Abstract

This chapter provides a new way of understanding the places in Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding where use is made of the language of Calvinist fideism: most notably, in Sections 8, 10, and 12. Hume's deployment of such language, it is argued, needs to be seen in the context of the conflict within the Church of Scotland between the ‘orthodox’ and the ‘modernizers’. It was the modernizers such as Francis Hutcheson and William Leechman who had been instrumental in denying Hume the Edinburgh moral philosophy chair in 1745, and, as M. A. Stewart has argued, the first Enquiry is best seen as a response to that episode. In various ways it attacks the modernizers' way of combining natural religion with neo-Stoic ethics: Hume's use of the language of the ‘orthodox’ opponents of that strategy is one of those ways. It is pointed out that later on in the eighteenth century, some of the orthodox quote Hume's attacks on rational religion with approval. The chapter does not claim that Hume had any sympathy with the orthodox agenda. Rather, it is concerned with the complex rhetorical strategies used by Hume in his writings on religion.