One shared stylistic feature of Cicero’s and Hume’s engagement with religion is their cross-genre approach to religion. For Cicero, this enabled him to reach a broader audience and delicately nuance certain positions. The use of different formats may also have appealed to the diverse cultural identities that he aimed to assimilate under the Roman banner. If we compare parts of a speech (“De domo sua,” 57 B.C.E.), a poem (“De consulatu suo,” 60 B.C.E.), a letter (to Atticus, 61 B.C.E.), and a philosophical work (De officiis, 44 B.C.E.), we notice that writing across these different genres from different moments in his career, Cicero consistently made an identical point: that religio was foundational for the unity of the state.12 His practice of using different genres dispersed his convictions across a wider range of human emotions and enhanced the potential for his ideas to reach and compel the variety of listeners and readers that constituted his audience. It also was an implicit acknowledgment that the spectrum of human sensibilities was broad: those who responded to poetry may have found it difficult to be convinced by a speech or vice versa. In each genre Cicero verified a similar point regarding religion: it was deeply connected to political stability and communal well-being.
As a subset within this first feature, his cross-genre approach, we should add that Cicero placed a particular value on the dialogue form to reveal the depths of the complexity of questions regarding the nature of the gods. The masterpiece from late in his career, De natura deorum (45 B.C.E.), thoughtfully exposed the potential of rich dialogue to advance compelling and contrasting positions on theological questions. Its dialogic structure demonstrated intellectual agility and displayed a sense of the complicated, interconnected issues in the discussion of religion. Important for Cicero, and later for Hume, was that an author’s views on the thorniest religious issues could be disguised behind character-interlocutors. This sort of concealment licensed both Hume and Cicero to press into controversial terrain and avoid culpability for undermining the beliefs of their readers. For Cicero there was an added benefit to this complicated veiling: it allowed him to choose his later positions from a wide palette and avoid being labeled hypocritical. At various moments in his corpus, but most intensely in his mature Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume wrote in this Ciceronian style of dialogue. Generally speaking, both men opted to suspend final judgment on controversial issues raised in their famous dialogues, yet neither thoroughly denounced traditions that sustained order and inspired virtue.
A second stylistic feature of Cicero’s approach that also appeared in Hume’s writing is the concomitant championing and challenging of religion. Cicero’s critical and constructive energy regarding religion was evident in his affirmation of public worship to the gods that supported the republic and his dismissal of private sacraments to the gods that distorted social responsibility. The latter were held as perversions, vices, or superstitio: sets of communal practices that could not be assimilated into the Roman religion. Cicero both criticized and supported different forms of religio to mark boundaries and serve his individual sense of political stability.
Even when he was not attending to specific distinctions between religio and superstitio, Cicero’s rhetoric on religion was two-sided. The degree to which his affirmations of certain religious beliefs and practices were generally qualified by critical remarks (both early in his career and even in his later works) provide evidence that Cicero never disavowed religion completely or entirely and that his support for religion was never without hesitation. His rhetorical strategy, rather, was to embrace certain aspects of religio and abandon others.13 Hume would take a similar bifurcated approach to religion. Given that his overall support for religion was less conspicuous than Cicero’s, his readers likely felt more sting from Hume’s critical emphasis.
A third stylistic feature of Cicero’s approach to religion that Hume’s resembled was his backward-looking means of establishing its claims. Cicero legitimated certain religious traditions of the ancestors over others by picking and choosing from a wide assortment of historical manifestations. We might say that he “defined” religion by granting historical continuity to some practices and denying it to others.14 Deft deployment of this kind of critique and affirmation (per the second feature) of historical practices served to exalt aspects of the Roman past and thereby point the way to a stable future. These rhetorical acts of reverence for ancestral traditions were clever acts of definition and restriction: they limited acceptable religious practices to those which (Cicero believed) ultimately served imperial interests. Hume did not venerate the ancestors in the way that Cicero did. His historical mode of inquiry generally operated along causal lines— the probability of a past event was able to be determined by evidence we currently have for it. Hume’s historical writings assess the contemporary status of both true and popular religion by describing their evolution. Thus Hume’s backward look intended to locate resources for a stable future where it was a virtue to love the established religion of one’s country (“there must be an ecclesiastical order, and a public establishment of religion in every civilized community” [HE, 3.134–35]).
The cross-genre approach to religion and the use of dialogue form, the critical and affirmative modes of engaging religion, and the importance of the history of religion for stability of the political order were formal features that appeared in both Cicero’s and Hume’s stylized approaches to religion. In addition to these components, there is overlapping content in the areas of theism, morality, and the passions, the areas I posit as the elemental building blocks for our provisional notion of true religion inspired by and linked to Hume’s work.
Three of Cicero’s Philosophical Ideas Concerning Religion
Of course, Hume’s radical Enlightenment work cannot be separated from its generally anti-Christian, rational emphases on natural religion. At the same time, its classical influence should not be overlooked. In fact, much of Hume’s thought was a synthesis of his extensive reading of classical writers. While he made no direct citations for his specific ideas, his work explicitly referenced scores of classical texts and thinkers. On the grounds of his admitted reading of and high regard for Cicero, we can fairly presume that he was influenced by the notion that religion—at its best—could enhance social and political life and contribute to the stability of the passions and the development of excellence of character. Accordingly, three philosophical ideas concerning religion in Cicero’s work stand out: his skeptical embrace of general theism, his notion that religion could moderate the passions, and his belief that religion could enhance virtuous character development. I shall briefly treat these in order.
Nowhere in the Ciceronian corpus do we find a flat-out rejection of the idea of an Author of Nature. Neither, however do we find a full-blown description of Cicero’s notion of divinity. Cicero’s public position on theism evolved throughout his long career, and he generally concealed his personal theistic beliefs, making it difficult to pinpoint his specific position on theism. Caught in the matrix of a contested yet expanding Hellenic worldview, Cicero’s attempt to reconcile Roman political identity with the heterogeneous ethnic and fluid cultural identities that constituted the empire led him to shift between articulating a skeptical theism, suspending judgment on theism, and remaining uncommitted on the question of theism.15 The general direction of Cicero’s dynamic rhetoric on theism, which is generally discernible after a patient reading across his wide corpus, is that our minds naturally assumed a deity.16 He confirmed this in an early speech, “De haruspicum responsis” (57 B.C.E.), when he asked, “who is so witless that, when he gazes up into heaven, he fails to see that gods exist?”17 Of course, Cicero’s nondogmatic approach to the question of theism was deeply considered and informed by an ethic of utility. His commitment to traditional civic religion required that he embrace, at best, or capitulate, at worst, to a basic theism that acknowledged the inescapability of our powerful belief in a natural order governed by a sense of general providence (that divine reason