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ОглавлениеHUME AND ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY: AIMS AND CONTEXTS
I
Ecclesiastical history, in so far as it deals with the Church Triumphant, concerns things not of this world, but things beyond experience about which we can know nothing. Its subjects lie in the realm of grace and amid the mysteries of faith. In so far as sacred history has a mundane side, it lies originally in the Hebrew scriptures, which were held to contain miraculous prophecies of the coming of Christ the Savior, and in the New Testament, which outlined the new dispensation of salvation culminating in the Last Judgment and the reception of the saved into Heaven to enjoy God forever. That history was held to have been validated by miracles.
The history of the otherworldly kingdom of God is not directly discussed by Hume.1 However, by 1762, Hume had dealt with the Bible, miracles, saints, and much else in an ironic or duplicitous manner. Religious beliefs resting on miracles he had shown to be unreasonable, if not unbelievable; we should not believe miracles because the testimony supporting them is never such as to compel belief. Hume treated the events of sacred history no differently from those of secular affairs. He thought the revelations and miracles of Judeo-Christian history were things we could not know had really happened, and he saw them as reflections of the ignorance of barbarous or simple peoples, the results of madness and delusion, or rooted in superstition that was grounded in fears. All of that became entangled with “priestcraft” and the calculations of kings and rulers. The Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (mostly written by 1751 but not published until 1779) continued that polemic against Christian beliefs. When ecclesiastical history dealt with the things of this world, with the Church Militant and the people of God as they acted in time, he explained its history with causal principles no different from those he applied to other topics. Here he differed profoundly from William Robertson, who thought one could discern the providence of God in world history. God had prepared the way for Christ by the expansion of the Roman Empire, in which Christianity could flourish and spread. There was no sharp line between the history of the Church and churches; both revealed the providence of God. Robertson’s restatement of old arguments must have seemed to Hume like speculative nonsense.2
Hume continued to pursue those themes in his History of England (1754–62), which contains a good deal of ecclesiastical history treated as but another set of events. The History was full of ironic and derisive comments about religion informed by his reading of Fra Paolo Sarpi, Pierre Bayle, and English deists like Conyers Middleton, whose own work against Christian miracles had upstaged Hume’s own.3 Hume’s comments were sometimes directed toward superstitious Roman Catholics but also against Protestant fanatics and even Muslims. Hume’s clerics remained generally as bigoted, political, power hungry, and self serving as they are in his essays. The religion they served seemed often absurd. Hume’s comments on the portions of the “true cross” are like many others:
But notwithstanding these disputes, as the length of the siege had reduced the Saracen garrison to the last extremity, they surrendered themselves prisoners; stipulated, in return for their lives, other advantages to the Christians, such as restoring of the Christian prisoners, and the delivery of the wood of the true cross; and this great enterprize, which had long engaged the attention of all Europe and Asia, was at last, after the loss of 300,000 men, brought to a happy period. (H 1:387–88)
The note to that passage reads: “This true cross was lost in the battle of Tiberiade, to which it had been carried by the crusaders for their protection. Rigord, an author of that age, says, that after this dismal event, all the children who were born throughout all Christendom, had only twenty or twenty-two teeth, instead of thirty or thirty-two, which was their former complement, p. 14” (H 1:388n). Here Hume is playing off Bernard de Fontenelle’s famous story of the Golden Tooth. The History is replete with such cynical and derisive comments; many were aimed at Protestants, even Scottish ones: “The famous Scotch reformer, John Knox, calls James Melvil, p. 65, a man most gentle and most modest. It is very horrid, but at the same time somewhat amusing, to consider the joy and alacrity and pleasure, which that historian discovers in his narrative of this assassination [of Cardinal Beaton]: And it is remarkable that in the first edition of his work, these words were printed on the margin of the page, The godly Fact and Words of James Melvil” (H 3:347n). Few of the religious escape some form of criticism or derision.
Hume was not an obvious candidate to write ecclesiastical history, but he was attracted by the field and seems for about ten years to have thought of writing an ecclesiastical history of some sort. This chapter asks why he might have wanted to write an ecclesiastical history and what sort of a history he would have written had he done one. But first the evidence he was really interested in the topic.
II
In early 1762, having finished his six-volume History of England, Hume was wondering what to do next. He had “not laid aside thoughts of continuing my History to the Period after the Revolution,” but he had clearly been talking to people about writing an ecclesiastical history. He tells us both those things in a letter to his publisher, Andrew Millar, written on 15 March 1762, as Millar was getting ready to publish the complete History of England in quarto. Hume told Millar “to contradict the Report, that I am writing or intend to write an ecclesiastical History.”
I have no such Intention; & I believe never shall. I am beginning to love Peace very much, and resolve to be more cautious than formerly in creating myself Enemies. But in contradicting this Report, you will be so good as not to impeach Mr [David] Mallet’s Veracity: For tis certain I said to Lord Chesterfield [Phillip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield] (from whom Mr Mallet first had it), that I had entertain’d such a Thought. But my saying so proceeded less from any serious Purpose, than from a View of trying how far such an Idea would be relished by his Lordship. (L 1:352)
Millar had heard the rumor and was eager to print what sounded like a scandalous best seller. If Hume was telling the truth, he had started this rumor himself. He loved to joke, and this might have also tickled the funny bone of an earl who was no better a Christian than Hume and who probably would have found the project laughably bizarre.
Chesterfield and Mallet both had interests in history that suggest things about Hume’s intentions. The earl thought grace was about deportment (Letter 140) and religion important only in its appearance, which seemed to guarantee good morals and character (Letter 100) if it was expressed without enthusiasm, bigotry, fanaticism, or sincerity.4 He was as at home among freethinkers as was Mallet, whose wife thought Hume a deist like herself and her husband.5 Their views were not uncommon in the London and Paris circles in which Hume moved. Chesterfield would not have found ecclesiastical history of much interest unless it related to secular subjects such as politics and statecraft (Letter 33). Useful history concerned the modern world (800 A.D. on) and could be written only when textual evidence was plentiful. Otherwise history was diversion that often allowed us to see through the motives and deceptions of others. Chesterfield, Mallet, and Hume lived in the same world as Voltaire, who had been writing useful ecclesiastical history of a sort since the 1740s. Chesterfield had remarked approvingly in 1753 of a work he thought to be by Voltaire, Les Croisades, that the Crusades were “the most immoral and wicked scheme that was ever contrived by knaves, and executed by madmen and fools, against humanity.”6 Popes had “generally been the ablest and the greatest knaves in Europe, wanted all power and money of the East; for they had all that was in Europe already.”7 Hume would see the effects of the crusades differently, but he too regarded them as “the most signal and most durable monument of human folly, that has yet appeared in any age or nation” (H 1:234). Hume’s talk with Chesterfield would likely have followed such a pattern.
Hume continued to think about an ecclesiastical history and must have discussed it with others both in London and later in Paris. On 8 November 1762, he wrote to Mallet, “The Undertaking you mention was rather founded on an Idea I was fond of, than on any serious, at least any present Purpose of executing it” (L 1:369). That was not quite what he had told Millar and shows a bit more commitment to the project. Mallet, the deist who had edited Bolingbroke’s Works (five volumes, 1754), was not to find an open ally in Hume, but the ecclesiastical history project figured in Hume’s correspondence with d’Alembert and Helvetius.8 The latter, in June 1763, when rumors were still circulating that Hume would write such a work, urged him to do so. In April 1766, Grimm, in the Correspondance littéraire, noted that the philosophic tribe in Paris had “frequently begged M. Hume, during his stay in France, to write an Ecclesiastical History.” He added that “this would be, at the present time, one of the most beautiful undertakings in literature, and one of the most important services rendered to philosophy and humanity.”9 That piece appeared after the Jesuits had been expelled from Portugal (1759) and France (1765), and in the year before, they were forced out of Spain and its empire. Grimm would have seen Hume’s contemplated work as another blow against l’infâme against which Voltaire and other philosophes had been crusading for years.10 D’Alembert echoed those hopes until 1773. He and his friends wanted Hume to “take the trouble to paint in her true colours our Holy Church.”11 Had he done so, the premier British man of letters would have joined their cause. Hume seems to have thought about this project for about ten years with enough seriousness to raise hopes that he too would write to crush l’infâme.
In 1762, Hume was well prepared to write on this subject. His philosophical works gave powerful arguments that undermined beliefs in miracles, revelations, providence, the soul, and notions of an afterlife. Hume’s explanations of action and thought left no place for simple ideas of grace as had the philosophy of Jonathan Edwards. Some of those arguments were restated in The Dialogues concerning Natural Religion already almost complete in the draft of 1751. The Essays, Moral and Political (1741) included the essay “Of superstition and Enthusiasm,” which made the first the basis of Catholicism and the second the ground of many kinds of Protestantism. He added “Of National Characters” to the collection in 1748; that included an attack on the character of clerics of all kinds.12 The conjectural histories like “The Natural History of Religion” (1757) sketched the origins and cyclical progresses of religions that naturally root among primitive, ignorant, and fearful people. This contradicted the biblical account of the origins of religion both among the people of God and among the pagans.13 For Hume, there were no differences in the origins. In all those works, the deists and rational theologians, as well as those who thought Christianity had to be understood from a unique standpoint grounded in faith, were refuted by the skeptical philosopher. Hume had attacked bigots and superstitious fools while posing as a good Calvinist—and Calvinists, when, as a skeptic, he considered the enthusiasts.
By 1762, Hume had already written a good deal of ecclesiastical history since it figured in The History of England, where it was given a wholly secular treatment. There, greedy and power-hungry clerics, fanatics and the superstitious, and politicians manipulating and being manipulated by them are to be found in abundance. Hume had mastered the standard sources of British history from ancient times to 1688, including a lot of medieval chronicles and other works dealing with Europe, particularly with France.14 He had become learned about the Roman and other churches because he needed to be to understand English religious history. He now knew enough to write a history independent of his work on the Church of England. He could have prefaced his ecclesiastical history with a general conjectural account of religion and then showed how Christianity conformed to the patterns offered by other religions, or he could have written a factual history of the Church in Europe with examples to show that it followed the patterns he had set out in his earlier works. Steeped in what he regarded as the follies of the English past, he had only to generalize his views to satisfy Chesterfield, the Mallets, and his Parisian friends.
III
Writing an ecclesiastical history must have been a tempting project in the 1760s, when European Catholicism seemed on the defensive and when Britain was beset by enthusiasts represented by Methodists in England and the “High-flyers” in the Kirk. The latter had harassed him and his friends, and this would be revenge. To deal critically with the whole of world history since the Creation was an ambitious end, but Hume was not without ambition. In doing so, Hume would then have joined the ranks of the open radicals—not the deists but the skeptically irreligious among whom he privately belonged. That he did not write this work in part reflects his sense of the danger of doing so. It would have cut him off from some friends, perhaps have barred some employment, and could have endangered his pension.15 In the end, he did not satisfy the urge to become a more open enemy of Christianity.
There is a second reason ecclesiastical history might have attracted Hume in 1762. The most prominent of the European historians of the time, Voltaire, had been writing just this sort of history and was becoming known for it. A man as emulous of other writers as Hume would not have ignored ecclesiastical history. Hume tells us that “a passion for literature” was “the ruling passion of [his] life” (H 1:xxvii). To write an ecclesiastical history might win him more laurels; that would have tempted him.
From 1753 to 1756, Voltaire published what became known as Essai sur les moeurs, translated into English in 1759 as An Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations, a work later prefaced by his La philosophie de l’histoire (1765). In 1754 Voltaire directly attacked Bishop Bossuet’s Abrégé de l’Histoire Universelle. Voltaire had aimed to replace the Bishop’s Christian vision of universal and ecclesiastical history set out in Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681). That and others like it privileged the biblical chronology worked out to show that the Jews were the oldest people with the oldest and best history. The Hebrews were the first people of God, who had been succeeded by the Christians. Voltaire’s universal history made the oldest people the Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians, not the Jews who were somewhat ignored in his article on “Histoire” in the Encyclopédie.16 He explained the religious beliefs and practices of the gentile nations not as the corruptions of Hebrew originals but as the creations of primitive peoples much like those whom Hume had described. There had to be a new universal history constructed around climate, race, manners, laws, the arts, commerce, and the evolution of those as they were changed and were shaped by peoples and their great men.17 Christian history should have no privileged status in the realm of learning. God’s providence was not to be inferred from the disasters of the past. There was no special causality needed to understand history sacred in name only. Voltaire found occasions to say more about the real nature of religion and its relation to manners and politics, priestcraft, and irrationality. He carried on a running critique of l’infâme in his squibs, satires, and biblical criticism, which circulated in manuscripts with even a bit being printed, and in his political pieces and other historical works. All that had contributed to Voltaire’s fame even though some of it was slapdash and not very good.18 Hume could see and envy the fame it brought Voltaire at the same time knowing such work could be better done. To write ecclesiastical history as Hume had seen it in The History of England would be to destroy the field in the interests of more enlightened ways of thinking.
Hume had already shown that the English church from the beginning was a political creation founded on the ambition of Pope Gregory, the fears of a pagan ruler in Kent who was “promised eternal joys above, and a kingdom in heaven without end,” and politic compromises about altars. Elsewhere, as in Wessex, it was introduced with violence and because of marriage agreements.19 Its benefits to the Saxons were very mixed:
Even Christianity, though it opened the way to connexions between them and the more polished states of Europe, had not hitherto been very effectual, in banishing their ignorance, or softening their barbarous manners. As they received that doctrine through the corrupted channels of Rome, it carried along with it a great mixture of credulity and superstition, equally destructive to the understanding and to morals. The reverence towards saints and reliques seems to have almost supplanted the adoration of the Supreme Being: Monastic observances were esteemed more meritorious than the active virtues: The knowledge of natural causes was neglected from the universal belief of miraculous interpositions and judgments: Bounty to the church atoned for every violence against society: And the remorses for cruelty, murder, treachery, assassination, and the more robust vices, were appeased, not by amendment of life, but by pennances, servility to the monks, and an abject and illiberal devotion. The reverence for the clergy had been carried to such a height, that, wherever a person appeared in a sacerdotal habit, though on the highway, the people flocked around him; and showing him all marks of profound respect, received every word he uttered as the most sacred oracle. Even the military virtues, so inherent in all the Saxon tribes, began to be neglected; and the nobility, preferring the security and sloth of the cloyster to the tumults and glory of war, valued themselves chiefly on endowing monasteries, of which they assumed the government. The several kings too, being extremely impoverished by continual benefactions to the church, to which the states of their kingdoms had weakly assented, could bestow no rewards on valour or military services, and retained not even sufficient influence to support their government.
Another inconvenience, which attended this corrupt species of Christianity, was the superstitious attachment to Rome, and the gradual subjection of the kingdom to a foreign jurisdiction. (H 1:50–51)
Writing an ecclesiastical history might give him lasting fame and more money and make some contribution to what he called at the end of his life “the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.”20 There were reasons enough to think about writing an ecclesiastical history.
IV
To fully appreciate the effects of what he contemplated one needs to see how ecclesiastical history functioned in Hume’s world—first in Scotland, then in Europe. It was important and had had a long career. Indeed, ancient historians such as Varro had separated sacred from secular history, the stories of the gods from those of heroes and the founders of states.21 Early Christians had coordinated the chronologies and histories of the Hebrews with those of other ancient peoples but had preserved the distinction between God’s chosen people and the gentile nations. For the Hebrews, there was both a religious and a secular history, particularly after the coronation of Saul. For the gentiles, there might be a providentially directed history, but they lacked inclusion in the Church, the community of the saved. By the second and third centuries A.D., Christians like Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 263–339) were working out a chronology of world history and of the events in it that constituted the story of God’s provision for the salvation of some and then, with the death of Christ on the cross, the offer of salvation to all. That account had been made canonical by the work of Saint Augustine (354–430) and others. His scheme or variants of it were still in place by the 1750s; indeed, it formed the backdrop to the universal and ecclesiastical histories of men like Charles Rollin, Dom Calmet, Jacob Vernet (a Genevan pastor and Voltaire’s onetime friend), and many others including, however insincerely, the philosophe Turgot in his Sorbonniques of 1750. Hume, if he attacked those views, would not be tilting at windmills but would create for himself enemies and he certainly would have no peace.
Ecclesiastical history was very much an apologetic tool of the churches and sects. For Catholics, it established the primacy of their church and of the Bishop of Rome. It showed the continuity of revealed and traditional beliefs and their validation by miracles. Historians delineated the heresies of those who opposed both. It relied unquestioningly on a history derived from the Bible and the stories of the people of God as they were related in the writings of the saints and martyrs, the Fathers of the Church, the records of Church councils and others made by ancient, medieval, and Reformation writers. For Protestants, it answered the old question “Where was your church before Luther?” Ecclesiastical history gave divinity students the learning to defend their faith while attacking the errors of others. This history was the history of a chosen people living in time but aware of a divine origin, a providential past, and a future containing judgments. Some would be damned, but others would be saved to spend a blissful eternity enjoying the presence of God. Ecclesiastical history showed the teleology imposed on all history by the Creator, who created and shaped our ends to His own unfathomable designs. It was providential and had causes and effects we can neither understand nor alter. Hume’s classical models for his own histories, Tacitus,22 Livy, Thucydides, and others, said nothing about those matters.
Hume’s first exposure to such traditional histories would have come in Scotland, where ecclesiastical history had always been taught in the divinity halls. University chairs were established fairly late and were posts that were not very lucrative and did not attract scholars of distinction. Like the study of Hebrew and oriental languages, ecclesiastical history did not flourish during the Scottish Enlightenment. Patrons used the chairs to place deserving men of little distinction, but the chairs were also of little concern to the moderates, who often determined the policies of the Kirk after the 1740s. Some of them were Hume’s friends and became in the 1750s members of the Moderate Party. They were among those who changed the nature of the courses.
The first lectureship in the field was held by “Blind [William] Jameson,” who in 1692 became a lecturer in civil and ecclesiastical history at Glasgow University.23 Jameson was a polemicist who excoriated the errors of the Roman Church but also of some Protestants. His sort of history required a knowledge of the ancient and modern churches since it was meant to prepare ministers to defend the Established Church of Scotland. An account of God’s providential actions in history was carried on into the present by Jameson’s friend Robert Wodrow, whose History of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution (1721–22) contained the story of God’s grace shed over a tested remnant who proved firm in their faith. Ecclesiastical history was the story of what really mattered in this and the other world in which true Christians lived. Something similar was taught at Edinburgh, where a regius chair of ecclesiastical history was founded c. 1702. In the eighteenth century, this chair had only one distinguished incumbent, William Dunlop. He taught the subject from 1715 to 1720 as centered on the defense of the Scottish version of Calvinism. St. Andrews received its regius chair in 1707; it quickly became a sinecure. Glasgow received a professorship in 1716, but neither King’s nor Marischal University had University chairs. Throughout the century, the subject was taught in those universities by professors of divinity as was some general history by others.
The ecclesiastical history taught in Scotland changed between c. 1720 and the 1750s. At Glasgow, the subject from 1721 to 1752 was taught by William Anderson, a polite man who had been a travelling tutor and had seen much of Europe. He seems to have broadened the course by making it more secular, but no notes of or from his lectures have been found. His inaugural lecture as professor was entitled “The Credibility of History” and shows that he was at least interested in matters of evidence and sources.24
During Hume’s college years (1721–25), the Edinburgh professor of ecclesiastical history was Matthew Crawford. He was not popular with his colleagues or with students, who found his courses uninspired. Robert Wodrow (who did not much like the man because he had supported toleration and the restoration of patronage to heritors and had favored John Simson, the heretical professor of theology at Glasgow), described Crawford’s teaching as attended by only “six or seven hearers.”25 Wodrow claimed that the professor gave only one course, not the usual two, because he expected fees for the second, but no one was willing to pay them.26 Crawford was believed to be the author of a life of John Knox, which George Ridpath, a Berwickshire minister, thought “stupidly wrote by some dull well meaning Whig.”27 Knowing that Crawford was something of an antiquary and had preserved and copied the “History of Scotland” left by his father would not have changed the judgments of Wodrow and Ridpath very much. Hume would have known that the traditional ecclesiastical history was dull, biased, and not worth much money. That was the judgment of others who began to change what its professors taught in order to make it more polite and useful.
Crawford was succeeded in his Edinburgh chair early in 1737 by Patrick Cuming, the ecclesiastical manager for the Argathelian political faction led by the Earl of Ilay and his brother, the second Duke of Argyll, whom Ilay succeeded in 1743. This was not a post for which Cuming had any special training or obvious interest beyond a general curiosity about historical matters. He shared that with Lord Ilay, who appointed him. Cuming’s Latin lectures ran in a six-year cycle with one given publicly each week for four months.28 His text was J. A. Turretin’s Compendium Historiae Ecclesiasticae, written in the seventeenth century but many times revised and brought up to date for later periods. It was widely used in Scotland and in Holland, where Cuming is thought to have studied.
Cuming’s course assumed the veracity and authority of the Bible and the truth of revealed religion. It saw the works of Moses as the oldest and best histories. The professor spent a good deal of time on evidences of the authenticity of the Mosaic revelations and of those given to prophets and to the inspired Hebrew historians. He refuted those who believed the world was eternal or that the Chinese records were older than those contained in the scriptures. He was carrying on a debate with seventeenth-century libertines such as Isaac de La Peyrère and English deists like Charles Blount, who knew of the views of Spinoza.
Cuming sought to show that the Calvinist Presbyterian system was the one warranted by the Bible. Like his colleague who taught universal civil history and the Roman antiquities, Charles Mackie, Cuming began with the Creation and traced the uneven declines and progresses of mankind. History was the unfolding of God’s plan. The course of history was irregular and cyclical. It spiraled down after the fall of Adam and later as the revelations of God were forgotten and the meaning of the death of Christ was perverted by a corrupt church. With the “10th age” (roughly 1000 and beyond ) history became progressive; men tended now to be better even if not all are to be saved. Until c. 1300 history was primarily the story of human error, but thereafter the world seemed to be progressing toward truth and becoming more as God would have it. Progress seems to be the intention of God and the unintended results of human actions taken for various reasons usually unrelated to each other.
While he called his subject “ecclesiastical history,” Cuming did not sharply differentiate secular from sacred history. He embedded ecclesiastical history in a universal history. He sketched the development of the arts and sciences that originated in Noah’s time. Tubal Cain was the Vulcan of the Hebrews. The professor also found a place for the Trojan War, which he thought occurred in the time of King Saul. David was thus a near contemporary of Homer—but earlier. The first great poets were Hebrews. Cuming carefully pointed out parallel developments in the Hebrew and gentile worlds and gave some of the chronologies of the pagan nations. By “the 10th age,” ecclesiastical and civil history mingled easily in his English summary of his lecture on it:
We are now arrived at the 10th age which is generally acknowledged to be the most ignorant but it is from the history of those darker ages that some of the original of many superstitions which are defended in the Church of Rome And the Seeds of great revolutions which happened afterwards are to be traced. . . . The court of Rome was governed by Whores and some of their Sons were made Popes . . . the tenth centurie because of almost universal ignorance is called by the Church of Rome it Self Seculum obscurium Most of the Popes of Rome in this century were rather Monsters of wickedness than men; affairs of the Court of Rome were managed by the lewdest The most cruel and abandoned Women. Second marriages were declared to be unlawful without a dispensations by this means the Treasures of the Church of Rome were greatly increased. The Christian Religion was received by the Normans, Poland too became Christian as did Russia Denmark & Sweden But the Religion of those times was made to consist chiefly in Fasts and Festivals pilgrimages Worship of Images the Virgin Mary Angles and Saints in a Veneration relicts the bones and ashes of the Saints and Superstitious practices Bells were consecrated and baptized by Pope John 13 Nothing was more frequent in this age than determining differences whether civil or Ecclesiastical by the tryal Ordeal that is passing bars of Iron blindfold, if they passed with out wacking [blistering] them they were declared Innocent if wacked guilty and Such like Methods The Monastic Life was in High reputation And Several New orders were instituted.29
But, with the “10th age,” events leading to the Reformation providentially appear, and history’s irregular downward spiral took an upturn.30 Whatever coherence Cuming’s course has was supplied by the faith that there is a providence that will bring history to a close as the light that began to shine in the Reformation continues to spread and to dispel darkness.
All that was a somewhat amazing pastiche. Archaic elements jostle with ideas that came from more modern sources such as the works of Friedrich Spanheim, Jean Mabillon, John Clerk, Henry Dodwell Sr., Humphrey Prideaux, and other érudits. Cuming seemed as much concerned with the course of Western civilization as with strictly religious topics. His explanations were couched in terms of the actions of individuals motivated by their passions. In his classes, the story of the people of God has been somewhat displaced by the story of the errors of the men, not their sins. Pious people were noticed. National characteristics have a role to play, but particular providences, such as Wodrow or his friend Cotton Mather reveled in, were not much noticed. This was not a wholly modern course and was probably not revised after the lectures were first written in the late 1730s or early 1740s. They would have looked antique by the time Cuming retired in 1762. Nevertheless, the story was broader and more secular in tone than the lectures that survive from his brighter predecessor, William Dunlop.31
Cuming had competition in the teaching of history at Edinburgh from Charles Mackiethe, professor of universal civil history and Roman antiquities who held this chair from 1719 until his retirement in the 1750s. Mackie was a polite man who had been a traveling tutor. He became a member of the Rankenian Club (c. 1720) and of a Whig club that hoped to re-edit George Buchanan’s History of Scotland (1582).32 Later, he was a member of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh (c. 1737). An intellectual interested in what was current among scholars, including historians, he wrote a report on the first appearance of syphilis in Scotland (1496) and an account of a house struck by lightning. Both were noticed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.33 His book purchases show us a man who read widely and wanted to own works such as Bayle’s Dictionaire Philosophique et Critique (1697). He drew on that and on Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1655–72) for some of the intellectual history he included in his courses.
Mackie taught two courses.34 His universal history course (which might be called “Western Civilization”) ran over two years. The other was a yearly course on Rome designed to make the study of Roman law easier. The first began with Creation, but it turned into a mostly political history, which went up to the Reformation and included bits of Scottish history too. Mackie did not give undue attention to religion and often treated it as another aspect of society to be discussed in a secular fashion. He wanted his boys to know who the principal Fathers of the Church were and why they were famous, but he treated them much as he did their pagan rulers.
Politics dominated the affairs of nations and helped to explain nonpolitical events. Mackie was also interested in politics at the international level and wanted his students to read parts of Thomas Rymer’s mostly posthumous Foedera (1704–35), a great collection of charters and treaties. Those tended to see churches as social factors among others. All churches in this world are, to some extent, merely political institutions reflecting the national character of the people who attend them.
Mackie’s historical world was full of nations with distinctive national characters. After it appeared in the 1730s, he recommended Charles Rollin’s Ancient History to his students, who found there sketches of the characters of ancient peoples, which were used to explain their histories. Rollin’s work saw the character of peoples reflected in all their institutions. National character in Rollin’s works, or in Mackie’s lectures, did not change much over time, but their treatment of it was one that leads to Montesquieu and Hume. They would see manners and institutions interacting in social wholes of a dynamic sort. That message was implicit in much that he taught.
The Franks described by Gregory of Tours, on whose works Mackie relied, could not possibly be a genteel people. They acted on passions they had not learned to control. Mackie on the world of Chilperic might have seemed long-winded to his students, but they would have come from his lectures with an appreciation of how much manners and customs mattered and how religious values affected them and were affected by them. The acceptance of the Christian religion among the Franks as described by Gregory was one that required the alteration of barbarian manners and the acceptance of new values that would result in chivalric attitudes and the formation of a new ethos. Ecclesiastical history in his classroom had little to do with the Church Triumphant but a lot to do with the sordid affairs of men in the Church Militant. Mackie knew that manners change with the growth of politeness and knowledge and that they change in what seems a cyclical manner.
Professor Mackie, like Anderson, the Glasgow historian, was interested in questions of evidence and in rules by which we might eliminate the “many vulgar errors which have crept into history.”35 The first of those he listed was “a strong passion for illustrious origins” such as the Greek’s propensity to trace their descent from gods and goddesses. The early modern historians’ eagerness to find among the Trojans ancestors for modern kings, who would then be the equals of the Roman founder Aeneas, was not much different. Mackie was as sure as Varro and Hume that all history came in three kinds—“obscure or unknown, fabulous, and Historical”—or that for which “vouchers” were to be had. Mackie even found his vouchers among artifacts and archaeological remains. If they paid attention to the vouchers, learned men would not have believed in the legend of the Golden Tooth ridiculed by Fontenelle, or in Pope Joan and the Pied Piper of Hamelin, about whom Mackie also spoke in class. Historians had to free themselves from such prejudices but also get their dates right.
Like many of his time, Mackie had a fascination with chronology. This rested on the fact that chronologies had not been established for most countries and were much contested for the ancient world, where the problems of relating Judeo-Christian chronology to the dating of events in the histories of other peoples had not been solved.36 Ancient traditions had some value, but they needed to be critically scrutinized and the tales of bards and poets set aside as worthless. Other old accounts were clearly forgeries.37 Credulity, religious and political biases, individual peculiarities, and the illusions of whole peoples all add errors to our perceptions of the past. Ecclesiastical history, if it was to be respectable, had to conform to the same standards as civil history. It was no better than its sources, and those seemed less adequate than they had once been.
While Hume took neither of Mackie’s courses, he had relatives and friends who did; he would have known what was being taught by the professor.38 Hume also knew William Rouet, who became professor of ecclesiastical history at Glasgow in 1752. Rouet may never have taught a course specifically on ecclesiastical history, but he tried to teach a universal history course that was polite.39 Rouet has had something of a bad press as a sinecurist, but he deserves better. He shared Mackie’s virtues but went beyond him in interesting ways. Rouet wanted history to give the causes of the events it narrated: “History should not be Confin’d to the bare recital of facts such as gaining or losing a battle, the rise or fall of an Empire, but we ought carefully to endeavour to Investigate the reasons & secret Causes which contributed to bring this or that remarkable event.”40 When it came to setting out those causes, Rouet showed that he owed as much to reading Montesquieu, Hume, and Voltaire as to Rollin, whose Ancient History he also recommended to his students:
[We ought] to be well acquainted wt ye Manners, customs, Genius & Character peculiar to each Nations generally & of all ye Extraordinary men, who through ye importance of ye Station they bore in ye Country, or from ye uncommon abilities they possess’d might possibly have greatly contributed to bring about any remarkable alterations in ye Changes of States or fortune of ye publick. When our knowledge in history is founded upon this firm and proper basis it can’t fail of producing both pleasure & profit to ye Mind.41
Such history would be “providential” and would teach us “the vanity of earthly things.”42 His history preserved a pious gloss, but its substance was different. Moreover, he told his classes that there was no pure church history:
church History consider’d entirely by itself, without any politicall Connections or references to ye Civil history of these times must in itself be imperfect, and unsatisfactory, but when carefully connected, & illustrated by a more accurate scrutiny into ye manners, Customs & political Maxims of ye Different Countries, or Governours, where ye Religious revolutions happen’d, Church history, consider’d in this view becomes one of the most regular & instructive & most interesting connected parts of Universal history, & actively contradict[s] that Sarcasm of Grotius Dum Historiam Ecclesiasticam legis Quid legis nisi Episcoparum.43
Rouet’s history is this-worldly and rather like Hume’s in several respects. Charlemagne is like the Alfred of The History of England. Rouet’s periodization resembles Hume’s, and the bases for it are much the same, although Rouet gives less attention to economics. They were similar in their attitudes to medieval sources. Those can be used but with caution, for they are the products of benighted times and have information mostly about the lifetimes of the writers. For both, modernity comes not with Charlemagne but with the Renaissance and Reformation. Rouet gave more time to politics and diplomacy, but, like Hume, he was also interested in the arts. Fragments of “Lectures on Ancient Painting” survive in his papers. Rouet presented the history of art in a cyclical mold with the Renaissance recapitulating the discoveries of the Greek and Roman artists, albeit at a higher level of achievement.44 Rouet had moved his universal and ecclesiastical history in a more polite and secular direction than had any other teacher in Scotland to that date. Hume would have seen that trend as needing extension.
Outside the Scottish universities, there was much to interest a would-be ecclesiastical historian. Both Colin Kidd and David Allan have drawn attention to the differing accounts of the Scottish Church given by Catholics, by English and Scottish Episcopalians, and by Presbyterians of various sorts.45 Politics could not be avoided in their discussions, which were aimed at establishing the independence (or dependence) of the Scottish church and state from (or upon) England or Rome. Much of that publishing came at a time when deists were challenging old accounts of religious history by deriding miracles, a superintending providence, privileging the Bible as a source of historical information, and finding in priestcraft and kingcraft the key to the development of states and churches. History had had, and still had, practical consequences for the Scottish economy and culture and for the peace and security of Britain and countries in Europe. After 1720, it had become difficult to see ecclesiastical history in the blinkered way that had previously prevailed. Realism also came from an understanding of the political and religious compromises made in 1690, 1707, and the years that followed.
V
There is also a wider context in which Hume’s ecclesiastical history project should be situated. Having considered the history of the English church for about thirteen hundred years and seen it from the perspectives of men of diverse opinions, Hume must have thought it was surely time to rethink the enterprise of ecclesiastical historians. In many cases, the critical acumen applied to the understanding of manuscripts and textual problems was at odds with the lack of critical judgment shown when it came to larger questions of religion and politics. For details, high churchmen like George Hickes or Thomas Hearne were necessary guides but not when it came to the grander themes. Hume was also aware of a surprising number of their continental counterparts whose works also show up in the notes to The History of England. Most of those scholars were still captive to the inerrant Bible and to the progeny of Eusebius and Augustine. When Hume was in France, he seems to have had little to do with men in the Académie des Inscriptions, but he did meet a number of less orthodox historians including Charles Duclos, the Abbé Raynal, Présidents de Henault and de Brosses, and minor figures such as the Abbé Le Blanc, who had translated into French Hume’s Political Discourses (1752) and William Robertson’s History of Charles V (1769). Perhaps the man whose works affected him most was one whom he never met—Voltaire.
There was more going on among historians of religion than he may have been aware. We lack evidence that he was, but that should not dissuade us from looking closer at the nature of that work. Radical biblical criticism had been coming out steadily since the mid-seventeenth century from Hobbes, Spinoza, their epigones, and from Bayle and the deists. Many of the ideas expressed in their works were common knowledge, and Hume had read those authors. It is unlikely that Hume knew that Dr. Jean Astruc, to whom he delivered a letter in 1764, was the anonymous author of the groundbreaking Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s’est servi pour composer le livre de la genèse (1753). That short work undercut orthodox beliefs in the divine inspiration of the mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch by showing that parts of it were composed of different accounts that had been conflated into the present text.46 It is also unlikely that Hume knew anything of the works of the German thinkers who had begun to approach the Bible in novel ways. Hermann Samuel Reimarius, in isolation and secrecy, had begun to recast Christological questions, which he assumed had to be treated like any other questions about the facts of the past. G. E. Lessing was moving in the same direction. The more orthodox philologist, Johann David Michaelis, as he reconstructed the society of the ancient Hebrews, reduced them to the status of just another rather uncivilized Middle Eastern people. In Aberdeen, where George Campbell was already at work on a translation of the Gospels, that message would be understood, although its radical implications were rejected. Germans were doing the sort of thing that had been done to some extent by Bishops William Warburton and Robert Lowth. Lowth had made it possible to see the Old Testament as the product of a rude people hooked on metaphors, a people who were not closely related to the Christians of the New Testament. Indeed, the Hebrews were closer to the Greeks of the Homeric world, but this was not quite the compliment which it had been in the lectures of Patrick Cuming. Once the Hebrews had been put into a historical context, the Bible had to be treated like any other old text. It could then be seen to deal with local and particular matters, not those of world historical importance. Such critics, often clerics, had come perilously close to breaking the prophetic thread that was, up to that time, held to connect the two Testaments. Theirs were not altogether new messages, but they were now not being stated by a disreputable Irish priest’s son, like John Toland, but by respectable men holding university and church positions even as they relegated church history to a section of universal history mostly concerned with politics. Their theories and those of their French counterparts were the subjects of enlightened conversations.
Finally, there were other continental influences that had some importance for eighteenth-century men thinking about ecclesiastical history. Those lie in the struggles of European rulers to control and regulate religious life in their domains. The greatest example of this was seen in the policies adopted and the actions taken by Louis XIV against Jansenists and Huguenots. Those were related to Louis’s efforts to bolster Roman Catholicism and to create what some saw as a universal monarchy. His career supplied many writers with all they needed to understand both priestcraft and kingcraft. In relatively tolerant Britain, the government faced nonjurors in both Scotland and England. It imposed greater controls on the Scottish Kirk through the imposition of toleration and patronage (1710–12) and by the management of the General Assembly. In England, it finally prohibited the meetings of Convocation after 1719. Everywhere those struggles centered on politics, on appointments, on the control of lands alienated to the Church, on the control of Jesuits and other orders, and on the rights of the Church and Papacy in various countries. Everywhere governments feared the enthusiasm provoked by Jansenists or expressed in the revivals conducted in France and Italy by Saint Alphonsus Ligouri. Protestant countries had to deal with enthusiastic Calvinists, Methodists, and dissenters from national churches who sometimes preferred exile and emigration to obeying their rulers. Greater freedom of the press and of expression now made it possible for men of letters to argue that religious behavior had always been like that and would be manipulated and controlled by those who found it in their interest to do so.
VI
Had Hume written an ecclesiastical history, he would have used the many elements already to hand. The conjectural historians, with their blend of social science and realistic data derived from the study of primitive societies, offered new perspectives on the ancient world of both the pagans and the People of God. Some of this, when provided by men like Lowth or Thomas Blackwell, the Marischal College principal and professor of Greek, had become quite acceptable although not when used to demean the Judeo-Christian myths and stories. Hume may have believed for a while that he could do better and that there was glory to be had if one succeeded. It might have gotten him into no more trouble than had the essay on miracles and the “Natural History of Religion.” Adopting an ironic and ambiguous stance was something he had long ago mastered. Irony more delicately veiled and explanations more finely wrought would allow him to écraser l’infâme as well as Voltaire. Less conjectural historical studies had included church history in universal and civil histories that were essentially political. The ways of understanding history Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Hume himself had supplied offered other ways to secularize accounts of the past. And the very philosophes who teased Hume to write such a work could have given him a model from the Encyclopédie, on which some of them were working. There we find three related articles that are pertinent.
In the first, “Ecclesiastique (l’histoire ecclesiastique)”, “Ecclesiastical History” is defined as “whatever has happened in the Church since its beginnings,” an ambiguous definition that applies either to the Church Triumphant or the Church Militant. It invited reflections on many unsavory topics. The ambiguities deepen as the very short article concludes:
M. Fleuri47 nous l’a donnée dans un ouvrage excellent qui porte ce titre; il a joint à l’ouvrage des discours raisonnés, plus estimables & plus précieux encore que son histoire. Ce judicieux écrivain, en développant dans ces discours les moyens par lesquels Dieu a conservé son Eglise, expose en même tems les abus de toute espece qui s’y sont glissés. Il étoit avec raison dans le principe, “qu’il faut dire la vérité toute entiere; qui si la religion est vraie, l’histoire d’Eglise l’est aussi; que la vérité ne sauroit être opposée à la vérité, & que plus les maux de l’Eglise ont été grands, plus ils servent à confirmer les promesses de Dieu, qui doit la défendre jusqu’à la fin des siecles contre les puissances & les efforts de l’enfer.”48
The editors thought more needed to be added.
The foregoing article was immediately followed by one entitled “Nouvelles Ecclesiastiques,” the clandestinely circulated Jansenist periodical that was commonly thought to be somewhat fanatical.49 It figures here largely for its accounts of the miracles that took place at the Parisian tomb of the Abbé Pâris in the 1730s. The controversies over those had been a scandal to the Gallican Church and to the government. Royal prohibition of gatherings at the tomb ended the miracles—as Voltaire gleefully noted. They served Hume as examples of well-authenticated modern miracles, ones that bothered Protestants since, if real, they would have been works of God having a probative value for the Roman Catholic faith. Both entries implicitly questioned the Catholic faith and Church and the truth of the miracles. Finally, the entry was cross-referenced to “CONVULSIONNAIRES.”
In a third entry, “Histoire,” Voltaire, its author, applauded the histories of opinion that were not mere “collections of human errors” and then quickly went on to say that his article would not deal with “sacred history.”50 That is “a succession of divine and miraculous events by which it pleased god in former times to lead the Jewish people and sometimes today tries our faith. I will not touch upon this important matter.” But we are soon back in Voltaire’s world. We quickly learn that the early history of all peoples is fabulous, that the Chinese have the oldest culture, the culture of the Egyptians being of an indeterminate age. Not the history of Palestine but of Rome most merits study because it is from Rome that Europe derived its laws and culture. The uses of history are mainly political, moral, and cultural.
It is also a probabilistic discipline offering but moral certainties. In its early periods, such as those about which Moses wrote, there are few certainties because the early history of all people is mythic and fabulous. If we would know the earliest times, we must look at archeological remains and decipher the meaning of their ceremonies, their festivals and myths. Those are mostly grounded in the needs and desires of agricultural peoples and in the great moments of their collective lives. In short, we need to attend to customs and manners. The article recommends Livy as the best historian for style but suggests that modern histories cover far more fields with more precision and with better-warranted evidence. “One expects from modern historians more details, confirmed facts, precise dates, sources, attention to customs and laws, to manners, to commerce, to finance, agriculture and population.” Religion is absent from that list, but the history of the Jews and of the Church are implicitly included. Christianity is thus, by implication, seen as barbarous in origin, and its early history mythical. The sort of details ecclesiastical history should include are shown in the Chevalier De Jaucourt’s entry for “Henri Wharton,” which gave many details and facts about the married clergy of the early church.51 There were similar messages in many small and obscure articles by Diderot, d’Alembert, and others.
Had Hume pleased his Parisian friends, he would have written a history that treated the churches as but other institutions in a complex secular whole. There were likely to have been other things in the history he did not write that would not have pleased them. In The History of England, there is a sense that the Church preserved over many centuries much that was worth preserving. It was a patron of the arts and to some extent of learning. It was not the Church which lost and scattered manuscripts containing a richer classical heritage than we now preserve but rapacious rulers like Henry VIII and Protestant enthusiasts who cared less for learning than the Dark Age monks who quoted Latin poems no longer to be found. Hume had no brief for the scholastics, but not all medieval philosophy was foolish. Popes like Aeneas Sylvius and Leo X come off well in The History of England. The Papacy never looks as grim in Hume’s work as it does in the works of many Protestants or in those of Voltaire. Hume sought to play a moderating and evenhanded role as a historian. We could expect to find in any ecclesiastical history by him things that would burnish and not blacken the image of some churches at some times. The philosophes might also have been surprised to find that Hume saw no immediate advantages coming from the sixteenth-century reformations but many losses. The freedoms fathered by enthusiasts had a long gestation period. When he said he did not want to write an ecclesiastical history because he prized his peace, he may not have been referring only to attacks by the orthodox. The peace he was loath to forego would have been disturbed by Catholics and Protestants but also by infidels and philosophes who wanted to écraser l’infâme.
NOTES
1. The searchable Past Masters disk containing Hume’s writing has no references to “Church Universal” or “Church Triumphant,” and its references to “the kingdom of saints” are ironic and refer mostly to the period of the English Civil War. History for Hume was only of events in this world. What Hume thought of the history contained in the Hebrew scriptures is shown by his 1751 broadside commonly called “The Bellmen’s Petition.” In that, the lineage of Christ is shown to be garbled, which makes His descent from the House of David uncertain. Hume thus undercut the link between King Zerubbabel, seen as a type of Christ the King, and Jesus of Nazareth. See Roger L. Emerson, “Hume and the Bellman, Zerobabel MacGilchrist,” Hume Studies 23 (1997): 9–28.
2. Robertson’s views of the relation of historical events to providence were set out in a 1755 sermon, “The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ’s Appearance.” He reiterated ancient views of the Roman world as civilized, unified, peaceful, and extensive—a proper place for the Gospel to be propagated. All these conditions had been brought about by providence acting though secondary sources. Robertson’s ideas are discussed by several of the authors collected in William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, ed. Stewart J. Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), including ones by Stewart J. Brown, Nicholas Phillipson, and Colin Kidd. The background to such views has been set out in an extended essay by C. A. Patrides, The Phoenix and the Ladder: The Rise and Decline of the Christian View of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964) and more recently at length by J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 5 vols. to date (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2010), 3:69–73.
3. Middleton was not unusual among the deists for secularizing history and undercutting traditional notions of ecclesiastical history. He was simply the best of the lot at doing so. The best account of Middleton’s work is Hugh Trevor-Roper, “From Deism to History: Conyers Middleton,” in Hugh Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment, ed. John Robertson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 71–119.
4. The edition of the letters I have used appears in the Universal Classic Library as Letters to His Son by the Earl of Chesterfield, 2 vols., ed. Oliver H. G. Leigh (Washington: M. Walter Dunne, 1901).
5. Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1954), 395; Sandro Jung, David Mallet, Anglo-Scot: Poetry, Patronage, and Politics in the Age of Union (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 145.
6. Voltaire’s Une histoire des Croisades et Un nouveau plan de l’histoire de l’esprit humain (1752) was often printed with the Micromégas (1752) and was later incorporated into a grander work published in 1756, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations. See also Chesterfield, Letters, letter 185; 2:147.
7. That was also the opinion of Chesterfield’s friend Voltaire; see J. H. Brumfitt in La philosophie de l’histoire, 2nd rev. ed. (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969); vol. 59 of Les Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire / The Complete Works of Voltaire, 16.
8. Helvetius to Hume, 2 June 1763, in Letters of Eminent Persons Addressed to David Hume, ed. J. E. Hill Burton (Bristol, 1995), 13–14; D’Alembert to Hume, 28 February 1767, in ibid., 183. D’Alembert wrote the short article on ecclesiastical history for the Encyclopédie, 5:223.
9. Friedrich Melchoir Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc., 16 vols., ed. Maurice Tourneux (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1879), 7:13. The original passage in French is: “Nous avons souvent sollicité M. Hume, pendant son séjour en France, d’écrire une Histoire ecclésiastique. Ce serait en ce moment une des plus belles entreprises de littérature, et un des plus importants services rendus à la philosophie et à l’humanité.”
10. Voltaire’s attacks on the Church and blasphemy laws intensified in the 1760s owing to the judicial murder of Jean Calas in 1762. D’Alembert himself had written in 1765 a notable work on the Jesuits, Sur la destruction des Jesuites en France, and the final volumes of the text of Diderot’s Encyclopédie appeared in 1765 and 1766. They contained many attacks on religions and the churches despite the censorship of one of its publishers.
11. “Je ne me consolerai, pourtant, jamais d’être privé de cette Histoire Ecclésiastique, que je vous ai demandé tant de fois, que vous seul peut-être en Europe êtes en état de faire, et qui seroit bien aussi intéressante que l’histoire Grecque et Romaine, si vous vouliez prendre la peine de peindre au naturel notre mère Ste. Eglise.” D’Alembert to Hume, 1 May 1773, in Letters, ed. Hill Burton, 218.
12. See “Of National Characters,” E 199–201n3.
13. Hume’s French friends missed his belief in the inevitability of the continuance of religion; see Roger L. Emerson, “Hume’s Histories,” in Essays on David Hume, Medical Men, and the Scottish Enlightenment: “Industry, Knowledge, and Humanity” (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 137.
14. See the forthcoming bibliography compiled for The History of England by Roger L. Emerson and Mark G. Spencer. This shows, in particular, Hume’s surprising familiarity with medieval sources.
15. Under a 1697 English act, it was illegal to blaspheme or to deny the doctrine of the Trinity or the articles of the creeds approved by the Anglican Church. In Scotland, Hume could have been prosecuted under the same laws that led to the hanging in 1697 of Thomas Aikenhead.
16. All quotations from the Encyclopédie are to the following edition: Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers . . . (Paris: Brisson, David, Le Breton and Durand, 1751; reprinted in 5 vols., New York: Readex Microprint Corporation, 1969). Page numbers are to that set and not to the original volumes; 2:335–38.
17. A fine account of Voltaire’s work in the books named above is given by Brumfitt in La Philosophie de l’histoire.
18. Hume’s general verdict on Voltaire was, “I know that author cannot be depended upon with regard to Facts; but his general Views are sometimes sound, & always entertaining,” L 1:423. Like Hume, he emphasized the uncertainty of all accounts of ancient peoples.
19. H 1:29–46 passim.
20. Adam Smith to William Strahan, 9 November 1776, in L 2:450.
21. On Varro, see Enlightenment Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Kim Sloan (London: British Museum Press, 2003), 169.
22. There is a short passage in Tacitus on Jews, History, bk. 5, 1–6, in The Complete Works of Tacitus, trans. A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb (New York: Modern Library, 1942), 657–60. This depicts them as odd and despicable and Moses as a power-hungry fraud.
23. See Roger L. Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 31–32, 52, 71; James Coutts, A History of the University of Glasgow (Glasgow: Maclehose and Sons, 1909), 170, 192.
24. Anthony Browning, “History,” in Fortuna Domus, ed. J. B. Neilson (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1952), 41–57; 44.
25. Robert Wodrow, Analecta or Some Remarkable Providences . . . , 4 vols., ed. Mathew Leishman (Glasgow: Maitland Club, 1842–43), 4:212.
26. Divinity students were not generally charged for the courses they took to prepare for the ministry.
27. James Balfour Paul, ed. Diary of George Ridpath, Minister of Stitchel, 1755–1761 (Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 3rd ser., vol. 2, 1922), 200.
28. The manuscripts of those lectures can be found in the Library of New College, Edinburgh University, MS W12a 5\2. Each Latin lecture as an English language summary on loose sheets, which are still in the volumes. I have depended mainly on those summaries for what follows.
29. The summary uses spaces as punctuation and is not always written in full sentences.
30. This was rather like Jonathan Edwards’s History of the Work of Redemption (written 1739; published Edinburgh, 1774), but Cuming did not see the cycles of life (degeneracy—revelation—moral improvement—backsliding—revelation, etc. ) as always falling lower; his tended, after 1300 A.D., to be upward and the work more optimistic, as was characteristic of moderate men in the Kirk of his day.
31. His course somewhat resembled Antoine Goguet’s The Origin of laws, sciences and their progress among the most ancient nations (Paris, 1758; Edinburgh, 1761). The translator was the Reverend Robert Henry.
32. George Chalmers, The life of Thomas Ruddiman (Edinburgh: John Stockdale; London: William Laing, 1794). The Rankenian Club is sometimes cited as the first Edinburgh club of adult intellectuals devoted to the discussion of religious and philosophical ideas.
33. The first letter was sent anonymously but is contained in the Leven and Melville Papers, National Archives of Scotland, GD 26\13\602. The second is in Philosophical Transactions 42 (1743), 420–21.
34. What follows rests largely on the notes for Mackie’s lectures and on “A discourse read to the Philosophical Society, 4 March 1741” on “vulgar errors and how to detect ‘em,” both held at Edinburgh University Library [EUL]. Those are discussed by L. W. Sharp, “Charles Mackie, the First Professor of History at Edinburgh University,” Scottish Historical Review 41 (1962): 23–45. See also Esther Mijers,“News from the Republick of Letters”: Scottish Students, Charles Mackie, and the United Provinces, 1650–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); her discussion of Mackie as a historian runs pp. 157–84.
35. EUL, Laing Manuscript 2:37.10; there are also notes dealing with this topic that seem related to his course in MS Dc.5.24.2.
36. The Scottish chronology for the Middle Ages was first sorted out by Thomas Innes and David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, in books published in 1729 and 1776.
37. This had been apparent to Sir Robert Sibbald and his friends in the 1680s when they rejected some of the fabulous genealogies offered to them by others. One for the Dukes of Argyle showed them as descendants of King Arthur and through him of Brut (Brute or Brutus), a descendant of Aeneas the Trojan. The mythical history of the Scots kings can still be seen, in part, in Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh, where the portraits of forty of them, painted by Jacob de Wet in the late seventeenth century, still hang.
38. Among the latter were Gilbert Elliot, Sir Harry Erskine, William Mure of Caldwell, James Oswald of Dunniker, Sir James Steuart of Goodtrees, and many more men whom Hume knew socially throughout his life.
39. The College reserved the right to make its professors also lecturers in civil history. Professors were paid mainly by students’ fees. There were not enough to support two men. The threat to render the chair virtually valueless gave them a voice in appointments. Rouet may have taught only a civil history course but that is unlikely.
40. William Rouet, Universal History Notes, National Library of Scotland [NLS], 4992\188.
41. Ibid., 34.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 36.
44. Ibid., 1–31. The lectures are undated but probably come from c. 1752–55. The lectures may have been given to the Glasgow Literary Society, which met after 1752 and of which Hume was later a member. On the other hand, they may have been part of a special course for students or discourses given to the University. See also Carol Gibson-Wood, “George Turnbull and Art History at Scottish Universities in the Eighteenth Century,” RACAR 28 (2001): 7–18, especially 10–12.
45. Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and “Religious Realignment Between the Restoration and Union” in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 145–68; Allen, Virtue, Learning, and the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993).
46. NL 88–89.
47. The Histoire ecclésiastique par M. Fleury, Prêtre, Prieur d’Argenteüil, & confesseur du Roy (vols. I–XXX) was continued by others as Histoire ecclésiastique pour servir de continuation à celle de Monsieur l’Abbé. The book is not by Cardinal Fleury, who also wrote history, but by Claude Fleury (1640–1723).
48. “M. Fleuri has given us an excellent work which bears that title; he has added to that a discours raisonné more estimable and precious than his history. This judicious writer, in developing in his discourse the means by which God has conserved His Church, sets out at the same time the abuse on which this species of writing is apt to slip. It is right in principle to say ‘that it is true that truth is one and entire; that if religion is true, the history of the Church is also; that truth ought not to be opposed to truth, & that the ills of the Church have been great, but they serve to confirm the promises of God who will defend it to the end of time against the powers and efforts of Hell.’” Encyclopédie, 1:1052n44.
49. Ibid., 1:1052.
50. Ibid., 2:335–37.
51. Ibid., 3:642–43. Wharton did write a treatise on clerical celibacy, but he was best known as an editor of historical sources, many of which Hume had used in writing his History of England and for attacks on the Jesuits.
