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David Hume. Mark G. Spencer
Читать онлайн.Название David Hume
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isbn 9780271068411
Автор произведения Mark G. Spencer
Жанр Философия
Издательство Ingram
Had Hume pleased his Parisian friends, he would have written a history that treated the churches as but other institutions in a complex secular whole. There were likely to have been other things in the history he did not write that would not have pleased them. In The History of England, there is a sense that the Church preserved over many centuries much that was worth preserving. It was a patron of the arts and to some extent of learning. It was not the Church which lost and scattered manuscripts containing a richer classical heritage than we now preserve but rapacious rulers like Henry VIII and Protestant enthusiasts who cared less for learning than the Dark Age monks who quoted Latin poems no longer to be found. Hume had no brief for the scholastics, but not all medieval philosophy was foolish. Popes like Aeneas Sylvius and Leo X come off well in The History of England. The Papacy never looks as grim in Hume’s work as it does in the works of many Protestants or in those of Voltaire. Hume sought to play a moderating and evenhanded role as a historian. We could expect to find in any ecclesiastical history by him things that would burnish and not blacken the image of some churches at some times. The philosophes might also have been surprised to find that Hume saw no immediate advantages coming from the sixteenth-century reformations but many losses. The freedoms fathered by enthusiasts had a long gestation period. When he said he did not want to write an ecclesiastical history because he prized his peace, he may not have been referring only to attacks by the orthodox. The peace he was loath to forego would have been disturbed by Catholics and Protestants but also by infidels and philosophes who wanted to écraser l’infâme.
NOTES
1. The searchable Past Masters disk containing Hume’s writing has no references to “Church Universal” or “Church Triumphant,” and its references to “the kingdom of saints” are ironic and refer mostly to the period of the English Civil War. History for Hume was only of events in this world. What Hume thought of the history contained in the Hebrew scriptures is shown by his 1751 broadside commonly called “The Bellmen’s Petition.” In that, the lineage of Christ is shown to be garbled, which makes His descent from the House of David uncertain. Hume thus undercut the link between King Zerubbabel, seen as a type of Christ the King, and Jesus of Nazareth. See Roger L. Emerson, “Hume and the Bellman, Zerobabel MacGilchrist,” Hume Studies 23 (1997): 9–28.
2. Robertson’s views of the relation of historical events to providence were set out in a 1755 sermon, “The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ’s Appearance.” He reiterated ancient views of the Roman world as civilized, unified, peaceful, and extensive—a proper place for the Gospel to be propagated. All these conditions had been brought about by providence acting though secondary sources. Robertson’s ideas are discussed by several of the authors collected in William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, ed. Stewart J. Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), including ones by Stewart J. Brown, Nicholas Phillipson, and Colin Kidd. The background to such views has been set out in an extended essay by C. A. Patrides, The Phoenix and the Ladder: The Rise and Decline of the Christian View of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964) and more recently at length by J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 5 vols. to date (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2010), 3:69–73.
3. Middleton was not unusual among the deists for secularizing history and undercutting traditional notions of ecclesiastical history. He was simply the best of the lot at doing so. The best account of Middleton’s work is Hugh Trevor-Roper, “From Deism to History: Conyers Middleton,” in Hugh Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment, ed. John Robertson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 71–119.
4. The edition of the letters I have used appears in the Universal Classic Library as Letters to His Son by the Earl of Chesterfield, 2 vols., ed. Oliver H. G. Leigh (Washington: M. Walter Dunne, 1901).
5. Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1954), 395; Sandro Jung, David Mallet, Anglo-Scot: Poetry, Patronage, and Politics in the Age of Union (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 145.
6. Voltaire’s Une histoire des Croisades et Un nouveau plan de l’histoire de l’esprit humain (1752) was often printed with the Micromégas (1752) and was later incorporated into a grander work published in 1756, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations. See also Chesterfield, Letters, letter 185; 2:147.
7. That was also the opinion of Chesterfield’s friend Voltaire; see J. H. Brumfitt in La philosophie de l’histoire, 2nd rev. ed. (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969); vol. 59 of Les Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire / The Complete Works of Voltaire, 16.
8. Helvetius to Hume, 2 June 1763, in Letters of Eminent Persons Addressed to David Hume, ed. J. E. Hill Burton (Bristol, 1995), 13–14; D’Alembert to Hume, 28 February 1767, in ibid., 183. D’Alembert wrote the short article on ecclesiastical history for the Encyclopédie, 5:223.
9. Friedrich Melchoir Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc., 16 vols., ed. Maurice Tourneux (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1879), 7:13. The original passage in French is: “Nous avons souvent sollicité M. Hume, pendant son séjour en France, d’écrire une Histoire ecclésiastique. Ce serait en ce moment une des plus belles entreprises de littérature, et un des plus importants services rendus à la philosophie et à l’humanité.”
10. Voltaire’s attacks on the Church and blasphemy laws intensified in the 1760s owing to the judicial murder of Jean Calas in 1762. D’Alembert himself had written in 1765 a notable work on the Jesuits, Sur la destruction des Jesuites en France, and the final volumes of the text of Diderot’s Encyclopédie appeared in 1765 and 1766. They contained many attacks on religions and the churches despite the censorship of one of its publishers.
11. “Je ne me consolerai, pourtant, jamais d’être privé de cette Histoire Ecclésiastique, que je vous ai demandé tant de fois, que vous seul peut-être en Europe êtes en état de faire, et qui seroit bien aussi intéressante que l’histoire Grecque et Romaine, si vous vouliez prendre la peine de peindre au naturel notre mère Ste. Eglise.” D’Alembert to Hume, 1 May 1773, in Letters, ed. Hill Burton, 218.
12. See “Of National Characters,” E 199–201n3.
13. Hume’s French friends missed his belief in the inevitability of the continuance of religion; see Roger L. Emerson, “Hume’s Histories,” in Essays on David Hume, Medical Men, and the Scottish Enlightenment: “Industry, Knowledge, and Humanity” (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 137.
14. See the forthcoming bibliography compiled for The History of England by Roger L. Emerson and Mark G. Spencer. This shows, in particular, Hume’s surprising familiarity with medieval sources.
15. Under a 1697 English act, it was illegal to blaspheme or to deny the doctrine of the Trinity or the articles of the creeds approved by the Anglican Church. In Scotland, Hume could have been prosecuted under the same laws that led to the hanging in 1697 of Thomas Aikenhead.
16. All quotations from the Encyclopédie are to the following edition: Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers . . . (Paris: Brisson, David, Le Breton and Durand, 1751; reprinted in 5 vols., New York: Readex Microprint Corporation, 1969). Page numbers are to that set and not to the original volumes; 2:335–38.
17. A fine account of Voltaire’s work in the books named above is given by Brumfitt in La Philosophie de l’histoire.
18. Hume’s general verdict on Voltaire was, “I know that author cannot be depended upon with regard to Facts; but his general Views are