Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections PDF
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Historital and Critical Dictionary SELECTIONS THE LIBRARY OF LIBERAL ARTS Osk.ar Pieat. Fotmder The Library of Liberal Arts •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• Pierre BAYLE Hi1itorical and Critical DICTIONARY SELECTIONS Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by RICHARD H. POPKIN Universiry of California, Son Diego With the Assistance of Craig Brush Columbia. Urdv~r.sity THE LIBRARY OF LIBERAL ARTS published by THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY, INC. A Subsidiary of Howard W. Sams & Co., Inc. PUBLISHERS • INDIANAPOLIS • NEW YORK • KANSAS CITY Pierre Bayle: 1647-1706 Historical and Critical Dictionary was originally published in 1697 Copyright © 1965 The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. All Rights Resened Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 64-16705 Designed by Stefan Salter Associates Acknowledgments I should like to take this opportunity to thank those with whom I have discussed Bayle over the years, and who have given me valuable suggestions about the prepara tion of this volume. First of all, I should like to thank my good friend Professor Paul Edwards of New York University for hav ing suggested that I undertake this venture. Next, I should like to thank la premiere bayliste du monde, Mme Elisabeth Labrousse, for all the invaluable interchanges we have had about our mutual friend Pierre Bayle. Then I should like to thank my collaborators in other ventures, Professor Paul Dibon of Nijmegen and the late Dr. C. Louise Thijssen-Schoute, who have helped me over the years to gain a perspective and under standing of Bayle. I should like to thank my students past and present, whose enthusiasm for the Bayle to whom I introduced them has helped to stimulate and develop my present picture of him. Among these gentlemen, I should like especially to men tion Professor Harry M. Bracken of Arizona State University, Professor R. A. Watson of Washington University, St. Louis, Professor Philip Cummins of the University of Iowa, and Mr. David Norton of the University of California, San Diego. I should also like to thank Professor Craig Brush of Columbia University for all his helpful criticism of the manuscript and his efforts in getting it into its final form. In addition, discussions with him and with Professor Walter Rex of the University of California, Berkeley, have aided me in formulating more clearly some of my interpretations of Bayle. And, I wish to thank Mr. Jack Ornstein for helping to prepare the Index. Lastly, and with sincere gratitude, I should like to thank my family for encouraging me throughout this venture. They have VII VUI Bayle: Dictionary had to live with the four folio volumes of the French 1740 edi tion, the ten folio volumes of the English 17S4-1740 translation (the last complete one, and not a very accurate one at that), the five folio volumes of Bayle's (Eutlf'es diverses, as well as assorted reference works. My wife, Juliet, has labored as an invaluable consultant and proofreader; my older children, Jeremy and Margaret, have labored at sorting and arranging the bits and pieces as they piled up everywhere. And I am also grateful to my infant daughter, Susan, who has crawled over the volumes, peeked in them hoping to find pictures, and who in all this time has not damaged or marked a single page! I want to thank the entire family for their patience and fortitude, hoping that we will all feel that the effort has been worth while. R.H.P. Contents Introduction xi Note on the Text xli Bibliography :xxxiii Index 445 Historical and Critical Dictionary (Selections) Abimelech 5 Mammillarians 140 Acindynus 16 Manicheans 144 Andronicus 19 Naples 154 Ariosta 21 Nibusius 159 Arodon 25 Paulicians 166 Arriaga 26 Pyrrho 194 Bonfadius 30 Rangouze 210 Bunel 56 Rorarius 2U Caniceus 45 Rufinus 255 Chrysis 44 Sanchez 265 David 45 Simonides 272 Dicaearchw 64 Spinoza 288 Eppendorf 75 Takiddin 559 Guarini 78 Tiraqueau M4 Guillemete 84 Weidnerw 547 Hall 88 Zeno of Elea 550 Hegesilochus 95 Zeno the Epicurean 589 Hipparchia 95 Clarifications 595 Jonas 104 First Clarification 599 Jupiter 107 Second Clarification 409 Lacydes 120 Third Clarification 421 Leucippus 124 Fourth Clarification 456 Introduction In this day and age, can we still imagine that a biographical dic tionary, a Who's Who, could be one of the most exciting works of an age; that such a work could have summed up and exposed the Century of Genius and could have launched the Enlighten ment? There has never been another work like Pierre Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary, and it is almost impossible to imagine today that there ever might be another such accom plishment. One man, Pierre Bayle, working in Rotterdam in the 1690's, was able to wander hither and yonder through the world of man's intellectual and moral thought, from the beginning of written history to yesterday's newspapers and cafe gossip, and could portray enough of it from A to Z to encompass all that his age had to offer, and to reveal so many of its failings in such sharp relief. One man's portrayal of the ancient sages, the Bibli cal heroes and heroines, the kings and queens, the courtiers and the courtesans, the theologians, the philosophers, the crack pots of all times, could fascinate such men as Leibniz, Voltaire, Bishop Berkeley, David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, and Her man Melville. Bayle had roamed from seductions to perversions to murders to massacres to visions to paradoxes, in dazzling fashion, as he marched from "Aaron" to "Zuylichem." He had provided a wondrous body of lore and food for thought. He had provided a marvelous suite of themes and variations, on such problems as those of cuckoldry, and castration fears, and reli gious intolerance, and historical accuracy, and of finding certi tude in philosophy, science, and religion. These themes flash back and forth and interplay through the columns of folio foot notes. A point raised in "Rorarius," or in "Pyrrho," or in "Helen of Troy," or in "Bolsec" could suddenly focus upon some of the most burning issues men have tried to resolve. Bayle XI XII Bayle: Dictionary wove his themes round and round into an incredible fabric of historical information, lewd anecdotes, moral musings, philo sophical and theological analysis, and doubts and super-doubts. The work is really a Summa Sceptica that deftly undermined all the foundations of the seventeenth-century . intellectual world. The Dictionary, first published in 1697, and enlarged in the second edition of 1702, continued to grow and grow. Subsequent editions and translations added what had been omitted, and refuted or corrected some of Bayle's odd or eccentric views. But the headlong rush of the Enlightenment for enlightenment soon outstripped the confines of any emendations of Bayle's Diction ary. Diderot's Encyclopedie, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Biog-raphie Universelle, and then in our century the Dictionary of National Biography, and Who's Who followed. No one man oould do it by himself. Teams of experts were needed who wo\lld report the facts and would have no time or space for digressions or reflections. A dictionary could no longer amuse or cause phil osophical and moral reflection: it had to inform, and only in form. Bayle was too incomplete, too inaccurate, too outdated, too digressive, too lewd, too obscure,· too obscene. Hence, he was relegated to oblivion. Library reference shelves needed the space for Who's Who in American Photography and Who~s Who in European Bridge Playing. No one would or could use Bayle for his children's homework, or for cribbing term papers. Hence, ihe monumental opua has disappeared, a victim of one of its offspring, "scientific" scholarship. The libraries moved their sets to storage, the owners sold them secondhand, to get new refer ence works. So, Bayle disappeared from intellectual history al most as completely as he had once dominated it. All that was left was a name, appearing and reappearing in almost all discus sions of the eighteenth century. We are now far enough remo\'ed so that we can rediscover Bayle, without worrying about what he has omitted, or whether his facta are accurate, or whether more complete studies exist on Aaron, or Beza, or Dicaearchus, or Flora, or. ... We can now
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