Women, Religion, and Zeal: Hume's Rhetoric in the History of England
[In the essay that follows, Kennelly criticizes Hume's History of England, which she believes is “sadly lacking in gender sensitivity and respect for religion and zealous believers (in any cause).”]
It has been said that David Hume's History of England (1754-1762) represented a “last ditch attempt to make himself heard.”1 If so, it seems to have been a successful attempt. While the sales of Essays, Moral and Political (in the 1740s) did not enable him to live as a man of letters, the sales of his History and the reputation it brought him, did. What Hume seems most to have wanted his readers to “hear” was an impartial account of the religious/political situation surrounding the English Civil War. Initially, at least, few believed him impartial. As he gently complains in his autobiography, “I thought that I was the only historian, that had at once neglected present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices; and as the subject was suited to every capacity, I expected proportional applause” (I: xxx). Today Hume is generally judged to have, indeed, presented an impartial account of the failings of both Whigs and Tories, protestants and papists.2 Now, however, it is time to examine his work in light of twentieth-century interest and prejudice. I am afraid we shall find Hume sadly lacking in gender sensitivity and respect for religion and zealous believers (in any cause).
Hume, of course, had not had his consciousness raised: in consequence, it is interesting to ask how a work as seemingly innocent of prejudice as a history book might indeed, serve to inculcate unspoken assumptions and hidden agendas into its text. I am purposely taking what some might call a frivolous approach to a great philosopher—I am not considering the serious implications for philosophy of Hume's intellect—to show how Hume's rhetorical skill shaped his dialogue with generations of history students: a dialogue which dominated historical accounts of England well into the nineteenth century in both England and America.
Hume used rhetorical style to set up dialogues and associative patterns to appeal to his readers' biases and subtly influence their judgement. In addition, although Hume objected to most cause and effect reasoning in his Essays—believing such associations were necessarily false, his history makes such associations unavoidable in certain cases. The purpose of this paper is to suggest how Hume's rhetoric worked by using a case study approach based on his treatment of three items: women, religion, and zeal.
Hume himself does not seem to have used the word “rhetoric” to refer to the art of written expression; his short essay “On Eloquence” (1742) refers to rhetoric as the product of politicians and sermonizers—something to be proclaimed rather than silently read.3 Further he seems to have thought that his contemporaries' rhetoric was greatly inferior to that of ancient Rome or Greece. On the other hand, he did believe that eighteenth-century written expression was superior in style and clarity to that of past ages because his age had progressed beyond the “false glister” which distracted Elizabethan audiences from the “durable beauties of solid sense and lively passion” (5: 150). He was not alone in this conclusion: Something of the same self-congratulatory tone may be heard in Goldsmith's observation that in his time “the extent and force of the language is [now] known”4 or in Joseph Priestly's theory of “progress” in language. Priestly theorized that languages were originally “rough, unpolished materials, that barely answer[ed] the purposes for which they were intended.” As time passed, however, and as more people used language, Priestly argued, it acquired elegance, strength, and beauty.5 As a matter of fact, he observed in 1761, anticipating his eventual dedication to science, that the “sublime studies of mathematics and philosophy” were superior to those of rhetoric and belles lettres since in the latter all secrets were known, and thus “the fruit is ripe and is as easily gathered.”6
Leading rhetoricians of Hume's time advocated simplicity and purity of expression in prose to produce strength and beauty. The idea was to communicate, not impress with elaborate figures and artful conceits. Rhetoricians whose teachings were prominent in the mid-eighteenth-century, such as John Lawson, Joseph Priestly, Adam Smith, George Campbell, and Hugh Blair, all wrote about communication while, generally, refusing to see themselves as “rhetoricians.” John Lawson characterized writers of “rhetoric” as irritating with their “tiresome Exactness”7 and Adam Smith dismisses systems of rhetoric as “generally a very silly set of books.”8 In general, all agreed that highly figurative language belonged with the more expressive arts, such as poetry, and that plain language should be used in most prose—most certainly in histories. As John Lawson put it, “Truth hath not that Air of Study and Labour: To please she needs but to be seen: We look not for Her amidst a Crowd of Ornaments” (257). These philosophers seem to agree with Hume that prose which is over-ornamented is ineffectual and often dishonest prose. An honest man, then, wrote in a plain style; a plain style became an honest man: a neat tautology.
Hume's History of England fits eighteenth-century prescriptions for plain style because it avoids hyperbole, apostrophe, elaborate rhetorical figures, and gains power and readability from a judicious use of examples (purported transcripts of real conversation, believable anecdotes, and popular gossip about matters such as Queen Elizabeth's love life or various plots to assassinate various political figures). It also gains strength and persuasiveness from certain techniques of association and implication. Indeed, as I show later in this paper, Hume's opinions are often dropped into his readers' minds through simple repetition of favored ideas—the effect is something like water's slow eroding of stone. As he writes, “eloquence is not always necessary [to influence another's judgement]. The bare opinion of another, especially when inforc’d with passion, will cause an idea of good or evil to have an influence upon us, which wou’d otherwise have been entirely neglected.”9 It is just such an effect that Thomas Jefferson seems to have had in mind when he writes that as an inexperienced, youthful reader he was quite taken with Hume's History and it is for that reason that he thinks it unadvisable for circulation to the general public. As he wrote in 1810, “every one knows that judicious matter & charms of stile have rendered Hume's history the Manual of every student. I remember well the enthusiasm with which I devoured it when young, and the length of time, the research & reflection which were necessary to eradicate the poison it had instilled in my mind.”10 Jefferson's poison was Toryism; today's female readers might see it as sexism.
Hume's thinking about such associative communication seems to have influenced at least one leading rhetorician of his day. George Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1750) asserts “under the authority of Hume … that there was an association among the passions as well as the ideas of the mind, one passion or idea being likely to occur in company with another, whenever the two were connected by the mind's perception of their resemblance, their contiguity, or the causal, that is to say, their temporal and spatial relations, each to each.”11
Such associative habits of Hume's—whether conscious or unconscious—served in a causal manner to shape and direct reader response to his History. The most interesting and most obvious of such associations may be seen in his almost inevitable linking of the words “religion” and “zeal,” and often, “women.” Such linkage was not unique to Hume by the mid-eighteenth century, of course. Dryden, Shadwell, Swift, Voltaire had all done so. One recalls, for example, Candide's discomfort after being scolded by a preacher when the “orator's wife, having looked out the window and seen a man who doubted that the Pope was the Antichrist, poured on his head the contents of a full … O heaven! To what excesses are ladies driven by religious zeal!”12
Hume blamed religion and zeal for the English Civil War, so he had good reason to emphasize the connection in his History. In his notes to his account of factors leading up to the war he asserts categorically that “With regard to the people, we can entertain no doubt that the controversy was, on their part, entirely theological … It is in vain, therefore, to dignify this civil war and the parliamentary authors of it, by supposing it to have any other considerable foundation than theological zeal, that great and noted source of animosity amoung men” (5: 572).
Rhetorically, Hume almost always associates religion with zeal by juxtaposing the words themselves. We read of “religious zeal” (3: 316) or the “opprobrious epithets that religious zeal has invented” (3: 391) or, when referring to the Scots of James I's time, of a “violent turn towards republicanism, and a zealous attachment to civil liberty; principles nearly allied to that religious enthusiasm, with which they were actuated” (5: 10) or, a few pages later, that they “displayed their zeal in prayers” (5: 12). We do not read about religious zeal directing acts of charity or toleration. Hume's History firmly directs the reader to his conclusion: mankind's religious enthusiasm needs strict controls. Sometimes he is quite blunt about it, as when he concludes his discussion of the Gunpowder Plot (1605):
It was bigotted zeal alone, the most absurd of prejudices masqued with reason, the most criminal of passions covered with the appearance of duty, which seduced them into measures, that were fatal to themselves, and had so nearly proved fatal to their country.
(5: 31)
At other times he is more subtle as when he spells out in (a) passage set in the middle of a description of civil war battles his attitude that all religions can be equally dangerous:
During those times, when the enthusiastic spirit met with such honour and encouragement, and was the immediate means of distinction and preferment; it was impossible to set bounds to these holy fervours, or confine, within any natural limits, what was directed toward an infinite and supernatural object. Every man, as prompted by the warmth of his temper, excited by emulation, or supported by his habits of hypocrisy, endeavoured to distinguish himself beyond his fellows, and to arrive at a higher pitch of saintship and perfection.
(5: 441-442)
Hume continues that the “soldier, the merchant, the mechanic, indulging the fervors of zeal” spoke directly with heaven. Catholics justified persecution by “pretending to an infallible guide” and Presbyterians “gratified to the full, their bigoted zeal.” The independents alone, and they only because of certain enthusiastic beliefs which demanded it, adopted the principle of toleration. Hume concludes that it is ironic that “so reasonable a doctrine [as toleration] owed its origin, not to reasoning, but to the height of extravagance and fanaticism” (5: 443).
In addition to linking religion and zeal (and zeal always had a negative connotation of passion uncontrolled by toleration), Hume also employed another strategy to prejudice his readers against organized religion. He made it seem womanish and therefore weak. Again, this prejudice was nothing new. One thinks of Pilgrim's Progress, where Bunyan seems to object to such associations when Shame is reported to have said “it was a pitiful, low, sneaking business for a man to mind religion” and that “a tender conscience was an unmanly thing.”13 Despite his disapproval here of Shame's opinions, later Bunyan has the women and children walking with physically weak Mr. Ready-to-halt and the mentally retarded Mr. Feeblemind while the healthy men stride on ahead.
It might be unfair to label Hume, personally, a misogynist, but his work certainly reveals that he thought of women as lesser creatures, creatures both included in and as a category apart from “mankind” or “men.” When he writes of popular opinion, for example, he tells the reader what “men” thought in a general, universal sense. However, when he wishes to suggest religion appeals to the weak-brained, he most often uses women to illustrate his point. When discussing the death of Charles I he writes “On weaker minds, the effect of these complicated passions was prodigious. Women are said to have cast forth the untimely fruit of their womb” (5: 541). When Hume describes the defense employed by defenders of traditional religious customs during the reformation, a prediction of horrors to come which Hume makes clear did come true, he records the forecast that, among other things, “a thousand sects must arise, which would pretend, each of them, to derive its tenets from the scripture; and would be able, by specious arguments, or even without specious arguments, to seduce silly women and ignorant mechanics, into a belief of the most monstrous principles” (3: 232).
Religion, Hume seems to say, is especially bad for women when it leads them to excess. Hume seems of two minds concerning women and religion. It may be good, if often misguided, when it makes women behave bravely, but it is an inescapable fact that “the tender sex itself, as they have commonly greater propensity to religion … [support] the profession of it, against all the fury of the persecution” (3: 438). In characterizing French Huguenots, for example, Hume writes “Women themselves, sacrificing their humanity as well as their timidity to the religious fury distinguished themselves by acts of ferocity and valor” (4: 56). When describing the tumult in London leading up to Civil War Hume mentions petitions brought to parliament by several groups of “the people” and then discusses another group—placing women in a special category again—one made up only of women. He writes, “The very women were seized with the same rage. A brewer's wife, followed by many thousands of her sex” handed Pym a petition which “expressed their terror of papists and prelates.” Pym, writes Hume, thanked the “female zealots” (5: 371-372). The women's petition was inspired by the Irish treatment of English settlers when the Irish, Hume writes, rose up to destroy all English in Ireland. In this account we again see Hume generalizing about the Irish women as a separate species: “The weaker sex themselves, naturally tender to their own sufferings, and compassionate to those of others, here emulated their more robust companions, in the practice of every cruelty” (5: 342). Clearly, the text conveys the impression that women should be protected from religious zeal—and further, manly men (“real” men) are superior to furious reactions to religious questions.
And Hume leaves no doubt that to be a woman is to be weak and, often, stupid. Even when he discussed the characters of royalty, Hume's patterns of association also showed his assumptions about women. Although we might expect Mary, Queen of Scots, or Mary Tudor (as they are) to be criticized for being fools for love, even Elizabeth, a ruler Hume praised as unsurpassed by any other sovereign of England in “uniform success and felicity” (4: 352), is called on the carpet for her “female coquetry” (4: 49), having at “the bottom of her heart … those levities and follies and ideas of rivalship, which possess the youngest and most frivolous of her sex” (4: 68) and a “womanish rivalship and envy” against Mary Stuart (4: 70). In addition, Elizabeth's passion for Essex in her old age made her “appear ridiculous, if not odious, in his [Essex's] eyes” (4: 338). Whether she appeared so to Essex we can not know; clearly, her passion appeared odious to Hume. When Hume praises Elizabeth, he cites her “masculine spirit” (4: 5) and her “masculine character” (4: 81). Incidentally, when Hume criticizes male rulers' characters, it is generally because they are acting in a “feminine” manner; for example James I is scolded for acting foolish over men. Male rulers faults seem to be those of humankind, not just “masculine.” For example, Henry VIII, who surely acted foolishly over women, and his “Violence, cruelty, profusion, rapacity, injustice, obstinacy, arrogance, bigotry, presumption, caprice” are said to be just the “worst qualities incident to human nature” (3: 322)—not qualities unique to males. So for Hume, women could have all the sins of general human nature plus a special set of their own weaknesses.
Elizabeth is praised, finally, for her achievements despite the fact that she is a woman. Hume seems to almost throw up his hands in surrender to the evidence he has presented in favor of Elizabeth throughout the chapter covering her reign in the last paragraph. He begins by dithering over her fame which “has surmounted the prejudices both of factions and bigotry” because she “lies still exposed to another prejudice” which he calls more “natural”—“This prejudice is founded on the consideration of her sex” (4: 352). Despite this “natural” prejudice, he is, finally, forced to conclude we must “consider her merely as a rational being, placed in authority” (4: 353). Yet he has neatly subverted his own call to rationality by continuously associating her femininity with stupidity and irrationality in the bulk of the chapter leading up to that penultimate paragraph.
In addition to associative techniques such as linking religion-zeal-womanish weakness, Hume also directed response by allowing us to “hear” various historical figures speak. We can then “judge” them ourselves, based on the rhetorical skill Hume allows them to show. This technique means that we will remember Thomas More and Charles I and Mary Stuart as gracious losers who gave memorable speeches. We can even admire the feisty countess of Salisbury, last of the Plantagenets, who when sentenced to death by Henry VIII refused to lay her head on the block. … “She told the executioner, that, if he would have her head, he must win it the best way he could: And thus, shaking her venerable grey locks, she ran about the scaffold and the executioner followed her with his ax, aiming many fruitless blows at her neck, before he was able to give the fatal stroke” (3: 280).
Hume's practice of including dialogue also means we can judge that religious zealot Cromwell as either an idiot or a hypocritical dissimulator if we believe he actually said the following. Hume maintains this speech, supposedly recorded directly from the 1657 Conference at Whitehall, reflects exactly what Cromwell said:
I confess, for it behoves me to deal plainly with you, I must confess, I would say, I hope, I may be understood in this, for indeed I must be tender what I say to such an audience as this; I say, I would be understood, that in this argument I do not make parallel betwixt men of a different mind and a parliament, which shall have their desires. I know there is no comparison, nor can it be urged upon me, that my words have the least colour that way, because the parliament seems to give liberty to me to say anything to you; as that, that is a tender of my humble reasons and judgement and opinion to them; and if I think they are such and will be such to them, and are faithful servants, and will be so to the supreme authority, and the legislative wheresoever it is: If, I say, I should not tell you, knowing their minds to be so, I should not be faithful, if I should not tell you so, to the end you may report it to the parliament: I shall say something for myself, for my own mind, I do profess it, I am not a man scrupulous about words or names of such things I have not.
(6: 96)
Hume's observation on the above speech, of which I have quoted only a small section, was that Cromwell must have had a “want of ideas” (6: 96) to have spoken so poorly. Another eighteenth-century historian thought that speech indicated “a mind at variance with itself.”14 Today, in a age saturated by televised political speeches, it seems quite possible that Cromwell knew exactly what he was doing. Cromwell sounds startlingly like contemporary politicians who rose from the ranks of the military, such as Alexander Haig and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who use language to sound as if they are saying something while they reveal nothing at all.
Hume's rhetorical purpose becomes clearer concerning religion if his history is compared to Oliver Goldsmith's A History of England which was published in 1771.15 For example, although Goldsmith copied Hume's account of Tudor and Stuart history almost word for word, he draws back from condemning all religions as Hume did. Goldsmith will censor Roman Catholics, indeed, sometimes he adds criticisms of Catholics, but he does not agree with Hume that liturgy is necessary as a channel to hold in dangerous religious enthusiasms. Where Hume wrote that enthusiasts objected to “episcopal authority, all ceremonies, rites or forms … which seem to restrain the liberal effusions of their zeal and devotion” (4: 123) Goldsmith changes the text to criticize papist ceremonies which only mimic feeling that which the truly devout “want no prompter but their hearts to inspire” (3: 216). Goldsmith excises Hume's condemnation of zeal in the above section, which describes Elizabeth's reign, and sees it, instead, as evidence of civil and religious liberty's first stirrings.
Hume, perhaps more than any other historian of his time, wrestled with John Lawson's pragmatic question: “For of what Importance is the Discovery of Truth, if it cannot be communicated?” (5). Hume consciously attempted to communicate truth by presenting as much of the evidence on both sides as he could. And yet, while Hume trusted in reason's appeal and the free exchange of ideas, his treatment of religion and women and zeal suggests that he, perhaps unconsciously, subverted his own agenda. His History reveals that he also managed to teach some of his own assumptions about human nature through his subtle rhetoric of association and cause-effect, associations he denied in his other works.
Notes
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Victor G. Wexler, David Hume and the HISTORY OF ENGLAND (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1979), ix.
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As William B. Todd comments in his foreword to the 1983 reprint of Hume's History of England, based on the 1778 edition with Hume's final corrections (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics), “However one may regard these two influential religious movements [Roman Catholic and Protestant], it must be conceded that Hume here betrays no unwonted partiality and is quite even-handed in his censure” (xviii). Textual citations will be taken from this edition.
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W. S. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), 614.
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Oliver Goldsmith, “Letter XL” in The Citizen of the World in The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 2: 171.
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Rudiments of English Grammar, with Observations on Style, ed. R. C. Alston (1761; facsimile rpt. Menston: Scolar Press, 1969), 58-59.
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Priestly, 62.
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Lectures Concerning Oratory: Delivered in Trinity College, ed. R. C. Alston (1758; facsimile rpt. Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1969), 254.
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Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres: Delivered in the University of Glasgow, Reported by a Student in 1762-1763, ed. John M. Lothian (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1963), 23.
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A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (New York: Penguin Classics, 1984), VI: 474.
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Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, E. Millicent Sowerby, comp. (Washington, D. C.: The Library of Congress, 1952), I: 157.
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As pointed out in Howell, 600. Howell also cites Lloyd F. Bitzer's “Hume's Philosophy in George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 2 (1969): 139-166.
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Voltaire, Candide, tr. Lowell Bair (New York: Bantam, 1959), 24.
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(New York: New American Library, 1964), 71.
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Oliver Goldsmith, The History of England, from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II (London: 1771), III: 348.
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For a comparison of these histories see my “Tory History Incognito: Hume's History of England in Goldsmith's History of England,” Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 20 (1991): 169-183.
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