Bayle and the Question of the Salvation of the Infidels

Abstract

For Bayle, the question of the ‘salvation of the infidels’ is no longer of much relevance. However, reading La Mothe Le Vayer’s De la Vertu des païens, Bayle knows the anti–religious polemical power of this theme, at least when it is challenged. Thus, in the article ‘Pyrrho’ of his Dictionnaire historique et critique, Bayle will demolish point by point, while pretending to take seriously, the apologetic approach of a sort of scepticism that would be capable, by invalidating all access to knowledge, of promoting religious belief, quite simply because the habit of believing nothing can lead to the blind faith (‘la foi du charbonnier’). On the other hand, the irrationalism of any religion, which forces us to have blind faith, favours all forms of fanaticism. It is therefore on the basis of moral rationalism and not on the basis of scepticism that Bayle will build his philosophical theory of tolerance. He will thus develop two complementary themes: that of virtuous atheists who base their morals on rational principles exclusively and that of the viability of an atheist society that invalidates any claim on the part of religion that it constitutes an essential social bond.