LITMIR.BIZ

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read those authors. It is unlikely that Hume knew that Dr. Jean Astruc, to whom he delivered a letter in 1764, was the anonymous author of the groundbreaking Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s’est servi pour composer le livre de la genèse (1753). That short work undercut orthodox beliefs in the divine inspiration of the mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch by showing that parts of it were composed of different accounts that had been conflated into the present text.⁴⁶ It is also unlikely that Hume knew anything of the works of the German thinkers who had begun to approach the Bible in novel ways. Hermann Samuel Reimarius, in isolation and secrecy, had begun to recast Christological questions, which he assumed had to be treated like any other questions about the facts of the past. G. E. Lessing was moving in the same direction. The more orthodox philologist, Johann David Michaelis, as he reconstructed the society of the ancient Hebrews, reduced them to the status of just another rather uncivilized Middle Eastern people. In Aberdeen, where George Campbell was already at work on a translation of the Gospels, that message would be understood, although its radical implications were rejected. Germans were doing the sort of thing that had been done to some extent by Bishops William Warburton and Robert Lowth. Lowth had made it possible to see the Old Testament as the product of a rude people hooked on metaphors, a people who were not closely related to the Christians of the New Testament. Indeed, the Hebrews were closer to the Greeks of the Homeric world, but this was not quite the compliment which it had been in the lectures of Patrick Cuming. Once the Hebrews had been put into a historical context, the Bible had to be treated like any other old text. It could then be seen to deal with local and particular matters, not those of world historical importance. Such critics, often clerics, had come perilously close to breaking the prophetic thread that was, up to that time, held to connect the two Testaments. Theirs were not altogether new messages, but they were now not being stated by a disreputable Irish priest’s son, like John Toland, but by respectable men holding university and church positions even as they relegated church history to a section of universal history mostly concerned with politics. Their theories and those of their French counterparts were the subjects of enlightened conversations.

      Finally, there were other continental influences that had some importance for eighteenth-century men thinking about ecclesiastical history. Those lie in the struggles of European rulers to control and regulate religious life in their domains. The greatest example of this was seen in the policies adopted and the actions taken by Louis XIV against Jansenists and Huguenots. Those were related to Louis’s efforts to bolster Roman Catholicism and to create what some saw as a universal monarchy. His career supplied many writers with all they needed to understand both priestcraft and kingcraft. In relatively tolerant Britain, the government faced nonjurors in both Scotland and England. It imposed greater controls on the Scottish Kirk through the imposition of toleration and patronage (1710–12) and by the management of the General Assembly. In England, it finally prohibited the meetings of Convocation after 1719. Everywhere those struggles centered on politics, on appointments, on the control of lands alienated to the Church, on the control of Jesuits and other orders, and on the rights of the Church and Papacy in various countries. Everywhere governments feared the enthusiasm provoked by Jansenists or expressed in the revivals conducted in France and Italy by Saint Alphonsus Ligouri. Protestant countries had to deal with enthusiastic Calvinists, Methodists, and dissenters from national churches who sometimes preferred exile and emigration to obeying their rulers. Greater freedom of the press and of expression now made it possible for men of letters to argue that religious behavior had always been like that and would be manipulated and controlled by those who found it in their interest to do so.

      VI

      Had Hume written an ecclesiastical history, he would have used the many elements already to hand. The conjectural historians, with their blend of social science and realistic data derived from the study of primitive societies, offered new perspectives on the ancient world of both the pagans and the People of God. Some of this, when provided by men like Lowth or Thomas Blackwell, the Marischal College principal and professor of Greek, had become quite acceptable although not when used to demean the Judeo-Christian myths and stories. Hume may have believed for a while that he could do better and that there was glory to be had if one succeeded. It might have gotten him into no more trouble than had the essay on miracles and the “Natural History of Religion.” Adopting an ironic and ambiguous stance was something he had long ago mastered. Irony more delicately veiled and explanations more finely wrought would allow him to écraser l’infâme as well as Voltaire. Less conjectural historical studies had included church history in universal and civil histories that were essentially political. The ways of understanding history Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Hume himself had supplied offered other ways to secularize accounts of the past. And the very philosophes who teased Hume to write such a work could have given him a model from the Encyclopédie, on which some of them were working. There we find three related articles that are pertinent.

      In the first, “Ecclesiastique (l’histoire ecclesiastique)”, “Ecclesiastical History” is defined as “whatever has happened in the Church since its beginnings,” an ambiguous definition that applies either to the Church Triumphant or the Church Militant. It invited reflections on many unsavory topics. The ambiguities deepen as the very short article concludes:

      M. Fleuri⁴⁷ nous l’a donnée dans un ouvrage excellent qui porte ce titre; il a joint à l’ouvrage des discours raisonnés, plus estimables & plus précieux encore que son histoire. Ce judicieux écrivain, en développant dans ces discours les moyens par lesquels Dieu a conservé son Eglise, expose en même tems les abus de toute espece qui s’y sont glissés. Il étoit avec raison dans le principe, “qu’il faut dire la vérité toute entiere; qui si la religion est vraie, l’histoire d’Eglise l’est aussi; que la vérité ne sauroit être opposée à la vérité, & que plus les maux de l’Eglise ont été grands, plus ils servent à confirmer les promesses de Dieu, qui doit la défendre jusqu’à la fin des siecles contre les puissances & les efforts de l’enfer.”⁴⁸

      The editors thought more needed to be added.

      The foregoing article was immediately followed by one entitled “Nouvelles Ecclesiastiques,” the clandestinely circulated Jansenist periodical that was commonly thought to be somewhat fanatical.⁴⁹ It figures here largely for its accounts of the miracles that took place at the Parisian tomb of the Abbé Pâris in the 1730s. The controversies over those had been a scandal to the Gallican Church and to the government. Royal prohibition of gatherings at the tomb ended the miracles—as Voltaire gleefully noted. They served Hume as examples of well-authenticated modern miracles, ones that bothered Protestants since, if real, they would have been works of God having a probative value for the Roman Catholic faith. Both entries implicitly questioned the Catholic faith and Church and the truth of the miracles. Finally, the entry was cross-referenced to “CONVULSIONNAIRES.”

      In a third entry, “Histoire,” Voltaire, its author, applauded the histories of opinion that were not mere “collections of human errors” and then quickly went on to say that his article would not deal with “sacred history.”⁵⁰ That is “a succession of divine and miraculous events by which it pleased god in former times to lead the Jewish people and sometimes today tries our faith. I will not touch upon this important matter.” But we are soon back in Voltaire’s world. We quickly learn that the early history of all peoples is fabulous, that the Chinese have the oldest culture, the culture of the Egyptians being of an indeterminate age. Not the history of Palestine but of Rome most merits study because it is from Rome that Europe derived its laws and culture. The uses of history are mainly political, moral, and cultural.

      It is also a probabilistic discipline offering but moral certainties. In its early periods, such as those about which Moses wrote, there are few certainties because the early history of all people is mythic and fabulous. If we would know the earliest times, we must look at archeological remains and decipher the meaning of their ceremonies, their festivals and myths. Those are mostly grounded in the needs and desires of agricultural peoples and in the great moments of their collective lives. In short, we need to attend to customs and manners. The article recommends Livy as the best historian for style but suggests that modern histories cover far more fields with more precision and with better-warranted evidence. “One expects from modern historians

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