Bayle and Japan

Abstract

The religion and customs of Japan were of great interest to men of letters in the 17th and 18th centuries, as is shown by the long article devoted to the subject by Louis Moréri in his famous Grand Dictionnaire historique (1674, 1st edition). In the present study, our attention is focused on another dictionnaire, as famous or even more famous than the first: the Dictionnaire historique et critique by Pierre Bayle, whose second edition (1702) includes an article on the subject. In it, Bayle describes and analyzes a set of teachings coming mainly from Buddhism, but he does so, in our view, mainly as a pretext to discuss other surrounding doctrines that irritated or annoyed him. We will see that this occurs particularly in connection with two scandalous intellectual events that caused heated controversies towards the end of the 17th century: a) Spinoza’s philosophy, or rather the mode of thinking called Spinozism that Bayle detects throughout history, and b) the mystical movement that arose from the writings of Miguel de Molinos receiving, from the Roman Church, the denomination of Quietism.