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HUME AND ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY: AIMS AND CONTEXTS

Roger L. Emerson

      I

      Ecclesiastical history, in so far as it deals with the Church Triumphant, concerns things not of this world, but things beyond experience about which we can know nothing. Its subjects lie in the realm of grace and amid the mysteries of faith. In so far as sacred history has a mundane side, it lies originally in the Hebrew scriptures, which were held to contain miraculous prophecies of the coming of Christ the Savior, and in the New Testament, which outlined the new dispensation of salvation culminating in the Last Judgment and the reception of the saved into Heaven to enjoy God forever. That history was held to have been validated by miracles.

      The history of the otherworldly kingdom of God is not directly discussed by Hume.¹ However, by 1762, Hume had dealt with the Bible, miracles, saints, and much else in an ironic or duplicitous manner. Religious beliefs resting on miracles he had shown to be unreasonable, if not unbelievable; we should not believe miracles because the testimony supporting them is never such as to compel belief. Hume treated the events of sacred history no differently from those of secular affairs. He thought the revelations and miracles of Judeo-Christian history were things we could not know had really happened, and he saw them as reflections of the ignorance of barbarous or simple peoples, the results of madness and delusion, or rooted in superstition that was grounded in fears. All of that became entangled with “priestcraft” and the calculations of kings and rulers. The Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (mostly written by 1751 but not published until 1779) continued that polemic against Christian beliefs. When ecclesiastical history dealt with the things of this world, with the Church Militant and the people of God as they acted in time, he explained its history with causal principles no different from those he applied to other topics. Here he differed profoundly from William Robertson, who thought one could discern the providence of God in world history. God had prepared the way for Christ by the expansion of the Roman Empire, in which Christianity could flourish and spread. There was no sharp line between the history of the Church and churches; both revealed the providence of God. Robertson’s restatement of old arguments must have seemed to Hume like speculative nonsense.²

      Hume continued to pursue those themes in his History of England (1754–62), which contains a good deal of ecclesiastical history treated as but another set of events. The History was full of ironic and derisive comments about religion informed by his reading of Fra Paolo Sarpi, Pierre Bayle, and English deists like Conyers Middleton, whose own work against Christian miracles had upstaged Hume’s own.³ Hume’s comments were sometimes directed toward superstitious Roman Catholics but also against Protestant fanatics and even Muslims. Hume’s clerics remained generally as bigoted, political, power hungry, and self serving as they are in his essays. The religion they served seemed often absurd. Hume’s comments on the portions of the “true cross” are like many others:

      But notwithstanding these disputes, as the length of the siege had reduced the Saracen garrison to the last extremity, they surrendered themselves prisoners; stipulated, in return for their lives, other advantages to the Christians, such as restoring of the Christian prisoners, and the delivery of the wood of the true cross; and this great enterprize, which had long engaged the attention of all Europe and Asia, was at last, after the loss of 300,000 men, brought to a happy period. (H 1:387–88)

      The note to that passage reads: “This true cross was lost in the battle of Tiberiade, to which it had been carried by the crusaders for their protection. Rigord, an author of that age, says, that after this dismal event, all the children who were born throughout all Christendom, had only twenty or twenty-two teeth, instead of thirty or thirty-two, which was their former complement, p. 14” (H 1:388n). Here Hume is playing off Bernard de Fontenelle’s famous story of the Golden Tooth. The History is replete with such cynical and derisive comments; many were aimed at Protestants, even Scottish ones: “The famous Scotch reformer, John Knox, calls James Melvil, p. 65, a man most gentle and most modest. It is very horrid, but at the same time somewhat amusing, to consider the joy and alacrity and pleasure, which that historian discovers in his narrative of this assassination [of Cardinal Beaton]: And it is remarkable that in the first edition of his work, these words were printed on the margin of the page, The godly Fact and Words of James Melvil” (H 3:347n). Few of the religious escape some form of criticism or derision.

      Hume was not an obvious candidate to write ecclesiastical history, but he was attracted by the field and seems for about ten years to have thought of writing an ecclesiastical history of some sort. This chapter asks why he might have wanted to write an ecclesiastical history and what sort of a history he would have written had he done one. But first the evidence he was really interested in the topic.

      II

      In early 1762, having finished his six-volume History of England, Hume was wondering what to do next. He had “not laid aside thoughts of continuing my History to the Period after the Revolution,” but he had clearly been talking to people about writing an ecclesiastical history. He tells us both those things in a letter to his publisher, Andrew Millar, written on 15 March 1762, as Millar was getting ready to publish the complete History of England in quarto. Hume told Millar “to contradict the Report, that I am writing or intend to write an ecclesiastical History.”

      I have no such Intention; & I believe never shall. I am beginning to love Peace very much, and resolve to be more cautious than formerly in creating myself Enemies. But in contradicting this Report, you will be so good as not to impeach Mr [David] Mallet’s Veracity: For tis certain I said to Lord Chesterfield [Phillip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield] (from whom Mr Mallet first had it), that I had entertain’d such a Thought. But my saying so proceeded less from any serious Purpose, than from a View of trying how far such an Idea would be relished by his Lordship. (L 1:352)

      Millar had heard the rumor and was eager to print what sounded like a scandalous best seller. If Hume was telling the truth, he had started this rumor himself. He loved to joke, and this might have also tickled the funny bone of an earl who was no better a Christian than Hume and who probably would have found the project laughably bizarre.

      Chesterfield and Mallet both had interests in history that suggest things about Hume’s intentions. The earl thought grace was about deportment (Letter 140) and religion important only in its appearance, which seemed to guarantee good morals and character (Letter 100) if it was expressed without enthusiasm, bigotry, fanaticism, or sincerity.⁴ He was as at home among freethinkers as was Mallet, whose wife thought Hume a deist like herself and her husband.⁵ Their views were not uncommon in the London and Paris circles in which Hume moved. Chesterfield would not have found ecclesiastical history of much interest unless it related to secular subjects such as politics and statecraft (Letter 33). Useful history concerned the modern world (800 A.D. on) and could be written only when textual evidence was plentiful. Otherwise history was diversion that often allowed us to see through the motives and deceptions of others. Chesterfield, Mallet, and Hume lived in the same world as Voltaire, who had been writing useful ecclesiastical history of a sort since the 1740s. Chesterfield had remarked approvingly in 1753 of a work he thought to be by Voltaire, Les Croisades, that the Crusades were “the most immoral and wicked scheme that

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