Читать книгу Toward a Humean True Religion - Andre C. Willis - Страница 11
ОглавлениеBut if we consider the matter more closely, we shall find, that this interested diligence of the clergy is what every wise legislator will study to prevent; because in every religion, except the true, it is highly pernicious, and it has even a natural tendency to pervert the true, by infusing into it a strong mixture of superstition, folly, and delusion.
—HE, 3.135–36
The majority of the literature on David Hume is relatively silent about what he takes the proper office of religion to be. This is understandable given Hume’s powerful critique of traditional Christian doctrine and the fact that he neither offered a prescriptive language for religion nor detailed its proper office. Unlike his peers who assumed the natural progress of history (Smith), proposed a Christian vision for society (Locke), or accepted that the universe had a moral dimension (Hutcheson), Hume challenged these ideas and contested the philosophical justification of religion. Still, his work was rich with constructive insights—some inchoate and others implicit—that contemporary thinkers in religious studies might benefit from considering. Taking his Ciceronian influences into account and reading Hume through the lens of our speculative true religion brings these constructive elements into view. From this perspective, Hume’s arguments regarding causation, his sense that passions can be moderated, and his commitment to a practical morality (T, 3.3.6.6) supply content for what Hume might have meant by religion’s proper office. This chapter elaborates on the rare form of religion that “regulate[s] the heart[s] of men” and “humanize[s] their conduct” (DCNR, 12.12) and attempts to extend Hume’s project for religion so that it might be useful for contemporary discourse in the philosophy of religion.
Hume’s explicitly stated aim regarding religion was to discern its manifestations in common life, explain its foundations in reason, and narrate its “origin[s] in human nature” (NHR, introd). His actual reflections on religion went a bit further: they were multidimensional and included penetrating observations as well as moderate suggestions couched in the terms he inherited: false religion and true religion.1 Characteristically, the critical framework of Hume’s science easily conveyed his distaste for false religion: “a species of philosophy” (E, 11.27). His positive project for religion, however, was largely concealed in indirection. Isabel Rivers offers a crucial reminder: we must “be aware of what is taken for granted, the unstated moral and theological assumptions” in the work of Radical Enlightenment philosophers.2 Her point, that the aspirations of some thinkers cannot find expression in their theoretical framing due to the critical structure of their work, is an important filter for the following investigation. To effectively consider what Hume may have meant by religion’s proper office, that is, to detect his mild suggestions for religion so we might build on them, we should generally work from a positive philosophical temperament and keep in mind the broad aims of his project.3
We expand our understanding of Hume when we acknowledge both the trenchant criticisms and tacit recommendations for religion across his writings. To be sure, Hume’s generically voiced project for religion was mostly a critical one directed against the Evangelical Presbyterianism in which he was raised. Though his work contained inconsistencies and incongruities, his critical disposition toward religion did not vary: he dubbed popular forms of Christian practice and doctrine “false religion” and he loathed them. Hume further derided the theism of popular religion that stipulated that God had moral attributes and was worship-worthy; he detested both superstition and enthusiasm due to their reliance on extreme passions, and he declared that vulgar religion had a corrupting influence on moral character. These vituperative positions constituted his direct response to the religious wars of his time and place, problems that deeply troubled him and ones that he prioritized in his work. Given his strategic choice to make more of a critical intervention against popular religion instead of a constructive one, he did not describe religion’s proper office with systematic detail. Still, it is fair to presume from his near obsession with religion, his Presbyterian background, his reading of Cicero, his commitment to moderation and the reflective, true philosophy, as well as his investment in social stability, that the question of the most effective form of religion remained near to his thinking. Further, Hume’s attitude toward religion was never simply a critical one. He offered (indirect) insights for true religion. We may extract from these (indirect) reflections—and cobble together substance for his undeveloped idea ‘true religion’—by reading between the multiple overlapping strands of his writings, assessing what is underneath his sometimes tacit intentions and closely attending to the fertile oppositions he implies between true and false religion. This sanctions our appraisal of what he may have taken, what he did not explicitly state that might be implicitly present in his work. Beginning with two productive premises—that Hume’s powerful work left us some positive resources for religion and that we can build a Humean-inspired true religion from these resources—the following argument posits three Humean commitments that, when combined, might serve as the foundation for a speculative true religion.
The riddle of both true and false religion in Hume is, ultimately—as he says in the last paragraph of his most important work on religion, the Natural History of Religion—“an enigma.” We can, however, holding the earlier-stated objectives in mind, give some provisional content to both forms of religion. Doing so is not to make a claim about Hume’s personal religious beliefs or the content of his spiritual life; it is simply to emphasize Hume’s positive attitude and the generative aspects of his contribution to religious discourse. This can resuscitate Hume’s work as a resource for scholars in the field. Philosophers of religion trained in philosophy have comfortably appropriated Hume’s writings for analytic approaches to philosophy, Kantian-influenced thinkers have seized on his work for its critical “errors” in relation to instrumental reason (most often regarding moral judgment), and skeptics have used him as their flag-bearer. Yet philosophers of religion trained in religious studies tend to avoid Hume, deploy him as an archcritic of religion, or treat him solely as a moralist. The irony here is that philosophers in religious studies generally approach the world of ideas in a Humean fashion: they take history seriously; tackle their work with a broad, philosophical temperament; and remain open to the relative insolubility of religious questions even as they seriously reflect on them. To bring these contemporary thinkers closer to their intellectual inheritance, I gesture, in this chapter, toward some possible historical foundations to foreground the larger argument I aim to develop: that we might construct a Humean-inspired true religion with a genuine theism, a moderation of the passions, and a practical morality.
Critics of Hume, in his day and in ours, have largely dismissed the idea ‘true religion’ in Hume as a “useless rump” with no religious value and little practical significance.4 I have two replies to this brush-off. First, to insist that Hume’s undescribed true religion has no religious value is to construe religious value in narrow, reductionist terms (that is, as false religion). The study of history, which Hume took to be enjoyable, intellectually edifying, and morally enriching (EMPL, 6.565), taught him that religion could be more than an amalgamation of ritualistic practices, ecstatic worship of deity, and a set of unyielding moral rules handed down from above. Second, the claim that Hume’s true religion has little practical significance obscures more than it clarifies. The connotation here is that practical significance is a function of direct moral precepts, explicit worship practices, or other formal influences. Hume detested this way of both describing and being religious. Thus, reducing religion to the conventional ideas of religious value and practical significance do not comport with his full perspective on the matter.
Hume considered religion, in its various forms, to be historically potent. And history, according to Hume, was unequivocal: it confirmed that religion was a consistent feature of human experience and that its popular manifestations had terrifying effects in the world.5 Given this, one might expect that Hume would want humans to be completely against the idea of religion and aim to abolish it. In fact, he took the opposite position. He never contended that humans should destroy all forms of religion, for religious sentiment never could be done away with fully. Instead, Hume actually suggested a state religion to counteract religious enthusiasm and ecclesiastical malfeasance (HE, 3.134–35). He wrote, “Look out for a people, entirely destitute of religion: if you find them at all, be assured, that they are but a few degrees removed from brutes” (NHR, 15.9). These sorts of claims illuminate the value of religion for civil society. They are found throughout Hume’s corpus and confirm a mild commitment to religion, sometimes for no other reason but to enhance social stability and augment common morality. Hume believed that religion, in its “proper office,” served a socioethical function. He stated that his “philosophy” (presumably, also his “philosophy of religion”) “if just, can present us only with mild and moderate sentiments” (T, 1.4.7.13) and suggested that true religion should reflectively affirm the stable, humanizing beliefs of common life (NHR, 12.13).6 His work also affirmed a basic sense of theism: “The universal propensity to believe in invisible, intelligent power, if not an original instinct is at least a general attendant of human nature” (15.5). Our speculative Humean true religion replaces the supernaturalism of popular religion with the fundamental belief in an Author of Nature. It supplants the “monstrous,” “Priestly inventions,” and “monkish virtues” of vulgar religion (T, 3.2.5.14) with the emphasis on virtuous character. And it displaces the enthusiastic, direct-passion hopes of false religion with a modest hope.
Hume’s work persuades us that useful suggestions for theism, morality, and passions do not, by any means, require religion. Yet if we consider religion, as I think Hume does, as a disposition that quietly connects us more deeply to one another and to that which is greater than us while inspiring excellence of character and steady passions that cultivate happiness and social stability, then we can say that this general theism, moderation of the passions, and practical morality, taken cumulatively, might be religious in effect. Our conjecture ‘true religion’ jettisons enthusiastic beliefs, divine behavioral codes, sacred rituals and texts, and ecstatic worship. In this way it expands the very idea of what it means to be religious. It advances gentle hopes for how religion might quietly contribute to the development of virtuous character and the moderation of the passions, and it holds a fundamental belief in a sense of general providence that neither creates factions nor aspires to universals. Naming these as provisional elements of a Humean true religion allows us to raise questions about the category ‘religion’ itself, something usually given scant attention in discussions of Hume.
If it is to be usable, a sound constructive project cannot simply materialize out of thin air: it must rely on historical evidence and corroborate with discursive trends. Locating the seeds for our proposal to build a provisional notion ‘true religion’ from Hume’s thought in efforts that precede his work could be helpful. In this regard, Cicero’s approach to religion and the discourse after it is of some use. Hume relied on the conventions of religious discourse post-Cicero by deploying the framework ‘true’ versus ‘false’ concerning religion and assuming that religion was a unique feature of human nature. At the same time, he challenged some of the inherited binaries (religious and secular, God and nature, self and world, metaphysical and empirical) and questioned the epistemological aspirations of the category ‘religion’ in modern discourse. Constructing a Humean true religion from the generative fragments of his work illuminates two crucial insights for our larger concern with this discourse that sometimes remain opaque in secondary scholarship of Hume: that he treats ‘religion’ as a category without a fixed meaning and that he uses the category ‘religion’ as part and parcel of a strategic enterprise. Hume approaches use of the term ‘religion’ as a question of cultural politics: he understands that discourse on religion invents and reifies domains (the religious and the nonreligious) that mark boundaries and serve a purpose beyond the academic.7 Perhaps attending to Hume’s underdeveloped sense of religion’s proper office can demonstrate how he simultaneously employed and challenged the category ‘religion’ in ways remarkable for his time.
Although Cicero’s deployment of the category religio is generally overlooked in Hume’s discussion of religion, it is feasible that he was influenced by Cicero’s emphasis on stability, moderation, and morality concerning religion. In fact, the foundational qualities of our Humean true religion—genuine theism, moderate hope, and practical morality—are grounded in Cicero’s classical idea of civic religion, which he inherited from the Greeks. Religio, in this classical view, aimed not for grace, salvation, or immortality but for the cultivation of civic virtue, political stability, and social trust. There are, however, over seventeen hundred years between Cicero and Hume, during which time discourse on religion shifted from the emphasis on civic virtue and public ritual to concerns about the philosophical legitimacy of beliefs in God and miracles. What might we gain by reading the constructive side of his approach to religion as a preservation of parts of the classical idea religio fused with insights from modernity filtered through his counter-Enlightenment lens? To answer these questions I turn to the work of Cicero and to three other key nodal points in the discourse on religion in which Hume participates.
Cicero was the towering figure for early eighteenth-century British thinkers. His work was seminal for Hume, who referred to him often as the wisest of the Roman philosophers (LG, 23). Often connected in secondary literature due to their similarly deft application of the extended dialogue form to the vexing questions of religion, their comparable classifications of the passions, and their related approaches to morality, Cicero and Hume are regarded as intellectual co-conspirators operating across a vast historical lacuna.8 Given Hume’s explicit devotion to Cicero’s style and his unequivocal classical approach to morality, it is relatively easy to expose their similar emphases and common outlooks, which privilege a moderate skepticism, display a commitment to moderation, and emphasize utility. The well-documented Ciceronian stylistic influence on Hume’s moral thought (Hume took himself to be a “classical moralist” concerned about self-formation toward excellence) and his theory of the passions (Hume’s self-styled Stoicism venerated moderation) invite us to further consideration of Hume’s work on religion. Does Hume conceive of religion in a classical mode? Might his idea of religion’s proper office be an updated version of Cicero’s religio? If so, what content or features might his underdeveloped notion ‘true religion’ contain?
To explain what Hume may have borrowed from Cicero at a significant moment in modern discourse, I provide a brief section on the stylistic features (part 1) and content areas (part 2) of Cicero’s writing on religion. Following this section, I characterize a key theme of modern discourse on religion: the notion of truth. Shaped by historical factors (the advance of reason and science, a decline in the authority of the church, and the Enlightenment quest for universal truth) and guided by evolving interests (identity politics, economic interests, and psychological needs), fertile, philosophical discourse on religion post-Cicero established new conceptions of truth and knowledge from which the modern idea of religion would sprout. This characterization of modern discourse on religion illustrates the degree to which Hume may have found himself trapped by discursive boundaries. What language was available for a thinker who was neither a deist nor a conventional theist to describe what he considered a genuine theism? What options were available for a moralist who was neither a dogmatic atheist nor a conventional religionist to discuss the potential positive impact of religion on morality? What philosophical position could one occupy if one wanted a hope that elided both superstition and miracles?
Hume inherited a conversation that engaged the idea ‘religion’ in terms of true and false, and he followed this discursive convention even as he redefined its terms. Religion that appeared in history and appealed to the (illusory) standard of abstract philosophy he dubbed false religion. True religion was the corrective idea for those forms of religion that aspired to be a species of philosophy. It was the counterpoint to arrogant atheism, stubborn superstition, and emphatic enthusiasm. It was also the inverse to forms of religious thought and practice that venerated the sacred as the source of morality, allowed for a divinity that could perform miracles, and originated in extreme passions. Hume implied that true religion, like Cicero’s religio, venerated stability in the realm of politics, morality, and our passions. It ratified the natural functions of the mind, the reflective customs and habits of common life, and the development of virtuous character.
The remainder of this chapter elaborates the potential influence Cicero may have had on the style and content on Hume’s religious thought and then attempts to situate Hume in the milieu of the religious discourse of his day. Hume’s implicit suggestion for religion was informed by historical forces such as the growth of institutional religious authority in Scotland, dynamics in Enlightenment philosophy, developments in modern science, the trajectory of discourse on religion, and his own moderate, skeptical, and naturalist vision. Keeping track of the shifting dimensions of discourse on religion as they manifested post-Cicero in the robust, multifaceted political considerations of Porphyry and Celsus, the quest for universal, rational truth in the work of Hugo Grotius and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and the naturalizing emphasis of Matthew Tindal and Thomas Morgan brings out the remarkable extent to which the early modern conception of religion revolved around themes that Hume both relied on and challenged. Admittedly, there are other stories one could tell about the philosophical conversation on religion and how it bears on true religion (for example, the history of Christian apologists such as Tertullian, Lucretius, Augustine, and Aquinas situates Christianity as the true religion and is a related trajectory in the same discourse). My hope is that the reader will find my choices to be warranted not simply by my aims but by a sound interpretation of the broad trends of the philosophical discourse and the proper temperament for the constructive task that lay ahead.
Hume’s Ciceronian Influence
Upon the whole, I desire to take my catalogue of Virtues from Cicero’s Offices, not from the Whole Duty of Man. I had, indeed, the former Book in my Eye in all my Reasonings.
—LET, 1.32.13
Hume admitted that he was deeply influenced by the “noble eloquence” (EMPL, 12.223) of Marcus Tullius Cicero.9 To understand the most significant aspects of Cicero’s thoughts about religion and illustrate their impact on Hume, I highlight three features of Cicero’s rhetorical and stylized approach to religio that appear in Hume’s work, then I isolate three of Cicero’s philosophical positions concerning religion that Hume seems to share. Attending to possible Ciceronian influences can provide classical foundations for Hume’s consideration of religion and thicken our understanding of what he could have meant when he contemplated its proper office.
Cicero is generally considered to be one of the most important literary figures of the Roman Republic due to the breadth of his extant corpus; his quest to situate Greek philosophy in the Latin vernacular; his brilliant comprehension of the nexus of religious, social, and political issues of his time; and his rhetorical virtuosity. It is his remarkable political career and energetic role as statesman, however, that figure most prominently into his intellectual legacy and shape his idea of religio. Cicero’s status as literatus rests on his vocation as a public servant, for even after his forced retirement from politics (46–44 B.C.E.) he conceived of himself as an active public orator in the Roman public sphere. His complex engagement with religion depended on but was not reducible to his public commitments. As Eli Edward Burriss bluntly writes, “The state was the first love of Cicero, and, if religion could serve the state, Cicero was willing to obey the laws of religion.”10 We should take care, however, not to completely collapse Cicero’s contributions on religion into his politics. He was well acquainted with the power humans associated with ritual practices (haruspex, augury, prophesy, etc.), and he showed respect for sacrality. He spoke of these things, and others, strategically, under the idea religio, likely derived from the root legere, “to gather together” or “to arrange.”11 Still, his intentions for religion cannot be fully detached from his political concerns and the sociocultural matters on which they depended: namely, his attempt to reconcile heterogeneous traditions under a Roman cultural identity and his commitment to develop a rhetoric that compellingly extended Hellenistic traditions through the Latin tongue. His use of religio had both intellectual and political components, and Cicero was neither reluctant nor alone in using the term in this way. When viewed through the lenses of utility and stability, Cicero’s discussions of religion reveal his functional investments in the order of the republic and the virtue of its citizens.
Three stylistic approaches in Cicero’s work on religion are noteworthy points of departure for our Humean true religion. First, Cicero employed different genres of writing in his discussion of the multivocal notion religio; second, he spoke both affirmatively and critically about religious beliefs; and, third, he rhetorically embraced the traditions of the ancestors. Arguably, Hume’s Enlightenment efforts included these same stylistic features. Additionally, three of Cicero’s religious and philosophical commitments may have been significant for Hume. Cicero generally embraced a basic theism based on what he took to be our natural predilections. He also suggested religio was, at times, an interior disposition that could moderate our passions. And he advised that the development of virtuous character could be enhanced by certain beliefs and practices. Thus, Cicero’s deployment of religio was strategic and deeply functional. Both he and Hume ultimately aimed for usability and stability in their reflections on religion.
Three Stylistic Features of Cicero’s Approach to Religion
Distinctions between Cicero’s and Lucretius’s use of religio prove that, like our modern idea ‘religion,’ the classical deployment of the term held different meanings for different users. The complexity and subtlety of its uses and meanings in the Roman Empire, where we locate the nascent Latin heritage of our modern idea of religion, can baffle even the most patient researcher. This is because the word religio was elastic. Getting a firm handle on Cicero’s different uses of it is difficult given his shifting rhetorical emphases, multifaceted aims, and evolving perspectives. Generally speaking, however, we can say that Cicero took religio to be a synthesis of the following: an inner feeling that engendered balanced affections; a set of state-sanctioned rituals and sacraments to the gods (culto pio); a communal affirmation of virtuous or moral behavior; and sets of ceremonies that could enhance political and cultural stability. Cicero also used religio to connote the opposite of superstitio, worship that stressed the powers of magic, emphasized ecstatic worship, and was relatively unpredictable. His use of religio was openly a boundary-marking activity; it differentiated acceptable forms from unacceptable ones.
One shared stylistic feature of Cicero’s and Hume’s engagement with religion is their cross-genre approach to religion. For Cicero, this enabled him to reach a broader audience and delicately nuance certain positions. The use of different formats may also have appealed to the diverse cultural identities that he aimed to assimilate under the Roman banner. If we compare parts of a speech (“De domo sua,” 57 B.C.E.), a poem (“De consulatu suo,” 60 B.C.E.), a letter (to Atticus, 61 B.C.E.), and a philosophical work (De officiis, 44 B.C.E.), we notice that writing across these different genres from different moments in his career, Cicero consistently made an identical point: that religio was foundational for the unity of the state.12 His practice of using different genres dispersed his convictions across a wider range of human emotions and enhanced the potential for his ideas to reach and compel the variety of listeners and readers that constituted his audience. It also was an implicit acknowledgment that the spectrum of human sensibilities was broad: those who responded to poetry may have found it difficult to be convinced by a speech or vice versa. In each genre Cicero verified a similar point regarding religion: it was deeply connected to political stability and communal well-being.
As a subset within this first feature, his cross-genre approach, we should add that Cicero placed a particular value on the dialogue form to reveal the depths of the complexity of questions regarding the nature of the gods. The masterpiece from late in his career, De natura deorum (45 B.C.E.), thoughtfully exposed the potential of rich dialogue to advance compelling and contrasting positions on theological questions. Its dialogic structure demonstrated intellectual agility and displayed a sense of the complicated, interconnected issues in the discussion of religion. Important for Cicero, and later for Hume, was that an author’s views on the thorniest religious issues could be disguised behind character-interlocutors. This sort of concealment licensed both Hume and Cicero to press into controversial terrain and avoid culpability for undermining the beliefs of their readers. For Cicero there was an added benefit to this complicated veiling: it allowed him to choose his later positions from a wide palette and avoid being labeled hypocritical. At various moments in his corpus, but most intensely in his mature Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume wrote in this Ciceronian style of dialogue. Generally speaking, both men opted to suspend final judgment on controversial issues raised in their famous dialogues, yet neither thoroughly denounced traditions that sustained order and inspired virtue.
A second stylistic feature of Cicero’s approach that also appeared in Hume’s writing is the concomitant championing and challenging of religion. Cicero’s critical and constructive energy regarding religion was evident in his affirmation of public worship to the gods that supported the republic and his dismissal of private sacraments to the gods that distorted social responsibility. The latter were held as perversions, vices, or superstitio: sets of communal practices that could not be assimilated into the Roman religion. Cicero both criticized and supported different forms of religio to mark boundaries and serve his individual sense of political stability.
Even when he was not attending to specific distinctions between religio and superstitio, Cicero’s rhetoric on religion was two-sided. The degree to which his affirmations of certain religious beliefs and practices were generally qualified by critical remarks (both early in his career and even in his later works) provide evidence that Cicero never disavowed religion completely or entirely and that his support for religion was never without hesitation. His rhetorical strategy, rather, was to embrace certain aspects of religio and abandon others.13 Hume would take a similar bifurcated approach to religion. Given that his overall support for religion was less conspicuous than Cicero’s, his readers likely felt more sting from Hume’s critical emphasis.
A third stylistic feature of Cicero’s approach to religion that Hume’s resembled was his backward-looking means of establishing its claims. Cicero legitimated certain religious traditions of the ancestors over others by picking and choosing from a wide assortment of historical manifestations. We might say that he “defined” religion by granting historical continuity to some practices and denying it to others.14 Deft deployment of this kind of critique and affirmation (per the second feature) of historical practices served to exalt aspects of the Roman past and thereby point the way to a stable future. These rhetorical acts of reverence for ancestral traditions were clever acts of definition and restriction: they limited acceptable religious practices to those which (Cicero believed) ultimately served imperial interests. Hume did not venerate the ancestors in the way that Cicero did. His historical mode of inquiry generally operated along causal lines— the probability of a past event was able to be determined by evidence we currently have for it. Hume’s historical writings assess the contemporary status of both true and popular religion by describing their evolution. Thus Hume’s backward look intended to locate resources for a stable future where it was a virtue to love the established religion of one’s country (“there must be an ecclesiastical order, and a public establishment of religion in every civilized community” [HE, 3.134–35]).
The cross-genre approach to religion and the use of dialogue form, the critical and affirmative modes of engaging religion, and the importance of the history of religion for stability of the political order were formal features that appeared in both Cicero’s and Hume’s stylized approaches to religion. In addition to these components, there is overlapping content in the areas of theism, morality, and the passions, the areas I posit as the elemental building blocks for our provisional notion of true religion inspired by and linked to Hume’s work.
Three of Cicero’s Philosophical Ideas Concerning Religion
Of course, Hume’s radical Enlightenment work cannot be separated from its generally anti-Christian, rational emphases on natural religion. At the same time, its classical influence should not be overlooked. In fact, much of Hume’s thought was a synthesis of his extensive reading of classical writers. While he made no direct citations for his specific ideas, his work explicitly referenced scores of classical texts and thinkers. On the grounds of his admitted reading of and high regard for Cicero, we can fairly presume that he was influenced by the notion that religion—at its best—could enhance social and political life and contribute to the stability of the passions and the development of excellence of character. Accordingly, three philosophical ideas concerning religion in Cicero’s work stand out: his skeptical embrace of general theism, his notion that religion could moderate the passions, and his belief that religion could enhance virtuous character development. I shall briefly treat these in order.
Nowhere in the Ciceronian corpus do we find a flat-out rejection of the idea of an Author of Nature. Neither, however do we find a full-blown description of Cicero’s notion of divinity. Cicero’s public position on theism evolved throughout his long career, and he generally concealed his personal theistic beliefs, making it difficult to pinpoint his specific position on theism. Caught in the matrix of a contested yet expanding Hellenic worldview, Cicero’s attempt to reconcile Roman political identity with the heterogeneous ethnic and fluid cultural identities that constituted the empire led him to shift between articulating a skeptical theism, suspending judgment on theism, and remaining uncommitted on the question of theism.15 The general direction of Cicero’s dynamic rhetoric on theism, which is generally discernible after a patient reading across his wide corpus, is that our minds naturally assumed a deity.16 He confirmed this in an early speech, “De haruspicum responsis” (57 B.C.E.), when he asked, “who is so witless that, when he gazes up into heaven, he fails to see that gods exist?”17 Of course, Cicero’s nondogmatic approach to the question of theism was deeply considered and informed by an ethic of utility. His commitment to traditional civic religion required that he embrace, at best, or capitulate, at worst, to a basic theism that acknowledged the inescapability of our powerful belief in a natural order governed by a sense of general providence (that divine reason suffused the cosmos).18
Second, Cicero’s self-styled Stoic commitment to the virtue of moderation was in Hume’s “eye” in “all his reasonings.”19 In De officiis (44 B.C.E.) Cicero gave sacred status to the notion that “people should obey calm of soul and be free from every sort of passion” (1.102).This sacrality invited the notion of religion, which Cicero defined in De inventione (84 B.C.E.) as “that which causes men to pay attention to, and to respect with fixed ceremonies, a certain superior nature, which men call divine nature.”20 He believed the habit for religion enhanced our capacity for self-restraint, our “superior nature” that separated us from animals. Thus, against the Platonic emphasis on knowledge-of-self as virtue (which can create detached philosophers unaware of the laws) and the Aristotelian notion of virtue as the mean between two extremes (which might encourage one to transcend the law), the Ciceronian commitment to moderation served the natural laws that reflected innate, collective duties that had been codified as laws of the state. They also linked to our theistic worldview as described in De finibus bonorum et malorum: “A study of the heavens brings in addition a certain sense of moderation when one observes the great order and control that obtains among the gods as well. To look upon the gods’ works and their acts creates in us a loftiness of spirit. And we gain a sense of justice when we understand the will, the design and the purpose of the supreme guide and lord to whose nature philosophers tell us that true reason and the highest law are perfectly matched.”21 Cicero’s conception of moderation updated Aristotle’s. Hume’s moderation of the passions would, in some ways, renew Cicero’s.
A third idea of Cicero’s that also appeared in Hume’s work is that attention to the “heavens” or “divine nature” (religio, in the previous argument) both enables moderation and assists in the development of virtuous character, a reflection of classical moral philosophy. Cicero’s self-styled Stoicism concerned itself with the political and (by default) personal benefits of religio. He supported forms of sacred worship and cultic practices that prioritized justice, which he took to be the Stoic form of natural law. If religio led to justice it follows that it assisted the human telos toward happiness because “the moral life is the happy life.”22 On this logic, one can argue that religio supported the development of virtuous behavior and human excellence to encourage stability—a condition for personal happiness. Thus the development of virtuous character, happiness, and proper functioning of the state were moral considerations undergirding Cicero’s use of the supple category religio. When read in the direct light of this Ciceronian emphasis, Hume’s ethics seems to reflect more of a classical approach to morality. Perhaps his 1742 essay “The Stoic” (EMPL, 16.146–54), where he reproduced the style of the Ciceronian “rhetorical dialogue” and argued that “the great end of all human industry, is the attainment of happiness” (16.148), is most obvious in this regard. In it Hume seems to imbue the sense of happiness with something of a religious flavor, in the sense that it is driven by something greater than our personal motivations and natural dispositions.23 In this sense religion may enhance our moral lives, but the quality of our moral lives does not depend on religion.
These features of Cicero’s style and content in his treatment of religion are present in Hume’s philosophical, religious, and historical writings. Secondary scholarship confirms that Cicero influenced Hume more than any other classical writer. His impact on Hume’s moral thought and theory of the passions has been well documented. Religion was an area that was crucial for both men. Given these facts, we may fairly presume a Ciceronian influence on Hume’s thinking about religion. More details from Hume’s work will emerge in the subsequent discussion, but his Ciceronian stylistic foundations are clear: Hume writes about religion across genres and uses the dialogue form; he takes both a critical and affirmative approach to religion (true and false); and he believes the best of religion is historically grounded in the traditions that serve stability.
Content-wise, the three features of Cicero’s position on religion were also evident in Hume’s. Each chapter of this book offers more details to the categories that tentatively endow our Humean true religion: a basic theism, moderation of the passions, and veneration of character development, respectively. None of these claims regarding style or content are very controversial. The assertion, however, that we might take his general theism, moderation of the passions, and practical morality, cumulatively, as constitutive of the proper office of religion is maybe more so. It challenges the pervasive views that Hume was an atheist, that he was only critical of and hostile to religion, and that his religious interests were subsumed in his moral theory. These views have steered philosophers trained in religious studies away from engaging with the more generative components of Hume’s religious thought and concealed his mild affirmations of religion. Consider this clarification from Hume’s own hand in his response to charges of irreligion in the Treatise: “And must not a Man be ridiculous to assert that our Author denies the Principles of Religion, when he looks upon them as equally certain with the Objects of his Senses?” (LG, 21). Commonly explained away as ironic and insincere and as a “smoke screen” for Hume’s real position, the persistent association of Hume with hostility to religion deadens us to his quiet suggestions for religion and their Ciceronian influences.
Cicero’s approach to religio provides a classical starting point for thinking about Hume’s views of religion and sheds light on what may have been present in Hume’s thought that he did not develop. This allows us to construct our Humean true religion on more solid foundations. Of course, Hume did not explicitly define the features of true religion as genuine theism, moderation of the passions, and practical morality. We extend his thought with our speculative construction as a way of preserving its understated fragments.
Cicero’s political interests largely guided his reflections on religion that, in effect, authorized imperial power by endorsing a particular bundle of ritual practices over others. Hume had less of an explicit political investment, and his analysis of and mild suggestion for religion developed out of a discourse structured by modern logic. His eighteenth-century deference to the Ciceronian view of religion reflected the “classical revival” of his time, which was in part a strategy of resistance. Modern science and logic strove to provide the category ‘religion’ with philosophical legitimacy, for this would make it ‘true.’ Hume resisted the obsession with abstract, normative reason that informed modern discourse by claiming, like Cicero, that the true was best used to connote the most stable, not the most logical.
Philosophical Discourse on Religion: From Religio to True Religion
For with what confidence can I venture upon such bold enterprizes, when beside those numberless infirmities peculiar to myself, I find so many which are common to human nature? Can I be sure that in leaving all establish’d opinions I am following truth; and by what criterion shall I distinguish her, even if fortune shou’d at last guide me on her foot-steps?
—T, 1.4.7.3
My aim in this section is to give a brief account of the theme of the ‘true’ in philosophical discourse on religion in the West to illuminate how Hume may have responded to this discourse. Philosophical discourse on religion has largely been determined by historical developments in science, philosophy, and religion and deeply impacted by a complicated matrix of cultural, economic, political, and psychic challenges. It is difficult to tease out single threads from the complicated can of worms that has informed its arc and decipher their precise impact. A general history of this discourse bears out two facts: the first is that the idea ‘religion’ has proven to be flexible and always in process; the second is that modern philosophical discourse on religion has revolved around the theme of the true.
Cicero’s visionary management of religio highlighted the vast array of political, cultural, and economic considerations he faced. Establishing a particular form of worship as epistemically true was not a primary consideration for him. Religio, in his framing, was not a form of knowledge; it was public worship of the gods that led to the virtue of justice and supported the stability of the Roman Republic. This form of civic religion based on the Greek notion of religion was destabilized by the unpredictable interplay of sociopolitical and cultural factors along with the dynamism of the growing confrontation between Greek and Christian intellectual traditions. In other words, we can read the classical approach to religio as getting swept up in the quest for institutional religious authority and its discursive claims for religion to be true. Third-century Christian apologist Tertullian, for example, strictly marked the “‘true religion’ of the true god” (veram religionem veri dei) as distinct from the worship of other gods.24 The true religion would demand the most authority and be the most powerful.
The insights of Jeremy Schott and Denise Kimber Buell—through their deployment of postcolonialist theory—remind us that, to a large extent, early Christian discourse was a confrontation of ethnic identities vying for survival. Under these circumstances, establishing a particular form of ritual practice as true would have great significance. Framed around the “truth” of doctrine, practice, or religio, the debate between Christian apologists and Greek intellectuals in the second- and third-century Roman Empire was a will-to-truth driven by sociopolitical circumstances, material interests, cultural concerns, and psychological needs. This, in part, explains the shift away from Cicero’s practical handling of religio as a civic virtue to others who privileged its status as true. For example, the work of third-century Platonists Celsus and Porphyry argued against the growing “threat” of marginal Christians in terms of true and false. Fourth-century Christian apologists Lactantius, Augustine, and Eusebius—in many ways respondents to Celsus and Porphyry—framed Christianity as the true religion (vera religio) and contrasted it with the false religion (falsa religio) of the empire. Both sides in this debate claimed theirs was the true religion. The legacy of the framing of religion as either true or false reverberates in religious discourse in our late modern moment.
Celsus and Porphyry, two Platonists, and Lactantius and Eusebius, two Christians, marked the early parameters of the third- and fourth-century debate in Rome between Christian apologists and defenders of imperial religion.25 In the Ciceronian tradition, Celsus and Porphyry valued the ancestral religions (most of them Romanized so that they could be integrated into imperial service) and contended that the best way to be religious was to affirm beliefs that had already proven to serve political stability. Against this valiant defense of the classical conception of religio as having a civic function, early Christian thinkers prioritized a particular set of beliefs and practices that venerated Divine Revelation through Jesus Christ as indisputably true.26 Celsus and Porphyry showed little appreciation for this Christian form of revelation, its concomitant notion of salvation, and the emphasis on miracles of this Jesus sect. Most important, they did not agree that acceptance of Jesus as Son of God was more important than political sustenance and civic stability. They took the “fringe” movement called Christianity to be inherently destabilizing given its public refusal to be subsumed under Roman political hierarchy or absorbed into Roman religious identity. Celsus and Porphyry were religious thinkers concerned with questions of political good and imperial sustenance. For them, the true religion was justified by its historical performance. The starting point for their assessment of sacred beliefs and practices was, did it stabilize the social order? These two men were often read as critics of early Christianity, attackers of the Christian faith, or traditionalists concerning religion.27 Adolf Harnack reminds us that they were united by a positive view of religion as the natural disposition that tied individuals in sacred, communal worship of the gods in ways that affirmed political order. A hallmark of their thought was the fundamental synthesis of the religious, social, and political. It followed from this that the Romanization of different systems of religious belief was necessary for a common morality. Celsus wrote, “If everyone were to adopt the Christian’s attitude, moreover, there would be no rule of law: the legitimate authority would be abandoned; earthly things would return to chaos and come into the hands of the lawless and savage barbarians.”28
Celsus and Porphyry extended part of the Ciceronian legacy against the onslaught of Christianity. Their goal-line defense of religio as public worship of the gods for the sustenance of political order, however, could not withstand the power of the emerging Christian identity that claimed the crown of the true religion and came to dominate the discourse on religion.29 Post-Constantine, Christianity confidently enjoyed imperial authority. Though there were challenges to it, the link between Christianity and the “truth” has not been uncoupled as discourse on religion has evolved in the West. This is important for our constructivist project on David Hume: it shows the discursive boundaries that he inherited and confirms the possibilities for extending his thought through a deeper awareness of these constraints.
The graceful logic of two seventeenth-century figures, Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Hugo Grotius, presents us with a different sense of the idea of religion and its links with the theme of the true. These two early modern architects of thought advanced philosophical discourse on religion as it engaged with the quest for truth mounted by early modern science. Secondary literature depicts Grotius and Lord Herbert as thinkers who anticipated the new method of philosophical inquiry articulated by Bacon, a radical Protestant who tried to make the Reformed tradition more amenable to reason, and Descartes, an early modern humanist responsible for the development of the fields of natural law and natural religion.30 I focus on another seminal insight of their work: that Christianity was a universal, rational set of beliefs and practices that relied on a particular form of revealed knowledge. These elements made it true.
The collapse of the authority of the papacy was a watershed moment that paved the way for the work of Grotius and Lord Herbert and the evolution of the modern discourse on religion. While the details are too complicated to describe here at length, both discursive trends and nondiscursive conditions propelled religious thought of their era. Three major discursive trends that contributed to the weakening and collapse of church authority from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries were the Renaissance fascination with the glories of the classical age, which inspired a cultural look backward (Ficino, Erasmus); the development of more complex theological systems by Scholastic thinkers in the universities, which led to a bolder distinction between faith and reason (Aquinas); and the scientific revolution, which generated new geographies of knowledge and new conceptions of the truth (Galileo, Newton).
Nondiscursive trends that played a significant role in this age were the increase in international trade and travel, the introduction of other cultures, the invention and proliferation of the printing press, and the development of new economic and political conditions (namely, monetary systems that increased the power of the bourgeoisie and led to the development of strong, centralized government). These circumstances not only inspired questions about the sanctity and usefulness of Roman Catholicism (these circumstances led to the Protestant Reformation) but also weakened the authority of the Christian revelation. Poignantly aware of the historical and cultural context, Grotius and Lord Herbert cleverly answered threats against Christianity by venerating it as the highest form of knowledge and (therefore) the greatest form of good. They deftly aided the transfer of the source of Christian power from the dominion of religious hierarchy (that is, the Catholic Church) to the rational basis of Christianity itself, the universal consensus it naturally generated, and the inner feelings it was based on and inspired. They contended that Christianity was authoritative and true not because clerics imposed it but because of the universal embrace stirred by its internally rational principles, which perfectly reflected the conditions and contexts that supported them.
Grotius and Lord Herbert quelled the dogmatic schisms of the theologians, defended Christianity against Islam and Judaism, and relied on the logic of modern science to establish that the Christian revelation was rationally certain. A major part of their intervention in religious discourse was the seminal importance they gave to the theme of the true. Both men claimed that Christianity was, indisputably, the true religion. They argued that its truth was derived from its universal standing as an inward instinct (not from the laws of science or the Biblical insight of clerics) imprinted by Divine Revelation (this ensured that it was not fully antagonistic to the Church). The true, in the work of both men, was inseparable from revelation and attached to the universal. Their quasi-Scholastic arguments cast a shadow that could not be ignored in subsequent discussions.
The Dutch-born Grotius articulated a conception of true religion in his best-known and groundbreaking work, De jure belli ac pacis (1625).31 A poem he composed in Dutch during his imprisonment in Loevenstein on the truth of the Christian religion (1620), however, might be more important in terms of the links between religion and the theme of the true. This poem, translated into Latin and transformed into a treatise on true religion after his escape, initially appeared in 1626 and took its final form in a 1640 fifth edition as “De veritate religionis christianae.”32 It venerated the idea of a universal religion and argued that the “plain consent of all nations” proved Christianity was the true religion. This universal true religion was inextricably bound to revelation (for “none of these things could be known without a revelation”) and served the ends of social harmony and political stability (for “truth was indissolubly linked with peace: where there was no peace there could be no truth”).33
Lord Herbert aimed for a method of discourse that could settle the bickering between various religious factions by appealing to the fundamental beliefs beneath their competing claims. To get to these foundational matters, Lord Herbert took the necessary step of making an inquiry into the epistemic status of the truth itself. In what is considered to be the first metaphysical work by an English philosopher, De veritate (1624, written in Latin), his longest and most important book, Herbert set out to “to examine truth itself” against those who merely asserted opinions (Scholastics, reformers, and skeptics).34 His investigation confirmed what was true was indeed universal, for “whatever is universally asserted is the truth”; further, it relied on a deity, “for what is universal cannot occur without the influence of the Universal Providence which disposes the movements of events.”35 All of this was derived from our a priori beliefs or “common notions” that our God-given natural instincts allowed us to apprehend.36
With only slight differences in style and emphasis, Grotius and Herbert located the theme of the true in the idea of revelation from God. Their focus on justificatory logic required that the true religion satisfy the standards of abstract philosophy. To defend Christianity on these grounds, they had to recast its ideas of revelation and divine grace as forms of knowledge. Establishing these foundations of Christianity as rational, revealed, and universal (and therefore true) provided Grotius a “good faith” to keep alive “the hope of peace” and Herbert a supreme religion that would “replace all others by including their basic tenets within itself, and by doing so would obviate the need for religious conflict.”37 Philosophic reason—always part mystical (supernatural) and part natural for Grotius and Lord Herbert—had delivered a coherent notion of the universal true religion that comported with our inner worlds and confirmed that human thought proceeded “from the efficiency of that reason impressed upon them, which reason is no other than what we call God.”38
Though Grotius and Lord Herbert tied Christianity more tightly to the idea of the true, the increasing obsession with the method of modern science and concomitant commitment to reason as autonomous and universal in the modern West was largely responsible for pushing philosophical discourse on religion even more deeply into the center of the matrix of scientific truth and knowledge. The illusory ideal of the modern subject as fully autonomous and on a quest for truth as rational certainty through coherence and logical consistency of argument was reflected in the modern conception of religion as a stable philosophical idea. Knowledge, on the logic of abstract thought, was justified purely by proper epistemological commitments. A feature of modern thought that sprung from this way of thinking is the idea that religion was a form of knowledge to be assessed for its validity on the standard of scientific reason. On the modern concept, the genus religion is a bundle of philosophically legitimate beliefs and justifiable practices about God and the world that simply arrived in different species. This theme is evident in a number of moments in discourse on religion, particularly its Enlightenment writings that eloquently treat the tension between philosophical reason and the natural grounds of religion. The work of Matthew Tindal and John Toland, for example, recruited aspects of this modern concept of religion and generally offered true religion as the perfectly rational, completely natural, and thoroughly universal form of Christianity.
The needs of the new self-regulating and self-determining modern subject, the extensive religious warfare and violent factionalism of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the further weakening of ecclesiastical theology, and the discoveries of modern science inspired English Enlightenment figures to develop the theme of the true in relation to the natural and moral features of discourse on religion. John Locke’s argument for toleration reflected the Enlightenment quest for a universal ethic. Its effect was to press religious thinkers to deemphasize the concept of revelation, which had served as the central category for Grotius and Lord Herbert. Further, the logic of science and the demands of philosophical reason illuminated two insurmountable problems regarding the concept of revelation: it was neither rationally verifiable nor fully universal. Enlightenment thinkers, therefore, jettisoned the idea of revelation because, on the terms of their enterprise, it mitigated against the possibility that Christianity could be fully established as true.
Secondary literature on eighteenth-century discourse about religion generally contends that religious writings of the early Enlightenment were largely anti-Christian, anticlerical, and antiscriptural. They emphasize that religious discourse in the Enlightenment—counter to that of Grotius and Herbert—was obsessed with establishing scientific reason as foundational for religion, devoted to describing religion as fully natural, and invested in demonstrating the truth of religion from its reflection of nature.39 Though the major texts of this era were not monolithic, this is a fair interpretation of an important strand of Enlightenment writing about religion. The writings of Matthew Tindal and Thomas Morgan are exemplary in this regard: they remained circumscribed by the idea of the true but refused any link to revelation. For them, the true religion was contingent on and marshaled the best of our rational, natural, and moral propensities.40
Tindal’s most well-known work, Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), is written in a quasi-dialogue form between himself and a questioner. Inspired by the work of Cicero, the naturalism of Grotius, and the humanism of Lord Herbert, it further deemphasized the importance of revelation for the true religion. Tindal claimed that revelation was anchored in the particulars of time and place and therefore was too restrictive to be universal. This led to the demotion of the role of revelation in his thought, a watershed move for discourse on religion. Tindal and his deistical cohort undermined revelation not only because they wanted to render a trenchant critique of revealed religion but also because they aimed to put forward a thoroughly universal religious vision that venerated nature, tolerance, and happiness without a personal deity. With revelation—the final impediment to this universal true religion—out of the way, the full burden of human happiness would rest completely on the faculty of unaided human reason. This profound confidence in autonomous reason was derived from the observation of nature for, as Tindal wrote, “the Perfection and Happiness of all rational beings, Supreme as well as subordinate, consists in living up to the dictates of their nature.”41 The laws of nature and reason fully replaced God and revelation as the foundations for the true religion and the sources for human happiness.
Tindal’s recommendation for religion, having shed the baggage of revelation, is, in many ways, a practical, ethical project. Yet he expresses it in terms of religion, not morality, and thereby confirms his aim to be part of the discourse on religion. He writes, “‘true religion’ consist[s] in a constant disposition of mind to do all the Good that we can; and therefore render ourselves acceptable to God in answering the End of his Creation.” It is our duty to embrace the moral demands dictated to us by the “One true religion of mankind,” the “Religion of Nature and Reason written in the hearts of every one of us from the first Creation.”42 The detachment of ethics from religion was left undeveloped in Tindal’s work (as well as Morgan’s), but we can fairly state that Tindal was primarily invested in providing a religious prescription, not simply a moral one.
Following the example of Tindal, Thomas Morgan also saw God’s truth to be evident in the visible, natural world. He too made nature the ultimate standard for religion, deemphasized the role of divine grace, and undermined revelation. Building on the idea ‘true religion’ promoted by Tindal (particularly in Morgan’s most well-known book, The Moral Philosopher [1737], written in dialogue form), Morgan presented a historiography that confirmed true religion as the original religion of humankind that had been corrupted at various stages throughout history. I quote him at length here to show his historical thinking, how he used the idea of nature, and his veneration of the true religion:
The original, true religion, therefore, of God and Nature, consisted in the direct, immediate worship of the one true God, by an absolute resignation to, and dependence on him in the practice of all the duties and obligations of moral truth and righteousness. During this state of true religion, men look’d to and depended upon God, as the sole author of nature, of all the properties and power of subordinate beings and agents, and as the one only original, efficient cause of all Things. . . . Men, in this state of innocency and true religion, own’d God, not only as the author, contriver and former of nature, but as the preserver, supporter and director of all nature by his continued agency and providential causality. They considered all events good and evil, as the ordination and appointment of God; the one, as the natural and just reward of wisdom and integrity, and the other, as either the necessary exercise and trial of virtue, or as the punishment and cure of folly or sin. This, as I take it, was the original state of philosophy and true religion, before the apostasy of angels and men.43
Tindal and Morgan connect religion to the theme of the true more than any other theme, including nature or “the natural.”44 Their discussion of true religion, however, has not generated as much attention in secondary scholarship as their handling of natural religion. Natural religion, the idea that the observation of nature suggests a deity, is the theistic feature of their true religion. Yet the true religion is not reducible to natural religion. Christianity, for example, if not polluted by the hierarchy of the priest craft or driven by revelation and superstition, can be dubbed true religion, not natural religion: its truth is eternal and immutable yet hidden from us by those who gain from keeping people ignorant of it. True religion was deployed by Tindal and Morgan to represent the sum total of natural religion and the virtuous acts it inspired.45
Both Tindal and Morgan were obsessed with reason and convinced that God left an indelible and immutable imprint on every living organism in the world. That imprint was visible in the uncorrupted and full expression of the nature of the organism. The nature of humans was expressed through the uninterrupted freedom of reason. It follows that reason was natural to human beings: it was the visible stamp of God, and it helped determine what was true. Unaided reason was necessary and sufficient for human happiness as well as the development of the “universal practice of moral truth and righteousness,” or the true religion.46
In addition to the thinkers I have mentioned here, a myriad of responses to the conversational shifts and changes in discourse on religion appeared. All, however, were ensconced in a larger discursive project that, in the modern West, leaned toward establishing the beliefs of religion as philosophically valid. While the themes of reason, authority, and universalizability were instructive in a discourse that aimed for a true religion, my analysis of it here is partial and limited; simply put, I hope to invite more detailed discussion on the theme of the true in discourse on religion. The intention of my heuristic account is not only to rehearse the larger context for our Humean true religion but also to provide a loose sense of the terms and trends in the discursive territory Hume inherited. As J. B. Schneewind states, “we need to understand the map of religious options on which Hume’s readers would have located him. Whether he accepted the common options or not, he would have known them and taken them into account in the presentation of his views.”47 In the face of these options Hume confronted a dual challenge: to stay within the discursive boundaries of philosophical thinking about religion so that he might remain a relevant interlocutor and, at the same time, to help push the discourse on religion past its limits. How might he justify a form of religion distinct from inherited conceptions of the false and the true? How could he compellingly articulate his unconventional sense of religion’s proper office?
The English Enlightenment provided the context for Hume’s distinctive intervention in religious discourse. While its notions of epistemic truth and its ideas of subjectivity have been radically challenged by structuralists and postmodernists, and religious discourse has become more porous in our late modern era due to the insights of pragmatism and existentialism, I have tried to show that Hume worked in a moment when the true was venerated. His work challenged religious discourse, but it did not escape the framework of the discourse, which had become inseparable from the theme of the true. Even the argumentatively dexterous and intellectually nimble Hume could not abscond from his own philosophical heritage: he worked within the limits of the modern categories available to him, that is—he used the terms “true” and “false” when it came to religion. Yet Hume subverted the conventional use of these terms. To him, our true ideas and beliefs were not those that could be verified by abstruse thought; they were the ideas and beliefs that reflected the general orientations confirmed by habits and reflective common life. These were our most stable ideas. Like Cicero, Hume’s intervention for religion was practical, but only on the discursive level: his argument aimed to moderate a discourse on religion that had gotten carried away by abstract philosophy and metaphysics. That is, Hume was discomfited by the modern view that made religion justifiable on the terms of abstract philosophy. He claimed this was an unintelligible and therefore false standard of legitimation that supported vulgar and superstitious forms of religion. True philosophy, he suggested, would put abstruse philosophy and metaphysics in its place, and the rare true religion would shift the grounds of religion back to the reflective traditions of common life. These strategic features of his work reflected its larger aims: to decrease religious factionalism and expose the “frailty of human reason” (NHR, 15.12).
Hume’s thought was informed by the terms and conventions of the discourse on religion that he inherited, but it developed in the midst of a raging debate between religious liberals—the freethinkers, deists, Arians (as well as Socinians, Latitudinarians, and Unitarians)—against the orthodox Methodists, Presbyterians, and Puritans about the form and content of religious belief and practices.48 Though raised Presbyterian, Hume occupied an intellectual perch on the margins of Christianity. Still, he saw himself as something of a friend to both sides of this debate. His writings show him to be acutely aware of its terms and able to access its arguments, especially the role of nature and reason, the status of miracles, the possibility of religious certainty, religious authority, and the argument from design. Hume was also somewhat of a foe to each side: he despised the deity of false religion—an assumption of the “dissenters” as well as the believers—and he articulated a philosophical approach of true philosophy that proceeded easily without religion (and potentially replaced it). Still, instead of directly attacking either the liberals or the clergy (or arguing that all forms of religion should be destroyed at all times), Hume challenged the source of their arguments: abstract reason. This did not mean, however, that he never imagined the best form of religion. In fact, his argument against abstruse thought implied that religion was a natural disposition of humans that could be marshaled for larger purposes. Its source was our nature, an “inexplicable mystery” in the terms of philosophy (NHR, 15.12), and its proper office would highlight social order, virtuous conduct, and calm passions. Like Cicero, Hume was mostly concerned about the functional value of religion, not its epistemic ‘truth’ value. His modern version of the classical civic religion was subsidized by his critique of Enlightenment notions of autonomous reason, philosophical discomfort with the idea that the natural was the rational, and a deep historicism that worked against the very idea of a “universal.” For Hume, reason was not radically independent; it was intricately bound with hopes, fears, customs, and traditions, hallmarks of the imaginative process by which humans derive orientation and meaning in the world. Though his mitigated skepticism suggested it might be futile, he aimed to tweak customs, moderate passions, and shift our sense of moral authority. He never requested that humans should discard religion altogether.
Following Tindal and Morgan, Hume rejected revelation as an adequate source for religious belief; thus, he destroyed the grounds for revealed religion. Yet, unlike Tindal and Morgan, Hume argued that nature, or natural religion—the capacity to derive an understanding of God and the order of the world through rational consideration of the observable evidence in nature—neither honored the myriad inconsistencies experienced in nature nor respected the limits of reason and the reach of the mind. For Hume, the premise that natural religion could prove God’s existence or assert God’s attributes (i.e., infinite, wise, good) was unsustainable. It relied on a very narrow interpretation of nature as well as a defective theory of how the mind functioned. Hume’s version of religion’s proper office stood firmly against the notion of natural religion as articulated by the deists.
Hume similarly dismantled the idea of rational religion presented by the freethinkers of his day. The theory of the mind he articulated in his early philosophical works showed the importance of the passions, the imagination, and our habits, as they traced the genesis of our beliefs. Hume contended that philosophy—always generated by the passions (the sources of our beliefs and behaviors)—could lead us to skeptical dead ends if it was not balanced by the customs and conventions of common life. With the foundations of revealed, natural, and rational religion destroyed, on what could true religion rely? For Hume, and this marked a significant shift in the theme of the true in religious discourse, the true had little to do with the standards of philosophical reason, observation of the natural world, or a universal worldview. In fact, these were the foundations of false religion. True religion, described by Hume in a redacted footnote, was a disposition of the human heart that secured “obedience to the Laws & civil Magistrate.”49
Hume was never more explicit than this about the content of true religion. We can presume that Cicero’s discussion of theism, his articulation of the role of the passions, and his description of the development of virtuous character likely influenced Hume’s sense of the proper office of religion. These content areas comport with Hume’s larger philosophical commitments: they are moderately skeptical, they affirm the reflective natural beliefs of common life, they challenge abstruse reason of false philosophy, they moderate the passions, and they extol a public morality that produces a more stable political order.50 They also cohere with the three-part division of Hume’s Treatise (the understanding, the passions, and morality), which I turn to in chapter 2. Hume—like Cicero—did not make hard distinctions between the social, the philosophic, the political, and the religious. For him, religion was natural, linked to the passions, and omnipresent in history. The disposition ‘true religion,’ however, was practically impossible to locate in history. As the discursive ideal that reflected the knowledge inherent in the stable beliefs of common life, it was to contrast vulgar religion, which operated under the illusion that it was in sync with the logical standards of metaphysics. One example of Hume’s explicit narration of this point occurs in an understudied essay, “Of Parties in General,” where he writes,
Most religions of the ancient world arose in the unknown ages of government, when men were as yet barbarous and uninstructed, and the prince, as well as peasant, was disposed to receive, with implicit faith, every pious tale or fiction, which was offered him. The magistrate embraced the religion of the people, and entering cordially into the care of sacred matters, naturally acquired an authority in them, and united the ecclesiastical with the civil power. But the Christian religion arising, while principles directly opposite to it were firmly established in the polite part of the world, who despised the nation that first broached this novelty; no wonder, that, in such circumstances, it was but little countenanced by the civil magistrate, and that the priesthood was allowed to engross all the authority in the new sect. . . . And the same principles of priestly government continuing, after Christianity became the established religion, they have engendered a spirit of persecution, which has ever since been the poison of human society, and the source of the most inveterate factions in every government. Such divisions, therefore, on the part of the people, may justly be esteemed factions of principle; but, on the part of the priests, who are the prime movers, they are really factions of interest. (EMPL, 8.13–14)
The following chapters attempt to support and develop the idea that content for a Humean true religion might be taken from the cumulative results of Hume’s project on the passions, his work on epistemology, and his contribution to moral thought. To some scholars, the rarefied status of true religion in Hume’s project and Hume’s ethical tilt raises questions about its value for religion. Others claim that his choice not to give explicit details to this category suggests irrelevance for his overall project. But David Hume took religious discourse—not just moral discourse—very seriously for intellectual and strategic reasons: he was committed to preventing the abuse of religion for political gain and invested in demonstrating the impossibility of grounding our religious beliefs in abstract thought. He valued religion for what it might do: moderate our passions, assist in the development of moral character, and enable loyalty to the state. He was also invested in preserving the reflexive traditions of common life.
This chapter had a twofold aim: to describe the possible Ciceronian links to Hume’s thinking about religion and to give a brief account of the development of the theme of the true in discourse on religion. I highlighted significant interventions in this discourse and showed Hume’s general response to the conversation he inherited. We now have some broad historical foundations for the argument of this book: that the cumulative achievements of Hume’s mild philosophical theism, the aim of his moral rationalism, and the conclusion of his project on the passions provide the best content for our speculative, Humean influenced notion of true religion.
