The ‘true religion’ of the sceptic: Penelhum reading Hume's Dialogues

Abstract

According to Terence Penelhum, Philo's confession in the last part of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion reveals on the side of the author a reconciliatory and pacifying attitude towards the liberal moderate clergy of his days. This article investigates whether another reading of this intriguing text is not more appropriate. It defends the idea that Philo's speeches and Cleanthes' reactions to it in the last part of the Dialogues reveal on Hume's side an attitude of mild despair and isolation towards the religious culture of eighteenth-century Scotland, in both its orthodox and more moderate form.

Keywords::

• Hume
• true religion
• superstition
• religious scepticism
• Terence Penelhum

Acknowledgements

This article stems from my contribution to the panel ‘Themes from the work of Penelhum’, 39th annual international Hume Conference, 18 July 2012, University of Calgary. On occasion of earlier talks on Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in St. Andrews, Prague, Edinburgh and Rome, I received invaluable comments from Petra Van Brabandt, Sandy Stewart, John P. Wright, Peter Millican, David Ferguson, Deidre Lynch, Pauline Phemister, James Harris and Emilio Mazza: they all have influenced my reading of this wonderful text more than they perhaps realize. I am especially indebted to Don Garrett, who suggested some clarifications to this article and whose lecture on Hume on ‘true religion’ at the Prague conference ‘Belief and Doubt in David Hume’ in September 2011 was for me an eye opener. Last but not least, I owe more than I with this article could express to Terence Penelhum, whose Hume scholarship has always been for me a major source of inspiration.

Notes

^1. References in the text cited as D refer to David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, edited by Norman Kemp Smith (1948), followed by the page number.

^2. The standard account that takes Hume to be ironical in Dialogues 12 remains Kemp Smith's in his introduction to the 1948 edition of the Dialogues. For Kemp Smith, Hume's account of true religion is merely tactical.

^3. For the earlier reading, see Penelhum (2000, chap. 9): ‘Hume's Scepticism and the Dialogues’ (the original article dates from 1979).

^4. For a recent interpretation that takes Hume to be sincere in accepting Philo's ‘true religion’, see Garrett (2012). Garrett gives an illuminating account of the epistemic content of Philo's assent to ‘true religion’ against the background of Hume's overall philosophy. In his view, the rhetoric of irony and doubletalk does not preclude Hume's wide-open avowal of the argument from design, though it remains an open question what the exact epistemic implications of this avowal are.

^5. ‘The most widely held view of Hume, in his own days and since, has been that he is a deliberate secularizer: that he seeks to persuade us that there are no good reasons to hold religious beliefs’.

^6. Penelhum seems strongly influenced by Kemp Smith, who also stresses the historical and rhetorical context of the Dialogues in his introduction to Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.

^7. For more recent expositions of the historical context of the Dialogues, see Stewart (2003), Rivers (2000, 238–329), Bell (2011) and Penelhum (2011).

^8. Penelhum understands Cleanthes to defend a theological position taken by Joseph Butler in his Analogy of Religion (see Penelhum 2000, 217, 2011, 332–333, 335). For more on the relation between Hume and the moderate clergy of his day, see Kemp Smith (1948), Stewart (2003) and Harris (2005).

^9. Hume defends already in his first Enquiry (section 11, ‘Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State’) that philosophical reflections of a sceptical nature should not be considered a threat for morality.

^10. For the ‘natural belief’ account of Phil's confession, see Butler (1960). For the evolution of this discussion, see Bell (2011).

^11. Penelhum (2000, chap. 10): ‘Natural Belief and Religious Belief in Hume's Philosophy’. Perhaps, the confession of Philo might be interpreted to thrive on a ‘natural feeling for design’ that is understood in theistic terms under the influence of education. On such a reading, the interpretation of Philo as being sincere and genuine in his pious genuflections sounds plausible: Philo (Hume) represents the doubting secularizer who is nonetheless still influenced by the spiritual climate of his culture. For more on the ‘feeling of design’ in Hume's Dialogues and the relation with theism, see Gaskin (1988).

^12. This earlier evolution can be clearly seen if one compares Chapters 9 and 10 of Penelhum (2000), which are based on articles of 1979 and 1983. Penelhum's characterization of Hume as a ‘closet atheist’ dates from 2010, but his 1983 article hints already in that direction.

^13. I have myself moved from a minimal theistic reading of Philo's confession towards an atheistic one (for this last position, see Lemmens 2012). But, perhaps, the whole question is irresolvable on a purely textual basis. With Penelhum I would now think that Hume's puzzlement with natural religion bears in the first place witness to his practical critique of religion. For Hume, the moral influence of religion is always bad. Theological attempts to found religious belief in reason are just another symptomatic feature of this law-like regularity: they foster the sense of dependence on a providential Deity who is in the end unreliable as a source of morality. For Hume's moral critique of religion, see Lemmens (2011).

^14. For a different reading of the relation between Philo and Cleanthes on this point, see Dees (2002). Dees' interpretation of Dialogues 12 fits Penelhum's reconciliatory reading.

^15. In Part 1, Cleanthes is quite clear on this point. He expresses his hope that the ‘confirmation of true religion’ might lend support to ‘confound the cavils of atheists, libertines, and freethinkers of all denominations’ (D 140).

^16. In the manuscript of the Dialogues, Hume wrote in a note on margin, scored out afterwards: ‘Since government, reason, learning, friendship, love, and every human advantage are attended with inconveniences, as we daily find, what my be expected in all the various models of superstition: a quality, composed of whatever is the most absurd, corrupted, and barbarous of our nature? Were there any one exception to that universal mixture of good and ill, which is found in life, this might be pronounced thoroughly and entirely ill’ (D 223, footnote added in the Kemp Smith edition). This remarks squares with Hume's moral critique of the pathologies of religion in the Natural History of Religion. Penelhum refers to the importance of the Natural History for Hume's account of religious belief as a psychological phenomenon (Penelhum 2000, chap. 10).

^17. It is Philo who calls in the beginning of Dialogues 12 the dispute between theists and atheists ‘merely verbal’, see D (218–219).

^18. The most Philo could accept is the Stoical maximum of Seneca, quoted in Dialogues 12: ‘To know God, says Seneca, is to worship him. All other worship is indeed absurd, superstitious, and even impious. It degrades him to the low condition of mankind, who are delighted with entreaty, solicitation, presents, and flattery’ (D 226). Kemp Smith observes that Philo's true religion ‘ought not to have, and when ‘true’ and ‘genuine’ does not have, any influence on human conduct – beyond its intellectual effects, as rendering the mind immune to superstition and fanaticism’ (1948, 24).

^19. Before Hume, a freethinking mind like Shaftesbury defends such a purely contemplative, quasi-scientific theism as nonetheless a necessary support for morality. For atheism implies that the order in nature is merely contingent and this leads to a melancholy that is detrimental for morality. See for this: Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit, in Shaftesbury (2001, 5–7, 27–30, 32–33).

^20. Millican stresses the atheistic flavour of this passage (2002, 38).

^21. Penelhum distinguishes a sceptical fideism from evangelical fideism. The first, going back to Sextus Empiricus and exemplified by Cotta in Cicero's De Natura Deorum, invites us to combine a quite Humean religious scepticism with a pragmatic accommodation to the religious traditions of one's culture. Evangelical scepticism stands rather for the theological doctrine of human depravity and the need to sustain faith by Grace (see Penelhum 2000, 205–221).

^22. According to his friends, Hume realized on his deathbed he would never witness the ‘delivering’ of his culture ‘from the Christian superstition’. That's at least what Dr William Cullen remarks in a letter to his colleague Dr Hunter (see Mossner [1970] 1980, 601).

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Willem Lemmens

Willem Lemmens has been Professor for Ethics and Modern Philosophy at the University of Antwerp since 2000, and head of its Center for Ethics since 2006. In 1997, he received his PhD on the moral philosophy of David Hume at the Higher Institute of Philosophy (Catholic University of Louvain). From 1998 until 2000, he was Fellow at the FWO (Research Foundation Flanders, Belgium). His main areas of research are Hume and early modern practical philosophy, contemporary ethics, bioethics.