapon, a theology.
Lawrence Durrell

BAYLE, DRYDEN, AND LORD HERBERT

Dryden, as we have just seen, perceived biblical interpretation as a threat to the established religio-political authority and contrived a version of Christianity that does without biblical interpretation but that nonetheless preserves the appearance of orthodoxy by retaining the Bible as the source of religious truth. Pierre Bayle, in his Commentaire philosophique, is also attempting to counteract the dangers of biblical interpretation. In this case, however, the fatal interpretation has been employed not by dissenters, and not "to the damnable uses of Sedition, disturbance and destruction of the civil government," but by the civil government of France, which, in its quest to stamp out heresy, has engaged in the persecution of its Protestant dissenters.

Bayle, himself a Huguenot refugee in Holland, published the first two parts of the Commentaire in October of 1686, a year to the month after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.1 The persecution of the French Protestants, however, had begun long before the revocation and had intensified throughout the reign of Louis XIV. Bayle had fled to Rotterdam in 1681, shortly after the Académie Réformée de Sedan—where he had held the chair in philosophy— was closed by the authorities.

Whereas Dryden had made his opposition to biblical interpretation vivid by depicting the enthusiasts as swarming flies that

"turn to Maggots what was meant for food," Bayle, not given to pungent metaphors, achieves vividness in his condemnation of the Catholic authorities by the straightforward technique of cataloging their cruelties and suggesting that these are inconsistent with Christian principles.2 Invoking their interpretation of the gospels, the civil powers claim that they are authorized by God

ruiner leurs Sujets hérétiques, les emprisonner, les dragonner, les pendre, et les brûler,3

to reduce their heretical subjects to poverty, to imprison them, to dragoon them, to hang them, to burn them,

and that Jesus' gospel of peace is to be understood to mean

battez, fouettez, emprisonnez, pillez, tuez ceux qui seront opiniâtres, enlevez-leurs leurs femmes, et leurs enfants. (CP, 114)

beat, whip, imprison, pillage, kill all those who remain obstinate, carry off their wives and children.

This technique may be seen to culminate in Bayle's hypothetical depiction of an emperor of China who, horrified by the willingness of Christian missionaries to induce conversion by coercive means, would bar them from entering his country. This emperor could not reasonably be blamed, Bayle asserts, if he decided that the religion preached by these missionaries was ridiculous and diabolical:

ridicule en ce qu'il verra qu'elle est fondée par un auteur qui dit d'un côté, qu'il faut être humble, débonnaire, patient, sans aigreur, pardonnant les injures, et de l'autre qu'il faut rouer de coups de bâton, emprisonner, exiler, pendre, fouetter, abandonner au pillage du soldat tous ceux qui ne voudront pas le suivre. Il verra qu'elle est diabolique, puis qu'outre son opposition diamétrale aux lumières de la droite raison, il verra qu'elle autorise tous les crimes, dès qu'ils seront entrepris pour son avantage, et qu'elle ne laisse plus d'autre règle du juste et de l'injuste, que son profit, ou sa perte; qu'elle ne tend qu'à rendre l'univers un théâtre affreux de carnage et de violence. (126-27)

ridiculous in that he would suppose that it was founded by a Creator who says on the one hand that one must be humble, meek, patient, without spite, ready to forgive injuries; and, on the other hand, that anyone who did not wish to follow him must be beaten unmercifully, imprisoned, exiled, whipped, and exposed to the rapacity of soldiers.

He would consider it diabolical since, beyond being diametrically opposed to the light of reason, it authorizes any crimes that it finds advantageous to itself, it judges whether something is just or unjust on the basis of no other rule than that of its own profit or loss, and it turns the world into a horrifying spectacle of violence and carnage.

With its use of breathtaking catalogs of evils, added to the technique of having a rational non-Christian evince disgust and astonishment at the gap between Christian moral principles and Christian practices, Bayle's depiction of the Chinese emperor may be seen as a precursor of the stunning denunciation of Christian Europe that Jonathan Swift will later put into the mouth of the King of Brobdingnag. Just as Dryden applies insect imagery to those who pervert Scripture to seditious purposes, the King of Brobdingnag will, of course, compare Christian Europe, which flouts its own moral principles, to a "pernicious race of little odious vermin."4 But, although dispensing with such imagery,5 and with the dramatic power of direct speech, Bayle's moral indignation comes across with considerable vehemence, a vehemence fueled by the fact that the list of Bayle's tortured and imprisoned coreligionists included his brother Jacob, who had died in a dungeon in Bordeaux less than a month after the revocation.

Bayle thus approaches the terrors resulting from biblical interpretation from a social perspective quite unlike that found in Dryden. He speaks as a victim of persecution by the established religio-political authority and as a spokesman for an oppressed group. At first glance, this standpoint would seem to make it impossible for Bayle to place himself, as Dryden had, above the interpretive fray. The advocates of forced conversion, invoking the exegetical (and persecutorial) authority of St. Augustine, had repeatedly cited a single biblical verse that they claimed enjoined them to constrain heretics to accept the orthodox faith, and Bayle undertakes to challenge their interpretation. His title, as it appears atop the first page of the Premiere partie, reads as follows:

COMMENTAIRE
PHILOSOPHIQUE
SUR CES PAROLES DE
L'EVANGILE SELON S. LUC,
CHAP. XIV. VERS. 23.
Et le Maitre dit au Serviteur, va par les chemins &

par les haies, ET CONTRAINS-LES D'ENTRER,
Afin que ma Maison soit remplie6 (CP, 83)

The text with which Bayle is concerned is the parable of the supper, in which the master tells his servant to compel guests to attend. This had been interpreted, beginning with St. Augustine, as a command to force orthodoxy upon heretics and unbelievers. When Bayle undertakes to refute the "literal" sense of the parable, he seems not to concern himself with disputing the view that the house in which the supper takes place is to be understood, figuratively, to signify the Church. But he wishes to refute the interpretation that Augustine had given to the phrase compelle intrare.

Although Bayle, unlike Dryden, is refuting a particular biblical interpretation, he tries to avoid miring himself in the fruitless exegetical realm of interpretation and counterinterpretation. In fact, as we shall see, Bayle's procedures in attempting to refute the persecutors' interpretation of the phrase compelle intrare have a good deal in common with Dryden's adaptation of deistic rationalism.

It will be recalled that Lord Herbert of Cherbury had offered deism not strictly as an alternative to revelation and the problems of scriptural interpretation but as a kind of adjunct to revelation. It is precisely because the original biblical text has been distorted, and because the one that we have received is subject to diverse interpretations, that it is necessary to distinguish between "the pure and undisputed word of God" and those parts of Scripture that are not authoritative or that have been distorted by priestly interpretation. What is needed is a criterion for isolating the texts that are "necessary to salvation," and deism represents that criterion.7 Insofar as the universal truths that God inscribes in every human mind allow us to ascertain which parts of Scripture represent the true and essential word of God, it might be said that we contain within ourselves, thanks to the light of reason, the authoritative text that we can use as a touchstone for interpreting the confusing biblical text.

When Bayle undertakes to refute the "literal" sense of compelle intrare, he is, in fact, not engaging in traditional biblical exegesis but is following a procedure very much like the one set forth by Herbert. He begins by explicitly distinguishing his task from the

sort of biblical interpretation that is carried out by theologians and other biblical exegetes:

Je laisse aux théologiens et aux critiques à commenter ce passage, en le comparant avec d'autres, en examinant ce qui precede et ce qui suit, en faisant voir la force des termes de l'original, et les divers sens dont ils sont susceptibles, et qu'ils ont effectivement en plusieurs endroits de l'Ecriture. Je prétends faire un Commentaire d'un nouveau genre, et l'appuyer sur des principes plus généraux et plus infaillibles. (CP, 85)

I leave it to the theologians and critics to provide commentary on this passage, by comparing it with others, by examining what precedes it and what follows it, by bringing out the significance of the terms in the original languages, and the various meanings that they can have, and that they have in fact had in several other places in the Bible. I shall undertake to provide a new type of commentary, and to support it with the most general and infallible principles.

Bayle's "Commentaire d'un nouveau genre" will appeal not to contextual or philological evidence but to

ce principe de la lumière naturelle, que tout sens littéral qui contient l'obligation de faire des crimes, est faux. (85-86)

this principle of the natural light, that an y literal interpretation that entails the obligation to commit crimes is false.

What the internal light of reason will do, then, is to provide him with a basis not necessarily for offering a positive interpretation but for rejecting an incorrect one. For Bayle, as for Lord Herbert, the natural light will serve as the supreme criterion of truth.

But whereas Herbert uses the rational criterion to challenge the authenticity of the texts themselves, so as to shrink drastically the realm of divinely revealed truth, Bayle uses the same criterion not to challenge the status of texts as revelation but only to prevent them from being interpreted literally. Thus, whereas Herbert's principles might require him to judge that compelle intrare cannot be the "very word of God," Bayle can leave the sacred status of the words unchallenged—even though he rejects the literal interpretation of the words and feels no pressing need to offer an alternative interpretation.8

In explicitly setting up reason as the criterion of truth, and the sovereignty of philosophy over theology, Bayle does not wish to relinquish his claim to Calvinist orthodoxy.9 Like Dryden, he serves as a spokesman for a group that defines itself in doctrinal terms. In both cases, therefore, rationality risks undermining its political effectiveness unless it stresses its adherence to the appropriate orthodoxy. Dryden follows Herbert in fundamentally narrowing the extent of scriptural revelation, but since he transfers the touchstone of authenticity from the light of reason to Scripture itself, he manages, as we have seen, to mask his indebtedness to unorthodox principles. Since Bayle's argument does not allow him to mask his rationalism but requires him to make it explicit, he needs somehow to legitimate it in Christian terms. And his strategy—or, at least, one of the first of his strategies—will be to show that rationalism is in no way inconsistent with Christianity. Those who appeal to the superiority of religious authority over human reason are, Bayle argues, in fact surreptitiously appealing to reason after all:

C'est à quoi se terminent tous les grands discours des catholiques romains contre la voie de la raison, et pour l'autorite de l'Eglise. . . . Ils ne font qu'un grand circuit pour revenir après mille fatigues, où les autres vont tout droit. Les autres disent franchement et sans ambages, qu'il faut s'en tenir au sens qui nous paraît meilleur: mais eux ils disent qu'il s'en faut bien garder, parce que nos lumières nous pourraient tromper, et que notre raison n'est que ténèbres et qu'illusion; qu'il faut donc s'en tenir au jugement de l'Eglise. N'est-ce pas revenir à la raison? Car ne faut-il pas que celui qui préfère le jugement de l'Eglise au sien propre, le fasse en vertu de ce raisonnement: L'Eglise a plus de lumières que moi, elle est doric plus croyable que moi ? C'est donc sur ses propres lumi ères que chacun se d étermine. (CP, 96)

This is how the grand discourses of the Roman Catholics against the rule of reason and in favor of the authority of the Church always finish up. . . . They do nothing more than travel in a great circle in order to return, much fatigued, to the very spot that others reach by a more direct route. The others say openly and straight out that we must hold to the meaning that seems best to us. But these say that we must beware because our natural light could deceive us, and because reason is nothing but shadow and illusion, and that we must therefore submit to the judgment of the Church. But isn't this to return to reason? For is it not the case that he who prefers the Church's judgment over his own does so by virtue of the following

argument: The Church has more lights than I; her beliefs are therefore more reliable than my own. It is thus that each person makes up his mind on the basis of his own lights.

Bayle's methodological self-justification, then, stipulates that reason, rather than being a threat to Christianity, is the sine qua non of all religious belief. By showing that the Catholic appeal to the weakness of human reason as a warrant for submitting to Church authority is ultimately a rationalistic argument, Bayle is not only legitimating his claim for the supremacy of reason but is demystifying the Catholic appeal to ecclesiastical authority by subsuming it under the Protestant principle of individual judgment. Moreover, he is raising questions regarding the nature of fideism and its relationship to reason. All this will eventually bear on our understanding of Bayle's overall strategy in the Commentaire philosophique. For the moment, however, I am still interested in a preliminary comparison of Bayle's appeal to rationalism with the strategies of Herbert of Cherbury and of Dryden.

We have already seen that Dryden, like Lord Herbert, wishes to ascertain, in a very minimalist way, what is the very word of God but that in doing so he co-opts Herbert's deism by giving it a scriptural guise. Bayle explicitly appeals to the inner light of reason as the ultimate criterion of interpretation but undertakes to establish his own orthodoxy by showing that his criterion is a universal one and by demystifying the pious attempts of his enemies to pretend that they are subordinating reason to some higher authority.

Bayle's critique of those who disguise the rational basis for their submission to authority is directed against his Catholic enemies. But a convenient way to see how Bayle's strategy differs from Dryden's scriptural deism would be to consider how easily Bayle's demystification of the Catholic apologists could be applied to Dryden's own procedures. We saw that the Religio Laici prefaces its scriptural deism with an explicit rejection of deism. That rejection of deism, as it happens, was introduced with a famous poetic expression of the weakness of human reason:

DIM, as the borrow'd beams of Moon and Stars
To lonely, weary, wandring Travellers,
Is Reason to the Soul: And as on high,
Those rowling Fires discover but the Sky

Not light us here ; So Reason's glimmering Ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtfull way,
But guide us upward to a better Day .
And as those nightly Tapers disappear
When Day's bright Lord ascends our Hemisphere:
So pale grows Reason at Religions sight;
So dyes , and so dissolves in Supernatural Light .
(ll. 1-11)

Dryden's attempt to portray reason's relationship to Christianity as like that of the moon and stars to the sun is consistent with his attempt to portray the Bible as the source of religious knowledge, but at the same time it resembles the strategy of Catholic fideists who assert that the weakness of human reason requires submission to the Church.10 And just as Bayle argues that if reason submits to the authority of the Church it does so on rational grounds—that is, for reasons —he could likewise demonstrate that Dryden's positing of scriptural deism, like the Catholic's submission to the authority of the Church, is ultimately rational, even though it attempts to occult its rationality. According to Dryden, the reason that we know that the biblical text is not totally corrupt and must contain a core of truths necessary for salvation is that God is good and that therefore he "wou'd not leave Mankind without a way." But how do we know that God is good and would not leave mankind without a way? If this crucial knowledge were derived from the biblical text itself, then Dryden's argument would be hopelessly circular. The notion that God is good and wishes to provide mankind with the means of salvation must, implicitly, be extratextual: it must, in a word, like the common notions of Herbert of Cherbury, be the product of the inner light of reason. Moreover, Bayle's attempt to demonstrate the primacy of reason could be used to demystify Dryden's attempt to transfer the criterion of biblical truth from human reason to Scripture itself. That is, Bayle could easily show that an argument to the effect that the scriptural passages that have elicited divergent interpretations are unessential for salvation is not really a proof that the interpretive criterion is inside the text; it is an appeal to an extratextual rational principle.

Bayle, then, like Dryden and Herbert of Cherbury, uses an appeal to the universal truths of reason in order to repudiate biblical interpretations that give rise to repugnant political behavior. But

whereas Dryden and Herbert are warding off seditious exegesis that threatens the established religio-political authority, Bayle is attacking persecutorial exegesis carried out by the established religio-political authority. On the other hand, whereas Dryden sees fit to mystify his rationalism, Herbert and Bayle make their rationalism explicit and undertake to demystify irrationalism.

Bayle, however, has more to ward off than literal readings of compelle intrare or charges that appeals to the supremacy of reason are ipso facto heterodox. His arguments will give rise to other difficulties; his logical and rhetorical strategies have just begun.

THE DELIMITATION OF RATIONALISM

No sooner has Bayle, in the first two paragraphs of the Première partie of his Commentaire, set forth his claim that the literal reading of compelle intrare is repugnant to the light of reason, and therefore false, than he finds himself impelled to ward off the accusation that reason leads to Socinianism:

A Dieu ne plaise que je veuille étendre, autant que font les sociniens, la jurisdiction de la lumière naturelle et des principes métaphysiques, Iorsqu'ils prétendent que tout sens donné à l'Ecriture qui n'est pas conforme à cette lumière et à ces principes-là est à rejeter, et qui en vertu de cette maxime refusent de croire la Trinité et l'Incarnation: Non, non, ce n'est pas ce que je pretends sans bornes et sans limites. (CP, 86-87)

God forbid that I would wish to extend the jurisdiction of the natural light and the principles of metaphysics as far as the Socinians do when they assert that every interpretation of Scripture that is not in keeping with this light and with these principles is to be rejected. By virtue of this maxim, they refuse to believe in the Trinity or the Incarnation. No, that is not at all what I maintain, without boundaries or limits.

The need to delimit his rationalism, to keep it from extending to the anti-Trinitarian extreme, arises immediately because the Socinians represent a conspicuous case of the unacceptable theological consequences of submitting Christian doctrines to the test of reason. Following Descartes, Bayle presents rationality as founded on the intuitive truths of mathematics, those propositions that, no matter how closely examined, present themselves so clearly and

distinctly to the mind that they cannot be doubted. His prime example of such clear and distinct truths, one that he cites repeatedly throughout the Commentaire, is the proposition that the whole is greater than its parts. In order to be able to claim that attempting to instill religious beliefs by coercive means is contrary to the light of reason, Bayle has to assert that we have an innate awareness of our obligations toward God that is no less clear and distinct than our awareness that the whole is greater than its parts. But the Socinians would claim that there cannot be three persons, each of whom is God, without there being three Gods and therefore that the doctrine of the Trinity is self-contradictory and contrary to the natural light.11

In order to be able to delimit his rationalism in such a way as to keep it from yielding anti-Trinitarian conclusions, Bayle needs somehow to demarcate the class of clear and distinct truths so as to have it include those truths that will allow him to refute the literal reading and to exclude those alleged truths that would allow one to challenge the doctrine of the Trinity. The way he does this is to separate truths about morality or equity, which are accessible to the light of reason, from alleged truths about so-called speculative doctrines such as the Trinity, which evidently are not:

Je le répète encore une fois: A Dieu ne plaise que je veuille étendre ce principe autant que font les sociniens; mais s'il peut avoir certaines limitations à l'égard des vérités spéculatives, je ne pense pas qu'il en doive avoir aucune à l'égard des principes pratiques et généraux, qui se rapportent aux moeurs. Je veux dire, que sans exception, il faut soumettre toutes les lois morales à cette idébe naturelle d'équité, qui, aussi bien que la lumière métaphysique, illumine tout homme venant au monde . (CP, 89-90)

Let me repeat once again: God forbid that I would wish to extend this principle as far as do the Socinians. But although there can be certain limitations regarding speculative truths, I don't think there can be any with regard to the practical or general principles having to do with morals. I mean that every moral law, without exception, must be submitted to our natural idea of equity, which, no less than the light of metaphysical truth, shines innately in every human being.

This delimitation, coming as it does at the point at which the charge of Socinianism needs to be deflected, may at first glance appear to

rest on an ad hoc distinction that a Socinian would be unlikely to find very convincing. But it will turn out that, however convincing or unconvincing the distinction, it does not merely serve an ad hoc role vis-à-vis Socinianism; it lies at the center of the intellectual structure of the Commentaire.

THE ERRING CONSCIENCE

In order to appreciate the significance of Bayle's willingness to limit the efficacy of the natural light "à l'égard des vérités spéculatives," without limiting it "à l'égard des principes pratiques et généraux, qui se rapportent aux moeurs," we will need to place the appeal to the supremacy of reason alongside the second great pillar of Bayle's analysis, his theory of the erring conscience. First, however, I need briefly to indicate why the appeal to the supremacy of reason cannot stand on its own.

The arguments in the Premiere partie center on what the natural light tells us about the nature of God, the nature of religion, and the nature of morality. Religion is essentially a matter of internal acts of the soul, and these cannot be compelled. All that can be compelled is external compliance, which, in itself, does no honor to God and is not pleasing to him. Moreover, the means by which these forced conversions are carried out are, according to what the natural light teaches us about right and wrong,12 themselves wicked. To compel conversion is thus contrary to religion and to morality.

The burden of the Premiere partie, then, is to show that the persecutors are not following the wishes of God. Meanwhile, however, there remains the problem of the eternal disposition of the souls of heretics. Even if one grants that God does not wish token honor and obedience that does not correspond to inner feelings and convictions, Christian tradition stipulates that heretics will be damned precisely on the basis of their inner feelings and convictions and that attempting to convert heretics is therefore an act of Christian charity.13 Accordingly, merely to argue that forced conversion is wrong could be seen to result in the paradoxical position that God's morality protects men from persecution in this world and thereby condemns them to everlasting torments in the next. Bayle would, of course, allow the orthodox to try to persuade heretics to change their convictions, but if persuasion failed, the orthodox

would, then, according to the principles established in the Premiere partie, be obliged to stand by while the deluded heretic went down the path to eternal sufferings far worse than anything that could be inflicted by zealous persecutors in this world.

It is this potential paradox that requires Bayle to shift his focus from the persecutors to the heretics and to complement his condemnation of the one with the exculpation of the other. This he does by means of the doctrine of the erring conscience, the development of which dominates the second part of the Commentaire .14 This doctrine may be seen as a rational analysis of our concept of moral culpability. The natural light requires us to act in accordance with our conscience—since conscience is informed by what we take to be God's wishes, and actions that follow conscience are performed in order to please God. Accordingly, to act against conscience is a sin that deserves punishment. Conversely, acts that are performed in good conscience are not culpable (283-84).15 In order to illustrate his point, Bayle offers the striking example of the woman who sleeps with an imposter whom she sincerely takes to be her husband (301-2). Insofar as she is unable to ascertain the true facts, she is blameless. Likewise with heretics. Just as the natural light of reason prohibits attempts to compel the consciences of heretics, it mandates that they follow their own conscience and suggests that a conscience that errs in good faith need not be considered sinful but that a person who acts against the promptings of conscience is always a sinner.

To this point, my outline of Bayle's theory of the erring conscience treats as unproblematic the perspective of an orthodox Catholic who considers his beliefs to be true and heretical beliefs to be false. This follows Bayle's own procedure, which is continually to place himself in the standpoint of his own persecutors, to grant them one of their grandest and most controversial claims—namely, that their church is the true Church and their beliefs the true beliefs—and to show them that, even if one granted all this, their persecutions would nonetheless be unjustified and immoral.16

As 1 have presented it thus far, Bayle's theory of the erring conscience is basically an extension of the opening strategy of the Première partie—namely, a demonstration that the moral truths that are revealed by reason vanquish all arguments in favor of forced conversion. Just as reason overrules appeals to Scripture on

behalf of persecution, so does it neutralize any arguments for forced conversion that are grounded on alleged concerns for the souls of the misguided. To this extent Bayle's theory may be seen as a rigorous philosophical defense of the traditional Calvinist doctrine of the rights of private conscience. But that doctrine, as was indicated in the discussion of the Puritan ideology in chapter 1 (see page 25), was sometimes linked to the doctrine of private revelation, the notion that individuals had been given direct access to the truth. And even when Calvinists did not appeal to divine inspiration, most would have presumably been unwilling to presuppose that their rights of conscience were completely independent of the truth of their beliefs.17 Thus there is something quite daring about Bayle's strategy of arguing for toleration without challenging the Catholic claim that their beliefs are true.

But this strategy is not one that can ultimately be carried through to the end of Bayle's exposition. For Bayle's argument, as it has been presented thus far, leaves itself open to two sorts of objections on the part of the advocates of Catholic intolerance. First, if the Catholics are allowed to retain the certitude that their doctrines are true and those of the heretics false, then they will have a basis for assuming that the heretics have not examined the issues conscientiously enough, that their consciences have fallen into error precipitously and can be led out of error if forced to consider matters more carefully. On the other hand, the doctrine of the erring conscience can be co-opted by the persecutors themselves, who can claim that they are acting in good conscience when carrying out their persecutions, that they are acting in accordance with what they take to be the will of God. In order to be able to defuse such objections, Bayle will find himself obliged to go to another level of analysis, where he will reach epistemological conclusions that protect his theory at the cost of putting great strains on his claim to Calvinist orthodoxy.

THE PARADOX OF THE PERSECUTOR'S CONSCIENCE

I have said that Bayle's argument that the erring conscience must not be compelled leaves itself open to two sorts of objections. It will be convenient to begin with the second. In the ninth chapter

of the Seconde partie, Bayle raises the following hypothetical objection against himself:

La deuxième difficulté qu'on nous propose est qu'il s'ensuit de ma doctrine le renversement de ce que je veux établir; je veux montrer que la persecution est une chose abominable, et cependant tout homme qui se croira obligé en conscience de persécuter, sera obligé, selon moi, de persécuter, et ferait mal de ne persécuter pas. (CP, 311)

The second difficulty to be raised against us is that my doctrine yields consequences that are just the reverse of what I am trying to establish. I wish to show that persecution is an abominable thing; however, anyone who believed himself to be obliged by his conscience to persecute would, according to my doctrine, indeed be obliged to persecute and would do evil if he did not persecute.

This may well strike the reader as a powerful objection that uses one aspect of Bayle's theory to undermine the other· In Bayle's discourse, however, it is presented as one of many hypothetical objections raised against one of Bayle's numerous arguments. Bayle does not give the objection special prominence, and his response to it is relatively short, all of which serves to give the impression that Bayle is being uncompromisingly thorough and rigorous and that this objection, like all the others, can be readily dismissed. Indeed, the response begins by treating the objection not as a special paradox but as a reiteration of the basic situation that the Commentaire is addressing:

Je réponds que le but que je me propose dans ce commentaire . . . étant de convaincre les persécuteurs, que Jésus-Christ n'a pas commandé la violence, je ne ruine pas moi-même mon dessein, pourvu que je montre par de bonnes preuves que le sens littoral de ces paroles est faux, absurde et impie. Si je me sets même de fortes raisons, j'ai lieu de croire que ceux qui les examineront sincèrement, éclaireront les erreurs de conscience où ils pourraient être quant à la persecution; et ainsi mon dessein est juste. (311)

I respond that the goal that I have set for myself in this commentary . . . being to convince the persecutors that Jesus Christ has not commanded violence, I do not undermine my project, provided that I demonstrate with solid proofs that the literal interpretation is false, absurd, and impious. Even if I avail myself of nothing more than strong arguments, I have reason to believe that those who examine

them sincerely will clear up whatever errors of conscience they may have regarding persecution. Thus, my project is just.

Bayle here undertakes to justify his attempt to persuade the persecutors of their error, and he does so by appealing to the epistemological principles upon which his general argument has been based. According to these principles the persecutors are violating a moral principle that is clear and distinct. Therefore they are wrong and can be shown to be wrong; and Bayle is undertaking precisely to persuade them that their beliefs are erroneous.

The problem is, however, that this initial response does not address the actual objection, which is not really challenging Bayle's right to declare that the persecutors are in error or to try to persuade them to discard their error but is challenging his right to condemn them morally for doing something abominable. Until now the erring conscience has been associated with persecuted heretics. In this hypothetical objection, however, the appeal to the rights of the erring conscience is being made on behalf of the Persecutors, who could claim that they are carrying out their persecutions in good conscience—that is, with the conviction that they are obeying the will of God. Since Bayle has been at pains to exculpate the erring conscience, why shouldn't he find himself forced to exculpate the Persecutors who claim to be following their consciences? But if his principles require him to extend his toleration to the persecutors themselves, then his case for toleration would be vitiated by dint of its very inclusiveness: he would be obliged to tolerate those whom he has set out to condemn.18

Bayle's response does move on to confront the issue at hand by acknowledging that, according to his principles, persecutors who believe their actions to be willed by God are obliged to persecute:

Je ne nie pas que ceux qui sont actuellement persuades qu'il faut, pour obéir à Dieu, abolir les sectes, ne soient obligés de suivre les mouvements de cette fausse conscience, et que ne le faisant pas ils ne tombent dans le crime de désobéir à Dieu; puisqu'ils font une chose qu'ils croient être une désobéissance à Dieu. (CP, 311)

I do not deny that those who are presently persuaded that they must, in order to obey God, eliminate the sects are obliged to follow the dictates of their erroneous conscience, and that for them not to

do so would result in the crime of disobeying God, since they would be doing something that they deemed to be contrary to God's wishes.

After first sidestepping the objection, Bayle would here seem to be acknowledging its full force. He refuses, however, to accept the apparently inescapable consequence, that the persecutors cannot be morally condemned for their crimes. What is most striking about this refusal is that it is expressed in a single short sentence, and without any argumentation.

Mais . . . il ne s'ensuit pas qu'ils fassent sans crime ce qu'ils font avec conscience. (311)

But . . . it does not follow that what they do in good conscience is guiltless.19

Walter Rex, a very knowledgeable and acute critic of Bayle's Commentaire, suggests that the attentive reader may be able to supply the reasoning that Bayle leaves out: "Bayle does not explain his reasoning here; however other sections suggest the answer to be that the error of the persecutor is not invincible, as are those of the adultress and the heretic. The latter, Bayle assumes, have done all they could to find the truth; but with persecution, Bayle apparently believes that the evidence of natural light is so strong against it, that failure to see it must be willful and therefore criminal." Although Rex is able to supply what he considers to be Bayle's strongest possible response, he does not feel that Bayle's best response would be entirely adequate. The distinction between the invincible conscience and the one amenable to correction, he suggests, "seems tenuous in view of the increasing relativity of the context."20 Rex believes that, after setting up the power of reason to recognize clear and distinct truths, Bayle, in the Seconde partie, undermines the status of rationality by making truth more and more elusive and reason more and more impotent. And he appears to think that this movement toward uncertainty renders problematic any attempt to blame the persecutors for not knowing something that is allegedly clear and distinct.

THE FORCE OF UNCERTAINTY

In order to be able to evaluate Rex's view, we need first to examine closely the epistemological corollary that Bayle attaches to his

doctrine of the erring conscience, a corollary without which it would be exceedingly difficult for him to establish the veniality of doctrinal error. The orthodox who feel justified in compelling the conversion of heretics maintain not only that the heretics are in error but that they are obstinately so, in that they perversely refuse to accept the evidence in favor of orthodoxy. Bayle, applying a procedure that he has used from the outset, first points out that this viewpoint of the orthodox persecutors presupposes that their consciences are guided by a divinely established law to the effect that we are obliged to act in accordance with the truth, a law that we represent to ourselves as set forth by God in the following terms:

Je veux que la v é rité engage les hommes à la nécessité de la suivre, et ceux qui la suivront feront une bonne action . (CP, 331)

I wish the truth to place men under the obligation of following it, and those who do follow it will be acting virtuously.

Not only does Bayle suggest that his opponents are actually making a rationalist argument based on an appeal to universal moral principles, to the effect that we have a moral obligation to act in accordance with the truth, but the argument that he attributes to them is an argument that he wholeheartedly accepts. He agrees that we have an obligation to follow the truth and maintains that we are aware of this obligation through the natural light. What distinguishes Bayle from his opponents is his denial of their assumption that those who recognize this obligation to follow the truth, and who, accordingly, diligently search for it, will necessarily arrive at the same truth that is embraced by the orthodox. If those who recognize a moral obligation diligently to search for the truth and to follow what they determine to be the truth turn out nonetheless to have heretical beliefs, then they cannot be accused of obstinacy:

Dieu nous propose de telle manière la vérité, qu'il nous laisse dans l'engagement d'examiner ce qu'on nous propose, et de rechercher si c'est la vérité ou non. Or dès là on peut dire qu'il ne demande de nous sinon de bien examiner et de bien chercher, et qu'il se contente qu'après avoir examiné le mieux que nous ayons pu, nous consentions aux objets qui nous paraissent véritables, et que nous les amions comme un present venu du ciel. I1 est impossible qu'un amour sincere pour l'objet que l'on reçoit comme un don de Dieu,

après l'avoir examinè soigneusement, et que l'on n'aime qu'en conséquence de cette persuasion, soit mauvais, quand même il y aurait erreur dans notre persuasion. (332)

God offers us the truth in such a manner as to leave us under the obligation of examining what has been offered and of ascertaining whether or not it is indeed the truth. Now, from there, one can conclude that he requires no more of us than to examine carefully and to search carefully and that he is satisfied if, after having searched to the best of our ability, we give our assent to those things that seem to be true and we love them as one loves a gift from heaven. If one sincerely loves an object that, after careful examination, one welcomes as a gift of God, and if one loves it precisely because one is persuaded that it is God's gift, it is impossible that such love should be wicked, even if we have been persuaded in error.

But just what is it that allows Bayle to repel the charge that the erroneous convictions, however sincere, are nonetheless the product of a perverse refusal to recognize the truth? What is it that allows one to determine that one's diligent examinations have been diligent enough? Bayle's answer is that while certain truths are so clear and distinct that it would be inexcusable not to believe them (332), others are not clear and distinct, lacking any marks that would allow us to distinguish them from falsehood:

Dieu n'a pas imprimé aux vérités qu'il nous révèle, à la plupart du moins, une marque ou un signe auquel on les puisse sûrement discerner; car elles ne sont pas d'une clarté métaphysique et géométrique; elles ne produisent pas dans notre àme une persuasion plus forte que les faussetés; elles n'excitent point des passions que les faussetés n'excitent. (333)

God has not imprinted upon the truths that he has revealed to us, at least not on most of them, any mark or sign that would allow us to recognize them. They lack the clarity of metaphysical and geometric truths, they do not produce in our souls stronger convictions than those produced by falsehoods: the reactions that they elicit in us are indistinguishable from the reactions elicited by falsehoods.

By this time, of course, the perspective of orthodoxy contemplating heresy has become utterly detached from the perspective of truth contemplating error, since the ability to distinguish between truth and error is precisely what is being denied. The reason that the heretic cannot be blamed for his "error" is that it cannot

be demonstrably proved to him that he is in error, any more than it can be proved that the orthodox are in possession of the truth. Orthodoxy, by now, can be nothing more than the official doctrines, heresy, the unofficial ones.

Bayle's denial, in the above passage and elsewhere, that the truth can be recognized as such seems to be the basis for Rex's view that there has been a perilous shift between epistemological poles. Having begun with the claim that reason is the supreme arbiter of religious truth, Bayle ultimately props his theory of toleration on the inability of human reason to differentiate between truth and error. Rex presents this denouement as a paradoxical threat to the integrity of Bayle's theory: "The God-given criterium of natural light by which we could discern God's eternal laws and know that persecution was wrong appears to have darkened into incertitude. There seems to be nothing left but ruin. One wonders if even the idea of tolerance remains."21 In Rex's view, then, Bayle's Commentaire is structured around two antithetical poles, and the shift from reason to skepticism would seem to have fatal consequences.

THE DELIMITATION OF SKEPTICISM

Here, as elsewhere in this study, my ultimate concern is with the ways in which ideas are put to specific uses in specific contexts rather than the extent to which philosophical problems have been solved through a rigorous adherence to principles of reasoning. Therefore, if the apparently conflicting ideas—such as rationalism and revelation, or rationalism and skepticism—that are brought to bear on a problem are reconciled by means that are more rhetorically ingenious than logically meritorious, I am pleased to be able to point that out. Indeed, if by delineating the ways in which ideological pressures push logic in one direction or another—or give rise to rhetorical solutions—I can demonstrate the amenability of logic to ideological pressures or the versatility of epistemological ideas, then I will have succeeded in my purpose. Accordingly, if Rex were correct in his claim that Bayle's skepticism is inconsistent with his rationalism and puts unbearable pressures on his argument, this would in no way impede me in my project.22 However, I think that Rex is not correct and that Bayle's attempt to bring a combination of rationalism and skepticism to bear on the problem

of religious persecution is—provided that one accepts his premises—remarkably consistent. This is not to say that the logic of the Commentaire stands entirely on its own, with no need for rhetorical virtuosity. But in order to be able to show where Bayle's logic alone falls short of fulfilling his political purposes, we need to be able to see just how far his logic is able to take him.

Since the human incapacity to distinguish orthodox from heterodox beliefs on the basis of their truth value is a fundamental aspect of Bayle's doctrine of the erring conscience, and since this doctrine gets elaborated toward the end of the work, it is not surprising that the theme of incertitude becomes increasingly conspicuous in the Seconde partie. But I do not think that Rex is correct in saying that Bayle's appeal to the light of reason becomes proportionally muted or that the coexistence of reason and uncertainty in Bayle's argument is necessarily problematic.

It will be noted that, in the passage that I just quoted to demonstrate that Bayle's doctrine of the erring conscience depends on the claim that we cannot be certain regarding most of God's revelation, this uncertainty is established by contrasting those alleged "truths" that lack the mark that would distinguish them from falsehood with the metaphysical and geometric truths whose certainty is not in question because they do carry the requisite mark. Unlike the skeptics, who challenge all claimants to the status of truth by showing that one after another lacks the requisite mark or criterion that a successful candidate would have, Bayle contrasts uncertain "truths" not with a hypothetical ideal but with real truths that are accessible and can be recognized by dint of their clarity and distinctness. Although the paradigms for truths that can be clearly and distinctly known are found in metaphysics and geometry, Bayle is at pains throughout the Commentaire to give moral truths the same paradigmatic status. I indicated earlier that Bayle asserted, in the first chapter of the Premiere partie, that there were certain limitations to the power of reason regarding so-called speculative truths, whereas there were no limits regarding the "principes pratiques et généraux, qui se rapportent aux moeurs." In the context of Bayle's defense against the accusation that rationalism leads to Socinianism, it might have seemed as if he was merely stipulating that reason is not a dangerous instrument that produces radically heterodox doctrines. But I suggested that the distinction

between speculative truths and moral ones had a much deeper significance. We are now in a position to understand at least part of that deeper significance.

The Socinians would claim that reason tells us that the concept of the Trinity is not a clear and distinct one and needs to be rejected. In distinguishing between speculative and moral knowledge, Bayle does not dispute the Socinians' claim that the Trinity is inconsistent with reason; he broadens that claim in such a way as to put all positions on the issue, including the Socinians' own, beyond the jurisdiction of reason. If the relationship between Jesus and God is a speculative matter about which we do not have clear and distinct knowledge, this means that reason does not force us to become either Socinians or Trinitarians. Indeed, it becomes clear in the course of Bayle's exposition that the dubious "speculative truths" are precisely those doctrinal issues, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Eucharist, that have been at the center of religious controversy and religious persecution throughout the history of Christianity. To say that the truth regarding these issues cannot be clearly and distinctly known is, of course, consistent with the traditional orthodox notion that the Christian embraces mysteries that are beyond the ken of reason. But in the context of Bayle's overall argument, according to which reason is the supreme authority, what had been a mystery is suddenly transformed into an uncertainty. Traditionally, mysteries needed to be embraced as part of a Christian's submission to the doctrinal authority of the Church. And even uncertainty had been employed by Catholic fideists, as we saw above (pp. 82-83), as a reason for submitting to the authority of the Church.23 But Bayle's argument has shifted the ideological valence of uncertainty from an instrument of authority to an argument for autonomy: our inability to know serves to empower and protect the individual conscience. We may make our individual choices, establish our convictions, as to whether we accept or reject the Trinity, accept or reject the notion that the eucharistic bread is the body of Christ, but, insofar as the truth in these matters is beyond the reach of human reason, no one can say that a believer in this or that doctrine is obstinately refusing to recognize the truth, is not acting in accordance with the dictates of conscience. For what conscience dictates in these speculative matters is not corrigible by any appeal to clear and distinct ideas. Thus

does Bayle's theory of the erring conscience, and ultimately his theory of toleration, depend on the elusiveness of speculative truths.

But the elusiveness of speculative truths does not impinge on the accessibility of moral truths, which—Bayle repeatedly claims— can be clearly and distinctly known. The first time that Bayle gives examples of truths that cannot be overruled by any doctrine of religion is in the third paragraph of the Premiere partie, the very paragraph in which he first wards off the charge that reason authorizes a refusal to believe in the Trinity and the Incarnation. In this instance, the list consists only of so-called metaphysical principles:

Je sais bien qu'il y a des axiomes contre lesquels les paroles les plus expresses et les plus évidentes de l'Ecriture ne gagneraient rien, comme que le tout est plus grand que sa partie; que si de choses égales on ôte choses égales, les residus en seront égaux; qu'il est impossible que deux contradictoires soient véitables; ou que l'essence d'un sujet subsiste réelle-ment apres la destruction du sujet . (CP, 87)

I know well that there are axioms that cannot be overturned by the most plain and explicit words of Scripture, such as that the whole is greater than its part; that if one takes equal parts away from two equal things, the remainders will be equal; that it is impossible that two contradictories are both true; that the essence of a subject subsists in reality after the destruction of the subject.

Toward the end of the same chapter, however, when Bayle again has occasion to offer such a list, he begins with the same principle but then switches to radically different examples of clear and distinct truths:

Un esprit attentif et philosophe conçoit clairement que la lumière vive et distincte, qui nous accompagne en tous lieux et en tous temps, et qui nous montre que le tout est plus grand que sa partie, qu'il est honnête d'avoir de la gratitude pour ses bienfaiteurs, de ne point faire fi autrui ce que nous ne voudrions pas qui nous fû fait, de tenir sa parole, et d'agir selon sa conscience ; il con çoit, dis-je, clairement que cette lumière vient de Dieu, et que c'est une révélation naturelle. (94-95)

An attentive and philosophical mind clearly conceives that the vivid and distinct natural light that accompanies us at all times and in all places, and that shows us that the whole is greater than its part, that justice requires us to be grateful to our benefactors, not to do unto others what we would not wish to have done to ourselves, to keep our word, and to

act in accordance with our conscience ; it clearly conceives, I say, that this light comes from God, and that it is a natural revelation.

By giving moral truisms the same paradigmatic status as the clear and distinct truths of metaphysics, Bayle is no doubt attempting to substantiate the distinction that he had made a few paragraphs earlier, between speculative and moral propositions. But he is also preparing the reader to accept the certitude of a series of moral propositions—including the crucial proposition, unostentatiously embedded in this list, that we are morally obliged to follow our consciences—that will form the backbone of his general argument.24 Several of the supposedly indubitable moral propositions will be offered throughout the Seconde partie, where the uncertainty of the speculative propositions at the heart of religious controversy will be juxtaposed with the certitude of moral propositions regarding the rights and obligations of the erring conscience. Nor is this juxtaposition contradictory or paradoxical; for the argument depends precisely on both the indubitability of the moral propositions and on the dubitability of the speculative ones.

Although we will have occasion below to look more closely at some of the moral propositions that provide the foundation for Bayle's doctrine of the erring conscience, it would require an excessive degree of quotation to demonstrate that the moral propositions are as insistent and conspicuous toward the end of the Commentaire as are the statements about the human incapacity to obtain certitude. But such a demonstration is unnecessary for our purposes. As long as Bayle consistently adheres to the distinction between moral truths and speculative ones, and as long as the moral truths remain clear to the light of reason while the speculative truths remain unclear, then there is no need to accept Rex's view that Bayle's theory is vitiated by a conflict between his rationalism and his skepticism.

If we return to the paradox of the persecutor's conscience with this distinction in mind, then there would seem to be a solid basis for finding the persecutor guilty of crimes despite the fact that he has acted in good conscience. Whereas the heretic's convictions have to do with speculative matters and hence cannot be overruled by the light of reason, the persecutor's convictions are a perversion of moral truths that God has imprinted on us. Accordingly, in order

to remain persuaded that God wishes us to persecute heretics, one would need obstinately to ignore the clear and distinct moral truths that God has revealed to us through the inner light.

It will be recalled that Bayle had earlier asserted that when the persecutors claim that they are acting in accordance with God's wishes they are presupposing a prior divine command—the truth of which Bayle vigorously accepts—to the effect that the truth places human beings under the obligation of following it and that those who do follow it are acting virtuously. But now we can see that in formulating this maxim Bayle was equivocating on the word vérité. With regard to ethical matters, we are obliged to follow the truth. With regard to speculative matters, we are obliged to follow what we take to be the truth, since, here, truth itself is inaccessible. Because the speculative beliefs that the persecutors attempt to force on the "heretics" cannot be clearly and distinctly known to be true, those "heretics" who, in good conscience, hold to their own speculative beliefs are under no obligation to give them up. They are not violating the moral imperative regarding the obligation to follow the truth; for the imperative in this case requires them only to hold their beliefs in good conscience. Nothing further can be demanded of them. But the imperative to follow the truth applies with its full force to the persecutors themselves: the moral truth that it is evil to compel consciences is available to the light of reason. Therefore, as Rex suggested, the persecutors' error is not invincible and they are morally culpable if they fail to follow the truth.25 Thus, by combining the general distinction between the moral and the speculative with the specific moral imperative to seek and to follow the truth, Bayle gives himself the capacity not only to deflect the paradox of the persecutor's conscience but to turn the tables on the persecutors by showing that it is they, and not the heretics, who are obstinate.

If Bayle's theory gives him this capacity, then why is he so reticent when confronted with the appeal to the persecutor's conscience? Why does Bayle, who otherwise conducts his arguments with astonishing perspicuousness and thoroughness, see fit to omit the heart of his response to what appears to be the most powerful objection that could have been raised against him? Why does he pass up this opportunity to turn the tables on his enemies?

The answer, I think, lies in the fact that Bayle's argument for

toleration achieves its power at the expense of the very idea of religious truth. For Dryden and for the deists, the fact that doctrines are uncertain is sufficient to make them inessential. Bayle agrees that they are uncertain but cannot agree that they are inessential. For to declare that the questions, say, of the Trinity and the Incarnation are inessential would be to repudiate Calvinism and to open oneself to the charge of deism. Hence, Bayle's position is that we cannot know whether God is three persons or only one but that we nonetheless can commit ourselves to one view or another in good conscience. Although the Socinians cannot rationally demonstrate that they are right, neither can they be shown to be wrong. Therefore, they too, like the Calvinists and all others who hold their speculative beliefs in good conscience, need to be tolerated (276). The notion that one is right to hold beliefs that cannot be shown to be true or false is certainly a species of fideism, but, unlike the usual sort of fideism, which postulates that one must submit to the revealed truths of one's own religion, this is a promiscuous fideism that postulates that one is guiltless in submitting to one or another set of speculative doctrines. Moreover, it is a fideism that, paradoxically, is ultimately grounded in reason.26 Even the deists had clung to the idea that one must obey the true religion in order to achieve salvation, but they had pared the true religion down to a small core of beliefs to be found at the heart of all religions. Bayle, on the other hand, is not necessarily cutting back on the number of beliefs that are required; he is removing the requirement that they be true.

The ultimate thrust of Bayle's argument, then, is to urge toleration of religious beliefs while at the same time devaluing the epistemological status of those beliefs. His rhetorical strategy is to emphasize the need for toleration while playing down the fact that the argument for toleration goes hand in hand with the devaluation of the actual content of religious belief. This is presumably why the distinction between moral and speculative truths is introduced explicitly when Bayle is warding off Socinianism and why Bayle fails to call attention to the fact that the distinction applies equally to more orthodox versions of Christianity. Although Bayle, unlike Dryden, does not mask his rationalism, he does attempt to mute it by not blaring out its full significance. While most philosophers paper over the weaknesses of their arguments, there is a strong

sense, then, in which Bayle finds it prudent in some degree to paper over his argument's remarkable strengths, and this may well be one of the reasons for his taciturnity in the face of the paradox of the persecutor's conscience.

To point out that Bayle stresses the unknowability of speculative truths only when it suits his purposes to do so is to point out that Bayle's principles are established with great strength and consistency but are applied differentially. Bayle's motivation for this is partly, no doubt, that he does not wish to outrage the very people whose rights he is so painstakingly defending.27 But this is not so much a matter of playing favorites as it is a matter of applying the lessons of his analysis only where they are needed. One result of this differential procedure, as we will see in the next section, is the transmutation of the political valence of skepticism.

MORAL TRUTHS AND THE POLITICS OF DOUBT

Thus far, in attempting to demonstrate the usefulness of Bayle's distinction between speculative and moral truth, I have stressed the way in which it renders the errors of the heretics pardonable and the errors of the persecutors condemnable. Since any doctrinal errors embraced by the heretics are in the speculative realm and cannot be corrected by the natural light, the heretics, unlike the persecutors, can take shelter in the doctrine of the erring conscience. Meanwhile, the persecutors' appeal to the erring conscience can be overruled on the ground that they are obliged not to settle for moral error but to search for the moral truth that is available to them.

It is important to note, however, that Bayle does not content himself with arguing that it is merely pardonable for the heretics to adhere to the speculative doctrines that they have fixed upon; he wishes to suggest that it is positively meritorious for them to do so. The merit derives partly from the fact that the heretics are depicted as having, like the good Calvinists on whom they are modeled, diligently searched for the truth before settling on their speculative doctrines.28 Thus they have obeyed the moral imperative to search for the truth and to follow it.

But Bayle refuses to assign merit to the search alone. That is to

say, he would not consider it meritorious to continue searching for the truth and rejecting every candidate that failed to meet the Cartesian criterion of clarity and distinctness. To search thus would be to follow the path of skepticism, and this is a course that Bayle rejects:

Après tout dans la religion on ne peut pas faire toute sa vie le sceptique, et le pyrrhonien; il faut se fixer à quelque chose, et agir scion ce à quoi on se determine. (CP, 299)

After all, in religion one cannot be a skeptic or Pyrrhonist for one's entire life; one must settle on something and act in accordance with what one has chosen.

Bayle is ruling out skepticism not on the familiar ground that it is a psychological impossibility to maintain such an attitude but on the ground that it would be morally unacceptable to do so.29 Granted, since Bayle's overall purpose is to show that the secular authority in France is obliged to tolerate religious beliefs that are held in good conscience, he is no doubt pleased to be able to show that if the persecutors insist that heretics continue searching until they find the true religion, then the persecutors would, in effect, be advocating skepticism. For in the absence of clear and distinct marks of truth on speculative doctrines, those who do not satisfy themselves with the dictates of conscience will be forced to search interminably for the true religion. But Bayle is not merely turning the tables on his enemies by suggesting that their principles would encourage something that they would deem highly undesirable. Skepticism is something that he, too, considers highly undesirable, something that emerges from his analysis as a baleful alternative to fixing on some religion or other and following its dictates. For Bayle, it will be recalled, to behave morally is to behave in accordance with the dictates of one's conscience, which means, by definition, to behave in accordance with what one takes to be the will of God. Morality is inseparable from conscience, which, in turn, is inseparable from religion.

This is not to say that Bayle is suggesting that, without religion, one would necessarily behave in a criminal manner. Bayle in fact became infamous in his own time for arguing that atheists are no less capable of civic virtue than Christians and that an orderly society of atheists is therefore quite conceivable.30 In making that

claim, however, Bayle was referring to the ability of atheists to conform to social norms rather than to their ability to please God. The "virtue" of atheists lies in their public behavior, which, like that of most Christians, is motivated by amour-propre and pride rather than by conscience. Atheists are no less motivated than are Christians by the desire for public approval and the wish to avoid censure or punishment, and therefore they are equally capable of being good citizens. But, conversely, as Bayle says in the Commentaire, atheists, unlike heretics, do not have the right to disseminate their views because, unlike heretics, they cannot claim that they are acting in good conscience:

Un athée ne pouvant être poussé à dogmatiser par aucun motif de conscience, ne pourra jamais alléguer aux magistrats cette sentence de saint Pierre, il vaut mieux obéir à Dieu qu'aux hommes . (CP, 312)31

Since an atheist cannot be impelled to dogmatize by any motive of conscience, he can never invoke before the magistrates this maxim of St. Peter: it is worthier to obey God than to obey men.

In other words, since someone who preaches atheism cannot claim to be acting in accordance with God's will, he is, by virtue of Bayle's definition of conscience, unable to claim the right of conscience for his actions. Thus Bayle's assertion that any religious beliefs are better than none at all is made not from the point of view that sees religion as an instrument of social control but from the point of view that sees the possibility of acting in accordance with one's conscience as the prerequisite for being able to please God and attain salvation.32

Soit que l'on se fixe au vrai, soit au faux, il est ègalement certain qu'il faut faire des actes de vertu, et d'amour de Dieu. (299)33

Whether one settles on the truth or on falsehood, it is equally certain that one must perform actions that are motivated by virtue and love of God.

Since God does not condemn those who sincerely follow an erring conscience, those who insist on searching eternally for absolute religious truth are guilty of a supreme folly:

C'est vouloir que toute sa vie passe dans une pure spéculation, sans qu'il consulte jamais sa conscience pour agir selon ses lumières. Or ce serait la plus grande de routes les absurdités. (299-300)

That would be willingly to spend one's entire life in pure speculation, without ever consulting one's conscience in order to act in accordance with its lights. Now, that would be the greatest of all absurdities.

The skeptic's mistake, like that of the persecutors, would be to assume that what matters is the content of belief, and that embracing false doctrines is culpable in God's eyes. Indeed, not only is it forgivable to commit oneself to false doctrines, but it seems positively dangerous to refuse to engage in such erroneous commitments. For Bayle sees the skeptical search for certainty in doctrinal truth as "la plus grande de toutes les absurdités" not simply because such a vain search is irrelevant to salvation but because it is positively inimical to salvation. The point at which Bayle, after using skeptical techniques to argue that doctrinal truth is inaccessible and hence not required for salvation, goes on to reject skepticism itself as inimical to salvation is perhaps the point at which the structure of Bayle's argument and the structure of his commitments most vividly intersect and illuminate one another.

We saw earlier that one of the fundamental axioms of Bayle's moral rationalism is that God places human beings under the obligation of acting in accordance with the truth. Since the skeptic has limitless respect for the truth and refuses to accept specious substitutes, it might well seem to a skeptic that he is acting morally in not making any premature commitments and, instead, in continuing his search for truth. Moreover, it might seem as if Bayle's moral rationalism ought to endorse such behavior or at least ought to consider it to be no more culpable than making commitments to speculative beliefs that lack the marks of certitude.

To such an objection, Bayle could reply that just as an atheist cannot proselytize in good conscience—since conscience is, by definition, one's sense of what it is that God requires of us—by the same token, a skeptic cannot appeal to conscience without first committing himself to the belief that there is a God and that in pursuing his skeptical inquiries he is acting in accordance with what he takes to be God's will. By thus appealing to conscience, the skeptic would cease to be a skeptic, since he would be commit-

ting himself to the truth of God's existence and of the requirement to act in accordance with his will.

But why, it might be asked, could one not accept belief in God but remain skeptical with regard to speculative beliefs concerning the Trinity and the Incarnation? Such a move would seem to be consistent with Bayle's principles as they have been set forth thus far and would seem to allow him to argue for religious toleration from a universalist perspective that transcended the various doctrinal disputes that had led to war and persecution. We have already seen that Bayle's argument brings him to heterodox positions, and it might seem as if the universalist argument for toleration would simply be the logical culmination of Bayle's heterodoxy.

We have already seen, however, in the case of Lord Herbert's and Dryden's deism, that in the context of late seventeenth-century religio-political discourse, the paring down of religious beliefs to the minima that were beyond dispute could be used as a means of discounting the particular beliefs that distinguished one sect from another and hence as a basis for setting aside those particular beliefs as a threat to social order. Bayle is arguing not simply that his coreligionists should not be persecuted for their beliefs but that they must be allowed to hold them. His position is that the fact that all speculative positions are equally dubious does not—contrary to Dryden—render them equally unnecessary to salvation. Rather, it renders them all equally necessary for salvation, insofar as God requires that one consult one's conscience on these matters and follow its dictates.

In avoiding the sort of universalism that would discount differences instead of protecting them,34 Bayle is not simply avoiding one of the ideological dangers of deism but is going against the traditional ideological justification of skepticism. Although skeptics spent their lives in search of that which could not be doubted, without accepting as true anything that proved to be merely a speculative uncertainty, they were always at pains to assure the authorities that their activities posed no threat to public order. Sextus Empiricus, the codifier of Pyrrhonism—the most rigorous and self-consistent skeptical procedure—acknowledged that the essence of the skeptical search was to question appearances, and not to settle for apparent truths, but nonetheless asserted that Pyrrhonists submitted to appearances (and hence to authority) in

their everyday lives. They followed, he wrote, "a line of reasoning which, in accordance with appearances, points us to a life conformable to the customs of our country and its laws and institutions, and to our own instinctive feelings."35

Religion is not given any special attention here, presumably because—as Gibbon will assert in the Decline and Fall —pagan religion is seen by pagan philosophers as simply an aspect of one's public duties.36 The skeptical tradition of submission to local laws and customs is still in evidence when Descartes, in the Discours de la méthode, establishes a provisional morality that will guide him in his daily activities while he suspends his beliefs and searches for indubitable principles. But Descartes, living in France during the early seventeenth century, cannot simply slide over religion. The first maxim of his provisional morality

était d'obéir aux lois et aux coutumes de mon pays, retenant constamment la religion en laquelle Dieu m'a fait la grâce d'être instruit dès mon enfance, et me gouvernant, en toute autre chose, suivant les opinions . . . reçues en pratique par les mieux senses de ceux avec lequels j'aurais à vivre. Car commençant dès lors à ne compter pour rien les miennes propres, à cause que je les voulais remettre toutes à l'examen, j'étais assuré de ne pouvoir mieux que de suivre celles des mieux sensés.17

was to obey the laws and customs of my country and to hold constantly to that religion in which, owing to the grace of God, I had been instructed since childhood, and to govern myself in all other matters by following the opinions . . . put into practice by the most judicious of those among whom I would be living. For, putting no stock in my own opinions from that point on, since I wished to subject them all to examination, I felt confident that I could do no better than to follow the opinions of those who were most judicious.

Although Descartes gives his retention of Catholicism a pious formulation that serves to ward off charges that his faith is merely token and external, the fact that his provisional morality is explicitly presented as guiding only his actions, while his judgment is being suspended, makes it hard to take his piety seriously.38 Thus, Descartes, like the skeptics before him, would seem to be submitting to appearances in order to protect his freedom to carry out his rigorous search for truth. But these individual acts of prudence end up allowing skepticism to associate itself with social conservatism

and even, paradoxically, to provide a positive argument for conservatism: in the absence of certitude, one recognizes one's own weakness, and the impulse to follow custom and obey authority comes to seem not merely prudent but virtually irresistible. In chapter 2, we found later versions of this very argument raised on behalf of the authority of the Catholic church: because of the weakness of reason, or because of our inability to establish the authentic biblical text, we need to submit to the traditional authority. Moreover, when the skeptic gives up the search for truth and achieves a state of ataraxia, or unperturbedness, he is undisposed to be anything but a model of obedience. Thus Montaigne finally extols skepticism in the "Apologie de Raimond Sebond" on the ground that those minds that do not look into matters divine and human are docile and tractable before the laws of religion and those of the state. Pyrrhonism, as he goes on to explain,

présente l'homme nu et vide, reconnaissant sa faiblesse naturelle, propre à recevoir d'en haut quelque force étrangère, dégarni d’humaine science, et d'autant plus apte à loger en soi la divine, anéan-tissant son jugement pour faire plus de place à la foi; ni mécréant ni établissant aucun dogme contre les observances communes; humble, obéissant, disciplinable, studieux, ennemi juré d'hérésie, et s'exemptant par consequent des vaines et irréligieuses opinions introduites par les fausses sectes.39

reveals man to be naked and empty, recognizing his natural weakness, and ready to accept some external, higher power; stripped of human knowledge, and hence all the more inclined to make room for the divine; annihilating his judgment in order to make way for faith; neither an infidel nor an establisher of beliefs contrary to the community's observances; humble, obedient, amenable, zealous, a sworn enemy of heresy, and therefore impervious to the foolish and irreligious opinions introduced by false sects.

Bayle, of course, cannot follow the skeptics in submitting, if only externally, to the prevailing religious beliefs, since his plea for toleration is premised on an abhorrence for token submission to the religion of the French king, a submission that would require Protestants to violate their consciences and hence endanger their souls. The "heretic" must be able to reject the religion of those who wield the authority of the state and who claim to be the wisest and

most knowledgeable. And his submission to the religion of his conscience, unlike the skeptic's submission to appearances, must be sincere, a matter of deep conviction. In fact, whereas the skeptics would attain speculative freedom at the cost of external submission to the customs, including the religious customs, of their country, Bayle undertakes to save his coreligionists from having to accept even external submission to the prevailing religion, and he does so precisely by rejecting unlimited speculative freedom (i.e., skepticism) in favor of conviction. For it is conviction that is essential to the moral status of conscience.

Yet Bayle's argument depends on his ability to see things through the eyes of a skeptic—that is, on his ability to recognize, in the classical skeptical manner, the failure of claimants to the status of truth to exhibit the marks that clearly and distinctly distinguish truth from falsehood. For the modern reader, there is a danger at this point that philosophical issues will give way to intriguing psychological ones and that the question of how Bayle is able to sustain his double perspective will press itself upon us. This pressure would distract us from the task at hand and needs to be resisted.40 But there is a closely related question that does need to be addressed. Since Bayle's argument depends on an understanding of the claims of reason and those of conscience, as well as the limitations of reason as exposed by skeptical scrutiny, and the interrelationship between all of these, the reader who is to be convinced by Bayle's arguments needs to be able to recognize and understand all these claims and perspectives.

I have already suggested that the fact that Bayle avoids underlining the uncertainty of speculative truths indicates that he is not anxious to trumpet one of the more provocative elements of his theory. Bayle's coreligionists might not be inclined to welcome a defense of religious toleration that demeaned the epistemological status of their beliefs. But there is no immediate reason why they need to be made painfully aware of this epistemological corollary of Bayle's argument for toleration. Bayle's fellow Protestants, insofar as they are submitting to beliefs that are not clearly and distinctly known to be true, are ultimately, like the skeptics, sub-mitring to appearances. It is necessary that they do so with conviction. But whereas it is necessary that the skeptic—in order to be a

skeptic—be aware that he is submitting to appearances rather than to the truth, it is not necessary that the Christian who submits to beliefs in good conscience be aware of the fallibility of conscience— the fact that the certainty of his or her beliefs cannot be guaranteed. That is to say, there is no indication that God requires that the commitment of the ordinary Christian needs to be made in the face of doubt, as a heroic triumph of faith over reason, in the manner of Pascal or Kierkegaard or, indeed, of Bayle. God requires only that the commitment be sincere and that it be followed.

Thus Bayle's fellow Huguenots do not need to share his exquisite epistemological self-awareness. The only time that one needs to be aware that it is impossible to know whether one's Christian beliefs are true is at such time as one has the power and the disposition to force one's beliefs upon others.41 It is precisely in that situation that one needs to understand every element of Bayle's argument: one needs to recognize the moral truth that it is a crime against God to constrain the consciences of others, and one needs to recognize that this moral truth is supported by the fact that the speculative beliefs of religion are dubious but that God nonetheless rewards those who follow their consciences.

In the political context in which Bayle is writing, there is only one person who needs to share Bayle's skeptical self-consciousness; there is only one person who needs to understand everything that Bayle has set forth in his Commentaire and who can afford to ignore Bayle's arguments only at the peril of his eternal soul, and that person is the king of France.42 For when the king understands that religious truths are uncertain and that, in the absence of certainty, God rewards those who follow their conscience, then the king's own conscience should be informed by the moral obligation to tolerate religious diversity.

The conservatism of traditional skepticism came from the fact that the role of skeptic was assigned to the citizen, or political subject, whose very awareness of the dubiety of appearances impelled him to submit to authority. Bayle changes the ideological valence of skepticism by assigning the role of the skeptical doubter not to the subject—who needs to stop the endless search and to obey his private conscience—but to the ruler, who, in the absence of certitude, is obliged by God to give the utmost latitude to his

subjects, both as they search for truth and as they submit to the doctrines that their consciences present to them as true. Ultimately, Bayle transforms skepticism into an instrument of subversion not by questioning authority or by questioning our ability to know the truth but by making it morally imperative that authority question itself.

4
Paganism, Christianity, and the Social Order

The Erastian philosophy found its cohesion in the principle of civil order at all costs. . . . It represents a very significant disposition to shift religious sovereignty from the clergy to the State. . . . The State's attention will be focused upon the maintenance of civil peace rather than upon the support of a religious system deemed to be the true Church of God.
W. K. Jordan

BOSSUET AND THE TRADITION OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY

When traditional Christian ideas about the source of religious knowledge came under attack in the ways that we have looked at in the preceding chapters, what was at stake was not merely the status of dogmas and mysteries and epistemologies but also the status of the Christian conception of history.

Bossuet's Discours de l'histoire universelle (1681) provides us with an epitome of traditional Christian historiography as well as a vivid introduction to the way in which that historiography is implicated in and threatened by the religio-political struggles of the period. Bossuet "perhaps more than any other [man] stands for the transmission of the early Christian historical tradition into the modern period."1 But Bossuet was not simply a transmitter of historiographic tradition. He was Versailles's most eloquent spokesman for royal authority and Catholic hegemony. He urged Louis XIV to "complete" the conversion of the Protestants and cheered the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.2 His justification—before the king on 21 October 1685 (two days before the revocation)—of measures already taken against the Protestants made use of an appeal to compelle intrare and "les principes de Saint Augustin"3 and was evidently one of the specific factors surrounding the revocation that moved Bayle to write his Commentaire.4

It should not be surprising to find Bossuet's absolutist and antischismatic viewpoints reflected in his Histoire universelle. Nor, indeed, should it be surprising that the conflict between Bossuet and Bayle over religious toleration should be fought not merely in the philosophical and theological arena but in the historiographic one as well. The historiographic differences between the two writers are nonetheless worth our attention; for they will help us to understand a surprising aspect of the evolution of the high Enlightenment's interpretations of Christianity and paganism, culminating in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire —namely, the way in which individual writers were motivated by religio-political considerations to embrace apparently inconsistent evaluations of pagan and Christian cultures. Consequently, as we will see below, the trajectory that carries us from Bossuet to Gibbon will involve not merely the transvaluation of the traditional attitudes toward Christians and pagans but a series of dilemmas that will arise from the need to condemn what one is valorizing and to valorize what one is condemning.

Insofar as he is transmitting the traditional Christian historiography, Bossuet is concerned with depicting all of history as the unfolding of God's providential scheme and with showing that the central event around which that scheme is organized is the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.5 In narrating the history of religion, Bossuet has little difficulty in presenting the advent of Jesus as the watershed. In a chapter entitled "Prodigieux aveuglement de l'idolâtrie avant la venue du Messie," Bossuet sets forth the depravity of pagan religion before it was supplanted by Christianity:

Comme . . . la conversion de la gentilité était une oeuvre réservée au Messie, et le propre caractère de sa venue, l'erreur et I'impiété prévalaient partout. . . . Qui oserait raconter les cérémonies des dieux immortels, et leurs mystères impurs? Leurs amours, leurs cruautés, leurs jalousies, et tous leurs autres excès étaient le sujet de leurs fêtes. . . . Ainsi le crime était adoré, et reconnu nécessaire au culte des dieux.6

Since the conversion of the gentiles was a task reserved for the Messiah, and of a character appropriate to his advent, error and impiety prevailed everywhere. . . . Who would dare to describe the ceremonies of the immortal gods and their polluted mysteries? The

gods' carnal passions, their cruelties, their jealousies, and all their other excesses were the subject of their festivals. . . . Thus was crime adored and deemed a necessary part of divine worship.

As depicted in this passage, paganism is an abomination not simply because it is a false religion but because it sets forth vile examples of immoral behavior among the gods and requires evil behavior in its rituals. For the Christian historian, the history of religion is closely related to the history of morality in that the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus needs to be seen as bringing into the world—along with a new conception of religion and a new offer of eternal bliss—a new morality, a new concept of virtue. And Bossuet appears to be eager to make this point:

Avec de si nouvelles récompenses, il fallait que Jésus-Christ proposêt aussi de nouvelles idles de vertu, des pratiques plus parfaites et plus épurées. La fin de la religion, l'âme des vertues et l'abregé de la loi, c'est la charité. (DHU, 848)

Along with such new rewards, it was also necessary that Jesus Christ should set forth new ideas of virtue, purer and more perfect standards of behavior. The end of religion, the core of the virtues, and the essence of the law is charity.

But no sooner does Bossuet seem to assert that the Christian doctrine of charity represents a moral revolution than he goes on to treat Christian morality more as an extension and purification of pagan morality than as an absolute innovation:

Mais, jusqu'à Jésus-Christ, on peut dire que la perfection et les effets de cette vertu n'étaient pas enti<0232>rement connus. C'est Jésus-Christ proprement qui nous apprend à nous contenter de Dieu seul. Pour établir la règne de la charité, et nous en découvrir tous les devoirs, il nous propose l'amour de Dieu, jusqu'à nous hair nous-mêmes, et persécuter sans relâche le principe de corruption que nous avons tous dans le coeur. Il nous propose l'amour du prochain. (DHU, 848)

But before Jesus Christ, it can be said that the perfection and the effects of this virtue were not completely known. It is properly Jesus Christ who teaches us to find our happiness in God alone. In order to establish the regime of charity and reveal to us all of the duties entailed therein, he instructs us to love God to the extent that we hate ourselves and to persecute unremittingly the source of corruption in all our hearts. He tells us to love our neighbor.

The central moral concept of charity was evidently available to the pagans, albeit only imperfectly. This abrupt shift in Bossuet's narrative points to the fact that he is undertaking to reconcile the traditional view of Christianity as a new moral system with the theologically unexceptionable notion that there was a natural light that informed pagan morality before the advent of Jesus. Nor is Bossuet merely bowing to the technical demands of orthodoxy. The notion that moral knowledge was available to pagans through the natural light is something that serves more particular purposes.

First, pagan virtue is a useful tool for him in his role as moral teacher. The Histoire universelle is addressed to the Dauphin— whose education had been placed under Bossuet's pious supervision—and is replete with explicit lessons for him as well as implicit lessons for his father, Louis XIV. Christian moralists and satirists often used the notion of virtuous pagans or heathens—real or imagined7 —as a way of reproaching Christians for failing to live up to the explicit dictates of revealed Christianity, and such a technique would seem to be at work in Bossuet's text, for example, in the following passage regarding the Athenians:

Ils détestaient l'adultðre, dans les hommes et dans les femmes; la société conjugale était sacrée parmi eux. Mais quand ils s'appliquaient àla religion, ils paraissaient comme possédés par un esprit étranger, et leur lumière naturelle les abandonnait. (DHU, 821)

They detested adultery, in men as well as in women; the marital state was sacred among them. But when they turned to religion, it was as if they were possessed by an alien spirit, and their natural light abandoned them.

In metaphorically associating Greek religion with possession by alien spirits, Bossuet is summoning up the old idea that pagan religion was the work of demons. But beyond this, in contrasting this demonic religion with the virtuous detestation of adultery that is attributed to the natural light, Bossuet is evidently availing himself of an opportunity to reproach Louis XIV for his adulteries by reminding him that even pagans were more virtuous in this regard than the divinely ordained Christian monarch.8

Bossuet does not limit his moralizing to matters of personal behavior but also mines ancient history for institutions and policies that highlighted the failures of Christian governments to follow

Christian precepts. He is able, for example, to praise the early Roman institution of the College of Fetiales for refusing to allow Rome to engage in unjust wars and to use this example to chide Christian monarchs who flout revealed Christianity by engaging in wars of conquest:

Sainte institution s'il en fut jamais, et qui fait honte aux chrétiens, à qui un Dieu venu au monde pour pacifier toutes choses n'a pu inspirer la charité et la paix! (DHU, 1008)

A venerable institution if there ever was one, an institution that shames Christians, in whom even a God bringing universal peace to earth could not inspire charity and peace!

That the virtuous pagans are able to reject adultery and unjust wars despite the fact that their religions teach bad morals, and that Christian kings engage in adultery and military conquest despite the fact that their religion—the true religion—prohibits these things, gives the above passages their satiric force. Paradoxically, however, the more extensive and estimable the virtues of the pagans, the more danger there is of creating the impression that a religion whose adherents exhibit so much personal virtue and so many enlightened institutions may not be in such dire need of supplantation; and such an impression would threaten the entire structure of providential history.

One way to ward off such danger is by stringently distinguishing between the natural light that informs pagan morality and the darkness that hangs over pagan religion. Bossuet attempts to guarantee such a separation in a very straightforward way, by dividing his Histoire universelle into separate narratives; the history of religions is the subject of Part Two, the history of civilizations, Part Three. (Part One deals with the history of epochs.) By dint of such a separation, Bossuet, in principle, is able to protect his orthodoxy while moralizing about the repeated failure of Christians to be as virtuous as pagans.

Bossuet, however, is writing not simply as an inheritor of the tradition of Christian historiography, nor simply as a Christian moralist; he does not, by any means, use ancient history merely for examples of ways in which pagans informed by the natural light could be more virtuous than Christians endowed with divine revelation. Like other historians, Bossuet looked to the past for ideological legitimation in order to justify those contemporary interests,

outlooks, policies, and institutions that he favored. But, as the analysis to this point has made abundantly clear, political issues in the seventeenth century were inseparable from religious ones. Thus when Bossuet, the relentless enemy of schism and zealous advocate of religious unity through force of arms—for whom the Christian summum bonum of charity manages to get transmuted into obedience9 —praises obedience among the ancients, even in the ostensibly secular context of the Roman army (DHU, 994), it is hard not to see the projection of hierarchical and antischismatic Catholic values. The same may be said of his extended idealization of Egypt—perhaps the most striking feature of his history of civilizations—which focuses, as Paul Hazard has pointed out, on the Egyptians' grave conservatism and horror of novelty.10

Nor does Bossuet's political animus allow him to content himself with projecting religio-political values onto the civic institutions of the ancients. He cannot keep himself from directly praising their religio-political arrangements when he finds them exemplary—for example, when he tells us that although the Egyptian monarchy was hereditary, the kings were obliged by ancient custom to obey (religious) laws, including a body of law that applied to them alone. This submission of otherwise inviolable kings to the power of religion and tradition is represented as enhancing rather than diminishing their godlike qualities.11 Thus in Egypt (as in France) the glory of civilization and the majesty of kings is seen to depend on a proper submission to religious tradition.

A more explicit, and, for our purposes, more crucial, example of Bossuet's exaltation of pagan religion—or, at least, of the role that it played in an orderly society—is to be found in his remarks on the foundations of Roman religion. Romulus, he tells us,

établit l'ordre et réprima les esprits par des lois trLs saintes. II commença par la religion, qu'il regarda comme le fondement des Etats. Il la fit aussi sérieuse, aussi grave, et aussi modeste que les ténèbres de l'idolâtrie le pouvaient permettre. Les religions étran-gères et les sacrifices, qui n'étaient pas établies par les coutumes romaines, furent défendus. Dans la suite, on se dispensa de cette loi; mais c'était l'intention de Romulus qu'elle fût gardée, et on en retint toujours quelque chose. (DHU, 1013)

imposed order and tamed unruly spirits by means of extremely venerable laws. He began with religion, which he considered the foundation of states. He made it as serious, as solemn, as modest,

as the darkness of idolatry would allow. Foreign religions and sacrifices that were not grounded in Roman custom were prohibited. Subsequently, this law was not always enforced; but it was Romulus's intention that it be preserved, and at least part of it was retained.

I have suggested that the orthodoxy of Bossuet's traditional Christian historiography depended on the separation of religious history from the history of civilizations, so that those aspects of pre-Christian civilization that were meritorious and thus reflected the benefit of the natural light would not lead one to question the need for the Incarnation of God and the revelation of the true religion. After all, the profound threat to providential history that deism was beginning to pose was precisely that, by making all of the fundamental truths about morality and religion equally available to pagans, it removes any need for the Incarnation.12

Despite this danger, however, Bossuet's virtual sanctification of Romulus's institution of religious conformity indicates how religio-political imperatives could drive even the staunchest orthodoxy to put strains on itself. On the one hand, the fact that pagan religion is not revealed might seem to leave room for the idea that it was invented by humans for human purposes. But if religions that are invented by wise pagans turn out to be exemplary, then that would seem to cast a shadow on the glory of the true religion, which will be brought down to humanity by the incarnate God. Indeed, Bossuet's qualifying statement in the passage just quoted—that Roman religion as set up by Romulus was as serious and as modest as the darkness of idolatry could allow—is clearly a rhetorical attempt to reassert the distinction between the benighted pagan religion and the redeeming light of Christianity. But here, notwithstanding Bossuet's vaunted rhetorical skill, his qualification seems lame. Rather than smoothing over the problem, it only underscores it: to the extent that the natural light illuminates not only pagan morality and political institutions but even pagan religion, to that extent does the historical centrality of the Incarnation become eroded.

In the religio-political discourse of the seventeenth century, then, the central world-historical importance of Christian revelation was being undermined by defenders of orthodoxy as well as by its deistic opponents. But the greatest danger that faced Bossuet's

traditional Christian historiography was to come from a different direction and take a different form. For the Enlightenment would pose its most profound challenge to traditional historiography not by undermining the distinction between paganism and Christianity but by retaining the distinction while inverting its valorization so that paganism comes to be associated with positive values and Christianity with negative ones. Of course, Bossuet, to the extent that he finds pagan virtues putting Christians to shame, manifests a slight tendency in the direction of this inversion. But he still sees the religio-political structure of French absolutism as a model of hierarchical perfection. A crucial step in the transvaluation of authoritarian Catholicism in particular and of Christianity in general will be the transvaluation of religious toleration. The writers that I will be discussing in the remainder of this chapter, starting with Pierre Bayle, find the exemplary manifestation of toleration in ancient paganism, especially that of ancient Rome.13

Less obvious than the shift in lessons drawn from history—but no less important for our purposes—will be a series of shifts in ideas concerning what counts as historical evidence and what methods need to be applied in turning evidence into explanations. It will be useful, therefore, before returning to Bayle, this time in his role as historian, to glance at the mode of explanation that Bossuet used in his comments on Romulus. Bossuet's valorization of the wisdom of Romulus's prohibition of alien religions is not based on historical evidence in the sense that it adduces data that point to some sort of causal relationship between a given policy and its consequences. Bossuet does tell us that Romulus's original decree was eventually set aside, but he omits to tell us whether Romulus's decree had desirable consequences to the extent that it was obeyed or whether its suspension had undesirable consequences. For Bossuet, it is sufficient to say that when the Romans did allow alien religions to come into their republic, they were going against Romulus's intentions—as if that fact, in itself, were sufficient to condemn their actions. In a word, Bossuet's valorization of Romulus's action is based on its originary status and hence is similar in nature to his own appeal to scriptural authority in his argument that French Protestants should be compelled to enter the Catholic church. This is the same essentialist logic that we found

in our brief look at cosmogonic myths in chapter 1. Value is conferred on intolerance by dint of its primordial origins.14

In the next section, we will see that Bayle's approach to Roman history differs from Bossuet's not only in the lessons that it gleans but in the methodology that it employs. Whereas Bossuet, as a priestly historian, approaches history in search of the transhistoricai, Bayle approaches history as an empiricist in search of causal explanations. This shift, as we will see, will have consequences not only for Bayle's attitude toward Roman history but also for his attitude toward Christian history.

BAYLE ON RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY AND SOCIAL ORDER

In the "Discours préliminaire" to the Commentaire philosophique, Bayle, while not addressing Bossuet's appeal to the wisdom of Romulus, addresses a somewhat similar appeal to ancient authority in support of religious intolerance. Catholic polemicists, he tells us, had invoked the advice regarding the proliferation of religions that—according to the Roman historian Dio—Maecenas supposedly gave to the Emperor Augustus:15

Servez Dieu . . . en tout temps et en toutes manières selon la religion de vos ancêtres, et faites que les autres en fassent autant. Haïssez, et reprimez ceux qui innovent quelque chose dans les matières de religion, non seulement à cause des dieux; mais aussi parce que ces novateurs, en introduisant de nouvelles divinités, poussent plusieurs personnes à troubler l'Etat d'où naissent des conjurations, des séditions, des conciliabules, choses préjudiciables à la monarchie.16

Serve God everywhere and in every way in accordance with the religion of your forefathers, and compel all others to do likewise. Those who attempt to distort our religion with strange rites you should abhor and punish, not merely for the sake of the gods, but because such innovators, by introducing new divinities in place of the old, persuade many men to trouble the state, creating conspiracies, factions, and cabals, which are harmful to a monarchy.

This appeal to the wisdom of Maecenas, unlike Bossuet's appeal to the wisdom of Romulus, includes a rationale for intolerance based on the alleged motivations of religious innovators. But this rationale is still not based on an examination of historical causes

and effects. Part of Bayle's response, as we will see, will be to argue that Maecenas's advice needs to be contextualized and that, once it is contextualized, it will lose its force as an argument for persecuting French Calvinists. But first Bayle will address a more blatant fault in his enemies' argument—namely, the fact that Maecenas's maxim itself, regardless of its rationale, is a double-edged sword. For if religious innovation should be suppressed out of raison d'état, then this would justify the Roman suppression of Christianity as well as the suppression of Catholic missionaries in Asia:

Ces paroles considérées en gros, et comme venant d'un politique païen, paraissent de fort bon sens; néanmoins rien ne peut être plus ridicule que de s'en servir, comme font . . . les catholiques romains, pour pousser les princes à persàcuter les autres communions chré-tiennes; car premièrement en vertu de ce conseil, Auguste et ses successeurs auraient dû persécuter les juifs et les chrétiens, et les empereurs du Japon, de la Chine, etc. devraient s'opposer de toutes leurs forces à ceux qui leur parlent du christianisme; à quoi le pape ni ses adherents ne s'accorderont pas. (72)

These words, taken broadly and seen as coming from a pagan politician, seem to make good sense; nonetheless there could be nothing sillier than to use them as the Roman Catholics do, as a means of persuading princes to persecute other Christian communions. In the first place, in heeding this advice, Augustus and his successors would have had to persecute the Jews and the Christians, and the Emperors of Japan, and of China, and of other lands, would have had to throw all of their strength against those who came to them to preach Christianity—something that neither the Pope nor his followers will endorse.

But in thus pointing out that the political argument against religious proliferation can also justify the suppression of Christianity, Bayle is by no means attempting to sidestep the political issue altogether. That is to say, Bayle recognizes that the fear that religious dissenters will bring about social upheaval—a fear that we have already found at the core of Dryden's Religio Laici —is an inescapable factor in the religio-political discourse of his time, a factor that no argument for religious toleration can ignore. Elsewhere, Bayle will deflect this accusation against dissenters by insisting that the demands of conscience, while they may require a subject to reject the religion of his king, cannot require him to challenge the king's secular authority.17 Nor does he claim that the rights of conscience ought to protect a religion from being sup-

pressed if the religion presents itself as a threat to the public order. Rather, he grants that governments have the right to preserve the peace and that religious innovators should not be allowed to use religion as a pretext for sedition.18 Accordingly, the question remains, When should a new religion be treated as a threat to the public peace, and when should it be left alone? Maecenas's answer is that religious innovation should always be treated as a threat. And the Catholics who cite him wish to use his ancient authority to justify their persecution of the Protestants. But the Catholics, of course, would not wish this blanket right to be invoked against themselves and would therefore have to exempt the "true religion." For Bayle, as we have already seen in chapter 3, the criterion of truth is not available since no religion can satisfactorily demonstrate that it is the true religion. This being the case, the problem of the criterion remains, and the continuation of Bayle's response to Maecenas seems to offer a context-based criterion:

La maxime de Mécène était plus judicieuse en ce temps-là qu'elle ne l'est aujourd'hui, parce que les Romains accordant pleine liberté de conscience à toutes les sectes du paganisme, et adoptant souvent les cultes des autres pays, la présomption était qu'un homme qui ne trouvait pas son compte dans un culte si étendu et si libre, et qui cherchait des innovations, avait pour but de se faire chef de parti, et de cabaler en matière de politique, sous le prétexte du service des dieux. Mais on ne doit pas aisément presumer cela d'un chrétien, tant parce qu'il est persuade que JEsus-Christ nous a laissé une certaine règle qu'il faut suivre exactement, que parce que I'Eglise romaine impose la nécessité de croire tout ce qu'elle décide; apres quoi un homme qui n'est pas persuadé qu'elle ait raison, doit en conscience, pour éviter l'hypocrisie, sortir de son sein. (72)

Maecenas's maxim was more sensible in his own time than it would be today. For since the Romans accorded full liberty of conscience to all the pagan sects, often adopting the cults of other countries, the presumption was that a man who couldn't find something that suited him in a religion so expansive and so free, and who sought to promote innovations, must wish to become the head of a party and engage in political plots, all under the pretext of serving the gods. But it is not easy to entertain such suspicions regarding a Christian, both because he is convinced that Jesus Christ left us certain rules that need to be followed exactly, and because the Roman Church insists that its creeds be embraced in toto. Accordingly, anyone who

is not persuaded that the Church imposes the right beliefs is required by conscience to avoid hypocrisy by leaving the fold.

On the face of it, Bayle seems to be saying that Maecenas's advice might make sense in his historical context, since there was already so much religious diversity that there could be no reasonable motive to ask for more religious innovations and that, therefore, anyone who asked for more might justly be suspected of seditious intentions. In the case of the Christians who are now being persecuted by the Catholic authorities, however, there is no reason to suspect their motivations for abandoning Catholicism and setting up a new religion. They have done so because, as Christians, they are obliged to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ in the way their consciences dictate; the Catholic church would not allow them to do so; therefore they had no choice but to leave the Catholic church and set up their own religion.

This ostensible argument, however, is a bit puzzling. It seems to suggest both that religious toleration was not harmful to Roman society and that intolerance was more justified then than it is now. That Bayle considers Roman religious toleration not to have been harmful is beyond doubt. By the time of the historical Maecenas, Romulus's supposed prohibition against allowing alien religions into Rome has been long since abandoned. Rome, as Bayle indicates here, has allowed full liberty of conscience to all pagan sects and has even adopted the cults of other countries. And the results of all this, as his next paragraph will make clear, is that Roman toleration, like pagan toleration in general, has proved to be conducive to civil peace:

Pour montrer évidemment l'absurdité de ceux qui accusent la tolé-rance de causer des dissensions dans les Etats, il ne faut qu'en apeller à l'expérience. Le paganisme était divisé en une infinité de sectes, et rendait à ses dieux des cultes fort différents les uns des autres, et les dieux même principaux d'un pays n'étaient pas ceux d'un autre pays; cependant je ne me souviens point d'avoir lu qu'il y ait jamais eu de guerre de religion parmi les païens . . . faite à dessein de contraindre un peuple à quitter sa religion pour en prendre une autre. . . . Il n'y a que Juvenal qui parle de deux villes d'Egypte qui se haissaient mortellement, à cause que chacune soutenait qu'il n'y avait que ses dieux qui fussent des dieux. Partout ailleurs grand

calme, et grande tranquillité; et pourquoi? Parce que les uns tolé-raient les rites des autres. Il est donc vrai, comme je le montre dans mort Commentaire, que c'est la non-tolerance qui cause tous les désordres qu'on impute faussement à la tolerance. (CP, 73)

To clearly demonstrate the absurdity of those who accuse toleration of causing political turmoil, one need only appeal to the facts of experience. Pagan religion was divided into an infinite number of sects and approached their gods with cults that were quite different from one another; and even the principal gods of one country were not those of another. However, I do not remember having read that there was ever a religious war among the pagans . . . waged in order to constrain people to give up their religion and to accept another one. . . . There is only Juvenal who speaks of two Egyptian towns with a mortal hatred for one another because each thought that its gods were the only true gods. Everywhere else, great peace and tranquility. And why? Because they were tolerant of one another's religions. It is therefore true, as I show in my Commentaire, that it is intolerance that causes all the tumults that are falsely imputed to tolerance.

Bayle is appealing to the history of Roman paganism in particular and that of pagan religion in general as an argument for religious toleration. In the arguments discussed in chapter 3, he used rationalism as a weapon against Catholic appeals to biblical authority; here in his preface to the Commentaire, he uses empiricism as a weapon against Catholic appeals to the authority of the ancients. The facts of experience show—regardless of what venerable authorities may have said or may be interpreted as having said—that toleration is conducive to civil peace. (The role of Egypt as the exception to the rule of pagan toleration, a piquant sidelight in the history of the bouleversement of Bossuet's hierarchy of values, will, as we will see in "Montesquieu on Roman Toleration and Social Control," become something of a leitmotif in the discourse on pagan toleration.)19

But this brings us back to the puzzle that I just mentioned: in the light of Bayle's praise of pagan religious toleration, how are we to understand the statement in the previous passage, according to which Maecenas's maxim regarding the political dangers of religious innovation was "judicieuse" in its original historical context? In that earlier passage Bayle had said that because the Romans allowed full liberty of conscience and often adopted the cults of

other countries they therefore had a right to suspect that a religious innovator might be using religion as a pretext for sedition. Are we to assume that Bayle is really claiming that at a certain point toleration reaches its limit, that when there are so many religions available that any additional ones would be superfluous, and that at that point religious innovation should be looked upon with political suspicion? Or perhaps, as seems more likely, Bayle is distinguishing between, on the one hand, the addition of new religions as a result of territorial expansion and, on the other hand, innovation in the sense of the invention of a new religion within the boundaries of the empire.

But, whether it came from within or from without, what is it that would make a new religion dangerous? If the political success of pagan toleration is a function of its continual openness to and assimilation of alien cults, then why should there come a point at which such a successful practice ought to give way to intolerance? And even if there were such a point, how could we recognize it? How could we tell that the variegated structure of Roman religion, the product of continuous growth, had reached a point at which any further addition or innovation should be considered politically unacceptable?20 What, in short, could serve as a criterion that would allow us to decide that an additional religion posed a threat to the public order and needed to be suppressed?

There is, I submit, only one possible criterion available to Bayle. Maecenas's maxim regarding the dangers of innovation would make no sense if applied to an innovation that offered merely a new elaboration of the polytheistic structure of pagan religion. But it would make very good sense if applied to a new religion that, instead of adding to the luxuriance of Roman paganism, rejected it altogether by claiming to be in exclusive possession of the truth. In other words, the identifying mark of a truly seditious religious innovation could only be its intolerance of other already established religions. Only if a religion insisted upon forcing the consciences of pagan believers, only then should that religion be suppressed. As Bayle explicitly says elsewhere in the Commentaire, "une religion qui force les consciences ne mérite point d'être soufferte" (CP, 275). For the forcing of conscience, besides being immoral, has bad consequences for the social order, and, in the case of ancient Rome, a religion that refused to take its place among the others and instead

offered to overturn them by any means necessary would clearly be seditious and therefore subject to Maecenas's maxim and, indeed, to Bayle's own.

But what religion would meet this criterion and deserve to be suppressed? The religion that comes to mind is, of course, Christianity. As Bayle himself is at pains to point out at various places in his writings, Christians have been intolerant toward other religions and toward other Christian sects throughout their history. Even when they have advocated toleration, it was only when they were the victims of the intolerance of others and too weak to protect themselves from persecution. As soon as they have had the power to force their beliefs on others, they have abandoned pleas for tolerance in favor of the practice of intolerance. This was no less true of the primitive Christians in their relationship to Roman paganism: as soon as they had the power to suppress paganism, they did so.21 For Bayle, it has been observed, intolerance is fundamentally a Christian practice.22 In short, if we look at Christianity in terms of its history, then the supposed advice of Maecenas to Augustus, the advice that Catholic polemicists have invoked to justify the suppression of Protestants, would justify the Roman persecution of early Christianity—not on the ground that just any religious innovation was a threat to the public order but rather on the ground that Christianity in particular is a threat to the public order because it is intolerant of other religions.

Such an interpretation of Bayle's argument sees him as once again turning the tables on his enemies. But this time he would be doing so much less explicitly than in other cases that we have examined—and for very good reason. For unlike the many other instances in which Bayle shows that following out the principle being invoked by his Catholic enemies would backfire against them, this is a case in which the blast would seem also to strike Protestantism and the Protestant view of history.

For a Protestant, it is far from daring to suggest that the Catholics have deviated from the spirit of Christianity. But it is quite another thing to suggest that the primitive Christians did so as well. For the Protestant rejection of Catholicism characteristically appealed to primitive Christianity as normative and depicted the rise of Catholic despotism and superstition as a falling away from the purity of original Christian practices. The Protestant Reformation

presented itself as a return to primitive Christianity. But Bayle's critique of intolerance quietly, but inevitably, treats primitive Christianity as already deeply flawed, thereby depriving Protestantism of its originary model. And it finds the historical paradigm for religious toleration and civic peace outside of Christian history altogether, in pagan Rome. Thus does Bayle undermine the foundations of Christian historiography in general and of Protestant historiography in particular.

All of this is done in rather undramatic fashion. If Bayle's critique of religious intolerance impels him to question the two dichotomies—primitive Christianity versus paganism and primitive Christianity versus Catholicism—that underlie the Protestants' view of their place in history, then it is not surprising that these conclusions, like the conclusion that we examined in chapter 3 regarding the dubiety of religious beliefs, are expressed without fanfare and, indeed, sotto voce.

If I am correct in my reading of the Maecenas passage, then it not only undermines Protestant historiography but also sets up a startling paradox between the two halves of the same paragraph: on the one hand Christians are intolerant and therefore are a danger to public peace and deserve to be suppressed; on the other hand, Christians set up new sects because their conscience dictates it, and their conscience needs to be respected.

It may seem that I have labored too much over a puzzle that perhaps has never puzzled anyone else. It may also seem that a paradox is not an entirely satisfactory solution to a puzzle. Moreover, in order to construct the paradox, I have had to go outside of the text under discussion, to Bayle's later remarks about Christian history. But the truth is that I am less concerned with solving the puzzle of the Maecenas passage than I am with using the passage as an opportunity for pointing out a paradox that is undoubtedly present in Bayle's work as a whole and that lies at the heart of his view of Christianity. This paradox will ultimately allow us to understand the nature of Bayle's pivotal position between traditional Christian history and the Enlightenment's treatment of paganism and Christianity.

The first thing to observe about this paradox is that it arises as a result of the fact that Bayle is looking at Christianity in two different ways. On the one hand, he is looking at it as a philosophical

theologian, examining its fundamental teachings as illuminated by the light of reason. This perspective allows him to condemn Christian intolerance as contrary to the nature of Christian religion and morality and to argue that Christianity requires that various sects be tolerated. On the other hand, Bayle is looking at Christianity as an empirical historian, and the facts of history reveal that Christians have consistently violated the fundamental principles of their religion and morality. Seen thus, the paradox resembles one that can be formulated in very familiar Christian terms: the history of Christianity is a history of the failure of Christians to live up to the principles of their religion.

It is important to recognize, however, that the error that Bayle is attacking as a ubiquitous factor in Christian history differs fundamentally from the sorts of errors that Christian moralists such as Bossuet generally condemn as failures to behave in accordance with Christian teachings. Bossuet and other Christian moralists have not condemned intolerance; they have preached it. Christian theologians, according to Bayle, have universally insisted on intolerance.23 In those rare cases in which Christian rulers have decreed religious toleration in their domains, they have done so not for religious reasons but for "raisons humaines"—in complete defiance of the theologians who represented the official teachings of their churches.24 In short, the history of Christian intolerance is a history of consistent agreement between what was preached and what was practiced, but it has also been a history in which both precept and practice have been a perversion of reason and of the Gospels. Another way of saying this is that Christianity, according to Bayle, is consistently intolerant, but not essentially intolerant.25

Does this mean that the consistent history of Christian intolerance is merely a historical accident, that there is nothing in Christianity that tends to make it intolerant, no underlying explanation that would account for the historical record? There would seem to be one factor that, according to Bayle, accompanies intolerance, and that is the certainty that one's own religion is the true religion. We saw in chapter 3 that Bayle's attack on intolerance ultimately required him to challenge the idea that speculative truths can be known. This could imply that the religions that tend to be intolerant are those that believe that they have exclusive access to the truth and that Christianity is particularly inclined in this direction. This

conjunction between certainty and intolerance would seem to be borne out in the exception to the rule of pagan toleration. In the passage quoted above in which Bayle refers to the ubiquity of toleration among the pagans, the significant exception is Juvenal's account of the religious warfare between two Egyptian towns.26 But if it is a misguided certitude that has inclined the Christians (and at least some Egyptians) to be intolerant, then why is it that Christians have a greater sense of certitude than believers in other religions?

For Enlightenment thinkers who pick up the problem at this point, a satisfactory analysis will be one that fills this explanatory gap by showing that there was an intrinsic connection between Christianity's history of intolerance and the religion and morality of the Gospels. Rather than attempting to follow Bayle in linking the Gospels to the natural light, these writers would wish to show that the Gospels go against the natural light of reason and preach a perversion of natural moral impulses and that this perversion of reason and nature is intimately connected to intolerance.

The Enlightenment's search for such explanatory coherence will not be motivated by a desire to correct Bayle's errors or to resolve his paradoxes. The writers that we will be looking at tended to assume that Bayle's claims to be a Christian were disingenuous— since they seemed inconsistent with the spirit of his attacks on superstition and intolerance.27 Nor will these writers be motivated simply by an intellectual imperative to construct the most thoroughgoing possible explanation. There were, as we will see, ideological considerations, political benefits to be derived from a demonstration that the superiority of paganism over Christianity was no mere historical accident. But before we can understand these ideological considerations, we need to see how an essentialist analysis of Christian intolerance took shape. And for this purpose, we will turn to David Hume's Natural History of Religion.

HUME ON CHRISTIAN MORALITY AND CHRISTIAN INTOLERANCE

At first glance, Hume does not seem to be undertaking the devalorization of Christianity. His work purports to explain the evolution of monotheism out of polytheism, and this evolution is presented

as a movement from a more barbaric form of religion to a higher and more philosophical form. It turns out, however, that, although monotheism may be noble from a philosophical perspective, when it actually takes shape in the historical world it tends, according to Hume, to be debased by the superstitious habits of the mass of its believers. It will become increasingly clear that the debased versions of monotheism that concern Hume are those that come under the heading of Christianity and that the corruptions that concern him—and us—are those that have dire ethical and political consequences.

According to Hume, monotheists ("theists" in his terminology) feel a vast gulf between themselves and their deity. The gods of polytheism, on the other hand, are not so distant and awesome. In fact, polytheism, precisely because its gods are so much less fearsome and so much easier to emulate, tends to place moral value on heroism instead of asceticism, and the shift from polytheism to Christianity is consequently a shift from "Hercules, Theseus, Hector, Romulus" to "Dominic, Francis, Anthony, and Benedict": "Instead of the destruction of monsters, the subduing of tyrants, the defence of our native country; whippings and fastings, cowardice and humility, abject submission and slavish obedience, are become the means of obtaining celestial honors among mankind."28

Hume, writing in a Protestant society, follows the convention of using Catholic submission to authority as his stalking horse. But everything he says about the contrast between polytheistic veneration of heroes and Catholic veneration of saints is readily applicable to the contrast between pagan morality and primitive Christian morality. After all, the rejection of worldly heroes in favor of paragons of asceticism is clearly linked to the early Christian moral imperatives of humility and otherworldliness. It needs to be stressed, however, that Hume does not attribute this morality to monotheism per se but to monotheism in combination with superstition, the hallmark of which is irrational fear. When a superstitious man feels a deep gulf between himself and his deity, he experiences fear and a need to placate the deity. Fulfilling one's natural obligations to society does not seem adequate to placate the deity, precisely because "the virtuous conduct is deemed no more than what we owe to society and to ourselves." Thus, in following his natural moral inclinations, the "superstitious man . . . finds nothing, which

he has properly performed for the sake of his deity." The paradoxical result of assuming that God will not value one's performance of duties to one's family or country precisely because they are natural is to develop a set of religious practices that reject the natural and exalt the unnatural: "He still looks out for some more immediate service of the supreme Being, in order to allay those terrors, with which he is haunted. And any practice, recommended to him, which either serves to no purpose in life, or offers the strongest violence to his natural inclinations; that practice he will the more readily embrace, on account of those very circumstances, which should make him absolutely reject it" (NHR, 359).

Thus, far from maintaining the traditional Protestant distinction between the purity of the primitive Christians and the superstition of the Catholics, Hume implicitly allows the two to merge insofar as both manifest the moral consequences of uniting monotheism with superstition.29 Paganism is associated with natural inclinations toward friends and family and the state, while Christianity is associated with a perverse and unnatural tendency to turn one's back on one's natural duties.

Hume's differentiation between the nature of polytheism and that of monotheism also yields something that Bayle, with his insistence that Christian history is a perversion of gospel morality rather than a consequence of it, cannot provide—namely, an explanation of Christian intolerance as a function of Christian beliefs. Just as the fact that the pagan gods are numerous, and limited in power, makes them less fearsome, it also makes them less jealous and exclusive—all of which conduces "naturally" to religious toleration: "idolatry is attended with this evident advantage, that, by limiting the powers and functions of its deities, it naturally admits the gods of other sects and nations to a share of divinity, and renders all the various deities as well as rites, ceremonies, or traditions, compatible with each other" (336). Monotheism, on the other hand, despite its philosophical superiority to polytheism, has the disadvantage of lending itself to intolerance: "These mighty advantages [of theism] are . . . somewhat diminished, by inconveniencies which arise from the vices and prejudices of mankind. While one sole object of devotion is acknowledged, the worship of other deities is regarded as absurd and impious" (336-37). For Hume, to speak of the intolerance of theists in terms of "inconve-

niencies" that somewhat diminish its mighty advantages is to nod ironically in the direction of the official monotheism of his time and place. But before long this understatement gives way to a much stronger characterization of religious intolerance: "I may venture to affirm, that few corruptions of idolatry and polytheism are more pernicious to society than this corruption of theism, when carried to the utmost height" (338). Here, Hume no longer treats intolerance as a mere inconvenience but as a pernicious corruption. Evidently, the vast gulf between a finite creature and an infinite God does not necessarily result in an unnatural morality and in religious intolerance; but these pernicious consequences ensue when this gulf is subjected to the "vices and prejudices of mankind."

But just what are the "vices and prejudices of mankind." and how do they manage to turn monotheism, which is in itself philosophically meritorious, into an instrument of fanaticism and intolerance? I have said that Hume sees Christianity as monotheism debased by an admixture of superstition. And there can be no doubt that superstition is an element of the vices and prejudices that lead to intolerance. When Hume talks about superstitious people, he is talking about the masses. Indeed, section 14 of Hume's text, which deals with the tendency of the superstitious monotheist to try to please the divinity with "any practice . . . which either serves to no purpose in life, or offers the strongest violence to his natural inclinations," has as its title "Bad influence of popular religions on morality." Here and throughout Hume's analysis, "popular" is being used interchangeably with "superstitious."

Hume, however, does not see the historical phenomenon of Christian intolerance as simply the expression of vulgar superstition. "Designing men" have consciously exploited these superstitions for their own selfish political purposes: "Nay, this unity of object [i.e., the unity of God in monotheism] seems naturally to require the unity of faith and ceremonies, and furnishes designing men with a pretence for representing their adversaries as profane, and the objects of divine as well as human vengeance" (NHR, 337).

Here, then, we have the two ingredients that would seem to make up the "vices and prejudices" that turn monotheism into an instrument of fanaticism. This analysis of the combination of superstition and designing men who would exploit it is, of course, reminiscent of a standard Protestant attack on Catholicism, includ-

ing the usurpation of authority by the Catholic priesthood. And there can be no question that when Hume refers to these "designing men," most of his readers will immediately think of Catholic priests. But in Hume's discourse, while the alternative to such priestly inciting of intolerance is happily to be found in England (and Holland), it is not attributed to Protestantism per se but rather to secular control of religion: "if, among CHRISTIANS, the ENGLISH and DUTCH have embraced the principles of toleration, this singularity has proceeded from the steady resolution of the civil magistrate, in opposition to the continued efforts of priests and bigots" (338). All of which can only leave the careful reader with the conclusion that Christianity in general has an innate tendency toward promoting fanatical intolerance, a tendency that makes Christianity more pernicious than idolatry and polytheism and that lends itself to exploitation for political purposes by those who have authority over the superstitious masses. On the other hand, this tendency of Christianity can be curbed by the actions of an enlightened and independent secular authority.

There has begun to emerge from my analysis of Hume's theory a second dichotomy without which the dichotomy of polytheism versus monotheism would not be able to account for the historical manifestations of Christian intolerance, and that is the dichotomy of elite versus masses. It is clear that bad elites, presumably including secular leaders as well as priests and other religious leaders, have exploited the Christian tendency toward intolerance by channeling it against their adversaries—by using it, that is, as a political weapon. Good elites, on the other hand, such as the secular authorities in England and in Holland, have neutralized the destructive power of Christian intolerance by enforcing religious toleration.

There is one significant loose end in Hume's brilliant and complex analysis, and that is the relationship between masses and elites in pagan society. In an important sense, Hume's analysis of the intrinsic connection between Christian beliefs and Christian intolerance takes as its starting point the notion that Christianity values behavior that goes against our natural moral impulses. Paganism, on the other hand, follows nature by valuing the love of family and country that manifests itself in heroism. The fact that Hume not only associates pagan religion with natural virtue but also treats

religious tolerance as a natural outgrowth of polytheism might seem to allow for the moral and political autonomy that was associated with ancient republics.30 But Hume does not indicate whether paganism lends itself to political arrangements that would be incompatible with monotheism. That is to say, while Hume's theory asserts that Christians need to be controlled from above— whether by cunning exploiters of intolerance or by enlightened suppressors of intolerance—the theory is silent on the question of whether pagans too need to be guided by a ruling elite or whether their natural morality would allow them to sustain a republic of virtue.

Hume's analysis allows him to find his political ideals in the present, by showing that it is necessary for secular magistrates to impose religious toleration on superstitious Christians and on the priests and bigots who would otherwise use Christian intolerance to subvert the public peace. He can thus make his political point without having to project his political values onto the pagan past. Consequently, he does not need to decide which of the two aspects of his theory ought to take precedence with regard to the pagan populace: whether the religious differences between Christians and pagans are sufficient to allow for the possibility of a different sort of political arrangement; or whether the populace in any time or place always needs to be controlled by a vigilant elite.

For Gibbon, however, the Roman Empire is precisely the place where political values are to be projected. Gibbon will have to decide how to present the relationship between the Roman people and their political leaders; and he will do so in such a way to have it reflect his views of political realities. Gibbon will find Hume's contrast between natural impulses and a perverted religio-ethical system to be an attractive one because it provides a rhetorically powerful structure on which to hang his ironic treatment of Christianity. But Gibbon will also be attracted by an explanation of ancient religion that differs from Hume's naturalistic one, an explanation according to which Rome's religious structure, with its emphasis on civic duty and social cohesion, was the invention of clever elites.

MONTESQUIEU ON ROMAN TOLERATION AND SOCIAL CONTROL

We have already seen that, as part of his attempt to preserve the providential structure of Christian history, Bossuet acknowledged that pagans could be virtuous by dint of the natural light but stipulated that this virtue came despite the evil morality that was enshrined in pagan religion. Paradoxically, Bossuet could see religion itself—as in the case of Romulus's establishment of Roman religion—as a product of pagan wisdom. Since both Christians and non-Christians generally saw religion as a necessary ingredient of an orderly society, and since both groups generally saw order as something imposed on people from above, this second perspective had a long and variegated history. According to Bossuet's favorite Roman historian, Livy, Roman religion was invented as an instrument of social control.31 Whereas Romulus, according to Livy, had so much authority himself that he did not need to invoke supernatural forces as an instrument of legitimation, the situation was different for Numa, who

fearing lest relief from anxiety on the score of foreign perils might lead men who had hitherto been held back by fear of their enemies and by military discipline into extravagance and idleness, . . . thought the very first thing to do, as being the most efficacious with a populace which was ignorant and, in those early days, uncivilized, was to imbue them with the fear of Heaven. As he could not instil this into their hearts without inventing some marvellous story, he pretended to have nocturnal meetings with the goddess Egeria, and that hers was the advice which guided him in the establishment of rites most approved by the gods, and in the appointment of special priests for the service of each.32

Machiavellian, unlike Basset, was able to derive religion-political lessons from Roman history without having to concern himself with reconciling pagan wisdom with Christian providential history. Thus, after retelling the story of Numb, he is able to offer the following generalization:

E Vermont Mai fu lacuna ordinate DI leggy straordinarie in uno popolo che non ricorresse a Dio; perché altrimente non sarebbero accettate: perché sono molti i beni conosciuti da uno prudente, i quali non hanno in sé ragioni evidenti da poterli persuadere a altrui.33

Nor in fact was there ever a legislator who, in introducing extraordinary laws to a people, did not have recourse to God, for otherwise they would not have been accepted, since many benefits of which a prudent man is aware, are not so evident to reason that he can convince others of them.

What Machiavelli has learned from Livy's account of Numa is a political lesson about the prudent use of religion as an instrument of social control. The efficacy of religion derives from the fact that it can instill fear of the gods in the populace and can lead them to obey their rulers by persuading them that such obedience is required by the gods.

For the eighteenth century, the chief ingredient that needs to be added to this view of Roman religion as an instrument of social control—in order to wrest it from the grasp of traditional historians such as Bossuet—is the notion that Roman toleration, far from promoting social instability and undermining the centralized authority of the state, actually promoted stability and enhanced governmental authority. An extremely interesting formulation of this view is to be found in an early work of Montesquieu, the "Dissertation sur la politique des romains dans la religion" (1716):

Quand les législateurs romains établirent la religion, ils ne pensèrent point à la réformation des moeurs, ni à donner des principes de morale. . . . Ils n'eurent donc d'abord qu'une vue générale, qui était d'inspirer à un peuple qui ne craignait rien, la crainte des dieux, et de se servir de cette crainte pour le conduire à leur fantaisie.34

When the Roman lawgivers established religion, they were not thinking about the improvement of manners or the inculcation of moral principles. . . . They had at first only the general aim of instilling the fear of the gods in a people who feared nothing and of utilizing this fear to allow them to govern as they pleased.

The same writer who, five years later, in the Lettres persanes, would treat particular revealed religions as instruments of oppression imposed on people who would otherwise be capable of moral and political autonomy here presents religion as a civilizing force imposed from above on ignorant and unruly people. Indeed, in both the Lettres persanes and De l'esprit des lois, Montesquieu will identify fear as the political principle of despotism, which allows despots to rule by caprice instead of by law. Here in the Dissertation,

the application of fear is being valued positively. Granted, it is fear of the Gods, rather than fear of the rulers themselves, but it is functioning as a means of allowing the kings to rule " àleur fantaisie." Here, however, the "fantaisie" is being associated not with personal caprice, and hence despotism, but with the civilizing impulse. Indeed, the fact that the Roman kings, in their establishment of religious fear as a means of government, are to be seen as wise lawgivers rather than capricious despots becomes particularly clear when Montesquieu describes the persistence of religious fear after the kings have been overthrown and the Roman republic established:

Romulus, Tatius et Numa asservirent les dieux à la politique: le culte et les cérémonies qu'ils instituèrent furent trouvßs si sages, que, lorsque les rois furent chassis, le joug de la religion fut le seul dont ce peuple, dans sa fureur pour la liberté, n'osa s'affranchir. ("DPR," 38)

Romulus, Tatius, and Numa made gods servants of the state: the doctrines and rituals that they created were found to be so wise that even after the kings were expelled the yoke of religion was the single thing that the people, with all their passion for liberty, did not dare to throw off.

The religion established by the kings is to be understood in institutional terms: it has a positive restraining influence on the people, even when all kings have left the scene.

Just as Roman religion was consciously devised as a political tool, so was the "tolerant" practice of embracing the religions of conquered peoples and integrating them into the structure of Roman religion. Bayle had associated this practice with "pleine liberté de conscience," thus implying that Rome accorded religious autonomy to its subjects and that this autonomy was not abused. But Montesquieu sees Roman religious policy quite differently:

Rome se soumit elle-même aux divinités étrang;ères; elle les reçut dans son sein; et par ce lien, le plus fort qui soit parmi les hommes, elle s'attacha des peuples qui la regardèrent plutôt comme le sanctuaire de la religion que comme la maitresse du monde. (49)

Rome accepted foreign gods, took them to her bosom, and by this tie, the strongest one to be found among men, she secured the loyalty of peoples who viewed her more as the sanctuary of religion than as the ruler of the world.

Here the toleration of foreign religions, like the original institution of Roman religion, is nothing more than a clever stratagem that utilizes "ce lien, le plus fort qui soit parmi les hommes" to pacify and subdue people who would otherwise pose a danger to the state.

Montesquieu's analysis of the calculated political use of Roman religion and religious toleration is not necessarily at odds with Hume's notion that there is something about the nature of polytheism that disposes its adherents to be tolerant of one another. On the contrary, Montesquieu speaks at one point of polytheism as naturally giving rise to the tolerance and mildness that reigned in the Roman world:

Comme le dogme de I'âme du monde était presque universellement reçu, et que l'on regardait chaque partie de l'univers comme un membre vivant dans lequel cette âme était répandue, il semblait qu'il était permis d'adorer indifféremment routes ces parties, et que le culte devait être arbitraire comme était le dogme.
Voilà d'où était né cet esprit de tolerance et de douceur qui r<a0233>gnait dans le monde païen: on n'avait garde de se persécuter et de se déchirer les uns les autres: toutes les religions, toutes les theologies, y étaient également bonnes: les hérésies, les guerres, et les disputes de religion, y étaient inconnues. (45)

Since the doctrine of the universal soul was embraced almost everywhere, and since each part of the universe was regarded as a living organ infused with this soul, it seemed permissible to treat every part with the same adoration and without distinguishing between different religions and beliefs.
Thus arose the spirit of tolerance and mildness that characterized the pagan world. There was no sense of a duty to persecute adherents of other religions or to tear them limb from limb. All religions, all theologies were equally valid; heresy, religious warfare, and controversy were unknown.

Where the Montesquieu of the "Dissertation" would seem to differ from Hume is in failing to associate the civic virtue of the Roman citizens with any natural impulses and instead in attributing the orderly behavior of the Roman populace entirely to the political wisdom of their lawgivers. It needs to be noted, however, that in this regard the Roman lawgivers distinctly resemble civil magistrates of England and the United Provinces, whom Hume would praise for their "steady resolution . . . in opposition to the continued

efforts of priests and bigots." This resemblance becomes most conspicuous at the very point at which the contemporary political relevance of Montesquieu's historical excursus concerning Roman religion itself becomes most conspicuous—namely, in his discussion of the Egyptians.

We have already seen that Bayle qualified his generalization about pagan religious toleration by mentioning a significant exception, namely the case of religious warfare in Egypt as described by Juvenal. In a footnote early in the Decline and Fall, Gibbon likewise will qualify a generalization concerning the fact that "the devout polytheist . . . admitted with implicit faith the different religions of the earth." The footnote mentions that "some obscure traces of an intolerant spirit appear in the conduct of the Egyptians," then goes on as follows: "the Christians as well as Jews, who lived under the Roman empire, formed a very important exception: so important indeed, that the discussion will require a distinct chapter of this work"'35 When Gibbon goes on to discuss Christian intolerance, he will cloak his disdain in a rather transparent irony.36 But Montesquieu chooses instead to make the most of the "obscure traces" of Egyptian intolerance37 by using the Egyptians as allegorical substitutes for the Christians and finding in them the faults that his perceptive reader is expected to transfer over to the Christians:

Il est vrai que la religion égyptienne rut toujours proscrite à Rome; c'est qu'elle était intolérante, qu'elle voulait régner seule, et s'établir sur les débris des autres; de maniére que l'esprit de douceur et de paix qui régnait chez les Romains fut la véritable cause de la guerre qu'ils lui firent sans relâche. ("DPR" 45-46)

It is true that the Egyptian religion was always prohibited in Rome; but that is because it was intolerant, because it wished to exercise sole dominion, to establish itself on the ruins of other religions; so that the spirit of mildness and peace that prevailed among the Romans was the true cause of the unremitting war that they waged against it.

To avoid any doubt that this is satiric allegory, Montesquieu adds the following remark:

Il faut remarquer que les Romains confondirent les Juifs avec les Egyptiens, comme on sait qu'ils confondirent les chrétiens avec les Juifs. (46)

It needs to be noted that the Romans confused the Jews with the Egyptians, just as they famously confused the Christians with the Jews

The continuation of the discussion of the Egyptians shifts the focus from the threat posed by an intolerant people who are unwilling to live in peace with adherents of other religions to the internal threat posed by an Egyptian priestly caste that is not under the control of the state:

Chez les Egyptiens, les prêtres faisaient un corps à part, qui étaient entretenu aux dépens du public: de là naissaient plusieurs inconvé-nients; toutes les richesses de l'Etat se trouvaient englouties dans une société de gens qui, recevant toujours et ne rendant jamais, attiraient insensiblement tout h eux. Les prtêtres d'Egypte, ainsi gagés pour ne rien faire, languissaient tous dans une oisiveté dont ils ne sortaient qu'avec les vices qu'elle produit; ils étaient brouillons, inquiets, entreprenants, et ces qualitas les rendaient extrêmement dangereux. Enfins un corps dont les intérêts avaient été violemment sépar4és de ceux de l'Etat était un monstre; et ceux qui l'avaient établit avaient jeté dans la société une semence de discorde et de guerres civiles. (47)

Among the Egyptians, the priests constituted a separate body, which was supported at public expense. This gave rise to several unfortunate consequences: all the wealth of the state was devoured by a group of men who, always taking and never giving, gradually amassed everything for themselves. The Egyptian priesthood, thus paid for doing nothing, languished in an indolence from which they never emerged without the vices that indolence fosters: they were fractious, unruly, ambitious, and these characteristics made them extremely dangerous. Ultimately, a body of men whose interests diverge violently from those of the state was a monster; and those who had established it had sown the seeds of discord and of civil war.

The first part of this passage, with its emphasis on the indolence and other vices of the priests, serves to cue the reader to the fact that the "Egyptians" have shifted their allegorical role from representing the early Christians to representing the Roman Catholic priesthood. Once this identification has been established, Montesquieu can concentrate on his main concern regarding the "Egyptians," which is indeed his main concern in the entire "Dissertation"—namely, that the existence within the state of a religious body whose interests do not correspond to those of the state is a

monstrosity that any prudent statesman will strive to avoid. And the way to avoid it is to follow the example of the Romans.

In the second paragraph of the "Dissertation," Montesquieu had written:

Je trouve cette difference entre les Iégislateurs romains et ceux des autres peuples, que les premiers firent la religion pour l'Etat, et les autres l'Etat pour la religion. ("DPR," 38)

I find this difference between the Roman lawgivers and those of other peoples: the first created religion for the sake of the state, and the others, the state for the sake of religion.

But it is not until the discussion of the Catholic church in the guise of the Egyptian priesthood that we can see the full significance of Montesquieu's concern that the religious functions of the state be under the strict control of the secular authority. Indeed, the very sentence in which Montesquieu declares that the existence of an independent priesthood is a monstrosity is followed by a passage that contrasts the "Egyptian" state of affairs with that in ancient Rome:

Il n'en était pas de même à Rome: on y avait fait de la prêtrise une charge civile; les dignités d'augure et de grand pontife, étaient des magistratures; ceux qui en étaient revêtus étaient membres du sénat, et n'avaient pas, par conséquent, des intérêts différents de ceux de ce corps. Bien loin de se servir de la superstition pour opprimer la république, ils l'employaient utilement à la soutenir. "Dans notre ville," dit Cicéron, "les rois et les magistrats qui leur ont succédé, ont toujours eu un double caractère, et ont gouverné l'Etat sous les auspices de la religion." (47-48)

It was not the same in Rome: there the priesthood was under civil authority. There the offices of augurer and of high pontiff were part of the magistracy; holders of these offices were members of the Senate and consequently did not have interests different from those of that body. Far from exploiting superstition to oppress the republic, they employed it benefidally in support of the republic. "In our city," said Cicero, "the kings and the magistrates who succeeded them have always had a double role: they have governed the state under the auspices of religion."

Here we find Bossuet's priestly glorification of Egypt getting turned on its head. Bossuet had congratulated the pharaohs for

being subservient to religion and thus had found in them an ancient model of the religio-political hierarchy gloriously achieved in Louis XIV's France. For Montesquieu, writing shortly after Louis's death, the independent power of Egyptian religion, and specifically of the priestly caste, is indeed a perfect simulacrum for the role of the Catholic church in French politics, and that is precisely what makes it so odious. Bossuet was so attracted to the conservative and theocratic aspects of Egyptian civilization that he was willing to strain the entire structure of providential history by praising Egyptian religion. Montesquieu is happy to attack the traditional structure of Christian history by finding in pagan Rome the ideal role for religion, not one that anticipates the French monarchy but that avoids its evils by having the priests and even the rituals serve the needs of the state. Toleration takes its part in such a religious structure, as the social glue of a far-flung empire, and as part of the political strategy that forces religion to serve the interests of the state.

I introduced Montesquieu's "Dissertation" to provide an alternative to Hume's way of looking at Roman religion. Whereas Hume seemed to stress the superiority of natural impulses over the unnaturalness of the Christians, Montesquieu presented the superiority of Rome not in terms of the natural impulses of citizens but in terms of the prudence of lawgivers. Both Hume and Montesquieu, to be sure, rejected the superstitious fanaticism of the early Christians and the machinations of the Catholic priesthood, and Hume's valorization of English and Dutch toleration resembles Montesquieu's valorization of Roman religious politics. But at the same time their similarities are offset by differing views about human nature and its relationship to politics. That is to say, Hume presents the civic virtue of pagan Rome as the result of natural impulses, whereas Montesquieu presents it as the fruit of an enlightened and prudent elite.

Gibbon, like both Hume and Montesquieu, will find an essential connection between Christianity and social disorder and will see the secular control of religion as the cure to the evils of Christian fanaticism and priestly despotism. Where Hume and Montesquieu go in different directions regarding the basis of pagan civic virtue, it might be supposed that Gibbon will be forced either to choose between the alternatives or to attempt to reconcile them. But as we

will see, he does neither. Like Hume, he will present Christianity as violating the natural impulses that conduce to social order, but, like Montesquieu, he will attribute the virtues of Roman religion to the wisdom of a ruling elite. He will accomplish this double vision by placing Roman religion in two separate dichotomies—that of the natural versus the unnatural and that of masses versus elite— where they serve his larger purposes without coming into direct conflict with one another. Likewise, he will place the early Christians in two separate dichotomies—that of asocial fanaticism versus civic religion and that of republican autonomy versus Catholic imperialism. In this way, he will be able to valorize paganism on the one hand and attack Catholicism on the other. The result of this procedure, as we will see in the next section, is a system of interlocking narratives in which the same characters play different roles.

GIBBON AND THE RHETORIC OF DICHOTOMIES

In Gibbon's narrative of the early history of Christianity, centering in chapters 15 and 16 of the Decline and Fall, the incompatibility between Christian morality and natural impulses is sometimes presented as a direct engagement, in which asceticism either seeks out encounters with temptation—as in the case of priests and deaconesses who shared their beds "and gloried amidst the flames in their unsullied purity" (DF, 2:37)38 —or judges it, as in the case of Origen's self-mutilation, "most prudent to disarm the tempter" (DF , 2:37). But although these misguided attempts to preserve chastity by defying nature are duly recorded, with amusement or scorn, the sorts of conflicts that evoke Gibbon's deepest concern, indeed, the ones around which this aspect of his narrative is structured, are, as in Hume, those that involve the individual's duties toward those around him, toward friends, family, and ultimately the state. And here the battle is not presented as a direct one between virtuous Christians and jealous nature, or as an internal psychomachia, but as one that is mediated by the institutions of pagan religion. For pagan religion here takes on the role of the institutionalized form of the natural inclinations, and the Chris-

tian battle against paganism is depicted as at once a battle against natural moral principles and a battle against the social order:

The innumerable deities and rites of polytheism were closely interwoven with every circumstance of business or pleasure, of public or private life; and it seemed impossible to escape the observance of them, without, at the same time renouncing the commerce of mankind, and all the offices and amusements of society. The important transactions of peace and war were prepared or concluded by solemn sacrifices, in which the magistrate, the senator, and the soldier were obliged to preside or to participate. The public spectacles were an essential part of the cheerful devotion of the Pagans, and the gods were supposed to accept, as the most grateful offering, the games that the prince and people celebrated in honour of their peculiar festivals. (2:16-17)

Pagan religion is thus a civic religion, and the Christian's pious refusal to participate in its rituals is seen—by the pagans, and by Gibbon, who, here as elsewhere, views things through their eyes— as a refusal to make even a token expression of one's obligation to the state: "The most trifling mark of respect to the national worship he [the Christian] considered as a direct homage yielded to the dæmon, and as an act of rebellion against the majesty of God" (2:18). The notion that the slightest bow to the "national worship" would, for the Christian, constitute a rebellion against the majesty of God strongly suggests that to be loyal to the Christian God requires rebelling against the state. And it is this conflict of loyalties that underlies Gibbon's entire discussion. But the zealous Christian is moved by his exclusive and transcendent loyalty not only to abandon his duty to the state but also to turn his back on friends and family:

The Christian, who with pious horror avoided the abomination of the circus or the theatre, found himself encompassed with infernal snares in every convivial entertainment, as often as his friends, invoking the hospitable deities, poured out libations to each other's happiness. When the bride, struggling with well-affected reluctance, was forced in hymenæal pomp over the threshold of her new habitation, or when the sad procession of the dead slowly moved towards the funeral pile; the Christian on these interesting occasions, was compelled to desert the persons who were the dearest to him. (2:17)

By thus placing early Christianity in a dichotomous structure in which pagan religion is seen to enshrine those values that Gibbon's readers would consider natural and estimable, and in which the Christians are seen to turn their backs on these natural values in such a way as to threaten social harmony and civic peace, Gibbon's history undoubtedly has the effect—in much the same way as had Hume's Natural History —of dramatically challenging traditional Christian attitudes. But how much does this juxtaposition tell us about Gibbon's view of the world?

I indicated earlier that the elevation of toleration to the status of a fundamental ethico-political value had the effect of calling into question the traditional notion that the early Christians were morally superior to their pagan neighbors as well as the more specifically Protestant notion that the early Christians were unsullied until they were swallowed up by the corrupt and despotic Roman Catholic Church. We have just seen that Gibbon's challenge to the pagan/Christian dichotomy takes the form not of a leveling of differences but of a dramatic contrast between pagan civic virtue and Christian fanaticism. Since the early Christians fare so poorly in contrast to the pagans, one might suppose that when Gibbon comes to trace the movement from isolated zealotry to centralized Catholic authority he would be inclined or impelled drastically to revise the traditional Protestant dichotomy of primitive purity versus corrupt despotism. In this instance, however, Gibbon adheres to the Protestant historiography and, accordingly, sets forth a historical dichotomy in which the early Christians are associated with virtue and the Catholics with tyranny. He accomplishes this by treating the consolidation of ecclesiastical authority as a process in which the early Christians play the role of innocent republican citizens about to be swallowed up by the forces of empire, the empire in this case being that of the Roman church: "Such was the mild and equal constitution by which the Christians were governed more than a hundred years after the death of the apostles. Every society formed within itself a separate and independent republic; and although the most distant of these little states maintained a mutual as well as friendly intercourse of letters and deputations, the Christian world was not yet connected by any supreme authority or legislative assembly" (DF, 2:43). Before long, however,

As the legislative authority of the particular churches was insensibly superseded by the use of councils, the bishops obtained by their alliance a much larger share of executive and arbitrary power. . . . They were enabled to attack, with united vigour, the original rights of their clergy and people. The prelates of the third century imperceptibly changed the language of exhortation into that of command, scattered the seeds of future usurpations, and supplied, by Scripture allegories and declamatory rhetoric, their deficiency of force and of reason. (2:43)

Ultimately, of course, there emerges, even while the unarmed church is subject to Roman armies, a kind of intimidating ferocity that Gibbon is able to link to the imagery of empire:

The progress of ecclesiastical authority gave birth to the memorable distinction of the laity and the clergy. . . . [The clergy's] zeal and activity were united in the common cause, and the love of power, which (under the most artful disguises) could insinuate itself into the breasts of bishops and martyrs, animated them to increase the number of their subjects, and to enlarge the limits of the Christian empire. . . . They had acquired, and they employed within their own society, the two most efficacious instruments of government, rewards and punishments; the former derived from the pious liberality, the latter from the devout apprehensions, of the faithful. (2:46-47)

Whereas the Christians occupy the negative pole in the dichotomy of early Christians versus pagans, here the same Christians clearly occupy the positive pole in the dichotomy of early Christians versus the Catholic church. If one were determined to seek some sort of consistency here, one might be tempted to suppose that the value of each pole is being relativized, and that what is emerging is a hierarchy of values according to which the early Christians have a lower rank than the pagans but a higher one than the Roman Catholics. Insofar as Gibbon is associating the pagans with natural moral inclinations, it could be argued, he is valorizing them at the expense of the early Christians, whose revealed religion is more concerned with ritual purity than with social and political obligations. On the other hand, insofar as he is valorizing the early Christians at the expense of the Roman Catholic church, he is valorizing autonomy over despotism. Thus, it could be supposed, on the basis of the two dichotomies that we have examined thus

far, that although the roles assigned to the early Christians differ, the overall structure of values remains the same.

The problem with such a reconciliation of the two dichotomies, however, is that it presupposes that the system of values in the abstract is more important than the question of who is playing which role. It is supposing, that is, that although the early Christians are assigned different roles in different contexts, the valorization of social duty and individual autonomy remains constant. Yet this is a presupposition that Gibbon's account ultimately cannot sustain. For the logic that underlies the dichotomies around which Gibbon's narrative of early Christianity is structured is a political logic, and one thing that this study has been demonstrating is that—since moral and religious and epistemological ideas have no intrinsic political valences—the political logic of early modern writers requires them not simply to invoke the ideas that suit their purposes but to manipulate them in such a way as to make them yield the right political results. In Gibbon's case, the political logic begins to take shape when we focus on the third dichotomy, one that reflects a different hierarchy of values and reveals that the question of who is assigned to which role is one that does matter.

The dichotomy to which I am referring is that of enlightened rulers versus superstitious populace. It is the dichotomy that will allow us to make political sense of the Decline and Fall and to see how the political sense utilizes the elements that we found in Hume and Montesquieu.

In the second chapter of the Decline and Fall, Gibbon characterizes Roman religion in general and Roman religious toleration in particular from three perspectives, that of the rulers, that of the enlightened citizens (or philosophers), and that of the people (the superstitious):

The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord. (DF, 1:28)

Although Gibbon's stylistic parallelism distinguishes between the epistemological perspective of the philosophers and the pragmatic perspective of the magistrates, it is clear that the philosophers— who knowingly approve of the religious policies of the emperors and senate—consider the religion to be both false and useful, and there can be no doubt that the magistrates see things precisely the same way. The three perspectives are thus reducible to two, that of the enlightened elite, consisting of magistrates and philosophers, and that of the superstitious masses.

The perspective of the enlightened Roman elite is generally the perspective that Gibbon himself takes throughout his discussions of Christianity and paganism, and this adds a significant complication to our understanding of the relationship between paganism and Christianity as well as the relationship between early Christianity and Catholic despotism.

The philosopher, recognizing that the religious beliefs of the pagan masses are both false and politically useful, goes through the motions of religious observance as part of his civic duty: "The philosopher, who considered the system of polytheism as a composition of human fraud and error, could disguise a smile of contempt under the mask of devotion, without apprehending that either the mockery or the compliance would expose him to the resentment of any invisible, or, as he conceived them, imaginary powers" (DF, 2:15).

From the philosopher's point of view, the superstitious pagan masses are credulous and ignorant, just as the Christians are credulous and ignorant. It just happens that the superstitions of the pagan masses are conducive to public order, while the superstitions of the Christians are a threat to public order. Here we can see what Gibbon has done with Hume's "loose end." He evidently does not wish to exempt the pagan masses from the blight of superstition that requires that they be guided by a philosophical elite, an elite endowed with Gibbon's own combination of religious skepticism and political wisdom.39 When the Christians are being reproached for treating some pagan ritual or belief as an abomination instead of being willing to make the "most trifling mark of respect to the national worship," they are in fact being reproached for not understanding, as the magistrates and philosophers do,

that religion need not be a matter of beliefs about transcendent reality but merely a token gesture that helps to reinforce social bonds. As satirists long before Gibbon had discovered, it is easier to reproach people for being unnatural and immoral than it is to reproach them for not being philosophers, and this is presumably why Gibbon's dichotomy of pagan ethical naturalism versus Christian perversity is so rhetorically useful. It mediates between the pagan philosophers and the fanatical Christians and allows the Christians to be condemned for their credulity—even though, from the philosophical perspective, they are no more credulous than their pagan counterparts. It accomplishes this by making it seem as if the superstitious pagan masses, rather than being the instruments of the enlightened magistrates, are in fact paragons of natural virtue and that the Christians are perversely violating natural moral feelings.

In order to use the pagan masses as a weapon against the Christians, Gibbon even goes so far, on occasion, as to give the impression that the pagan masses, like the pagan philosophers, recognize that they are performing public duties rather than true acts of religious devotion. Consider, for example, Gibbon's justification of the deification of emperors in the face of Christian abhorrence: "This legal, and, as it should seem, injudicious profanation, so abhorrent to our stricter principles, was received with a very faint murmur by the easy nature of Polytheism; but it was received as an institution, not of religion, but of policy" (DF, 1:69). Here Gibbon seems to suggest that the pagan masses are not mere dupes but that they, like everyone else—except the benighted Christians—recognize that the worship of emperors is merely a political act.

The dichotomy of elite versus masses also greatly complicates our view of Gibbon's history of the consolidation of ecclesiastical authority. For the depiction of a pagan elite that uses religion to manipulate the pagan masses has a somewhat unsettling resemblance to the depiction of the Christian empire that later evolved through the separation of laity from priesthood, and to the consolidation of ecclesiastical authority in the hands of those empowered to wield "the most efficacious instruments of government, rewards and punishments." The despotic Christian priesthood, culminating in the Pope himself, thus serves the same hegemonic

role as the tolerant pagan magistracy, that of exploiting for political purposes the superstitions of the masses. But this structural similarity is not one to which Gibbon wishes to draw our attention.

While the earlier paradox was one in which the same primitive Christians were being mocked in one context and valorized in another, here the same structure of authority is being condemned in one context, praised in another. When the manipulators of superstitious masses are Catholic prelates, they are treated as despots; but when the same role is given to Roman magistrates, they are treated as enlightened and beneficent leaders.

CONCLUSION: STRUCTURES OF ERASTIANISM

The radical shift in the roles that Gibbon assigns to the early Christians in the first two dichotomies is facilitated by a radical shift in narrative perspective. In presenting the Christians as dangerous fanatics, Gibbon is looking at them through the eyes of the pagan authorities. But in presenting them as victims whom the ecclesiastical authorities will rob of their political autonomy, he is taking the perspective of the Christians themselves. This technique is remarkable but also has a familiar ring to it. In chapter 2, we saw Dryden trace the same sort of historical movement—except in reverse—that is, from the tyranny of papal authority to the dispersion of authority during the Reformation. When Dryden talks about the despotic Roman Catholic monopoly on exegetical authority, he speaks from the perspective of a laity who are robbed of their proper inheritance, but when he discusses the "horney-fisted rabble" who turn this inheritance to seditious purposes, he speaks, unmistakably, from the perspective of established political authority.

The comparison with Dryden serves not only to broaden the context in which Gibbon's technique is being placed but also to broaden the context of the political values that underlie the technique. When the early Christians are being perceived as dangerous fanatics, they are taking the role of seditious Puritans. When they are being portrayed as innocent republican victims of Catholic despotism, they are serving to highlight the political danger presented by that other extreme.40

The fact that both Dryden and Gibbon depict Christian history

as a shift between two extremes, one a kind of anarchic enthusiasm and the other a kind of imperial Catholic despotism, reflects the continued ideological usefulness of this dichotomy across more than a century of post-Restoration religiopolitical discourse.41 What is remarkable, I think, is the way both writers find the benign alternative to the two extremes not at some midpoint between them but at a point that is outside the continuum altogether. In Dryden's case the external point, as we have seen, is a nominal Anglicanism, which is in fact a kind of civic deism. In Gibbon's case—and here I am limiting myself to his history of early Christianity—the external point is Roman paganism. But Gibbon's paganism, like Dryden's Anglicanism, is a civic religion established by the ruling elite in order to promote political obedience and social order.

We saw in chapter 2 that just as the Erastian impulse can present deism in the guise of Anglicanism, it can present submission to the power of the state in the guise of freedom. One thing that emerges from the present chapter is the fact that while Hume and Montesquieu represent two different ways of looking at Roman civic virtue, Hume's praise of Dutch and English toleration and Montesquieu's praise of the Roman toleration represent one and the same solution to the problem of religious fanaticism. For both Hume and Montesquieu (like Dryden) advocate the suppression of the religious threat to the authority of the state by giving the state authority over religion. For Bossuet, submission of the people to an absolute monarch, who himself submitted to the authority of God as mediated by the Catholic church, was the hierarchical structure that represented perfect order. For Hume, Montesquieu, and Gibbon—as for Dryden—social order is again the goal, but the structure of the hierarchy is different: religion must be subsumed under the authority of the state.

I mentioned in chapter 3 that Bayle was reviled in his own time for suggesting that a society of atheists could be just as orderly as a society of Christians. When, several years later, Bayle undertook to answer the various inevitable attacks that his assertion had elicited, he did not temper his original audacity but actually intensifted it by insisting that a society of atheists could be more orderly than a society of religious people because it would be free of the strife and cruelty that the intolerance of contemporary Christianity had given rise to. Indeed, he observes that the French Protestants

(and, presumably, France as a whole) would have been much happier if the French king and his zealous Catholic subjects had been atheists. Atheists would not have been concerned that the Huguenots embraced this or that religion and would have left them in peace.42

At first glance, it might seem that the reason Bayle's remarks about atheism were so shocking is that they disparaged Christianity. But those whom Bayle outraged evidently were often less committed to the proposition that the specific moral teachings of Christianity were conducive to civic virtue than to the more general proposition that religion was an essential instrument of social control. That is why Christians could valorize pagan religion as the socially useful invention of prudent lawgivers. The apologists for Christianity who invoked the pagan lawgivers were clearly not defending Christianity but were defending precisely what Hume, Montesquieu, and Gibbon were defending—namely, the notion that the masses needed a religion in order to be controllable by the elite. Gibbon's depiction of Roman society is one that follows Bayle in the assumption that atheists can understand what is requisite for social order, but it treats atheists not as a general population but as an enlightened elite. What is really shocking about Bayle's assertion that atheists could be good citizens is the notion that an entire society could be virtuous without the hierarchical differentiation between the elite and the populace. Seen in this light, Bayle's argument about the virtuous atheists and his Christian plea for the rights of conscience are not simply technically consistent; they are equally radical in their social implications. For while both the enemies of toleration and the enlightened defenders of toleration differ only on the question of which elite wields control of religion and thereby maintains social order, it is Bayle alone who can envision a society in which order can be achieved in the absence of any authority over religious belief.