Master's Dissertation by Matt Rooks
INTRODUCTION-HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SUBVERSIVE IDEAS With regard to David Hume's Natural History of Re... more INTRODUCTION-HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SUBVERSIVE IDEAS With regard to David Hume's Natural History of Religion (1757), Frank Manuel writes, in The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (1967): Between the rationalist apologiae for the truths of revealed religion current in eighteenth-century England and a naturalistic interpretation of religious experience there was no great divide. The act of apology itself involved a momentous leap-objectifying the problem-and once this gap had been bridged the reduction of religious mystery to mere anthropology could not be long delayed. 1 The attempt to defend Christian revelation on 'rationalist' grounds, he writes, ultimately backfired. Thinkers in late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century Britain developed theories of religion that, for Manuel, rendered Christian revelation theologically unnecessary, a priori, and historically improbable, a posteriori. That is, apologists for natural religion made such a strong case for its universality and sufficiency that any specific revelation, including Christian revelation manifested in the Bible, became superfluous. At the same time, historical investigations of early religion elaborated accounts of 'priestcraft' by which false claims to divine revelation were invented. Theological writings in defense of Christian doctrine were co-opted by radical deists who stripped away revelation in their account of true religious belief that derived from unaided human reason. Seemingly inevitably, this ended in Hume's account of religious belief as a product of human passions-the reduction of Mystery to mere anthropology. 2
Papers by Matt Rooks
begins a recent essay about the eighteenth-century British debates on luxury and commerce with an... more begins a recent essay about the eighteenth-century British debates on luxury and commerce with an anecdote about David Hume on his deathbed. Hume refused religious sacraments and died with a tranquil mind, making lighthearted jests about religious superstition. Having established Hume's credentials as an Enlightened religious skeptic and opponent of superstition, Whatmore then identified Hume's writings on luxury and commercial society as part of his project to overturn superstition with reason. 'Hume's contention', writes Whatmore, 'was that the superstition that dogged the subject of commerce needed to be identified, if possible extinguished, and, at the very least, denounced…. Hume argued that unthinking condemnation of luxury was one of the great superstitions of the age'. 1 Whatmore identifies those who unthinkingly vilified luxury as certain Christian moralists who drew on a longstanding Christian tradition condemning luxury. This position was exemplified in François Fénelon's Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d'Ulysse (1699), 2 which argued not only that commerce led to national decline, but also that luxury must be avoided because it was immoral. The rise of political economy in the eighteenth century is represented, in broad strokes, as a process wherein the secular approach exemplified by Hume wins out over the conservative moralistic approach exemplified by Archbishop Fénelon. While this narrative is well founded and accurate by-and-large, it tends to marginalize the historical significance of Christian ethics in the development of Enlightenment views on the possibility of a virtuous commercial society. The full picture is, I will argue, a bit more complicated. A defense of luxury did not necessarily entail an abandonment of theology. Such a defense could be articulated, not only within a secular framework, but also within a theological framework. Decades before Hume's 1752 essay 'Of Refinement in the Arts', the Reverend Archibald Campbell (1691-1756) had
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Master's Dissertation by Matt Rooks
Papers by Matt Rooks