Clarifications: On Atheists and On Obscenities

Summary

[Shortly after publication in 1697 formal charges were laid against the Dictionary at the instigation of Pierre Jurieu. Its references to Epicureans and atheists, and its obscenities, the theologian alleged, were offensive to religion. After deliberating for a year, the Consistory of the Calvinist Church in Rotterdam cleared Bayle but on condition that he made changes. (See Dic, vol. xvi, pp. 287–300.) In the second edition of 1702 Bayle accordingly amended the articles ‘David’ and ‘Xenophanes’, and included four vindicatory essays. The latter were entitled: I. On the praises bestowed on certain persons who have denied either the providence of God, or the existence of God. II. On the objections to the Manicheans. III. On the objections to the Pyrrhonians. IV. On obscenities. Of these Clarifications the First and the Fourth are included here.

Bayle denied the charge that he had defended atheism, explaining that he had sought to examine a more testable proposition that had a bearing on the persecution of the religiously unorthodox: namely, whether human conduct was motivated solely by the individual's love or fear of God, or whether by a combination of natural factors such as love of praise and fear of disgrace. A political reading of the defence indicates that Bayle's target was not religion's truth, but religion's supposed utility, and the fallacy of the age, believed by politiques to be true, that a public religion was an indispensable instrument of government. […]