While Leibniz was a natural continuation of Feuerbach’s work on the history of philosophy, Pierre Bayle seems an odd choice. Indeed, Feuerbach himself finally concludes his Pierre Bayle. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Menschheit by noting that Bayle never really brought anything positive to philosophy, and indeed, failed to understand the worth of thinkers like Spinoza, confusing in his criticism of latter the level of sense individuals with the level of one substance behind these individuals.
Yet, what was of worth in Bayle’s writings, Feuerbach says, is the contradiction of faith and reason – a question which appears to haunt Feuerbach himself more and more in his writings. Feuerbach begins again from the consideration of Christianity, which he sees as characterised by dualism. True, Feuerbach admits, the pre-Christian culture did also speak of oppositions, but only of natural oppositions, while Christianity added to these certain metaphysical dualisms, like that of God and world, of heaven and earth, of spirit and flesh and of faith and reason, all of which were externally expressed in the battle between the Church and the state.
Characteristic dualism in Catholicism, Feuerbach notes, was the opposition between sensuous flesh and supersensous spirit, where the latter was placed above the former. Thus, the highest virtue for the Catholic Church was not natural love, but unnatural chastity, and although the Church seemingly allowed marriage, the practice of the saints showed the true preference. Catholic artists, like Dante and Petrarca, appeared to value natural love as the highest shape in which heavenly can appear on earth, but, Feuerbach says, these artists were for Church mere adopted children in comparison to real children or saints. Even a Christian artist must do beautiful works that appeal also to non-Christians, because a true work of art belongs to no specific religion, but unites the whole humanity, and therefore religion is just an external covering to an artist. Thus, beautiful Catholic works of art are contrary to the very idea of Catholicism, and seeing sensual Madonnas pictured in cloisters just shows that monks were never truly able to leave their earthly lusts behind.
Just as the Catholic Church related to art, similarly it related to science, Feuerbach insists. True, Catholic monks did develop science, but this was opposed to the original spirit of Catholicism, which appreciated only devotional books. Scientific spirit contradicts Catholicism, Feuerbach thinks, and therefore it will either turn against Catholicism or be suppressed as mere means for spreading faith.
Protestantism rebelled against the practical contradiction of flesh and spirit, Feuerbach continues, but retained the theoretical opposition between faith and reason. Feuerbach thinks that the battle of the reformers against celibacy was not just based on the Bible, but the true reason justifying this turn was human understanding. Thus, Feuerbach finds it even more puzzling why Protestantism then turned against reason. A Catholic saint can at least cut away tempting organs – Feuerbach is probably referring to the famous rumour of Origen castrating himself – but a Protestant cannot cut away their reason.
It is this opposition of reason and faith that Feuerbach thinks is the most interesting aspect of Bayle. Feuerbach thinks it particularly poignant that Bayle was no professional theologian, since that showed him to start his criticism from a standpoint of freedom. Theology, Feuerbach states, thinks it has a monopoly over other sciences. The interest of theology is not to study anything scientifically, but to interpret and comment on the truth of faith. Doubts, on the other hand, are a sin for it and science is a mere means for the goal of faith. In other words, Feuerbach concludes, the spirit of theology is not the spirit of science, since science is universal for both Christians and non-Christians, while theology limits itself to the former.
When theology reigned, Feuerbach continues, other sciences were considered only as means for theology and subservient to it. Nature was studied for the sake of finding signs of God in nature and was thus regarded in a mechanical fashion as a mere external means for a goal. Thus, humans were forcefully turned toward heaven by theologians arguing teleologically from various phenomena of nature, and only Giordano Bruno and Spinoza understood that nature has its own reason. Theology, Feuerbach thinks, opposes science, because the main principle of theology is miracle and arbitrary will, which is opposed to reason as the principle of science. Thus, philosophy regards moral principles as laws of reason, while theology sees them as commands of God. More generally, theology derives everything from the will of God, while philosophy tries to explain it.
Feuerbach regards Bayle as an antitheologian and thus a person of reason. For instance, Bayle saw comets as natural phenomena and not as divine signs and argued for this by noting that by using comets as signs God would have just increased superstition, which Bayle regarded as worse than atheism. Indeed, Bayle went even so far as to note that atheists often lived better lives than Christians.
Bayle’s criticism, Feuerbach says, concerned religion as differing from morality and philosophy, in other words, positive religion like Catholicism that had solidified into a church and was limited by certain articles of faith. In such a positive religion the believer does not need to do anything else, but what its dogmas say to be sanctified (the official sacraments). Although Protestantism was a sort of liberation from Catholicism, it also became a positive religion. Thus, even Protestantism makes God into an object of devotion that demands service, while duties toward humans become subservient to this and filled only because so God is also served. Protestantism, Feuerbach concludes, binds itself to a specific time and place – church Sundays, when the priest is preaching – and religion becomes a mere custom one has to regularly follow.
Feuerbach thus agrees with Bayle that it is not the positive religion that has combined barbarians into society, but that humans have done it themselves, because of their conscience. Christians do not do good because they are Christians, but because they are humans. On the other hand, a bad person remains a bad person, even if Christianity would frighten him not to do bad things. Furthermore, paradoxically the belief in the dogma of the original evil in human nature just shows that the believer of this dogma does not believe themselves to be good.
Feuerbach notes that Bayle endorsed the independency of ethics from religion and criticised the habit of explaining away the immoralities of Biblical figures. Feuerbach regards Bayle’s endeavour to separate ethics from religion as noble. According to Feuerbach, it is foolish to try to ground ethics on the notion of God. True, one could try to base ethics on the idea of God as the epitome of goodness, but actually, it is not the goodness as the goodness of God that is here important, but merely goodness as such. Furthermore, Feuerbach continues, although the goodness of God might be in line with ethics, the notion of divine omnipotence contradicts the idea of goodness, since it is just a notion of a magical demon capable of anything. Indeed, he adds, even the devil seems capable of miracles, which then are just an unethical and immoral concept.
Scholastic theology could not do proper ethics, Feuerbach explains, since it founded everything on the will of God. Truly independent ethics didn’t appear, Feuerbach thinks, before the Kantian categorical imperative, which gave ethics a sacred and independent position. Feuerbach praises Fichte for raising ethics even further to an ideal that an empirical human being could never fully achieve, but still has to strive to for its own sake, while in comparison, a theologian does good only for the sake of God and paradise. If one does not do good for its own sake, one is merely seeking for one’s own interest and making good serve as a means for one’s pious goal, Feuerbach insists and adds that only ethics is the true religion and true love of God is the love of humanity.
According to Feuerbach, separation of ethics from theology shows most strikingly that spirit has broken away from theology. He thinks that Bayle expounded this contradiction especially in discussion with rationalists theologians, who thought that dogmas could not contradict reason. Against them, Bayle argued that especially original sin was an unreasonable dogma: the Biblical story of the fall of humankind makes God into a literal instigator of sin. Leibniz had argued against Bayle that God had other ends beyond human virtue (perhaps the preservation of certain plants, as the Bible story suggests), but Feuerbach thinks this justification is not available to the theological standpoint, which sees God working only for humanity. Leibniz and rational theologians objected also that divine goodness and justice meant no ordinary human goodness and justice, but Bayle could answer that they must still be recognisable as goodness and justice. Indeed, Bayle was only holding on to a philosophical ideal of good and just God, while the theologian’s God was very passionate and deceived humans into sin, although this God also wanted to retain the appearance of not doing so.
Bayle found dogmas of religion problematic, Feuerbach continues, not because they contradicted lower passions, but because they contradicted natural reason. While for an orthodox theologian reason was just a concubine, for Bayle it was a life companion. Feuerbach sees Bayle’s relation to faith as exhibiting a more general sign of his time: faith was not anymore natural, but felt as contradictory to reason or as a mere object, first of reflection, then of doubt and criticism and finally of denial.
Feuerbach notes that Descartes had particularly shared a similar idea of faith: both Descartes and Bayle knew objectively the contradiction of positive faith with reason, while their own faith was subjectively contradicting their reason. Descartes did not doubt his own faith, but just with this lack of doubt he showed that it contradicted the universal reason. Philosophy cannot exist, when assertions have to be just assumed as true, which Feuerbach thinks is true of Church dogmas. Thus, if Descartes had been a good Catholic, he would have just accepted dogmas and not thought of anything. Yet, as an instigator of modern philosophy he could not accept any determined fundament or limitation for thinking, but had to follow its own necessity.
Descartes, Feuerbach thinks, had based his philosophy on self-certainty, which is something completely antidogmatic. Positive effects of any philosophy, Feuerbach says, are not visible to the senses and do not limit to mere formal consequences, but to change of spirit. Cartesian philosophy especially taught us to think, Feuerbach insists, and to distinguish material from spiritual and to reduce study of nature to mechanism.
A particular point where Feuerbach sees Descartes contradicting the dogmas of Catholicism was his idea of body as characterised by extension. Feuerbach thinks that this notion of extension cannot be reconciled with the idea of transsubstantiation, where the same extension of bread supposedly changes its very substance into the flesh of Christ. By ignoring such dogmas, Feurbach notes, Cartesian thinking showed its lack of interest in matters of faith. Faith was thus not anymore based on self-consciousness, but was only an external addition or historical faith. Historical matters can be believed only historically, that is without any further justification, since while present facts we are forced to believe, historical facts of past lack this feeling of necessity and are something we must always doubt. Similarly, Feuerbach suggests, true faith in dogmatic facts could occur only when these facts were felt as a living part of human self-consciousness, while from Descartes onward such living faith was more and more just a thing of the past.
Feuerbach admits that there was still something making faith very much a living force at the time of Descartes, namely, the community of believers or the Church representing faith in the actual world. Because of the Church, faith was a universal opinion, while reason was in comparison a mere subjective opinion. Feuerbarch notes that Bayle also was a part of such a community, although in his case it was not Catholic, but Reformed church. Still, Feuerbach insists, Bayle’s faith was an act of self-denial: Bayle rejected reason in favour of historically grounded faith, or after placing doubts on dogmas he still leaped to faith.
Feuerbach sees Bayle as an intellectual ascetic, abstaining from the use of reason, but at the same time contradicting himself. For Feuerbach, Bayle was a sophist in defending faith. Feuerbach considers earthly satisfaction to be truly more divine than mere blind faith, which is just human invention. Indeed, Feuerbach says, even the believers understand this, because they think God is the most blessed and happiest of all beings, who does not require any faith at all, but knows everything with full clarity.
Although Feuerbach thus is ultimately let down by Bayle’s choice of faith over reason, he congratulates Bayle for his otherwise impartial polemics against all positive forms of religion. He is especially fond of Bayle’s criticism against all religious authority and particularly the Catholic reliance on the power of tradition. Bayle was correct, Feuerbach says, in rejecting the idea that the Church could force the conscience of individual people into believing something. Instead, Bayle demanded unlimited tolerance of all creeds, which Feuerbarch wholeheartedly agrees with: truth is tolerant, because it is always sure of itself.
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