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 to the sixteenth centuries were the Renaissance fascination with the glories of the classical age, which inspired a cultural look backward (Ficino, Erasmus); the development of more complex theological systems by Scholastic thinkers in the universities, which led to a bolder distinction between faith and reason (Aquinas); and the scientific revolution, which generated new geographies of knowledge and new conceptions of the truth (Galileo, Newton).
Nondiscursive trends that played a significant role in this age were the increase in international trade and travel, the introduction of other cultures, the invention and proliferation of the printing press, and the development of new economic and political conditions (namely, monetary systems that increased the power of the bourgeoisie and led to the development of strong, centralized government). These circumstances not only inspired questions about the sanctity and usefulness of Roman Catholicism (these circumstances led to the Protestant Reformation) but also weakened the authority of the Christian revelation. Poignantly aware of the historical and cultural context, Grotius and Lord Herbert cleverly answered threats against Christianity by venerating it as the highest form of knowledge and (therefore) the greatest form of good. They deftly aided the transfer of the source of Christian power from the dominion of religious hierarchy (that is, the Catholic Church) to the rational basis of Christianity itself, the universal consensus it naturally generated, and the inner feelings it was based on and inspired. They contended that Christianity was authoritative and true not because clerics imposed it but because of the universal embrace stirred by its internally rational principles, which perfectly reflected the conditions and contexts that supported them.
Grotius and Lord Herbert quelled the dogmatic schisms of the theologians, defended Christianity against Islam and Judaism, and relied on the logic of modern science to establish that the Christian revelation was rationally certain. A major part of their intervention in religious discourse was the seminal importance they gave to the theme of the true. Both men claimed that Christianity was, indisputably, the true religion. They argued that its truth was derived from its universal standing as an inward instinct (not from the laws of science or the Biblical insight of clerics) imprinted by Divine Revelation (this ensured that it was not fully antagonistic to the Church). The true, in the work of both men, was inseparable from revelation and attached to the universal. Their quasi-Scholastic arguments cast a shadow that could not be ignored in subsequent discussions.
The Dutch-born Grotius articulated a conception of true religion in his best-known and groundbreaking work, De jure belli ac pacis (1625).31 A poem he composed in Dutch during his imprisonment in Loevenstein on the truth of the Christian religion (1620), however, might be more important in terms of the links between religion and the theme of the true. This poem, translated into Latin and transformed