Hume had less of an explicit political investment, and his analysis of and mild suggestion for religion developed out of a discourse structured by modern logic. His eighteenth-century deference to the Ciceronian view of religion reflected the “classical revival” of his time, which was in part a strategy of resistance. Modern science and logic strove to provide the category ‘religion’ with philosophical legitimacy, for this would make it ‘true.’ Hume resisted the obsession with abstract, normative reason that informed modern discourse by claiming, like Cicero, that the true was best used to connote the most stable, not the most logical.
Philosophical Discourse on Religion: From Religio to True Religion
For with what confidence can I venture upon such bold enterprizes, when beside those numberless infirmities peculiar to myself, I find so many which are common to human nature? Can I be sure that in leaving all establish’d opinions I am following truth; and by what criterion shall I distinguish her, even if fortune shou’d at last guide me on her foot-steps?
—T, 1.4.7.3
My aim in this section is to give a brief account of the theme of the ‘true’ in philosophical discourse on religion in the West to illuminate how Hume may have responded to this discourse. Philosophical discourse on religion has largely been determined by historical developments in science, philosophy, and religion and deeply impacted by a complicated matrix of cultural, economic, political, and psychic challenges. It is difficult to tease out single threads from the complicated can of worms that has informed its arc and decipher their precise impact. A general history of this discourse bears out two facts: the first is that the idea ‘religion’ has proven to be flexible and always in process; the second is that modern philosophical discourse on religion has revolved around the theme of the true.
Cicero’s visionary management of religio highlighted the vast array of political, cultural, and economic considerations he faced. Establishing a particular form of worship as epistemically true was not a primary consideration for him. Religio, in his framing, was not a form of knowledge; it was public worship of the gods that led to the virtue of justice and supported the stability of the Roman Republic. This form of civic religion based on the Greek notion of religion was destabilized by the unpredictable interplay of sociopolitical and cultural factors along with the dynamism of the growing confrontation between Greek and Christian intellectual traditions. In other words, we can read the classical approach to religio as getting swept up in the quest for institutional religious authority and its discursive claims for religion to be true. Third-century Christian apologist Tertullian, for example, strictly marked the “‘true religion’ of the true god” (veram religionem veri dei) as distinct from the worship of other gods.24 The true religion would demand the most authority and be the most powerful.
The insights of Jeremy Schott and Denise Kimber Buell—through their deployment of postcolonialist theory—remind us that, to a large extent, early Christian discourse was a confrontation of ethnic identities vying for survival. Under these circumstances, establishing a particular form of ritual practice as true would have great significance. Framed around the “truth” of doctrine, practice, or religio, the debate between Christian apologists and Greek intellectuals in the second- and third-century Roman Empire was a will-to-truth driven by sociopolitical circumstances, material interests, cultural concerns, and psychological needs. This, in part, explains the shift away from Cicero’s practical handling of religio as a civic virtue to others who privileged its status as true. For example, the work of third-century Platonists Celsus and Porphyry argued against the growing “threat” of marginal Christians in terms of true and false. Fourth-century Christian apologists Lactantius, Augustine, and Eusebius—in many ways respondents to Celsus and Porphyry—framed Christianity as the true religion (vera religio) and contrasted it with the false religion (falsa religio) of the empire. Both sides in this debate claimed theirs was the true religion. The legacy of the framing of religion as either true or false reverberates in religious discourse in our late modern moment.
Celsus and Porphyry, two Platonists, and Lactantius and Eusebius, two Christians, marked the early parameters of the third- and fourth-century debate in Rome between Christian apologists and defenders of imperial religion.25 In the Ciceronian tradition, Celsus and Porphyry valued the ancestral religions (most of them Romanized so that they could be integrated into imperial service) and contended that the best way to be religious was to affirm beliefs that had already proven to serve political stability. Against this valiant defense of the classical conception of religio as having a civic function, early Christian thinkers prioritized a particular set of beliefs and practices that venerated Divine Revelation through Jesus Christ as indisputably true.26 Celsus and Porphyry showed little appreciation for this Christian form of revelation, its concomitant notion of salvation, and the emphasis on miracles of this Jesus sect. Most important, they did not agree that acceptance of Jesus as Son of God was more important than political sustenance and civic stability. They took the “fringe” movement called Christianity to be inherently destabilizing given its public refusal to be subsumed under Roman political hierarchy or absorbed into Roman religious identity. Celsus and Porphyry were religious thinkers concerned with questions of political good and imperial sustenance. For them, the true religion was justified by its historical performance. The starting point for their assessment of sacred beliefs and practices was, did it stabilize the social order? These two men were often read as critics of early Christianity, attackers of the Christian faith, or traditionalists concerning religion.27 Adolf Harnack reminds us that they were united by a positive view of religion as the natural disposition that tied individuals in sacred, communal worship of the gods in ways that affirmed political order. A hallmark of their thought was the fundamental synthesis of the religious, social, and political. It followed from this that the Romanization of different systems of religious belief was necessary for a common morality. Celsus wrote, “If everyone were to adopt the Christian’s attitude, moreover, there would be no rule of law: the legitimate authority would be abandoned; earthly things would return to chaos and come into the hands of the lawless and savage barbarians.”28
Celsus and Porphyry extended part of the Ciceronian legacy against the onslaught of Christianity. Their goal-line defense of religio as public worship of the gods for the sustenance of political order, however, could not withstand the power of the emerging Christian identity that claimed the crown of the true religion and came to dominate the discourse on religion.29 Post-Constantine, Christianity confidently enjoyed imperial authority. Though there were challenges to it, the link between Christianity and the “truth” has not been uncoupled as discourse on religion has evolved in the West. This is important for our constructivist project on David Hume: it shows the discursive boundaries that he inherited and confirms the possibilities for extending his thought through a deeper awareness of these constraints.
The graceful logic of two seventeenth-century figures, Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Hugo Grotius, presents us with a different sense of the idea of religion and its links with the theme of the true. These two early modern architects of thought advanced philosophical discourse on religion as it engaged with the quest for truth mounted by early modern science. Secondary literature depicts Grotius and Lord Herbert as thinkers who anticipated the new method of philosophical inquiry articulated by Bacon, a radical Protestant who tried to make the Reformed tradition more amenable to reason, and Descartes, an early modern humanist responsible for the development of the fields of natural law and natural religion.30 I focus on another seminal insight of their work: that Christianity was a universal, rational set of beliefs and practices that relied on a particular form of revealed knowledge. These elements made it true.
The collapse of the authority of the papacy was a watershed moment that paved the way for the work of Grotius and Lord Herbert and the evolution of the modern discourse on religion. While the details are too complicated to describe here at length, both discursive trends and nondiscursive conditions propelled religious thought of their era. Three major discursive trends that contributed to the weakening and collapse of church authority from the thirteenth
