On the Politics of Faith and Reason: The Project of Enlightenment in Pierre Bayle and Montesquieu

Abstract

This study seeks to contribute to our understanding of the original political goals of the Enlightenment, especially in its confrontation with the Bible as a source of political guidance. It consists primarily of an exegesis of two seminal works of the period, Pierre Bayle's Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet (1682) and Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws (1748). With clarity, grace, and power, both works make manifest the grandeur of the Enlightenment's philosophic vision, the staggering ambition of its attempt to overcome the Bible as a political authority, and the ultimate vulnerability of that attempt, the full consequences of which we in the post-Enlightenment era must come to grips with.