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.
