Perhaps attending to Hume’s underdeveloped sense of religion’s proper office can demonstrate how he simultaneously employed and challenged the category ‘religion’ in ways remarkable for his time.
Although Cicero’s deployment of the category religio is generally overlooked in Hume’s discussion of religion, it is feasible that he was influenced by Cicero’s emphasis on stability, moderation, and morality concerning religion. In fact, the foundational qualities of our Humean true religion—genuine theism, moderate hope, and practical morality—are grounded in Cicero’s classical idea of civic religion, which he inherited from the Greeks. Religio, in this classical view, aimed not for grace, salvation, or immortality but for the cultivation of civic virtue, political stability, and social trust. There are, however, over seventeen hundred years between Cicero and Hume, during which time discourse on religion shifted from the emphasis on civic virtue and public ritual to concerns about the philosophical legitimacy of beliefs in God and miracles. What might we gain by reading the constructive side of his approach to religion as a preservation of parts of the classical idea religio fused with insights from modernity filtered through his counter-Enlightenment lens? To answer these questions I turn to the work of Cicero and to three other key nodal points in the discourse on religion in which Hume participates.
Cicero was the towering figure for early eighteenth-century British thinkers. His work was seminal for Hume, who referred to him often as the wisest of the Roman philosophers (LG, 23). Often connected in secondary literature due to their similarly deft application of the extended dialogue form to the vexing questions of religion, their comparable classifications of the passions, and their related approaches to morality, Cicero and Hume are regarded as intellectual co-conspirators operating across a vast historical lacuna.8 Given Hume’s explicit devotion to Cicero’s style and his unequivocal classical approach to morality, it is relatively easy to expose their similar emphases and common outlooks, which privilege a moderate skepticism, display a commitment to moderation, and emphasize utility. The well-documented Ciceronian stylistic influence on Hume’s moral thought (Hume took himself to be a “classical moralist” concerned about self-formation toward excellence) and his theory of the passions (Hume’s self-styled Stoicism venerated moderation) invite us to further consideration of Hume’s work on religion. Does Hume conceive of religion in a classical mode? Might his idea of religion’s proper office be an updated version of Cicero’s religio? If so, what content or features might his underdeveloped notion ‘true religion’ contain?
To explain what Hume may have borrowed from Cicero at a significant moment in modern discourse, I provide a brief section on the stylistic features (part 1) and content areas (part 2) of Cicero’s writing on religion. Following this section, I characterize a key theme of modern discourse on religion: the notion of truth. Shaped by historical factors (the advance of reason and science, a decline in the authority of the church, and the Enlightenment quest for universal truth) and guided by evolving interests (identity politics, economic interests, and psychological needs), fertile, philosophical discourse on religion post-Cicero established new conceptions of truth and knowledge from which the modern idea of religion would sprout. This characterization of modern discourse on religion illustrates the degree to which Hume may have found himself trapped by discursive boundaries. What language was available for a thinker who was neither a deist nor a conventional theist to describe what he considered a genuine theism? What options were available for a moralist who was neither a dogmatic atheist nor a conventional religionist to discuss the potential positive impact of religion on morality? What philosophical position could one occupy if one wanted a hope that elided both superstition and miracles?
Hume inherited a conversation that engaged the idea ‘religion’ in terms of true and false, and he followed this discursive convention even as he redefined its terms. Religion that appeared in history and appealed to the (illusory) standard of abstract philosophy he dubbed false religion. True religion was the corrective idea for those forms of religion that aspired to be a species of philosophy. It was the counterpoint to arrogant atheism, stubborn superstition, and emphatic enthusiasm. It was also the inverse to forms of religious thought and practice that venerated the sacred as the source of morality, allowed for a divinity that could perform miracles, and originated in extreme passions. Hume implied that true religion, like Cicero’s religio, venerated stability in the realm of politics, morality, and our passions. It ratified the natural functions of the mind, the reflective customs and habits of common life, and the development of virtuous character.
The remainder of this chapter elaborates the potential influence Cicero may have had on the style and content on Hume’s religious thought and then attempts to situate Hume in the milieu of the religious discourse of his day. Hume’s implicit suggestion for religion was informed by historical forces such as the growth of institutional religious authority in Scotland, dynamics in Enlightenment philosophy, developments in modern science, the trajectory of discourse on religion, and his own moderate, skeptical, and naturalist vision. Keeping track of the shifting dimensions of discourse on religion as they manifested post-Cicero in the robust, multifaceted political considerations of Porphyry and Celsus, the quest for universal, rational truth in the work of Hugo Grotius and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and the naturalizing emphasis of Matthew Tindal and Thomas Morgan brings out the remarkable extent to which the early modern conception of religion revolved around themes that Hume both relied on and challenged. Admittedly, there are other stories one could tell about the philosophical conversation on religion and how it bears on true religion (for example, the history of Christian apologists such as Tertullian, Lucretius, Augustine, and Aquinas situates Christianity as the true religion and is a related trajectory in the same discourse). My hope is that the reader will find my choices to be warranted not simply by my aims but by a sound interpretation of the broad trends of the philosophical discourse and the proper temperament for the constructive task that lay ahead.
Hume’s Ciceronian Influence
Upon the whole, I desire to take my catalogue of Virtues from Cicero’s Offices, not from the Whole Duty of Man. I had, indeed, the former Book in my Eye in all my Reasonings.
—LET, 1.32.13
Hume admitted that he was deeply influenced by the “noble eloquence” (EMPL, 12.223) of Marcus Tullius Cicero.9 To understand the most significant aspects of Cicero’s thoughts about religion and illustrate their impact on Hume, I highlight three features of Cicero’s rhetorical and stylized approach to religio that appear in Hume’s work, then I isolate three of Cicero’s philosophical positions concerning religion that Hume seems to share. Attending to possible Ciceronian influences can provide classical foundations for Hume’s consideration of religion and thicken our understanding of what he could have meant when he contemplated its proper office.
Cicero is generally considered to be one of the most important literary figures of the Roman Republic due to the breadth of his extant corpus; his quest to situate Greek philosophy in the Latin vernacular; his brilliant comprehension of the nexus of religious, social, and political issues of his time; and his rhetorical virtuosity. It is his remarkable political career and energetic role as statesman, however, that figure most prominently into his intellectual legacy and shape his idea of religio. Cicero’s status as literatus rests on his vocation as a public servant, for even after his forced retirement from politics (46–44 B.C.E.) he conceived of himself as an active public orator in the Roman public sphere. His complex engagement with religion depended on but was not reducible to his public commitments. As Eli Edward Burriss bluntly writes, “The state was the first love of Cicero, and, if religion could serve the state, Cicero was willing to obey the laws of religion.”10 We should take care, however, not to completely collapse Cicero’s contributions on religion into his politics. He was well acquainted with the power humans associated with ritual practices (haruspex, augury, prophesy, etc.), and he showed respect for sacrality. He spoke of these things, and others, strategically, under the idea religio, likely derived from the root legere, “to gather together” or “to arrange.”11 Still, his intentions for religion
