Who was Pierre Bayle, the Huguenot philosopher whose Dictionnaire historique et critique influenced Leibniz, Hume, Kierkegaard, and Melville? Was he, as some of his critics called him, “un dangereux ennemi de la Religion” [“a dangerous enemy of religion”] (177), or was he, as others suspect, an absolute fideist? And if this enigma cannot exactly be unraveled, can it at least be illuminated?