Pierre Bayle et l'instrument critique (review)

Abstract

176 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Professor Cohen offers copious and illuminating notes, mainly on Jewish sources and themes. One only regrets that too little is done with relating Usque's philosophical ideas to Renaissance sources. (It would be most interesting to see a comparison of Usque's ideas with those in Leon Ebreo's Dialoghi d'Amore.) One further theme that is intriguing that is not treated in this work is the relation of Usque's work to the series of theological-historical works that came out of Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, such as Menasseh ben Israel's Esperanza de Israel, the unpublished and widely disseminated Providencia de Dios con Israel by Saul Levi Morteira, and the Preveneione8 Divinas contra la vana Idolatria de las genres by Isaac Orobio de Castro. Menasseh ben Israel is certainly more confident than Usque, sure both that recent European history shows that God is protecting the Jews, and that the end of world history is at hand. Morteira and Orobio de Castro are willing to be more polemically anti-Christian since they too have a greater confidence than Usque did. Perhaps the change that takes place in Jewish history in the course of the century after the appearance of the Consola~am, with the development of a really free ffudaism in Amsterdam, and the rising Kabbalistic expectations about the arrival of the Messiah in the mid-seventeenth century, account for the differences in tone and content. Usque was trying to save the remnant of Marrano Judaism, to lead them back to the faith. Mena~seh ben Israel, Morteira, and Orobio de Castro had all come back and were secure in their world and in their expectations. Israel had been saved in Holland and was flourishing. Its dramatic finale, they believed, was obviously at hand. (And the catastrophe of Sabbatai Zevi's Messianic movement in 1666 seems to have put an end to Jewish Providential historical-theology, while Spinoza, in his Tractatus undermined its intellectual foundation.) The appearance of this English edition of Usque's Consola~am should be a boon to Renaissance scholars, historians of Judaism, and scholars of intellectual history. It should provide many avenues for further research and study and should help greatly in evaluating Jewish currents in the Renaissance. Professor Cohen's excellent translation and edition should help give this classic the place it deserves. RICHAI~D H. POP:KIN University oJ Cali]ornia, San Diego Pierre Bayle et l'instrument critique. Par Elisabeth Labrousse. Pr6sentation, choix de textes, bibliographie. (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1965, Vol. 16 of the series, "Philosophes de tousles temps," Pp. 185.) This volume, an excellent short introduction to Pierre Bayle's ideas, consists half of a survey of Bayle's thought and its place in the world of its time by Mine Labrousse and half of a selection of illustrative short texts taken from Bayle's major writings. In her two recent erudite and definitive volumes, Pierre Bayle, Du Pays de Foix ~ la Citd d'Erasme (1963), and Pierre Bayle, Heterodoxie et Rigorisme (1964), Mme Labrousse developed her interpretation of many of the facets of Bayle's thought at length. Here she briefly outlines her views, placing Bayle in the intellectual currents of his time, and in the context of the embattled French Protestant refugees in Holland. Rather than portraying Bayle as Voltaire, Hume, and others saw him, as the man who provided "the Arsenal of the Enlightenment," Mme Labrousse endeavors to evaluate his views for their own merit. Bayle is presented as extending the Cartesian method of doubt to historical knowledge and thereby revealing the inordinate difficulties in establishing what is and what has been the case in human affairs. Bayle's critical attitude toward history, philosophy, theology, and science undermined all confidence in the great seventeenth-century systems. His scepticism about man's rational ability to give a coherent and adequate explanation of the nature of the cosmos is constantly coupled with a fideistic appeal to Revelation as the proper guide for human understanding, and with a firm commitment to certain moral and political maxims which justify his tolerationist views and his monarchism. While leaving the question of ascertaining Bayle's ultimate, sincere, and continuous...