Both thinkers pay close attention to Hume’s positive description of religion and correctly privilege the view that his intellectual investments were driven by social and religious concerns as well as political considerations and philosophical strategies. The cornerstones for my argument are the basic theism Livingston grants Hume, Baier’s acknowledgment that Hume’s calm passions serve socioethical interests, and Joseph Godfrey’s idea that religious hope can be fundamental hope (what Hume would call a calm passion).
My Approach to Hume
In the introduction to his first work Hume claimed that he wanted “to establish a science . . . superior in utility to any other of human comprehension” (T, xxiii). From the beginning of his writing career, “utility” was the ultimate aim and driving force of his wide-ranging enterprise.20 Against the Platonist commitment to escape time and transcend conditions, Hume’s goals were practical: he wanted to contribute ideas that enhanced common life and increased social peace. Against false metaphysics and popular religion, he was confident about the history of human propensity for both good and evil, committed to our being ensconced in a complex web of traditions, and invested in the slight possibility that we might improve conditions for generations to come. In some ways, we can say that the classic repose of stoic tranquility was transformed in Hume to a posture of equipoise: that we do our best to live in full contact with the mystery of life and remain open to its challenging vicissitudes without a paralyzing fear.
Hume’s positive project was derived from his attention to history, which confirmed that divisiveness and conflict between both individuals and societies were often based on clashing religious beliefs and nature, the set of constantly combative and generative conditions that provided the grounds for, and connected a variety of, historical events. His philosophical response to the human limitations that history revealed neither fully rejected the radicalism of the philosophes (D’Holbach, Voltaire) nor completely embraced the rationalism of the metaphysicians (Descartes). Similarly, his response to the seeming chaos of experience was neither developed completely outside of the discursive framework of the natural religion of the deists (Tindal, Morgan) nor fully independent of the moderate Presbyterianism of his clergy friends (Blair, Carlyle). We might say that Hume’s suggestion for religion—neither a prescription nor a dogmatic plan—was endowed by epistemological humility and an affirmation of common sense, a gentle hope that we could better moderate the passions, and a moral commitment to social and civic stability.
In some ways, Hume’s historically grounded challenge to autonomous reason, popular religion, and moral rationalism was also leavened by an inordinate intellectual freedom unmatched by his immediate predecessors and his peers. He was neither constrained by an overwhelming commitment to his Christian lineage nor propelled by an irresistible disdain for it. Never completely against the idea of religion, Hume targeted religion as a species of philosophy, the vulgar form of religion that provided the illusion of metaphysical certainty and ontological reliability, supplied strict codes for moral conduct, and relied on fantastical hopes and illusory fears. Hume referred to this specific form of religion (most closely known to him as Scottish Presbyterianism) as popular religion, and it, along with enthusiasm and superstition, drew his ire.
I approach Hume as a broad, synthetic thinker informed by a love of wisdom and as a seeker inspired to find a way—that he might suggest to others—to be happy without the need for otherworldly transformation or sovereign authority and without impinging on the happiness of others. Mine is neither a disengaged reading of Hume nor is it an analytic approach: I try to write from inside the lived experience of joy, frustration, and laughter that I have as I read him. He venerated passionate engagement, energetic style, and lively provocation over disengaged reason, analytic argument, and stale professionalism. He aimed to be emotionally persuasive more than he did to be logically sound and seemed not to mind having contradictions in his writing. Hume strove, against the grain, for a kind of humaneness with his pen. The following argument aspires to this sort of Humean style. My encounter with the sum of Hume’s project has led me to believe it is a generative venture that inspires curiosity and aims to challenge many assumptions of the popular approaches of its day. I try to celebrate the spirit of his overall commitments and cherish his verbal dance to transform some of the textual possibilities available to him. Hume was comfortable with the complexity of human beings: our proclivity to good as well as our propensity for evil. My Humean approach takes his work as a philosophical and literary model in the way, for example, that he may have understood the work of Cicero and likely the way that Sir James understood him.
Roughly speaking, I read Hume’s epistemology as it relates to the question of theism against the logical positivists and phenomenalists who are generally concerned about the truth-value of propositions in Hume. I also take him to be a synthetic thinker about morality and the development of virtuous character against those who read him as a strict Hutchesonian about morals (someone who accepts that morals depend on an a priori moral sensibility). And I understand his theory of the passions to address not only psychological concerns but also social and political ones.21 Combining these elements, I hope to give a viable interpretation of a (barely stated) suggestion for religion.
Organization of the Argument
Admittedly, true religion has always been a contested term in religious discourse. Orthodox Christians use the descriptor “true religion” to refer to religious beliefs that depend on revelation. For freethinkers—many who later identified as deists—true religion was a set of religious beliefs derived from rational reflection on our experience of nature. Hume did not accept either of these views. He held little regard for religion based on revelation, interpretations of nature that led to the idea of a God with moral attributes, and a religion of reason that denied the foundational role of the passions in any human enterprise.
My first chapter is a prologue to the overall argument: it traces a particular narrative of true religion from the classical era through the English Enlightenment to Hume’s radical revision. My claim is that the traditional method of interpreting religious writers as either skeptics, critics, and atheists on one side and defenders, supporters, and institutionalizers on the other is obfuscating. I suggest a slight shift in framing: to read some as employing a hermeneutic of curiosity regarding religion and others as employing a hermeneutic of credulity.22 This allows for a richer assessment of thinkers on both sides of the religious question, and it opens our minds to the constructive components of work written by those we tend to label as critics (and summarily dismiss). Beginning with Cicero, I build a narrative of thinkers who deploy a hermeneutic of curiosity regarding religion, from second- and third-century writers Celsus and Porphyry through late medieval contributions of Hugo Grotius and Lord Herbert of Cherbury to Enlightenment figures Matthew Tindal and Thomas Morgan.
The body of my argument is given in the three chapters that follow the first one. Each attends to a feature of the speculative true religion that I am trying to build. Chapter 2 argues that Hume’s early philosophical writings presuppose a natural belief in general providence. Without the presupposition of regularity in nature (“secret springs and principles”) Hume could not have formulated his theory of ideas. I call this Hume’s basic theism and argue that it is foundational to his project and a presupposition of any science. I examine the path Hume carves between Cartesian rationalism and Pyrrhonian skepticism to demonstrate that this basic theism can evolve into either the vulgar theism of false religion or the genuine theism of true religion. I rehearse Hume’s theory of ideas and his discussion of belief to show that his causal worldview allows for the assertion that our imagination naturally projects an Author of Nature (ultimately unknowable) based on our observation of effects (with unobservable causes). This genuine theism is made intelligible in Norman Kemp Smith’s discussion of Hume’s theory of belief, which posits the category of natural belief. Thus, I can justifiably posit natural belief in genuine theism as the first leg in the stool of a Humean true religion.
In chapter 3, I discuss the discourse
