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
