Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Lewis A. Selby-Bigge and Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Cited by section, part, and paragraph number or by section and paragraph number, where applicable.On June 6, 1764, Sir James Macdonald, Eighth Baronet of Sleat (a peninsula on the Isle of Skye in the Scottish Highlands), penned a letter from Paris. His friend David Hume, in his role of secretary to the British ambassador, was also in Paris. Hume’s writings, particularly his History of the Stuarts and Natural History of Religion, were greatly admired in France, and statesmen, visiting dignitaries, and patrons of high-society literary salons exalted him as if he were an international luminary. In fact, the entire sojourn in France—Hume’s fourth, longest visit (twenty-six months)—was marked by adulation from the French reading public. This enlivened and energized Hume. He may also have been relieved by the sentiment expressed in Sir James’s correspondence to a friend in England: “poor Hume, who on your side of the water was thought to have too little religion, is here thought to have too much.”1
What Sir James dubs Hume’s “too much” religion is the point of departure for this book. Hume’s contribution to religious thought is generally regarded as negative. He is widely read as an infidel, a critic of the Christian faith, and an attacker of popular forms of worship. His reputation as irreligious is well forged among his readers, and his argument against miracles perennially indoctrinates thousands of first-year philosophy students. The offhanded remark of Sir James, however, whose Oxford training and cosmopolitanism earned him the nickname “the Scottish Marcellus,” reminds us that our philosophical views are, ultimately, perspectival and that religion is an interpretive concept. To the French, Hume’s writings neither confirmed that he was an atheist in the mode of D’Holbach, nor made clear that he desired to destroy the church à la Voltaire. The iconoclastic French atheists therefore took Hume’s critique of religion to be relatively mild.
Perhaps Sir James’s comment reflected the philosophes’ inclination to see Hume’s work as open to the possibility that religion could be understood as a social convention and an artifact of culture that affirmed habits of moral excellence, aimed to moderate passion-inspired beliefs, and, as a result, buttressed the stability of the civic order. To them, even mild receptivity to this concept of religion would have been troubling, for religion required submission and thereby diminished human liberty. Hume actually shared most of the philosophes’ criticisms against religious belief: he thought popular religion, in its modern sense as a philosophically legitimate system of beliefs, was mostly dangerous, and he was deeply troubled by the conventional categories of dogmatic Christianity (miracles, a supernatural deity with human attributes, etc.).
Hume took history seriously. He acknowledged religion to be a historical activity of humans in community that sometimes had pernicious outcomes and other times had virtuous ones. He may have understood himself as occupying a watershed moment when the classical notion of religio, a set of socially beneficial celebrations of the gods, was being replaced by the modern notion of religion, a system of beliefs, practices, and rules warranted by abstract thought. Treating Hume as a transitional figure between the dying legacy of cultus deorum, pietas, and virtus and the emergence of the idea ‘religion’ as a set of epistemically true yet speculative claims repositions the relative weight of his antireligious sentiment. Instead of relying on personal animus, this move allows that both historical and discursive forces were central for his invective against religion. The distinction between modern conceptions of religion that sought philosophical legitimation and the classical idea of religio that was marked by the capacity to stabilize sociopolitical order was partially reflected in Hume’s bifurcated approach. As a modern thinker, he sometimes took religion to be a broad, neutral phenomenon eminently suited for cross-cultural and transhistorical study that had become corrupt in its contemporary popular manifestations. Yet the classical influence on his thought led him, at other times, to consider religion to be a particular virtue that could serve ethical formation in spite of its rampant distortions. This helps us understand why, on the one hand, Hume advanced a derisive critique of popular religious beliefs yet, on the other, he encouraged the virtue of moderate passions in our religious endeavors (as well as our philosophical and political ones). The dynamic oscillations of Hume’s thought project—his veritable attempt to expose the severe limitations of abstract thought and false philosophy and, at the same time, his quest to promote the possibilities of reflective imagination and true philosophy—are accentuated by paying close attention to his handling of religion, which follows from his interrogation of modern philosophy.
Hume challenged false philosophy as abstruse thought by showing that its foundational claims for truth were, on its own standards, unjustifiable. He called, instead, for a reflective turn toward nature and common life—what he named “true philosophy”—to gain a clearer sense of the sources of our ideas and beliefs. Hume’s acute sense of the bidirectional historical tendencies (both classical and modern) tugging at his philosophical consciousness along with his temperament as a thinker coalesced in ways that made his thought project unique. His notion ‘true philosophy’ was as illuminating an ideal as its appearance was elusive. Its sources were uncommon, and its content—humility, greatness of mind, and benevolence—unusual. More exceptionally, true philosophy might, on rare occasion, invite religion to its “proper office,” which Hume named “true religion,” following the discursive parameters of his day. Hume did not detail what he meant by true religion. We may reasonably presume, however, based on the overall emphasis of his project, that a Humean true religion might preserve the best of classical religion updated, without the epistemic insecurities of modern philosophy summoned by commitments to rational certainty and moral realism. Too thin for converts and too mild for most religious believers, Hume’s true religion manifested only rarely and was mostly an ideal form. Perhaps he took true religion to be something like a (classical) virtue warranted by the (modern) conventions of common life. He may have thought of it as true not because it reflected epistemic certainty but because the outcome of its beliefs could marshal Europe into an age of peace and (true) Enlightenment. That this was very unlikely (as Hume admitted) does not nullify the possibility that a constructive project based on Hume’s grappling with religion might be of contemporary use for the philosophy of religion.
Most philosophers of religion hold the view that when it came to religion, Hume was simply a devastating critic. Scholars who take this position, however, cannot deny the warm references to true religion in his thought. Is true religion a throw-away category in Hume—empty or insincere—a mere fig leaf hiding his irreligion? Or is it a bit more—an inchoate suggestion about how we might properly conceive religion? The following argument assesses Hume’s philosophy of religion with an eye toward its generative value for contemporary religious thought. I am
