Pierre Bayle e William King sobre o mal da imperfeição

Abstract

The final years of Pierre Bayle’s life were largely given over to a number of debates sparked by several of the more provocative articles of the Dictionnaire historique et critique and in particular those, such as “Manicheans” and “Paulicians,” in which Bayle sought to undermine every rational attempt to justify the existence of evil in a world created by a supremely good, wise and powerful deity. Perhaps the best known of these critical exchanges are Bayle’s extended debates with Isaac Jaquelot, on the one hand, and Jean Le Clerc, on the other. However, the list of opponents that arose to challenge Bayle was hardly limited to these two. In particular, Bayle’s forceful presentation of the problem of evil drew an important response from Archbishop William King, whose De Origine Mali (1702) was occasioned by his reading of the Dictionnaire. Bayle, in turn, offered an extended criticism of King’s theodicy in the Réponse aux questions d’un provincial (Bayle 1737, 650-683).

Although Bayle knew King’s work only through a two-part précis of De Origine Mali published by Jacques Bernard in the Nouvelles de la république des lettres (May and June, 1703), the debate between King and Bayle proved to be a valuable and philosophically rich exchange concerning the problem of evil. In fact, the exchange is even richer and more extensive than it initially appears, since King offered a point by point response to many of Bayle’s criticisms—a fact that seems largely to have escaped the notice of commentators. King’s responses were culled from his voluminous manuscript papers and posthumously published by Edmund Law in An Essay on the Origin of Evil, Law’s English translation of De Origine Mali. In this essay I consider just one facet of Bayle’s debate with King, namely the dispute concerning the nature of evil in general and in particular King’s notion of evil of imperfection.