The French Context of Hume's Philosophical Theology

Abstract

As student of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in France, I am struck by the change of landscape as one moves from commentary upon Cartesians, Malebranchists, Aristotelians, and Thomists to commentary upon Hume. The most striking topographical difference occurs in the adjectives that dominate the scholarly terrain. We say systematic; you say modified. We say unyielding; you say attenuated. We say absolute; you say partial. We say representative; you say a kind of. The adverbs also differ. Above all, we say obviously; you say perhaps. What creatures of our subjects we are! In The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief, volume one of my Atheism in France, 1650-1729, Hume receives, in all senses, slight attention. The index refers the reader merely to two pages. Desiring glib rhetorical reinforcement of my main thesis—that the debates of orthodox Catholic French learned culture, in the two generations following Descartes's death, had generated the arguments and motifs of disbelief well before the Enlightenment—I twice made ignoble use of the singular Hume. Thus, concluding chapter on Cartesian and Malebranchist assaults upon proofs of God from the order, law and purposes of the world, I opined as follows about proof from the sensible world: It was powerful current of Christian philosophical theology, however, that, long before Hume, sought to vitiate the use of such 'A©vidence' as proof of God.1 This was wholly gratuitous, but it was positively substantive intellectual reflection upon Hume compared to my second and final reference.

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