Hume's Mysticism Redux
[Readers, thanks for your patience and flexibility as I've worked through my first summer as a newsletter writer. This is the first of 4 newsletters you'll receive this month, making up for August.]
In our last newsletter we considered an alternative reading of David Hume, not as a Scottish Voltaire but as perhaps something more like the Kierkegaard of Edinburgh. This is not a popular reading, I grant, and there is certainly ambiguity in Hume’s texts. But I think it is a plausible reading that takes his texts more seriously than some that have simply decided, in advance, that he is a skeptic.
This week I want to consider another example from his corpus: his later work, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Published posthumously in 1779, the Dialogues have been hailed as one of Hume’s masterpieces. The energy of the conversation is reminiscent of Plato, but there’s a verve and coyness that feels more like an Oscar Wilde play.
Reflecting Hume’s empiricism, his oft-cited focus on billiard-ball cause-and-effect chains, the Dialogues reach a kind of culmination in Part X. The rules of the game are this: what can we conclude about God’s existence if we are inferring causes from observable effects? Here we need to remember that the focus of these Dialogues is described as “natural” religion, which is to say, what could be inferred about God or the divine merely on the basis of empirical observation and logical inference–what could be inferred about God if one lacked revelation (“revealed” vs. “natural” religion).
To this point in the Dialogues, the interlocutors seem to have settled on a conclusion something like what we might now call a “design” argument–that the cosmos as we know it requires us to infer some sort Creator, a divine cause of the cosmos, a “deity” or some sort.
But Part X is a key turning point. Now the question is: if, per the rules of “natural” religion,” we can only avail ourselves of inferences about this divine cause on the basis of observable effects, then the question is: What kind of deity should we infer on the basis of our experience?
A good chunk of Part X is a litany of all the ways creaturely life is nasty, brutish, and short–a catalogue of disease, disaster, and cruelty. All of these are part of the “effects” from which we are trying to infer something about the deity. Then this key challenge from Philo to Cleanthes (two of the interlocutors):
And is it possible, CLEANTHES, said PHILO, that after all these reflections, and infinitely more, which might be suggested, you can still persevere in your Anthropomorphism, and assert the moral attributes of the Deity, his justice, benevolence, mercy, and rectitude, to be of the same nature with these virtues in human creatures? His power we allow is infinite: whatever he wills is executed: but neither man nor any other animal is happy: therefore he does not will their happiness. His wisdom is infinite: He is never mistaken in choosing the means to any end: But the course of Nature tends not to human or animal felicity: therefore it is not established for that purpose. Through the whole compass of human knowledge, there are no inferences more certain and infallible than these. In what respect, then, do his benevolence and mercy resemble the benevolence and mercy of men?
Some have described this conclusion as “moral atheism”: God exists, but is malevolent. (It seems to me that “immoral theism” would be a more appropriate moniker.) The point is that, if all we have to go on is observation of natural phenomena and the inferences of reason on the basis of our experience, then we ought to conclude that God exists, is a powerful, even infinite creator, but is malevolent.
Cleanthes (and, most assume, Hume himself) suggests this conclusion spells “an end at once of all religion.” In other words, he thinks Philo has come around to his skeptical, irreligious corner.
But Philo’s position is more nuanced, perhaps even a little slippery. Philo doesn’t question the logic of this inference; he questions whether religion should be “natural.” So when he seems to be caught on the horns of Epicurus’ trilemma (“Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he Botha able and willing? when then is evil?”), Philo swerves like Neo facing the bullets in The Matrix:
How then does the Divine benevolence display itself, in the sense of you Anthropomorphites? None but we Mystics, as you were pleased to call us, can account for this strange mixture of phenomena, by deriving it from attributes, infinitely perfect, but incomprehensible.
“None but we Mystics.” This is the pivot that intrigues me. What Philo seems to mean by “Mysticism” here is akin to what, last time, we described as “fideism.” It is, at least, a refusal to concede that “natural” religion is the only way to God.
Now, does this set up religious faith as a species of ir-rationality? Perhaps. The question would be whether empirical cause-and-effect inferences are the only mode of reasoning that warrant our congratulatory label: “rational.” In the twentieth century, lots of streams of philosophy–from pragmatism to phenomenology to different strands of feminist thought–will all call that into question. So we could say that Philo is not leaning toward ir-rationality but challenging the strictures of what counts as rational.
In any case, I find myself very sympathetic to such a critique of “natural” religion, for which I have little to no use. It is too often the “religion” of apologists whose accounts barely register the scandal of the Incarnation or the inexplicable offense of grace.
To agree with Cleanthes, Philo says, is not to reject a good and merciful God, but only to reject the epistemological claim that such a God could be known by mere inference, “scaled up to” from our experience. Thus Philo’s last word is not atheism, but faith:
Here I triumph. Formerly, when we argued concerning the natural attributes of intelligence and design, I needed all my sceptical and metaphysical subtlety to elude your grasp. In many views of the universe, and of its parts, particularly the latter, the beauty and fitness of final causes strike us with such irresistible force, that all objections appear (what I believe they really are) mere cavils and sophisms; nor can we then imagine how it was ever possible for us to repose any weight on them. But there is no view of human life, or of the condition of mankind, from which, without the greatest violence, we can infer the moral attributes, or learn that infinite benevolence, conjoined with infinite power and infinite wisdom, which we must discover by the eyes of faith alone.