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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
Hume continued to think about an ecclesiastical history and must have discussed it with others both in London and later in Paris. On 8 November 1762, he wrote to Mallet, “The Undertaking you mention was rather founded on an Idea I was fond of, than on any serious, at least any present Purpose of executing it” (L 1:369). That was not quite what he had told Millar and shows a bit more commitment to the project. Mallet, the deist who had edited Bolingbroke’s Works (five volumes, 1754), was not to find an open ally in Hume, but the ecclesiastical history project figured in Hume’s correspondence with d’Alembert and Helvetius.8 The latter, in June 1763, when rumors were still circulating that Hume would write such a work, urged him to do so. In April 1766, Grimm, in the Correspondance littéraire, noted that the philosophic tribe in Paris had “frequently begged M. Hume, during his stay in France, to write an Ecclesiastical History.” He added that “this would be, at the present time, one of the most beautiful undertakings in literature, and one of the most important services rendered to philosophy and humanity.”9 That piece appeared after the Jesuits had been expelled from Portugal (1759) and France (1765), and in the year before, they were forced out of Spain and its empire. Grimm would have seen Hume’s contemplated work as another blow against l’infâme against which Voltaire and other philosophes had been crusading for years.10 D’Alembert echoed those hopes until 1773. He and his friends wanted Hume to “take the trouble to paint in her true colours our Holy Church.”11 Had he done so, the premier British man of letters would have joined their cause. Hume seems to have thought about this project for about ten years with enough seriousness to raise hopes that he too would write to crush l’infâme.
In 1762, Hume was well prepared to write on this subject. His philosophical works gave powerful arguments that undermined beliefs in miracles, revelations, providence, the soul, and notions of an afterlife. Hume’s explanations of action and thought left no place for simple ideas of grace as had the philosophy of Jonathan Edwards. Some of those arguments were restated in The Dialogues concerning Natural Religion already almost complete in the draft of 1751. The Essays, Moral and Political (1741) included the essay “Of superstition and Enthusiasm,” which made the first the basis of Catholicism and the second the ground of many kinds of Protestantism. He added “Of National Characters” to the collection in 1748; that included an attack on the character of clerics of all kinds.12 The conjectural histories like “The Natural History of Religion” (1757) sketched the origins and cyclical progresses of religions that naturally root among primitive, ignorant, and fearful people. This contradicted the biblical account of the origins of religion both among the people of God and among the pagans.13 For Hume, there were no differences in the origins. In all those works, the deists and rational theologians, as well as those who thought Christianity had to be understood from a unique standpoint grounded in faith, were refuted by the skeptical philosopher. Hume had attacked bigots and superstitious fools while posing as a good Calvinist—and Calvinists, when, as a skeptic, he considered the enthusiasts.
By 1762, Hume had already written a good deal of ecclesiastical history since it figured in The History of England, where it was given a wholly secular treatment. There, greedy and power-hungry clerics, fanatics and the superstitious, and politicians manipulating and being manipulated by them are to be found in abundance. Hume had mastered the standard sources of British history from ancient times to 1688, including a lot of medieval chronicles and other works dealing with Europe, particularly with France.14 He had become learned about the Roman and other churches because he needed to be to understand English religious history. He now knew enough to write a history independent of his work on the Church of England. He could have prefaced his ecclesiastical history with a general conjectural account of religion and then showed how Christianity conformed to the patterns offered by other religions, or he could have written a factual history of the Church in Europe with examples to show that it followed the patterns he had set out in his earlier works. Steeped in what he regarded as the follies of the English past, he had only to generalize his views to satisfy Chesterfield, the Mallets, and his Parisian friends.
III
Writing an ecclesiastical history must have been a tempting project in the 1760s, when European Catholicism seemed on the defensive and when Britain was beset by enthusiasts represented by Methodists in England and the “High-flyers” in the Kirk. The latter had harassed him and his friends, and this would be revenge. To deal critically with the whole of world history since the Creation was an ambitious end, but Hume was not without ambition. In doing so, Hume would then have joined the ranks of the open radicals—not the deists but the skeptically irreligious among whom he privately belonged. That he did not write this work in part reflects his sense of the danger of doing so. It would have cut him off from some friends, perhaps have barred some employment, and could have endangered his pension.15 In the end, he did not satisfy the urge to become a more open enemy of Christianity.
There is a second reason ecclesiastical history might have attracted Hume in 1762. The most prominent of the European historians of the time, Voltaire, had been writing just this sort of history and was becoming known for it. A man as emulous of other writers as Hume would not have ignored ecclesiastical history. Hume tells us that “a passion for literature” was “the ruling passion of [his] life” (H 1:xxvii). To write an ecclesiastical history might win him more laurels; that would have tempted him.
From 1753 to 1756, Voltaire published what became known as Essai sur les moeurs, translated into English in 1759 as An Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations, a work later prefaced by his La philosophie de l’histoire (1765). In 1754 Voltaire directly attacked Bishop Bossuet’s Abrégé de l’Histoire Universelle. Voltaire had aimed to replace the Bishop’s Christian vision of universal and ecclesiastical history set out in Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681). That and others like it privileged the biblical chronology worked out to show that the Jews were the oldest people with the oldest and best history. The Hebrews were the first people of God, who had been succeeded by the Christians. Voltaire’s universal history made the oldest people the Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians, not the Jews who were somewhat ignored in his article on “Histoire” in the Encyclopédie.16 He explained the religious beliefs and practices of the gentile nations not as the corruptions of Hebrew originals but as the creations of primitive peoples much like those whom Hume had described. There had to be a new universal history constructed around climate, race, manners, laws, the arts, commerce, and the evolution of those as they were changed and were shaped by peoples and their great men.17 Christian history should have no privileged status in the realm of learning. God’s providence was not to be inferred from the disasters of the past. There was no special causality needed to understand history sacred in name only. Voltaire found occasions to say more about the real nature of religion and its relation to manners and politics, priestcraft, and irrationality. He carried on a running critique of l’infâme in his squibs, satires, and biblical criticism, which circulated in manuscripts with even a bit being printed, and in his political pieces and other historical works. All that had contributed to Voltaire’s fame even though some of it was slapdash and not very good.18 Hume could see and envy the fame it brought Voltaire at the same time knowing such work could be better done. To write ecclesiastical history as Hume had seen it in The History of England would be to destroy the field in the interests of more enlightened ways of thinking.
Hume had already shown that the English church from the beginning was a political creation founded on the ambition of Pope Gregory, the fears of a pagan ruler in Kent who was “promised eternal joys above, and a kingdom in heaven without end,” and politic compromises about altars. Elsewhere, as in Wessex, it was introduced with violence and because of marriage agreements.19 Its benefits to the Saxons were very mixed:
Even Christianity, though it