Critics of Hume, in his day and in ours, have largely dismissed the idea ‘true religion’ in Hume as a “useless rump” with no religious value and little practical significance.4 I have two replies to this brush-off. First, to insist that Hume’s undescribed true religion has no religious value is to construe religious value in narrow, reductionist terms (that is, as false religion). The study of history, which Hume took to be enjoyable, intellectually edifying, and morally enriching (EMPL, 6.565), taught him that religion could be more than an amalgamation of ritualistic practices, ecstatic worship of deity, and a set of unyielding moral rules handed down from above. Second, the claim that Hume’s true religion has little practical significance obscures more than it clarifies. The connotation here is that practical significance is a function of direct moral precepts, explicit worship practices, or other formal influences. Hume detested this way of both describing and being religious. Thus, reducing religion to the conventional ideas of religious value and practical significance do not comport with his full perspective on the matter.
Hume considered religion, in its various forms, to be historically potent. And history, according to Hume, was unequivocal: it confirmed that religion was a consistent feature of human experience and that its popular manifestations had terrifying effects in the world.5 Given this, one might expect that Hume would want humans to be completely against the idea of religion and aim to abolish it. In fact, he took the opposite position. He never contended that humans should destroy all forms of religion, for religious sentiment never could be done away with fully. Instead, Hume actually suggested a state religion to counteract religious enthusiasm and ecclesiastical malfeasance (HE, 3.134–35). He wrote, “Look out for a people, entirely destitute of religion: if you find them at all, be assured, that they are but a few degrees removed from brutes” (NHR, 15.9). These sorts of claims illuminate the value of religion for civil society. They are found throughout Hume’s corpus and confirm a mild commitment to religion, sometimes for no other reason but to enhance social stability and augment common morality. Hume believed that religion, in its “proper office,” served a socioethical function. He stated that his “philosophy” (presumably, also his “philosophy of religion”) “if just, can present us only with mild and moderate sentiments” (T, 1.4.7.13) and suggested that true religion should reflectively affirm the stable, humanizing beliefs of common life (NHR, 12.13).6 His work also affirmed a basic sense of theism: “The universal propensity to believe in invisible, intelligent power, if not an original instinct is at least a general attendant of human nature” (15.5). Our speculative Humean true religion replaces the supernaturalism of popular religion with the fundamental belief in an Author of Nature. It supplants the “monstrous,” “Priestly inventions,” and “monkish virtues” of vulgar religion (T, 3.2.5.14) with the emphasis on virtuous character. And it displaces the enthusiastic, direct-passion hopes of false religion with a modest hope.
Hume’s work persuades us that useful suggestions for theism, morality, and passions do not, by any means, require religion. Yet if we consider religion, as I think Hume does, as a disposition that quietly connects us more deeply to one another and to that which is greater than us while inspiring excellence of character and steady passions that cultivate happiness and social stability, then we can say that this general theism, moderation of the passions, and practical morality, taken cumulatively, might be religious in effect. Our conjecture ‘true religion’ jettisons enthusiastic beliefs, divine behavioral codes, sacred rituals and texts, and ecstatic worship. In this way it expands the very idea of what it means to be religious. It advances gentle hopes for how religion might quietly contribute to the development of virtuous character and the moderation of the passions, and it holds a fundamental belief in a sense of general providence that neither creates factions nor aspires to universals. Naming these as provisional elements of a Humean true religion allows us to raise questions about the category ‘religion’ itself, something usually given scant attention in discussions of Hume.
If it is to be usable, a sound constructive project cannot simply materialize out of thin air: it must rely on historical evidence and corroborate with discursive trends. Locating the seeds for our proposal to build a provisional notion ‘true religion’ from Hume’s thought in efforts that precede his work could be helpful. In this regard, Cicero’s approach to religion and the discourse after it is of some use. Hume relied on the conventions of religious discourse post-Cicero by deploying the framework ‘true’ versus ‘false’ concerning religion and assuming that religion was a unique feature of human nature. At the same time, he challenged some of the inherited binaries (religious and secular, God and nature, self and world, metaphysical and empirical) and questioned the epistemological aspirations of the category ‘religion’ in modern discourse. Constructing a Humean true religion from the generative fragments of his work illuminates two crucial insights for our larger concern with this discourse that sometimes remain opaque in secondary scholarship of Hume: that he treats ‘religion’ as a category without a fixed meaning and that he uses the category ‘religion’ as part and parcel of a strategic enterprise. Hume approaches use of the term ‘religion’ as a question of cultural politics: he understands that discourse on religion invents and reifies domains (the religious and the nonreligious) that mark boundaries and serve a purpose beyond the academic.7 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