are outlined and seen in the context of other essays he wrote as well as the Treatise. But Hume’s “skeptical argument is only as good as Hume’s scholarship.” A real strength of this chapter is its masterful account of Hume’s sources, of which there are dozens, including many classical historians. Plutarch is cited most; Polybius is a “favored source”; Thucydides and Xenophon are “trusted,” as is Xenophon, whose “reliability as a historian rests for Hume on his being a contemporary of the events he narrates.” Less trusted are Herodotus and Livy. Hume’s assessments of Tacitus, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder are more complicated, and extended attention goes to Hume’s critique of Athenaeus’s account of the population of Athens. Several other topics—slavery and infanticide included—are also dissected from the perspective of Hume’s use of sources. Box and Silverthorne conclude that “Hume accumulated from his having ‘read over of almost all the Classics both Greek and Latin’ an astonishing amount of evidence, much of which scholars of population in antiquity still use today, and that he deployed it relentlessly to question, and in many cases, to invalidate definitively, the overconfident generalizations of those admirers of antiquity who had uncritically exaggerated its populousness.” That survey is brought to bear on Hume’s account of “ancient virtue” and “modern luxury.” So what are we to make of Hume’s account? More than anything else, Hume’s “Of the Populousness of Antient Nations” was “a work of history,” but it was also one with ample room for Hume’s skepticism. Hume appears to lead his readers to a rather ambiguous conclusion: “Though we cannot prove that population was lower amongst the ancients, it would be enthusiasm to attempt to fashion society on the supposition that it was higher.”
Far from presenting the final word on Hume as historical thinker and historical writer, the chapters in this book offer fresh and insightful points of departure for further research. Some readers may wish to dip in to particular chapters only, and of course each can be read as a stand-alone piece. But their real power—or so it seems to the volume’s editor—comes in reading them as a connected whole. Historical thinking and historical writing were clearly at the core of Hume’s being. Together, these chapters provide an exceptionally rich account of David Hume as historian.
HUME 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
