sign in sign up
<<
Home , Religious naturalism

’s Natural History of (1757) and the end of modern Eusebianism

Richard Serjeantson*

One of the most consequential developments in post-Reformation Euro- pean history is the shift away from a view which saw ‘religion’ exclusively in terms of ‘true’ or ‘Christian religion’, towards one which—however unwillingly—saw Christianity as just one religion among many.1 Arising from the countervailing forces of confessionalisation and heterodoxy, this shift in turn allowed for what might be called the naturalisation of reli- gion: its treatment as a natural phenomenon, something that might be known without the assistance of Revelation. The most prominent manifestation of this is the investiga- tion by numerous authors—both orthodox and heterodox in intent— of what came to be called ‘natural religion’; that is, the use of reason to establish the existence, attributes, and perhaps also the commands, of .2 A second strand of inquiry, however, came to consider religion not in terms of the being and attributes of a deity, but as something that arose from what was increasingly understood in terms of ‘human ’.3 Its protagonists set out to identify what they called the ‘natural seeds’ of reli- gion and they wrote something they termed its ‘natural history’. This his- torical strand of religious naturalism is less prominent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than the philosophical investigation of ‘natural

* I am grateful to Anthony Grafton, Sarah Hutton, Dmitri Levitin, Scott Mandelbrote, Robin Mills, Gabriel Roberts, Mikko Tolonen, Damian Valdez and the Editors for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 1 See further John Bossy, ‘Some Elementary Forms of Durkheim’, Past and Present, 95 (1982), 3–18, at 4–8; also Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the in the English Enlighten- ment (Cambridge, 1990), esp. 1–2. 2 But on the vexed definition of ‘natural religion’ in this period, see further D. A. Pailin, ‘The Confused and Confusing Story of Natural Religion’, Religion, 24 (1994), 199–212; and Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A study of the language of religion and in England 1660–1780, 2 vols, (Cambridge, 1991–2000), vol. II, 9. 3 On the of ‘human nature’ in the eighteenth century, see further Roger Smith, ‘The Language of Human Nature’, in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth Century Domains, ed. C. Fox, R. Porter and R. Wokler (Berkeley, 1995), 88–111; Aaron Garrett, ‘Human Nature’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century , 2 vols, ed. K. Haakonssen (Cambridge, 2006), vol. I, 160–233. 268 richard serjeantson religion’. In the hands of its exponents it also tended to be less orthodox in intent. Yet, perhaps for this reason, its implications may be even more far-reaching. David Hume (1711–1776) contributed to both these forms of naturalistic inquiry into religion.4 Firstly, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (first drafted c. 1749; published posthumously in 1779) Hume treated, with raillery and artificial malice, ‘the subject of natural religion’.5 Secondly, in his Four Dissertations—first published, after some difficulties,6 in 1757— Hume included a treatise he called the Natural , which took as its goal the investigation of religion’s ‘origin in human nature’.7 The Natural History of Religion begins with the assertion that ‘poly- and idolatry was, and necessarily must have been, the first and most antient religion of mankind.’8 It goes on to offer a series of learned, droll, and rather idiosyncratic reflections on the nature of religious and practice, from the most ancient times onwards. The first edition of this dissertation, and the nature of the history it tells, forms the focus of the present chapter. In particular, I wish to raise two questions about it. The first question concerns the significance of Hume’s treatment of very ancient religions, and especially that of ancient Egypt. The second and larger question arises from the answer I offer to the first: who are Hume’s principal targets in the Natural History? But before turning to answer these two questions I have some more general arguments to make about the investigation of religion as a natu- ral and very human phenomenon in the later-seventeenth and earlier- eighteenth centuries. How did this perilous tendency arise? And why was it so closely associated with more orthodox scholarly investigations into the origins of idolatry?

4 On this point see further the suggestive comments of Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Histo- riography of Religion: Western views’, in On Pagans, Jews and Christians (Middleton, CT, 1987), 11–30, at 12; also Winfried Schröder, Ursprünge des Atheismus: Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik- und Religionskritik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1998), 225. 5 David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion ([London?], 1779), 3. The implica- tion of Paul Russell, The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and (Oxford, 2008), esp. 267–78, is perhaps that we should also consider Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, 3 vols (London, 1739–40) in this light. 6 Ernest Campbell Mossner, ‘Hume’s Four Dissertations: An essay in biography and bib- liography’, Modern Philology, 48 (1950), 37–57, at 44. 7 David Hume, Natural History of Religion, in Four Dissertations (London, 1757), 1 (Intro- duction). All references to the Natural History are from this first edition unless otherwise specified. 8 Hume, Natural History, 3 (§i).