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 on the passions that Hume inherited and present his general theory of the passions. He explicitly described the category of hope—the opposite of fear—as a direct passion that occurred when “the mind by an original instinct tends to unite itself with the good, and to avoid the evil” (T, 2.3.9.2). He showed in both the Enquiry (1748) and the Natural History of Religion (1757) that this hope, always linked to fear, was the driving force behind popular religion, superstition, and enthusiasm, along with their concomitants, miracles and salvation. My intervention is to elucidate Hume’s notion of hope in light of Joseph Godfrey’s theory of hope. This exposes that Hume’s own hopes—“where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science” (T, intro., 10)—were very calm and moderate. He never exhibited, in his life, letters, or work, personal hopes of the sort that he described as direct passion hopes. He consciously moderated his passions and was generally known to be of a temperate, peaceful, and congenial disposition even in the face of personal misery. This disposition, which Godfrey contends is a type of hope (fundamental hope), might be a useful component of our Humean true religion. It implies a trust in nature, and this particular kind of trust implies a belief that what we have is all we need.23
Chapter 4 places Hume’s moral thought in the context of his immediate predecessors, that is, between the rationalists and sentimentalists. This sets up my argument, based on Annette Baier’s extensive work, for a religious sensibility in Hume’s practical morality. Hume’s conviction is that sympathy—a psychological mechanism that allows us to share the feelings of another—assists us in the development of virtuous character.