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Southern Political Science Association

On the Politics of Faith and Reason: The Project of Enlightenment in Pierre Bayle and
Montesquieu
Author(s): Robert C. Bartlett
Source: The Journal of Politics, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Feb., 2001), pp. 1-28
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association
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On the Politics of Faith and Reason: The Project of
Enlightenment in Pierre Bayle and Montesquieu*

Robert C. Bartlett
Emory University

This study seeks to contributeto our understandingof the original political goals of the Enlighten-
ment, especially in its confrontation with the Bible as a source of political guidance. It consists
primarilyof an exegesis of two seminal works of the period, Pierre Bayle's VariousThoughts on
the Occasion of a Comnet(1682) and Montesquieu'sSpirit of the Laws (1748). With clarity, grace,
and power, both works make manifest the grandeurof the Enlightenment'sphilosophic vision, the
staggering ambition of its attempt to overcome the Bible as a political authority,and the ultimate
vulnerabilityof that attempt,the full consequences of which we in the post-Enlightenmentera must
come to grips with.

In the heyday of the momentous political-philosophic project known as the


Enlightenment-a period lasting from at least the middle of the sixteenth cen-
tury to the publication of Rousseau'sFirst Discourse (1750) it seemed only a
matterof time before the "darkness"or ignorance characteristicof every "cave"
or political community would be eliminated forever.This act of enlightenment
could be achieved, not by somehow compelling the philosopher to returnfrom
the light of the sun to the cave, as in the Republic of Plato, but by reconstruct-
ing the cave such that the sun's light might penetrateto its every corner. Polit-
ical philosophy, that is, would remake our conception of the good community,
first by disentanglingthe truly naturalhuman needs from the illusory ones pro-
moted by both "vain philosophy" and false theology, then by discerning more
reliable means to satisfy those genuine needs. Thus the Garden of Eden gave
way to the State of Nature as the true portraitof our original condition, the obe-
dient love of God to the fear of violent death as our deepest passion. By ridding
the world of superstitionand prejudice,by distinguishing exactly "the Business
of Civil Governmentfrom that of Religion, and [by settling] the just Bounds
that lie between the one and the other,"the philosophers of the early modern
Enlightenmentbelieved that a new and altogetherphilanthropicunion could fi-
nally be forged between politics and reason or philosophy (Locke 1983, 26).
Reason or philosophy would thus take the place previously occupied by (what

*The authoris grateful to the EarhartFoundationfor a researchgrantthat made possible the com-
pletion of this study in a timely manner.

THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, Vol. 63, No. 1, February 2001, Pp. 1-28
C 2001 Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main St., Maiden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road,
Oxford OX4 1JF, UK.
2 Robert C. Bartlett

claimed to be) the divine or its representatives.And only with the achievement
of this truly revolutionarybreak or liberation could communities pursue such
ends as unfetteredhuman reason discerns, among them governmentconstituted
by individual consent, charged with the promotion of the liberty of all, hence
limited chiefly to the protection of the natural,pre-political rights of each.
Yet,howeverhopeful the principalarchitectsof the new communitywere, and
however successful they have been in fact, many of those concerned with the
study of politics today would concede or insist that the philosophy characteris-
tic of the modern Enlightenmentis incapable of determining the proper goals
of political life. Consider, for example, the influential view of the postmodern
theorist RichardRorty:
The Enlightenmentidea of 'reason' embodies ... the theory that there is a relation between
the ahistorical essence of the human soul and moral truth, a relation which ensures that free
and open discussion will produce 'one right answer.'. . . . In our century,this rationalistjus-
tification of the Enlightenmentcompromise has been discredited. Contemporaryintellectu-
als have given up the Enlightenmentassumptionthatreligion,myth,andtraditioncan be opposed
to something ahistorical, something common to all human beings qua human.... The result
is to erase the picture of the self common to Greek metaphysics, Christiantheology, and En-
lightenmentrationalism:the picture of an ahistorical naturalcenter, the locus of human dig-
nity, surroundedby an adventitious and inessential periphery (Rorty 1991, 175-76).

The present study seeks to advance our understandingof the original goals of
the earlymodernEnlightenment,and of the principalmeans used to realize them,
in order to contributeto the increasingly heated debates concerning the nature
of the Enlightenmentand the future of the liberal democracies for which it is
chiefly responsible.
Because there can be no substitutefor first-handawarenessof the Enlighten-
ment's original argumentsand aims, what follows will take the form of an ex-
egetical discussion of two seminal works of the period: Pierre Bayle's Various
Thouightson the Occasion of a Comet (1682) and Montesquieu'sSpirit of the
Laws (1748). The list of Enlightenmentphilosophersis of course long, their var-
ious aims and strategies are complex, and I have been compelled to be highly
selective from among them. Bayle and Montesquieu merit extended consider-
ation for at least three reasons: Both thinkers make very clear the aims of, and
the obstacles facing, the early modern Enlightenment;both were immensely in-
fluential in shapingthe terms of debateamong theoreticiansand statesmenalike;
and both have received ratherless scholarly attentionin the last generationthan
have Hobbes, Spinoza, or Locke, for example. This is true especially regarding
Pierre Bayle, but it holds, if to a lesser degree, even in the case of Montes-
quieu.1 A secondary aim of this study, then, is to begin to fill an important

'A complete and reliable English translationof Montesquieu'sSpirit of the Laws, for example,
did not appear until 1989, and only one comprehensive commentary on it has been published in
English, Thomas L. Pangle's Montesquieu 's Philosophy of Liberalism (Pangle 1973). As for
Montesquieu's lesser writings, perhaps scholars will be inspired to rectify the relative neglect of
them by the publication of Diana Schaub's importantstudy of the Persian Letters (Schaub 1995).
On the Politics of Faith and Reason 3

lacunain the scholarshipof the early modernEnlightenment.With clarity,grace,


and power,both works make manifest the grandeurof the Enlightenment'sphil-
osophic vision, the staggering ambition of its attemptto overcome the Bible as
a political authority,and, in the end, the vulnerability of that attempt.

The Separation of Morality from Piety in Pierre Bayle


That Bayle has traditionallybeen placed among modern rationalism'sgreat-
est architects is not difficult to prove: According to no less an authoritythan
Voltaire,the "immortalBayle, the honor of human nature,"was the "greatestof
the dialecticians who ever lived," the "Fatherof the Churchof Wise Men" de-
serving of an "immortal reputation."2 Bayle's monumental Dictionnaire his-
toriqueet critique(1820-24), was for Voltaire"the first work of its kind in which
one can learn how to think"(Voltaire1877-1880, Siecle de Louis XIV,XIV:546).
Moreover, it was the most widely held book in French libraries in the eigh-
teenth century3 and can be said to have been "the real arsenal of all Enlighten-
mentphilosophers"-even, perhaps,"theBible of the eighteenthcentury"(Cassirer
1951, 167; Faguet1890, 1, 6). Bayle'sdazzling argumentation,his immenselearn-
ing and razor-sharpwit, prompted Diderot to declare of him that he had "few
equals in the art of reasoning, and perhaps no superiors."4Indeed, by the seri-
ousness with which they studied him, learned from him, and in some cases
disagreed with him, a host of learned personages bears witness to Bayle's
importance-from Leibniz,Lessing, andRousseauto Hume,Herder,and Melville,
from Catherinethe Greatand Frederickthe Greatto Thomas Jeffersonand Ben-
jamin Franklin.5
It was not Dictionnaire, however, that first established Bayle as the "philos-
ophe of Rotterdam,"but the VariousThoughts.The latter alone will serve here
as an introductionto the political thought of Bayle, not only because its prin-
cipal themes the tension between faith and reason, the possibility of the

2Voltaire 1877-1880, XX:197; IX:468; XXXIX:37. For Bayle's influence on Voltaire, see
Mason 1963a.
3 See Mornet 1910, 463; Rex 1965, x; and Gay 1967, 293.
4Diderot 1765, 111:613.Consider also: "The moderns have some men such as Bayle, Des-
cartes, Leibniz, Newton whom they can, and perhapswith success, set up against the most aston-
ishing geniuses of antiquity"(Diderot 1765, 11:369).
5To give just a few examples: Leibniz's Theodicyis in large part a response to Bayle, and Herder
describes Bayle as the greatest Frenchthinker of his time who "set in motion the developments of
the century"(Herder 1967, 23:86, cited by Weinstein 1992, 1-2). In her youth, Catherinethe Great
spent two years studying Bayle's Dictionnaire, and Frederickthe Great made an abridged version
of it in order to popularize the work (see Retat 1971, 129, 310). Thomas Jefferson included the
Dictionnaire in the one hundredbooks forming the basis of the Libraryof Congress (Popkin 1967,
261), and Benjamin Franklin"was so struck by Bayle's [VariousThoughts] that he published a se-
ries of articles in the Pennsylvania Gazette in favor of Bayle's thesis that a society without religion
could be as ethical as a society of believers" (Weinstein 1992, 7; see also Aldridge 1967, 89-90,
124). Helpful general statementsof Bayle's place in the Enlightenmentinclude Cazes 1905, 69-79;
Hazard 1946, 44-45; Popkin 1959 and 1967; Gay 1967, 290-95; Retat 1971; and Labrousse 1983.
4 Robert C. Bartlett

knowledge of God and of His miracles, the problem of evil accuratelyreflect


his lifelong concerns, but also because Bayle treats these concerns more di-
rectly there than in the truly labyrinthineDictionnaire. Moreover, it is in the
VariousThoughtsthat Bayle first made his notorious suggestion, unique in the
history of political thought until then, that a decent society of atheists is possi-
ble in principle. By turns outrageous and profound, calmly argued and indig-
nantly provocative, Bayle's VariousThoughtsis, I suggest, a crucial document
in the rise of modern rationalism.
For the purpose at hand, the VariousThoughtsmay be divided into four sec-
tions.6 In the first, Bayle begins to address the question of the possibility of
miracles and the characterof our knowledge of them by means of an analysis
of the widespread belief that comets are a miraculous presage of future calam-
ities (??1-101). He then offers a lengthy and powerful account of both the im-
potence of all religion as a check on morals, given the true nature of human
beings; and the possibility of a decent society of atheists (??102-193). In the
third section, Bayle returnsto the question of miracles in general, this time at-
tacking them more openly (?? 194-23 8). Finally,Bayle makes his most political
remarksand, in particular,sketches a kind of political union that takes into ac-
count the preceding remarkson religion and human nature (??239-263).

The Problem of Miracles: Comets as Presages (??1-101)


As Bayle himself stresses ("Avis"to the 1682 edition; ?8), the core of the
book's argument is to be found in the seventh reason against the presages of
comets, an argumentthat explicitly proceeds on the basis of theological, rather
than philosophical, premises. In pagan times, Bayle contends, the sole effect of
God's having set comets ablaze would have been to increase the zeal of the
pagans for their idolatrous worship. As both the Bible and the Church Fathers
tell us, however, God hates nothing as much as he hates idolatry.It is therefore
incompatible with the jealous God of the Bible to suppose that he would have
done something the only result of which would be to encourage men to do what
he most abhors (??60-71); it is impious to maintain that God intended comets
to be miraculous signs of anything to pagans. Accordingly, there is no reason
to believe that comets were anything other than natural events. In Christian
times, nothing in nature has given us reason to link comets with misfortunes,
just as no revelation has taught us that comets are endowed with divine mean-
ing. Furthermore,however much progress the true religion has made, most of
the world remains idolatrous,and the argumentagainst the miraculouspresages

61 have used the critical edition of A. Prat and Pierre RMtat


(Bayle 1994). Except for the "Avis"
of 1682 and the "Avertissement"of 1699, which are cited by page number, all references are to
sections of the VariousThoughts.Translationsare my own; see Bayle 2000. The best historical ac-
count of the comet in question is Robinson (1916).
On the Politics of Faith and Reason 5

of comets in pagan times holds true today (?72). In general, God's miraculous
use of a comet is incompatible with the characterof his providence, for God
does not in fact punish all alike simultaneously,though all alike see a comet
simultaneously.God must deceive some people, then, if he intends to presage
punishment by means of comets, and this cannot be said without impiety
(? ?74-77).
Bayle also arguesmore broadlythat "the knowledge of the futurecoming only
from God, there is no presage of contingent things that is not immediately es-
tablishedby God" (? 101; consider also ?213). Just as naturalevents can be pre-
saged only by anothernaturalevent known to share the same cause (see ?54),
so contingent or chance events can be presaged only by the immediate and ex-
plicit word of God, as Jacob, for example, knew the fate of Joseph's sons be-
cause he was "filled with a celestial revelation."In the immediatesequel, however,
Bayle also speaks of an "eternallaw of God" that would be requiredto indicate
that "an encounterwith a weasel," for example, presages some misfortune. Ei-
ther direct and explicit revelation, then, or an "eternal law of God" promul-
gated by him and knowable in principle to all men is needed for there to be
presages of contingent events. Yet, with respect to the latter, it would be "ab-
surd"to suppose that "God has made an infinite numberof these sorts of com-
binations in order to teach the futureto all men," in part because God teaches,
quite to the contrary,that he reserves to himself the knowledge of the future in
orderto "confoundfalse Gods" (? 101; Bayle refers the readerto Isaiah 41:23).
Although Bayle gives other argumentshere against this possibility, nothing he
says in his theologicalargumentproperrefutesthe possibilityof divinerevelation
and hence of miraculousinterventionin the naturalorder.We should not be sur-
prised that Bayle will turn to elaborate on and defend his theological argument
in a section that proves to be more than twice as long as the exposition of the
argumentitself.

Religion, Human Nature, and the True Character of Morality


(?? 102-193)
Bayle proceeds to delve more deeply into the question of God and his rela-
tion to the world by stating and then respondingto three objections to his argu-
ment. The first and most important of these objections takes the form of an
explanationof God's purpose in igniting comets accordingto which God wished
to show men that there is a providentialpower and to give them time to repent.
If idolaters react to the sight of comets by turning with greater fervor to their
idolatrous worship, that is their own fault, for we must be held responsible for
turning away from the true God. And better that men should become idolatrous
than that they should fall into atheism, for this would be "the ruin of human
society" (?102).
Bayle's most searching response to this objection (??1 15-193) makes clear
that he is in fact less concerned with the demotion of idolatry than with the
6 Robert C. Bartlett

elevation of atheism.7For he argues that the widespread denigrationof atheism


stems from the faulty suppositionthat it is the "lights of the conscience" (? ? 133,
beg.; 134, end; 138, end) or, what is the same thing, "the knowledge of a God"
that "correctsthe vicious inclinations of men" (?134, title). Rather, according
to Bayle, "it is not the mind'sgeneral opinions that determine our actions but
the passions in the heart" (? 138, emphasis original). For a man "is not set on
a certain action rather than another on account of the general knowledge he
has of what he should do but ratheron account of the particularjudgment he
brings to bear on each thing when he is on the point of acting" (? 135); such a
particularjudgment "almost always accommodates itself to the dominant pas-
sion of the heart, to the inclination of the temperament,to the force of adopted
habits, and to the taste for or sensitivity to certain objects" (?135). These dic-
tates of the heart, and not "the conviction that there is a providence punishing
wicked people and rewarding the good" (?144, beg.), are the "true springs"
that make us act (?133). So it is, then, that the ancient pagans were obsessed
with their gods and yet "did not fail to commit all the crimes imaginable"
(?136).
Bayle does not hesitate to apply this psychological insight to Christianity:
Christiansknow clearly that they must renounce vice in order to be eternally
happy and to avoid being eternally unhappy,but nonetheless they continue to
live "in the greatest and most vicious dissoluteness" (?136, end). To be sure,
the dictates of religion can play a part in shaping men's actions, but in the
cases where this is so, "it is because this does not prevent them from satisfy-
ing the dominant passions of their heart, or else because the fear of infamy
and some temporal punishment leads them to it" (?137). More complicated,
perhaps, is the case of those who "regularlyobserve several painful and incon-
venient forms of worship" in order "to redeem their usual sins and to make
their conscience accord with their favorite passions." Whatever the ultimate
source or cause of the "conscience" and Bayle leaves this uncertain he in-
sists thatwe laborto ease its pangs chiefly so as to enjoy once again our "favorite
passions":"the corruptionof their will is the principalreason determiningthem"
(?137).
Christianityand paganism also prove to be as impotent an incentive toward
virtue as they are a check on vice: None of the admirabledeeds found in the
ancient histories can be attributedto knowledge of the true God or, still less, to
the horrendousexamples set by the pagan gods. Ignoring for present (rhetori-
cal) purposes the accounts of Varroand other ancient historians concerning the
centrality of a "civil theology" to education (see, e.g., Augustine City of God
6.4), or exploiting the (as it were) natural inclination of his largely Christian
audience to abhorpaganism, Bayle insists that any admirabledeeds in antiquity
must be traced solely to "temperament,education, the desire for glory, the taste

7CompareBayle's initial contention that "idolatryis at least as abominableas atheism"(? 114)-


with his eventual conclusion: "Idolatryis worse than atheism" (?192, emphasis added).
On the Politics of Faith and Reason 7

for a sort of reputation,the esteem one can conceive for what appearsto be de-
cent and praiseworthy,and to several other motives within the competence of
all men, whether they have a religion or whether they do not" (? 146, emphasis
added). The aim of his rhetoric is clear in the lesson he draws:"Whatprevents
an atheist, either throughthe disposition of his temperamentor throughthe in-
stinct for some passion that dominates him, from performing all the same ac-
tions that pagans have been able to do?" (? 146).
According to Bayle, religion as such8 will always prove on examination to
be powerless in the face of the demands of the passions, be they conducive to
virtue or to vice. The ultimate explanation of the strength of the passions over
that of the formal demands of religion is that the passions, being grounded in
the body (? 139 and esp. ? 144), are naturalto man, whereas all religious dic-
tates are conventional and for the most part fly in the face of nature:"Whence
comes it, I beg you, that althoughthere is among men a prodigious diversity of
opinions bearing on the manner of serving God and of living according to the
laws of propriety,one nonetheless sees certain passions consistently ruling in
all countries and in all ages?" Indeed, the only thing uniting "all the sorts of
peoples who in other respects have as it were nothing in common except the
general notion of man" is the similarity of their passions, a similarity so great
that "one might say they copy one another"(? 136). Again, the will to trans-
gress the law of God or gods, found in all societies, is but "a copy made ac-
cording to nature"(?145). "We see this sort of spirit still reigning everywhere
which drags men into sin notwithstandingthe fear of hell and the pangs of the
conscience" (?145, emphasis added).
We are now preparedto consider the most infamous section of Bayle's book,
the argumentfor the possibility of a society of atheists. With it, Bayle intends
to show that the morality requisite to healthy political life is possible without
belief in God and therefore also without belief in providence or the immortal-
ity of the soul. He intends, in other words, to give the outlines of a morality
conceived by human reason alone and grounded in human nature properly
understood.

8Given the breadthof Bayle's attack on both miracles and religion, I cannot agree with the view
that Bayle set his critical sights only or even principally on Catholicism, as distinguished from Cal-
vinism (see, above all, Rex 1965, 30-74). I thereforeagree with the older generationof Bayle schol-
ars (to say nothing of the philosophes) accordingto whom Bayle denies the truthof revealedreligion
as such, however great may have been the lengths he was willing to go to conceal this fact: "[Bay-
le] has, not only an irreligious mind that rebels against feelings of the supernatural,but the taste
for aggression, and for polemics, and for irreligious jesting. Not only does he not cease I do not
say to deny God, providence, and the immortalityof soul, for he indeed refrainsfrom denying them;
I say: not only does he not cease subtly and captiously to lead his leader to the denial of God, to
the misapprehensionof providence, and to the conviction that all ends at death, but he also takes
pleasure in clearly showing to men patiently, obstinately,with the calm persistence of a drop of
water piercing a rock that they have no reason to believe in these things" (Faguet 1890, 3). See
also, inter alia, Robinson 1931, esp. 151-75; Hazard 1935; Mason 1963b; and, most recently,Wein-
stein 1992.
8 Robert C. Bartlett

Every human being is by nature concerned first with his or her own well-
being, and it is this self-concern that compels all to flee pain or harm: The
fear of pain is great, the fear of death, "the most violent of the passions,"greater
still (? 163). In accordancewith this, every healthy society must rigorouslypun-
ish legal transgression by means of corporal and capital punishment (? 161).
Yet Bayle puts more emphasis on the goods we are drawnto than on the evils
we flee: "It is certain, whatever one may say, that man loves delight [joie]
more than he hates pain and that he is more sensitive to good than to harm"
(?167). Indeed, "delight is the nerve of all human affairs" (?167). And al-
though delights or pleasures may be most associated with the body, the great-
est pleasure we can have is in fact the good opinion we hold of ourselves as
mediated or determinedby the opinion others have of us: "It is to the inward
esteem of other men that we aspire above all" (?179, emphasis added). "A
machine that could come to us in reverence ... would hardly give us a good
opinion of ourselves, for we would know that these were not signs of anoth-
er's good opinion of our merit"(? 179). The foundationof man's natureis there-
fore his self-love or vanity (amour-propre),"thatpassion inseparablefrom our
nature" (?171; also ?83). A society of atheists is possible in principle pro-
vided that human laws make use of our naturalfear of harm and, more impor-
tant, of our naturalattractionto honor or reputationin the eyes of others. Bayle's
sketch of a society of atheists is at its core an outline of a rational legislation
that exploits these two different but linked inclinations of our nature, the nat-
ural attractionto honor being but the obverse of our natural desire to flee the
pain of indignity.A society of atheists stands or falls by the possibility of main-
taining "the harsh law of honor"without recourse to belief in a divinity (? 162,
end).
Bayle contends that such a society "wouldperform civil and moral actions as
much as other societies do, provided that it punish crimes severely and that it
attachhonor and infamy to certain things" (? 172, beg.). For given that "the true
driving force of man's actions is altogetherdifferentfrom religion" (? 181), there
is every reason for the true motives of action to be effective among atheists,
"namelypunishmentsand rewards,glory and ignominy, temperamentand edu-
cation" (? 172). The "fearof being taken in society for a traitorand a rogue will
overcome [an atheist's] love of money"; "a man without religion" is "capable
of returninga deposit . . . when he sees that his good faith will earn for him the
praise of a whole city and that his infidelity could one day subject him to re-
proach,"or at the very least to "being suspected of something that would im-
pede his being taken as a decent man" (? 179). Morality properlyunderstoodis
nothing more than the policy most conducive to the survival, prosperity, and
(sober) honoring of each and all in society; it is selfishness intelligently pur-
sued or at any rate prudentlycontrolled. Supportedin this way by calculations
of advantageand by our amour-propre,morality needs no exhortationsto self-
less action to be obeyed and therefore need not promise eternal rewardor pun-
ishment as an incentive so to act.
On the Politics of Faith and Reason 9

What then is the characterof the ends or actions an atheistic society would
esteem? To clarify this, Bayle turns to the topic of "shamelessness":"It is nec-
essary to confess that this idea [of the goodness of chastity] is older than either
the Gospel or Moses; it is a certainimpressionthat is as old as the world"(? 172,
end). Bayle later elaborates:"As it is as naturalto man to value things in pro-
portionto what they cost as it is to love to be distinguished, nature alone would
have soon taughtthe inhabitantsof the same village thatit is gloriousfor a woman
not to be prodigal with her favors, which leads things naturallyand impercep-
tibly to the state in which they are seen in almost all republics"(? 180, end; em-
phasis added).Thus, "thereare ideas of honor among men that are purely a work
of nature"(? 172). Free of Christianity'sconfused and confusing interferencewith
the dictates of human nature, atheists as Bayle envisions them would attach ig-
nominy to shamelessness because doing so is sanctionedby natureitself for the
reason indicated. One must add, however, that shamelessness as a transgres-
sion would be demoted in rank in favor of those crimes that reason tells us are
most harmfulto society, murderchief among them.9 And the horrorof murder
would be felt more keenly in a society that denies the immortality of the soul
than in one that accepts it.
After his lengthy condemnationof all religion, pagan and Christian,as a check
on action, as well as his extended praise of the mores of atheists, Bayle con-
cludes by returningto the question that permitted these all-important"digres-
sions": "There is no longer any reason to say one must necessarily deny-
that comets are signs of the anger of God formed in a miraculous way, since
they are altogethersuited to keep men in the most criminal condition they could
be in" (?193, end).

The Problem of Miracles Revisited


The most important purpose of the rest of Bayle's theological discussion
(??194-238) is to return to and grapple more openly with the problem of the
possibility of miracles. Bayle's principal argumentthus far has relied heavily
on the view, characteristicof what is known as naturalreligion or theology,10
that God is perfectly good, just, and wise and that an action said to be God's
that appears to us to be incompatible with these qualities cannot be God's in
fact; the differencebetweenthe necessarilyimperfectmanifestationsof the virtues
in man and the perfection of them in God in no way obviates our comparing

9It is true that shamelessness is "morefavorableto public society" than either murderor perjury,
but this is irrelevant"before God." While apparentlysiding with "sound theology," Bayle clearly
indicates that the rankthe Bible assigns the various sins has no foundationother than the brute fact
of God's having thus commandedit. The only reasonable standardby which to judge, namely what
is "favorableto public society," sets murderas a far worse crime than shamelessness, as do human
beings generally (?169).
10Among the many examples that might be cited, see Diderot 1875, I: 259-73 ("De la suffi-
sance de la religion naturelle").
10 Robert C. Bartlett

God to man. Bayle therefore appeals repeatedly to "the idea we have of God"
(e.g., ??71, 101, 225; cf. ?65) or to what we know to be compatiblewith "God's
wisdom" (e.g., ??98, 222). Bayle is of course aware that this manner of argu-
ment is controversial:"It is not for us to find fault with what God does" (?56).
Indeed, Bayle's argumentsthus far do not confrontthe possibility of a God whose
very perfection requires that He be, in some respects at least, mysterious. In
addition, the psychology that is the basis of his political prescriptionsis some-
what puzzling; in his account of the passions, for example, he disregardsrather
than disproves the existence of genuinely religious passions, as distinguished
from those passions (e.g., fear) that give rise to religions.
Bayle avers in the present context that he is willing to disregardthe lights of
his reason if someone proves to him, "eitherby necessary reasonings or by in-
fallible authority,"that God has performeda given miracle (?223). But as quickly
becomes clear, only reason can establish the infallibility of an authority.For ac-
cording to Bayle, the infallible authorityof revelation or of God's word as de-
livered by the prophets is requiredto establish the existence and meaning of a
miracle.Yet there are and have been false prophets;how then to distinguish be-
tween true and false prophecy? "Discourses without miracles would not con-
vince" (?218), and to "confirm" Moses' mission, "God has Moses perform
astonishing miracles that are superior to the marvels of Pharaoh'smagicians,
and reduces this prince to the necessity of confessing that indeed the God of
the Hebrews is the true God" (?218). l Prophetic revelation, then, is required
to establish the existence of a miracle, but a miracle is in turn requiredto es-
tablish the existence of prophetic revelation. The circularity of these require-
ments indicates that far from establishing faith, both miracles and revelation
presuppose it. Thus neither (supposed) miracles nor (supposed) revelation can
constitute an "infallible authority,"and only "necessary reasonings"remain to
us as the source of sound conviction.12
But could not this argumentbe dismissed as simple hardheartedness,as an
obstinate deafness to God's manifest call? Or, even granting that the disavowal
of biblical authoritymust be reasonable,why is it reasonableto demandof God

l For other indications of the necessity of miracles to vouch for prophecy, see also ? 119, end;
?136, towardthe end; ? 160.
12Within the confines of the present discussion, it is impossible to enter into the highly contro-
versial question of Bayle's final view of the power or limits of human reason-his "scepticism,"
especially as regardsits consequences for religious faith. It is my contention that at least duringthe
period in which he wrote the VariousThoughts, Bayle maintained that unaided human reason is
able to understandenough of the world to know that the providential,miraculous God of the Bible
does not exist. It must remain an open question here whether Bayle's later pronouncementsof the
impotence of human reason and hence the necessity of blind faith were more the product of "pol-
icy" than "sincerity,"to make use of a distinction Bayle employs with regardto Epicurus (? 178). I
am inclined to accept the former alternative,but the reader is urged to consult the studies of Rex
(1965) and Popkin (1959, 1967, and 1979). About this much we can agree: "The position that Bayle
claimed to hold at the end of his career seems ratherelusive and hard to classify, let alone defend"
(Popkin 1959, 1).
On the Politics of Faith and Reason 11

that His actions be subject to our reason, especially since the Bible seems to
demandfaithful obedience and the strengthto endurethe tests of faith? But here
too, Bayle seems perfectly aware of such difficulties: "Youmight stop me here
to tell me that it is punishabletemerity for me to deny that God has done a thing
because my petty reason does not discover any use of it and sees, to the con-
trary,that many great abuses result from it" (?223). His strategy to overcome
these and comparableobjections, I suggest, is to supply readers with what he
hopes will be an irresistible moral or political incentive to adopt the view of
the world he sketches. For coming between Bayle's two main argumentsagainst
miracles is his lengthy and powerfulpresentationof the advantagesto be gained
by demoting the concern for religion. His deluge of examples of the atrocities
committedin the name of any and every religion, on the one hand, and his sketch
of the possibility of a decent society of atheists, on the other, together are in-
tended to induce his audience to accept this demotion of religion in favor of
both the preservationof life and the attainmentof the satisfactionstemmingfrom
the esteem of others. For those already inclined to doubt, the VariousThoughts
supplies a ready arsenal of theoretical arguments that despite or perhaps be-
cause of their highly rhetorical character,could be selectively used to trouble
any number of different audiences; the practical success of "naturaltheology"
is but one example. And for those not already inclined to doubt, Bayle's me-
thodical, insistent use of examples of the horrors committed in the name of
religion-first of paganreligion but eventuallyalso of Christianity would surely
be disturbingto anyone whose faith nurtures,and is in turn nurturedby, moral
seriousness and compassion. In other words, Bayle makes use of the very con-
cern for justice at or near the heart of biblical faith to alter or undermine our
understandingof biblical faith. And yet the acceptance of the priority of this-
worldly security and esteem, and therewith a demotion of the concern for sal-
vation in the next, seems both to require the prior knowledge that the biblical
God does not exist and, in Bayle, to substitutefor such knowledge: Only in a
world without providence do bodily security and mundane prosperity become
paramountends; let us therefore act on the basis of the belief that there is no
providence, the better to attain them.
That there is a fundamentaltension between nature or the God of "general
providence"and the biblical God is clear from ?234, the section to which Bayle
draws our attention in his "Avertissement"as dealing with a particularlysensi-
tive issue (Bayle 1994, 18-19). Bayle makes use of the remarkof Barnabusand
Paul that prior to the birth of Jesus Christ, God "sufferedall nations to walk in
their own ways" but "left not himself without witness" in the form of "rainfrom
heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our heart with food and gladness" (see the
referencesto Acts 14 in ??60, 218, and 234). The core of the conclusion to Bay-
le's theological argumentmay be stated as follows: God is nothing but imper-
sonal nature-natura sive deus which, while it provides a certain bounty,
nonetheless "suffers all nations to walk in their own ways." What for the apos-
tles was the temporarymanifestationof God's rule is for Bayle the only one we
12 Robert C. Bartlett

ought to expect. By equating God with nature, Bayle makes the biblical God
vanish into the natural world that is in principle subject to the analytical sci-
ence of physicists and philosophers.13In accordance with this denial of mirac-
ulous intervention and hence of particularprovidence, Bayle turns to discuss
prudentpolitics as the only means available to compensate for the direct rule
that naturedoes not and cannot supply.

Bayle's Political Teaching


Despite the notoriety of Bayle's account of the possibility of an atheistic pol-
itics, it would seem that he did not expect such a society to come into being. As
he stresses, atheism is the vice of very few people. Men as much as women, the
nobles as much as the people, are deeply attached to the belief in divine pre-
sages (e.g., ??21, 81, 151, 154). But Bayle also indicatesthat "an excess of zeal"
marks especially the devotees of "a religion still hot from the forge" (?257).
Indeed, "care"must be taken"notto allow the people time to become tepid [tiede]
in their religion" (? 109, end). A religion grown old, in other words, will be ob-
served less fervently than it was in its youth. This is true especially if its cer-
emonies and demands are simple, for complicated creaturesthat we are-we
grow more attached to a religion the more "extravagant"its demands (? ?184;
189-90). Thus "Christianprudence"saw that "the excessively great simplicity
of the worship that the Apostles had taught"was "inappropriateto the times, in
which the fervor of one's zeal had lessened a little" (?85). This example sug-
gests that great changes to a religion can be made if they are gradual:a father
may wrongly believe that he hands down to his childrenprecisely the same wor-
ship he himself had inherited"because changes in these mattersare carried out
by unnoticeable steps and are scarcely noted during the life of one man." Yet
these "unnoticeablesteps, at the end of several centuries, carry things very far
distant"(? 112). Might it be possible, then, to move from Christianityto athe-
ism by changes so gradual as to be "unnoticeable"?
To begin to undermine a religion, one must understandthe forces at work in
the world supporting it, and in the context of proving that God's intervention
would be unnecessary to combat irreligion, Bayle enumerates three forces of
this kind (??106-13). First, the simple course of nature produces enough

13In Ce que c 'est que la France toute Catholique soUts le regne de Louis le Grand (Bayle 1973),
Bayle returnsto this equation of God with nature, which he there traces to Malebranche:"I find
something so unworthy of a wise intelligence in making so many particularedicts, in advancing
and retreating,in going right and going left, in retractingand explaining oneself better-in a word,
in living day to day, I mean, in making new regulationsat every Council meeting; this, I say, seems
to me so far removed from the idea of perfection ... that I begin to believe with this new Philos-
opher that God acts only througha small number of general laws" (Bayle 1973, 46). Again: "God,
preferringwisdom to all else, prefers that his conduct bear the mark of a wise agent who does not
disturbthe simplicity and uniformity of his ways in order to avoid a particulardisaster, constantly
to remedy the evils that happen in the world by opposing himself to the progress of general laws"
(Bayle 1973, 62). On the importance of Malebrancheto Bayle, consider Rex 1965, 34-40.
On the Politics of Faith and Reason 13

"monsters,meteors, furiousstorms, floods, deaths, and horriblefamines"to keep


men in fearful awe of some higher power (? 107). Second, "the magistratescon-
cerned with civil affairs and with those of religion" have always exploited men's
ignoranceof nature"to keep men in a state of dependenceby means of the brake
that is the fear of Gods." For it has been recognized in "all times" that "religion
was one of the bonds of society and that the subjects were never kept in a state
of obedience better than when one could have the minister of the Gods inter-
vene" (? 108). Finally, the priests rely for their livelihood and rank on the con-
tinued devotion of the people: "It is in the interestof pontiffs, priests, and augurs
that such news [of prodigies] be perpetually announced, just as it is in the in-
terest of lawyers and physicians that there be trials and illnesses" (? 109, end).
Bayle's implied programto undermine a religion, then, includes the following:
the spread of naturalscience to explain away the principal cause of man's fear-
ful credulity; the recognition that religion is at best useless as a bond of soci-
ety; the creation of a politics concerned with our bodily security and hence our
civic deeds ratherthan with the ultimate fate of our souls and hence the sound-
ness of our doctrinal beliefs; and finally the demotion of the power and pres-
tige associated with the "sacerdotalauthority."The VariousThoughtsdoes all it
can to promote each of these ends.
Yet it remains unlikely that Bayle envisioned a day when Catholic France,
for example, would be entirely atheistic. Much more likely is that, the impor-
tance of deeds over dogmas established, human beings would grow ever more
"tepid"in their concern for religion as such and that this would permit much
greater tolerance of religious opinions, atheism among them, than ever before.
As an acceptableresidue of orthodoxy,Bayle seems to have in mind something
like the faith of the Sadducees as he presents it, for although the Sadducees be-
lieved in God, they denied the immortality of the soul and hence the prospect
of heaven and hell, of eternal rewardand punishment(? 178). Bayle goes so far
as to classify them as atheists in a section in which he criticizes imprecise clas-
sifications of belief (? 174): From Bayle's point of view, the faith of the Saddu-
cees is an acceptablealternativeto atheism, strictly speaking. Bayle may defend
the Sadducees by appealing to the opinion of Jesus Christ (? 185), but his pref-
erence for the very limited belief they representhas its roots in the attemptto
sever the connection between politics and religious belief. The VariousThoughts
thus argues for the transformationof monarchical,ChristianEurope into an al-
liance of free republicstolerantof diverse religious opinions, including and per-
haps above all the indifference to religion.

Montesquieu and the Challenge of Christian Politics


To continue the inquiry into the roots of the modern Enlightenment,I turn to
Montesquieu'sSpirit of the Laws. The influence of this great work is difficult
to overstate, especially with respect to the American Founding.The Federalist
Papers refers to "the oracle" Montesquieu more frequently than to any other
14 Robert C. Bartlett

political philosopher, and on more than one occasion the quarrelbetween the
Federalists and anti-Federalistsconcerns, not whether Montesquieu's political
teaching is correct,but whetheror to what extent the proposed constitutionlives
up to that teaching (consider,e.g., Federalistnos. 9 and 47; see also Shklar 1987,
111-26; Pangle 1988, 67-68, 89-94). To be sure, other philosophers were cru-
cial to the development of modern liberal republicanism, Spinoza and Locke
not least, but the outlines of the new thinking and the new politics are particu-
larly clear in the liberal philosophy of Montesquieu. I turn now to the closest
point of contact between our two thinkers,to Montesquieu'sexplicit discussion
of Bayle in the Spirit of the Laws.

Montesquieu's Critique of Bayle (XXIV 1-6) 14


Montesquieu'squarrelwith Bayle is played out at the beginning of the three
books he devotes to religion (XXIV-XXVI). The first question of substance
Montesquieutakes up in this context is "Bayle's Paradox":"M. Bayle claims to
have proven that it is better to be an atheist than an idolator; that is, in other
words, that it is less dangerousto have no religion at all than to have a bad one"
(XXIV2; see also MontesquieuPensees 1946 in Montesquieu 1950-55, 11:584-
90). In this explicit reference to the VariousThoughts(XXIV 2, n. a), Montes-
quieu clearly wishes to take issue with, and thus separatehimself from, Bayle's
infamous assertion of the possibility of a decent society of atheists. His precise
reasons for doing so merit scrutiny.
Montesquieu argues that while it may be a matterof indifference to mankind
whether one believes that a given man exists, "it is very useful that one believe
god is. From the idea that he is not follows the idea of our independence;or, if
we cannot have this idea, that of our rebellion" (emphasis added). To say that
religion does not always restrain conduct is not to prove that it never does; to
gather together "a long enumerationof the evils that [religion] has produced,"
as Bayle has done, is to reason poorly against it, if one does not make an enu-
meration also of the goods that it has produced. As Montesquieu had argued
early in the Spirit of the Laws and here confirms, religion is often the only bridle
that can restraina vicious prince: "As despotism causes appalling ills to human
nature,the very ill thatlimits it is a good" (11.4,248; see also 111.10,260; XXIV2).
The issue separatingMontesquieu from Bayle, then, is clearly that of religion's
political utility: Montesquieu insists and Bayle denies that religious belief is
necessarily more "useful" for mankind than is atheism. To be more precise,
Montesquieuframesthe questionin termsof lesser evils ratherthangreatergoods:
"It is not a question of knowing whether it would be better for a certain man
or a certain people to have no religion than to abuse the one they have, but of

14Unless otherwise indicated, all references in this section will be to the Spirit of the Laws by
book and chapter and, where a more precise reference is needed, to the pagination of the Pleiade
edition (Montesquieu 1951). References to the Pensees are by numberas these appearin Volume II
of the Masson edition of the Oeuvres completes (Montesquieu 1950-55). Translationsare my own.
On the Politics of Faith and Reason 15

knowing which is the lesser evil, that one sometimes abuses religion or that there
be none among men." Not only, then, does Montesquieu concede to Bayle that
religion is sometimes productiveof evils, he insists upon it; Montesquieumain-
tains merely that atheism produces still greater evils.
The burdenof XXIV.2, however,is not so much to comparethe evils of athe-
ism with those of belief and thereby to attack atheism, as it is simply to praise
religious belief. To appreciatethe peculiar characterof this praise, one must see
the skillful way in which Montesquieu blurs the question of the truth of reli-
gion. He begins by speaking of "religion" in general and then turns to speak
of and praise "idolatry,"for from the point of view of political utility, idola-
trous religions are no less religions than is Christianity.Montesquieu's attack
on Bayle thus has a strangecharacter:It requiresor permits Montesquieuto de-
liver an extended praise of false religion. He even extols, at the end of Chap-
ter 2, the merits of the Lacedaemonianreligion. In other words, Montesquieu
objects much less to Bayle's elevation of atheism than to his demotion of idol-
atry: "In order to diminish the horror of atheism, one burdens idolatry overly
much."Whatevermay prove to motivate Montesquieu'scensure of Bayle, it ap-
pears from the outset that he does not speak in the name of Christianorthodoxy.
After introducingin XXIV5 the "unfortunatedivision" of Christendominto
Catholic and Protestant,Montesquieu turns to discuss Bayle one last time, this
in the chapter entitled "Anotherof Bayle's Paradoxes"(XXIV6).15 "M. Bayle,
after having insulted all religions, blights the Christianreligion: he dares to pro-
pose that true Christianswould not form a state that could last" (see also Pense'es
1230 in Montesquieu 1950-55, 11:328).To this Montesquieu strenuously ob-
jects: Christians"wouldbe citizens infinitely enlightened about their duties and
... would have a very great zeal to fulfill them; they would sense very well the
rights of naturaldefense; the more they would believe they owed to the religion,
the more they would think they owed to the fatherland."Devotion to an "estab-
lished" Christianchurch,then, would at the same time be devotion to the father-
land, and the duties imposed by the latter would in no way conflict with the
demands of the former. Now among the things Christianityteaches according
to Montesquieu is "the rights of naturaldefense," and Montesquieuhimself had
devoted considerableattentionto uncoveringand clarifyingprecisely these rights:
The life of states is like that of men. The latter have the right to kill in the case of natural
defense; the former have the right to wage war for their own preservation.
In the case of naturaldefense, I have the right to kill, because my life is mine, as the life of
the one who attacks me is his; similarly a state wages war because its preservationis just, as
is any other Dreservation.(X. 2. 377: see also IX as a whole)

15Montesquieurefers explicitly to Bayle once more: XXVI. 3, n.2. Robert Shackleton detects
the influence of Bayle also at XXV. 10 and 11 (that a religion once established should not be dis-
turbedand that a multiplicity of religions in a state is fine provided religious toleration exists): see
Shackleton 1959, 147. One might note in this connection also the agreement between Montes-
quieu's analysis of the things that attractand attach us to a religion and Bayle's: compare Spirit of
the Laws XXV2 with, for instance, VariousThoughts ??184, 189-90.
16 Robert C. Bartlett

This teaching concerning natural defense looks for its foundation, not to the
Hebrew or ChristianBible, but to the original and naturalcondition of human
beings in a "state of nature"very different from the Garden of Eden (see 1.2;
X.3, 378). Might it be that Christianityis as compatible with moderatepolitics
as Montesquieuinsists only when it is reinterpretedin the light of the humanly
knowable principles underlying "moderate"politics in the light of Montes-
quieu's own science of politics?
This possibility is confirmed in the final paragraphof XXIV 6. It turns out
that Bayle's blunder is due to a misunderstandingof "the spirit of his own
religion" however "astounding"it may be that one can attributesuch a mis-
understandingto "this great man."16 Bayle failed to see that the "orders for
the establishmentof Christianity"or its "precepts"are essentially differentfrom
"Christianityitself" or its mere "counsels" and that the two must therefore be
distinguished. Many of Christ'sexhortations,that is, aim at "perfection"rather
than the possible, and since perfection "does not concern men or things uni-
versally,"such exhortationsmust not be mistaken for universal commands ob-
ligating all alike (XXIV 7). When "the legislator"-Christ-"instead of giving
laws, gave counsels, it is because he saw that his counsels, if they were or-
dained as laws, would be contrary to the spirit of his laws" (XXIV 6, end).
Jesus Christ, it turns out, understood the "spirit of his laws." It would seem
that Christ was a good Montesquieuan, and Montesquieu can appear to be a
good Christianby introducingthe distinction between the orders and the coun-
sels of Christ,the formerbeing obligatory,the lattermerely exhortatory(Pangle
1973, 252-55). Thus, all the teachings of Christ that Montesquieu deems com-
patible with "moderategovernment"become Christ'sorders, whereas those he
deems incompatible become mere "counsels." Bayle made the mistake of tak-
ing Christ too literally.
In these opening chaptersof his discussion of religion, Montesquieu defends
Christianityby twice attackingthe bold impiety of Pierre Bayle. The genius of
Montesquieu's rhetoric, however, is such that he defends both idolatry and
Christianity and therebybegins to drainfrom Christianityall of its essentially
unprovableand hence controversialassertions concerning the divinity of Christ.
Montesquieuresponds in particularto Bayle's denial of the possibility of a truly
Christianpolity by reinterpretingChristianityin such a way as to make it preach
"the rights of natural defense" and defer to the "spirit of the laws." I suggest
that Montesquieuand "this greatman"Bayle do not have fundamentallydifferent
ends in mind and that they disagree only over the best strategy to attain that
end: Both philosophers envisage a day when, to the very great benefit of poli-
tics, the concern for religion in general and Christianityin particularwould fall

"6Thisbold phrase was a source of trouble for Montesquieu: see Defense, 1129-30. If I am not
mistaken, Montesquieuuses it to characterizeonly one other philosopher in the Spirit of the Laws,
Machiavelli (VI. 5, 313; cf. Preface, 231, where Montesquieu speaks of, but does not mention by
name, certain "greatmen" of France, England, and Germany).
On the Politics of Faith and Reason 17

into desuetude, the lives of citizens being taken up with other, more mundane,
and strictly speaking more naturalconcerns.

Religion and the Spirit of Commerce


The remainderof Montesquieu'sextended discussion of religion in Part Five
of the Spirit of the Laws presupposes familiarity with that of the penal law in
its relation to liberty in Book XII, and I therefore turn to the latter before con-
tinuing. In the course of his reforms of the penal law, Montesquieu finds it
necessary or at any rate possible-to re-work the fundamentalunion of reli-
gion and politics. In a few masterful paragraphs,in fact, Montesquieu effects
nothing less than the separationof Churchand State by arguing as follows. All
such crimes as bear on religious opinion and dogma ("simple sacrilege") are
properly the concern only of the religious body in question; suitable punish-
ments may include "expulsion from the temples; deprivationof the society of
the faithful for a time or forever; avoidance of their presence; execration, de-
testation, and exorcism" (XII.4, 433). In no case, however,is the governmentto
raise a hand against the sacrilegious the infinite god can, after all, take care
of himself and the religious body ought never to punish citizens in such a way
as to threatentheir fundamentalsecurity. Only those crimes that affect the "ex-
ercise" of religion requirethe interventionof the government,and then only in-
sofar as they bear on questions of security:The state should be concerned solely
with liberty of action, not correctness of belief. Indeed, to make of sacrilege a
purely intra-religiousmatter in this way is to strip the state of its concern for
religious opinion or dogma. Although Montesquieu appearsto follow the tradi-
tional orderaccordingto which crimes against God are the gravestpossible and
first in importance(see, e.g., Plato Laws 853a-d), he in fact ascends from what
he regardsas the least importantto the most, namely to crimes against tranquil-
lity and security.Accordingly,his subsequentdiscussion of political crimesproper
(XII.7-30) is manytimes longerthanthatof sacrilege("magicandheresy":XII.5).
The guiding premise of Montesquieu'sargumentis that "laws are chargedwith
punishing only external actions" (XII.11), religion as well as "mores and man-
ners" being "naturally separate" from law (XIX.21, emphasis added): As
Montesquieu is at pains to demonstratethroughouthis analysis of the "spiritof
the laws," law must bow to the complex web of manner and morals, climate
and geography,that severely limits what legislation, and the legislator, can ac-
complish. Montesquieu states with remarkableclarity what changes in the con-
cern for religion he thought would arise from the acceptance of the properly
limited task of law:

With regardto religion, as in this state every citizen would have his own will and would as a
consequence be led by his own enlightenment or his fantasies, it would happen either that
each would be altogetherindifferentto every sort of religion of whateverkind, in which case
everyone would be led to embrace the dominant religion; or one would be zealous for reli-
gion in general, in which case sects would multiply. (XIX.27, 580)
18 Robert C. Bartlett

Whetherled by reason or fantasy, indifference or zealotry, every citizen will be


concerned (or unconcerned) with religion in a manner suitable to maintaining
the public peace. If there is but one religion, it will be looked on with a certain
coolness; if many, no one will gain ascendancy.Montesquieu envisions not so
much atheism, then, as its most practical substitute, the effective indifference
to religion or a certain benign zealotry.
It is now not so difficult to discern a link between Montesquieu'spraise of
commerce in PartFour and his correspondingdemotion of religion in PartFive,
for to be concerned above all with the tangible goods of this world is necessar-
ily to be less concernedwith the intangible,perhapsineffable, and certainlymore
controversialgoods of the next. And all too often we have sacrificed the former
in the name of the latter:Had Louis XIII wished merely to tradewith the Negroes
of his colonies, ratherthan to save their souls, he never would have enslaved
them (XV4).17
In the most importantsection of his treatmentof religion (XXV 12), one de-
voted to a further discussion of the penal law, Montesquieu goes so far as to
provide a kind of recipe to demote religion or, more precisely, to remove the
very concern for it from the soul by the gentle means supplied by commerce:

It is not therefore by filling the soul with this great object [i.e., fear of one's own death], by
bringing it closer to the moment when it should find religion of greater importance,that one
succeeds in detaching the soul from religion; a more certain way to attack a religion is by
favor, by the comforts of life, by the hope of fortune; not by what reminds one of it, but by
what makes one forget it; not by what makes one indignantbut by what casts one into indif-
ference [tildeur] when other passions act on our souls and when those that religion inspires
are silent. General rule: in the matterof changing religion, invitations are strongerthan pen-
alties. (XXV 12, 745-46)

Here we see the audaciouspeak of Montesquieu'spolitical philosophy; here we


see that Montesquieu'sutilitariananalysis of religion, from which we began, cul-
minates in an "attack"on it. With this much as an outline of Montesquieu's
political project, it remains to discuss the theoretical foundation from which
he begins and on which would presumably rest his willingness to "attack"

17Consider here Voltaire'spraise of the pacific effects of commerce, especially on religious ha-
treds, which praise anticipated by a few years Montesquieu's own and is fully in accord with its
spirit:"Enterthe London Stock Exchange, that place more respectablethan many courts; there you
see gatheredtogether deputies of all nations for the sake of the utility of men. There, the Jew, the
Mohammedan,and the Christiantreat one anotheras if they were of the same religion and give the
name 'infidels' only to those who go bankrupt;there, the Presbyteriantrusts the Anabaptist, and
the Anglican accepts the promise of the Quaker.Upon leaving these pacific and free assemblies,
some go to the synagogue, others to have a drink;this one goes to get himself baptized in a large
tank in the name of the Fatherby the Son of the Holy Spirit;this one has his son's foreskin cut off
and has some Hebrew words that he does not understandmumbled over his infant. Still others go
to their church to await the inspiration of God, hats on their heads, and all are content" (Voltaire
1877-1880, "Sixieme Lettre,"Lettresphilosophiques).
On the Politics of Faith and Reason 19

religion. What, in otherwords, is the equivalentin Montesquieuto Bayle's analy-


sis of miracles?

The Theoretical Foundation (1.1-3)

Montesquieu devotes the whole of Book One to a discussion of "the laws in


general,"evidently in order to explain, at the end of that book, what he means
by "the spirit of the laws." These opening sections in fact contain the most
philosophic utterancesMontesquieu permittedhimself to make in the Spirit of
the Laws, and they therefore can most obviously claim to be the theoretical
foundation of the moral and political teaching outlined. The first chapter, en-
titled "On the Laws in the Relation They Have With the Various Beings," is
brief but (or for that very reason) notoriously difficult, and I limit myself to
discussing only those parts of it that bear most directly on my theme.18
Montesquieubegins 1.1 with a definition of law accordingto which the whole
can or must be understood in terms of the necessary relations19 derived from
reflection on the nature of the various beings. Rejecting as absurd (that is, re-
jecting without argument)the idea that a "blind fatality" could have produced
intelligent beings-despite the fact that creation itself could well appearto be
an "arbitraryact" (?6) Montesquieu posits the existence of a "primitiverea-
son" (?3): Laws are the relation between such reason and the various beings, as
well as the relations between the various beings themselves. In the next para-
graph,Montesquieuseems to equate such primitivereason with the creatorGod,
who creates and preserves the universe strictly according to laws (?4, 6 end).
Here Montesquieustresses the constancyof the rules governingthe universeand,
in particular,the materialworld:Matterin motion follows "invariablelaws" (?5).
"Thus creation . . . supposes rules as invariable as the fatality of the atheists."
Again, "every diversity is uniformity,every change is constancy"(?7, emphasis
original). Ratherdifferent is the case of "particularintelligent beings," for they
have both laws they make and those they do not; and if it is hardly surprising
that human beings frequentlyviolate their own positive laws, it is difficult in-
deed to understandhow, given Montesquieu'sdefinition of law as a necessary
relation, we can be said to violate "incessantly"the laws we did not make that
pertainto us as intelligent beings. Just as before there were any particularintel-
ligent beings such beings were possible, so also they had "possible relations"
and hence "possible laws." Similarly,accordingto Montesquieu,priorto the ex-
istence of any laws, "therewere possible relations of justice." He explains: "To
say that there is nothing just nor unjust except what the positive laws order or
prohibitis to say that before one had traceda circle, all the radii were not equal"

`8The best discussions of Book I are Lowenthal(1959) and Shackleton (1961). My analysis dif-
fers from these works principally in that I stress rathermore than they the (anti-)theological impli-
cations of Montesquieu'sargument.
'9On the peculiarityof Montesquieu'sdescriptionof law as a relation,see Shackleton1961, 244-46.
20 Robert C. Bartlett

(?8). But if there were no circles in fact, could one speak of the properties of
their radii? If there were no particularintelligent beings at all, would their po-
tential existence, relations,and laws be known?To whom would they be known?
It seems that such argumentshave surreptitiousrecourse to our experience of
those circles that have been traced, or to the particularintelligences we do know.
I tentatively suggest that to speak as Montesquieu does both of the radii of cir-
cles prior to their existence and, more to the point, of possible laws pertaining
to particularintelligent beings prior to the existence of any such beings, is to
presupposethe presence of an ordering,comprehendingmind apartfrom any par-
ticularbeings: It is to presupposethe mind of a god that knows the possible ex-
istence of circles (and hence their possible properties)and the possible existence
of particularintelligent beings (and hence the possible laws pertainingto them).
Montesquieuhimself suggeststhatthis is so by ultimatelyreferringto these "prim-
itive laws" as those that "god established"(?14), explicitly in contrastto those
we make; whatevermay be the role of the positive law in making such primitive
laws known to us, they seem to require a creatorgod for their existence.
Montesquieu identifies four such laws or "relations of equity" (?9): that,
given a society of men, it would be just to obey their laws; that any intelligent
being should be grateful for benefactions received; that any intelligent crea-
ture should remain in a state of dependence on the intelligent creature that
created it; and that any intelligent creaturethat has harmed another deserves
the same treatmentin return.Obedience to law, gratitude,dependence, and pun-
ishment or retaliationare thus the laws that pertain to human beings even prior
to their existence. But Montesquieu immediately proceeds to stress how little
we conform to these laws in fact: The intelligent world, like the physical, "also
has its laws that, by their nature, are invariable,"and yet "it does not follow
them consistently as the physical world follows its" (T10). Indeed, we violate
them "incessantly."This is due in part to precisely our nature, as Montesquieu
indicates. But is there not something strange about invariablenaturallaws that
we violate on account of our nature? One could of course reply that, unlike
circles with their radii, humanbeings are by naturefree and thus "act by them-
selves" (?10). But there is another,more radical, possibility. What if these very
laws or relations prove to be radically defective in terms of human nature and
hence undeserving of the name natural law? Indeed, the first supposed natu-
ral law (that it is obligatory to conform to the laws of one's society) is under-
mined by Montesquieu's political project as a whole, for so far from being
content to obey the laws under which he lives, he seeks to underminethem in
their entirety: If it is true that "changes can be proposed only by those who
are born fortunate enough to penetrate with a stroke of genius the whole of a
state's constitution,"Montesquieu eventually confesses that "I do not believe
that I have totally lacked genius": "'And I too am a painter.'" (Preface, 230-
31). Second, Montesquieu'spolitical project underminesthe view that the cre-
ated should remain in a condition of original dependence on its creator,be it
God's creatureson him or children on parents:We must rely more on prudent
On the Politics of Faith and Reason 21

calculation of interest than on God's providence, and the extreme subordina-


tion of children to parents is needed only in the classical republic of virtue
(consider, e.g., XXIII.21, 706; and, on children and parents, V7). In addition,
to spreada new religion or (by implication)to underminean existing one, "one
must take away the extreme dependence of children, who are always less con-
cerned with what is established" (XXIII.21, 705). As regards the fourth sup-
posedly naturallaw or relationpertainingto punishmentor revenge,Montesquieu
traces the law of retaliation(la loi du talion) to the Koran and argues that it is
characteristic of despotic governments above all (VI.19). If, then, Montes-
quieu himself has reservationsabout the naturalnessof these four laws, depen-
dent as he states they are on god, might one supplant them with better, truly
natural,and hence constantlyobeyed laws that do not depend on any such god?
Could it be that Montesquieu makes the existence of god necessary in orderto
explain the existence of "relations of equity"-whose own existence he then
quietly calls into question on the grounds that they are radically unnaturaland
by no means "necessary"?
To begin to see the manner in which Montesquieu will replace the supposed
laws that "god established" with his own laws reasonably deduced from the
true nature of things, it is best to take up his discussion of the beasts and the
understandingof "naturallaw" that he first sketches there (??11-12; cf. ?1;
Lowenthal, 1959). Regardless of whether beasts are governed by general laws
of movement or by a particular motion, "they do not have a more intimate
relation with god than does the rest of the material world," which is to say
that they have no direct relation with him at all (see ??5 and 6, beg.). On the
contrary,beasts are led by the attractivepull of pleasure to preserve both their
particularbeing (through the pleasure of eating, for example) and their spe-
cies (through the pleasure of procreation). These desires for the preservation
of oneself and one's species Montesquieu calls "naturallaws," his first explicit
mention of them in the work. Here Montesquieu clearly returns to the under-
standing of law that he had sketched at the outset of the book according to
which law describes a necessary relation derived from reflection on nature:
Bodies in motion, plants, and beasts all obey their natural laws. Natural law
properly understood, then, is compatible with a relationship to god that is not
"intimate."In fact, as Montesquieu presents it, natural law takes the place of
god's direct or providential governance.
It is because beasts are guided by feeling (sentiment) ratherthan reason that
they obey their naturallaws so well-though not quite as well, it turns out, as
do plants. Knowledge and to some extent even feeling (insofar as the latter
may give conflicting impulses) complicate obedience to natural law. As for
human beings, Montesquieu makes it clear that in one respect at least, beasts
enjoy a decisive advantage over us, for although beasts cannot escape death,
they escape foreknowledge of it. Men, driven by both hope and fear, for the
most part fail to preserve their being as well as the animals do. Our passions,
to say nothingof our reason,interferewith our obedienceto naturallaw understood
22 Robert C. Bartlett

as the natural directedness to self- and species-preservation.20It is only by


guiding aright men's hopes and fears that human beings will come to live rea-
sonably in the sense of obeying their naturallaws properly understood.
Montesquieu'sprincipalaim in Book I is to question the "primitivelaws" said
to govern mankind, the existence and obligatory characterof which may de-
pend on positing the existence of god, but the incessant violation of which calls
into question their truly naturalor necessary character.He seeks also to replace
these problematic"laws"with the civil or political equivalents of the truly nat-
ural laws governing matter in motion, plants, and beasts. Montesquieu indi-
cates the limited but sober aim of his undertakingby makingclear that all laws-
religious, moral, political and civil pertain to man as a "feeling creature"and
not as a rational one (see the three-fold division in ?14); man is subject "to ig-
norance and to error,as all finite intelligences are: the feeble knowledge he has
he loses again." Montesquieu'sown political philosophy will therefore rely far
less than did traditionalphilosophy on man's reason and far more on an under-
standing of his passions. One might say that the peak of human reason is the
comprehensionof the passions that act on our souls, its most importanttask the
discovery of the best means to manipulatethose passions such that we may sat-
isfy the deepest of them. To re-write naturallaw in this way, Montesquieumust
begin again from the very beginning.
Montesquieusignals by the title of 1.2 its fundamentalcharacter:"Onthe Laws
of Nature."He first characterizesall the laws he has just mentioned in the pre-
ceding paragraph to repeat, religious, moral, political, and civil laws: "Before
all these laws are those of nature, so named because they derive uniquely from
the constitutionof our being" (1.2, 235; emphasis added). Montesquieuthus in-
dicates both that none of the laws pertainingto man yet discussed are truly nat-
ural and that he himself will take his bearingsby "the constitutionof our being,"
by human nature correctly understood. There is no clearer path to Montes-
quieu's intention here than to compare that part of 1.1 devoted to sketching the
four "relationsof equity prior to the positive law" or "primitivelaws" that "god
established"before there were particularintelligent beings (??8-9, 14) with his
own four "laws of nature"deduced from man's condition "priorto the estab-
lishment of societies" or in the state of nature.
To be sure, Montesquieubegins somewhat cautiously: "That law that, by im-
printing on us the idea of a creator,leads us towardhim, is the first of the nat-
ural laws, in its importanceand not in the order of these laws. Man in the state
of nature would have the faculty of knowing ratherthan knowledge. It is clear
that his first ideas would not be speculative ideas: He would think of the pres-
ervation of his being before seeking the origin of his being" (emphasis origi-
nal). This "first" naturallaw, then, is first in importancebut not in time: Man
in the state of nature has no innate idea of god. Indeed, as Montesquieu had

20See also his characterizationof "the law of nature"in X.3, 378; on the interferenceof reason
and the passions with human procreation,consider XXIII.1, 683.
On the Politics of Faith and Reason 23

admittedat the end of Chapter 1, even man in society is such a being as "could
at any moment forget his creator;god has called him back to him by the laws
of religion" (I. 1, 234). Montesquieulater resolves the apparentcontradictionbe-
tween the knowledge of god as a naturallaw and as resulting from (positive)
religious law when, in Book XXVI, he gives a more detailed enumerationof
the various kinds of law. There he clearly places divine (and ecclesiastical) right
apartfrom naturallaw and together with the many positive laws (XXVI. 1). In
other words, Montesquieu introducesknowledge of god as the first naturallaw,
but he never speaks of it as such again.
The four naturallaws properlyso-called, then, are these: the desire for peace,
food, procreation,and the society of others. Unlike the four relations of equity
that are said somehow to exist apartfrom the positive law that establishes them,
but that nonetheless requirethe suppositionof "a society of men" to speak about
at least one and perhaps all of them (see 1.1, ?9), Montesquieu's own natural
laws are meantto apply to humanbeings as they are truly or by natureand hence
prior to all society and the effects of society on their nature:As the radii of any
given circle are all equal, so every human being acts in accord with the four
naturallaws he indicates. Montesquieuattemptsto delineate those laws that, be-
ing truly in accord with our nature, deserve the name of natural law and that
require no exhortation or sanction for us to act in accord with them. The main
purpose of Book I of the Spirit of Laws is to replace the four supposedly natu-
ral laws "god established" which,however,humanbeings violate "incessantly"-
with four genuinely naturallaws that, like the laws or axioms of geometry, are
never violated because they are deduced from the true nature of the things in
question. Howevermuch political society may distort or mutilatethe naturalde-
sires Montesquieu discerns, and however plastic those desires may be in them-
selves, they nonetheless remain present in us and can be retrieved and made
use of by the prudentlegislator.The opening and largely destructivesections of
the Spirit of the Laws are meant to preparethe way for the constructiveproject
that follows them.
If one accepts the naturallaws that Montesquieu states, there seems to be no
need to accept or even to speak of the biblical God, the just and providential
God capable of miraculous intervention in the world. It cannot be said, how-
ever, that Montesquieu establishes the truth of his own naturallaws over those
of traditionaltheology in the four or five pages of the Spirit of the Laws he de-
votes to this dauntingtask. The new naturallaws, and the understandingof the
world that goes together with them, have at bottom the characterof assertions,
and they are good or choiceworthybecause their acceptance will lead to a man-
ifestly good political order,not because they are manifestly true. For example,
Montesquieu'spolitical philosophy looks to the "state of nature"for its foun-
dation, and yet he never speaks of it at length in the Spirit of the Laws. What is
more, Montesquieuwas at the least familiar with objections to the very idea of
a "stateof nature,"for in the Persian Letters his Usbek raises the following one:
"I have never heard one speak of public law (droit public) without beginning
24 Robert C. Bartlett

by searchingcarefully for the origin of societies, which seems to me ridiculous.


If men never formed any societies, if they abandonedeach other and fled from
one another,we would have to ask the reason for this and search out why they
stand off from one another.But they are all born joined to one another;a son is
born before his father, and he stays there: here is society and the cause of so-
ciety" (#94). One cannothelp but wonderwhetherMontesquieuadoptedthe idea
of a state of nature as a fiction useful for his purposes. At all events, what ap-
pears to be the theoreticalfoundation of Montesquieu'spolitical prescriptions
is in fact deducedfrom those prescriptions:The politics justifies the theory, not
the other way around.One may say that the deepest stratumof the modern phil-
osophic response to the pious is an exhortation to behold a new and better
Jerusalem,built by human hands and fit for human habitationhere and now.

Conclusion
Despite the disagreements,both apparentand real, between Montesquieuand
Bayle, they are at one on the fundamentalquestions. Both agree that religion is
responsible for greater ills than benefits, at least in well-governed polities, and
that it can safely be demoted if the task of politics becomes the pursuit of such
goods (e.g., liberty understood as security) as can clearly be traced to natural
passions, above all the fear of death and the dictates of amour-propre.To be
sure, Montesquieugoes out of his way to distance himself from Bayle's by-then
infamous assertion of the possibility of an atheistic society, but his specific crit-
icisms amountessentiallyto this: In praisingthe political utility of atheism,Bayle
was far too critical of idolatry; idolatry deserves greater praise than Bayle ac-
knowledged. By thus making idolatry the focus of his defense against Bayle's
criticisms, Montesquieuleaves almost untouchedBayle's praise of atheism.And
insofar as Montesquieu praises Christianity,he does so explicitly in terms of
the "political utility" of what he determines are its "counsels" as distinguished
from its "precepts,"a standardfully in accord with Bayle's own denigrationof
dogma in favor of deeds that in practicehas the effect of obscuringChristianity's
claim to be the one true religion. Montesquieu's denial that the state has any
reasonableconcern with "sacrilege"amountsto the privatizationof the heart of
religion, each being left to his own "fantasies"or "enlightenment,"and Montes-
quieu states clearly what he hoped such privatizationwould really amount to:
By removing religion from the state, one may eventually "detachthe soul from
religion" altogether.If Montesquieu refused to go quite so far as Bayle in toy-
ing with the possibility of a simply atheistic politics, this refusal stems from
his greater moderationor prudence, not from a disagreement over principle.
To begin to take a critical distance from Bayle and Montesquieu, it is best to
reflect on one consequence of the elevation of the concern for deeds at the ex-
pense of dogmajust noted. For that elevation leaves in some doubt the status of
their own preoccupationwith precisely "dogma"or at any rate opinions: Nei-
ther philosopher, that is, seems to leave much of a place for philosophy in his
On the Politics of Faith and Reason 25

political psychology or to explain and justify philosophy as such. One might


suppose, it is true, that Bayle advocates religious tolerance for the sake of the
freedom to philosophize, but in fact he makes no suggestion that philosophy is
the way of life most in accord with human naturethat would therefore supply a
fixed, naturalstandardby which to judge the goals he praises. Not the longing
for wisdom but the desire to satisfy amour-propre, which desire can take very
many forms, is the most fundamentalfact of humannature.Bayle seems to have
understoodhis own philosophizing to be partly in the service of society but ul-
timately in that of his own amour-propre. And the political philosopher Montes-
quieu leaves little room in his politics for philosophy; he criticizes any religion
that leads to "contemplation"and suggests that concern with the "speculative
sciences" makes men "savage" (sauvage).21 Of the many philosophic sects
Montesquieu discusses, he reserves his praise for the Stoics: "They were occu-
pied only in working for men's happiness and in exercising the duties of soci-
ety.... Born for society, they all believed that their destiny was to work for it"
(XXIV 10). As Montesquieu states, human beings are made "to preserve, feed
and clothe themselves, and to carry out all the actions of society": In order to
lead the good life, there is in principle no need to transcendthe things of a so-
ciety devoted to security or to seek out anythingother than what is attainablein
and through such a society. If, then, the political prescriptionsrequiredto meet
our truly naturalneeds dependedon a Montesquieufor their discovery,their im-
plementationwould seem to make far less necessary and indeed less likely the
subsequentrise of any new Montesquieus. "In Montesquieuperhapsmore than
in any other modern philosopher, we are made aware of the amazing, nay, the
astoundingparadoxof the attemptto explain the highest humanactivity as some
form of the desire for self-preservation"(Pangle 1973, 238).
It is worth noting in this context that there is a peculiarity even or precisely
in Montesquieu'saccount of our naturalneeds. For he does not conceal the fact
that his aforementioned"attack"on religion can succeed only if the legislator
succeeds first in distracting citizens from their awareness of, and hence from
reflecting on, their mortality: "It is not therefore by filling the soul with this
great object [i.e., fear of one's own death], by bringing it closer to the moment
when it should find religion of greaterimportance,that one succeeds in detach-
ing the soul from religion." Recall in this context that beasts have one "supreme
advantage"over humanbeings accordingto Montesquieu,namely that "they are

21 See XXIV 11 and IV.8, as well as XI.6 (407: on the undesirabilityof an "excess of reason"). If
I am not mistaken, Montesquieu'sonly extended praise of reason in the Spirit of the Laws occurs at
the end of his poetic invocation of the Muses: "Youwant me to speak to reason; it is the most per-
fect, the most noble, and the most exquisite of our senses" (XX. 1, 585). But even apart from the
fact that this praise is found in a poem intended to make pleasant and charmingthe truths Montes-
quieu has discerned, which pleasure and charm evidently stem from some source other than rea-
son, Book XX as a whole is dedicated to elevating commerce as a way of life uniquely suited to
harnessing our naturalpassions in a way compatible with the new republicanism:reason is essen-
tially in the service of political life and hence in that of the passions.
26 Robert C. Bartlett

subject to death as we are but without recognizing it" (I. 1, 234). The very fore-
knowledge of our own mortality,then, has the paradoxicalresult that, by driv-
ing us deeper into religious zeal, it prompts us to overlook such means as are
genuinely availableto us to satisfy our naturaldesire to preserveourselves:"This
same delicacy of organs that makes [Indians] fear death serves also to make
them dreada thousandthings more than death"(XIV.3,478). Accordingly,"most
[beasts] even preserve themselves better than we do and do not make such bad
use of their passions" (I. 1, 234). One must conclude that if "it is not a matterof
indifferencethatthe people be enlightened"(Preface,230), the enlightenedaware-
ness of our truly naturalpassions that Montesquieu seeks to promote is none-
theless aided in a decisive way by the diminution of our natural awareness of
death and therewithof our fear of it. Hobbes taught us to focus above all on our
fear of violent death, but Montesquieu encourages us simply to forget death,
and the reason for this difference is clear enough: The problem of violent death
admits of a political solution far more readily than does death simply.
That Bayle and Montesquieu can account for philosophy only with diffi-
culty may not by itself amount to a decisive objection. If Montesquieu'sphilo-
sophic account of human nature leaves no place for the philosopher, perhaps
such a being is explicable in terms of idiosyncratic tastes and unusual capac-
ities. Only one question can concern us here: If the philosopher is not the ful-
fillment of human nature, can the life of philosophy, as distinguished above
all from a life of pious devotion, be known to be the good life? That this is an
appropriatequestion to bring to the political philosophy of Bayle and Montes-
quieu is clear from the characterof their principal works, for both manifestly
thought it essential to overturn,by means of the tools of philosophy, the tra-
ditional biblical understandingof man's relation to God and community. In-
deed, Bayle and Montesquieu were as keenly aware of the greatest obstacle
that the philosophic effort to "enlighten"politics faced, namely the claims to
knowledge of the world raised by the pious, as they were hopeful that this
obstacle could be overcome once and for all. The fundamentalquestion, then,
is whether the philosophers in question successfully refuted these claims, as
their project evidently requires them to do. As we have seen, Bayle and
Montesquieu did not deduce their politics from a completed metaphysics
from a complete account of the nature of human being, God, and world that
was as such a standing refutation of the biblical claims. They sought instead
to satisfy our most unambiguous natural needs, those for security and com-
fort, then to suppress for the sake of that new security our interest in and even
awareness of the most fundamentalquestion of metaphysics. In the name of a
greater and more rational tranquillity,both Bayle and Montesquieu elevated
deeds over opinions, morality over understanding,and thus encouraged us to
become indifferent to biblical faith, to its truth or falsity.
This gamble proved to involve a difficulty. For a political philosopher sub-
sequently arose whose rhetorical gifts were as extraordinaryas his powers of
reasoning, and he used these capacities to launch the first great assault on the
On the Politics of Faith and Reason 27

modernEnlightenment:Jean-JacquesRousseau(see, most recently,Melzer 1996).


When Rousseau deplored the transformationof human beings into the empty
bourgeois who depend for their well-being on precisely the amour-proprecel-
ebratedby Bayle as the key to an atheisticmorality,we were reminded, or forced
to see, that the politics wrought by the Enlightenmentis neither beyond ques-
tion nor without alternative:
Bayle has proved very well that fanaticism is more pernicious than atheism, and this is in-
contestable. But what he did not take care to say, and which is no less true, is that fanaticism,
though sanguinaryand cruel, is nonetheless a grandand strongpassion that elevates the heart
of man, makes him despise death, that gives him a prodigious spring [ressort] that need only
be better directed to produce the most sublime virtues. On the other hand, irreligion and in
general the reasoning and philosophic spirit causes attachmentto life, makes souls effem-
inate and degraded, concentrates all the passions in the baseness of private interest, in the
abjectness of the human I, and thus quietly saps the true foundations of every society. For
what private interests have in common is so little that it will never balance what they have in
opposition. (Rousseau 1964, 386 n.)

And yet, to repeat,the ultimatejustificationof the earlyEnlighte-nmentas a whole,


at least as we have come to see it in the work of Bayle and Montesquieu, is the
manifest goodness of the new politics. Thus, their attemptto rid us of the con-
cern with the next world for the sake of peace and security in this one has been
shaken to its core, and we in the postmodern age are the heirs of this problem-
atic project.

Manuscriptsubmitted 15 July 1999


Final manuscriptreceived 11 July 2000

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Robert C. Bartlett is an assistant professor of political science, Emory Uni-


versity, Atlanta, GA 30322.

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