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.Bayle s, we are now told, was infact a very Calvinist scepticism, rigorously separating reason from grace;and from Rotterdam to Amsterdam came to be a longer journey thanfrom Sedan to Saumur.Bayle and Le Clerc were seldom friends, soonrivals and in the end enemies,¹x and their later controversies turned onBayle s conviction that Le Clerc had become a Christian rationalist,who thought it possible to ground religion in natural law and naturalreason.Bayle would have none of this; he thought the problems oftheodicy, of reconciling God s goodness with God s omnipotence, in-soluble by human reason and susceptible only of a solution by faith, inwhose absence one must accept authority but authority would be welladvised to impose toleration.Not everyone understood or accepted the fideist component inBayle s scepticism, and it is not likely that Gibbon, in whom fideism ishard to trace,¹y was one who did.The thrust of scepticism, where notdirected against patristic or scholastic authority, was coming to beincreasingly aimed at Nicene and Trinitarian orthodoxy, and here theviews of Bayle command attention.There is no article on Arminius orArminianism in Bayle s mighty Dictionnaire historique et critique, but there isone on Simon Episcopius (1583 1643), who had been Arminius s im-¹x Barnes, 1938, ch.vii ( La rèpublique des lettres; querelles ), pp.228 37; Labrousse, 1963, i, pp.259 65.For an account of Bayle differing from hers, see Popkin, 1979.¹y Turnbull, 1982. 62 England and Switzerland, 1737 1763mediate successor, and here a lengthy footnote²p aligns Bayle with LeClerc, who has confuted Jurieu s attempt to charge Episcopius withSocinianism.Bayle cannot resist remarking that Le Clerc has beeninstructed to do this by his superiors, the Amsterdam Remonstrants, buthe applauds him for carrying out the task, and remarks that while Jurieudeserves credit for remaining silent in the face of Le Clerc s rebuttal, hewould have done better still to withdraw his charges and confess himselfmistaken.Jurieu could make his enemies one another s allies, and thecharge that Arminians necessarily became Socinians was the kind ofthing Bayle enjoyed dismantling; but he had no particular commitmentto the defence of Arminian doctrine, and the significance of these pagesin the Dictionnaire is that they show us how easily all roads could lead tothe spectre of Socinianism.In the article on Socinus himself, Baylealludes to a widespread belief that several powerful European princeswould introduce Socinianism if only they dared, but adds that since theSocinian sect disapproves of both war and magistracy this is hardlylikely to happen, and that the fantasy that the sect is secretly multiplyingeverywhere may be dismissed.He goes on to a lengthy confutation of acharge of crypto-Socinianism brought against Arnauld and the école dePort Royal in general, to whom he was certainly no closer than he was toEpiscopius and the Remonstrants of Amsterdam.²¹ This is all veryBaylean, but he is testifying to the existence of a widespread concernwith Socinianism which, however much it fantasised about under-ground conspiracies based on the Rakovian Catechism, arose from therecognition that something of a Socinian nature lay in the political logicof much that was happening in Latin²² Europe.It was not the activitiesof the Socinian confession that mattered.Everywhere the peace seemedto be menaced, and the authority of the civil sovereign challenged, bythe spiritual claims of church and sect, revived by the disastrous pro-ceedings of Louis XIV; and a revision of the divinity ascribed to JesusChrist might follow from the response to these claims.If the Spirit hadnot been incarnate in the Flesh, there was no one in the world who couldclaim authority from the Spirit; in the last analysis it was as simple asthat.If Jesus had been simply a man, social authority had nothing to fearfrom him; if the claim that he had been more than a man was such thatonly social reason could discuss it, the outcome of the debate waspredetermined.The counter-offensive against the decrees of grace hadopened up sucha debate within Calvinist and quasi-Calvinist Protestan-²p Bayle, 1696, pp.1056 7 (footnote 14).²¹ Ibid., pp.1065 (text), 1070 4 (footnote M).²² By Latin is meant that Europe whose history derives from the problems of Latin Christianity
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