Appendix 1

Hume’s Curious Relationship to Tillotson

HUME OPENS HIS EXAMINATION of the testimony in behalf of miracles with these words:

THERE is, in Dr. TILLOTSON’S writings, an argument against the real presence, which is as concise, and elegant, and strong as any argument can possibly be supposed against a doctrine, so little worthy of a serious refutation. (EHU, 10.1)

After sketching what he presents as Tillotson’s basic argument against the doctrine of the real presence (or transubstantiation), Hume tells his reader:

I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument of a like nature, which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures. For so long, I presume, will the accounts of miracles and prodigies be found in all history, sacred and profane. (EHU, 10.2)

These remarks suggest that Tillotson’s argument against transubstantiation will provide an interpretive guide to understanding Hume’s treatment of miracles. How, then, does Hume understand Tillotson’s argument against transubstantiation? Here is what Hume says:

It is acknowledged on all hands, says that learned prelate, that the authority, either of the scripture or of tradition, is founded merely in the testimony of the apostles, who were eye-witnesses to those miracles of our Saviour, by which he proved his divine mission. Our evidence, then, for the truth of the CHRISTIAN religion is less than the evidence for the truth of our senses; because, even in the first authors of our religion, it was no greater; and it is evident it must diminish in passing from them to their disciples; nor can any one rest such confidence in their testimony, as in the immediate object of his senses. But a weaker evidence can never destroy a stronger; and therefore, were the doctrine of the real presence ever so clearly revealed in scripture, it were directly contrary to the rules of just reasoning to give our assent to it. (EHU, 10.1)

Tillotson would not be pleased with any of this. In the first place, as a number of writers have noted, the argument that Hume attributes to Tillotson cannot be found in Tillotson’s writings.³⁰ Specifically, a key component in the argument that Hume attributes to Tillotson is the claim that evidence in behalf of transubstantiation must “diminish in passing from [the first authors of our religion] to their disciples.” Nowhere in the relevant texts does Tillotson employ this diminution argument, as we might call it. Indeed, as we shall see, Tillotson would reject it as running dead counter to his central reason for rejecting the doctrine of transubstantiation. For that matter, Hume, in his treatment of miracles, does not employ this diminution argument either and, in fact, specifically rejects a variation of it in the Treatise.³¹ So what exactly is going on? In an attempt to answer this, we can look more closely at what Tillotson actually does say in his polemic against the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Hume does not identify the texts he has in mind in acknowledging his debt to Tillotson. There are two obvious candidates: Sermon 11, “The Hazard of being Sav’d in the Church of Rome, ” and Sermon 26, “Discourse against Transubstantiation” (Tillotson 1742, 77–84, 190–203). In “The Hazard of being Sav’d in the Church of Rome, ” the doctrine of transubstantiation is listed as one of five dogmas of Roman Catholicism that make it difficult, though, as Tillotson concedes, not strictly impossible, for a Roman Catholic to achieve salvation. (The other four dogmas are the doctrine of infallibility, the doctrine of repentance, the doctrine of purgatory, and the doctrine of deposing kings in case of heresy.) The “Discourse against Transubstantiation” is an extensive elaboration of the argument found in the earlier Sermon 11. Both sermons exhibit the same argumentative structure. Because it is more thorough—as well as more diverting—I will consider the argument presented in Sermon 26.

Tillotson offers various kinds of objections to the doctrine of transubstantiation. Some are scriptural. He argues that there is no need to take Christ’s words “This is my body” literally rather than figuratively. To this end, he cites a long series of passages from the Gospels that can only, with good sense, be taken figuratively. For example, on a purely literal reading of the texts, we would be committed to saying that Christ was a door, a vine, and his church, again literally, his body. About such “Expressions in Scripture, ” Tillotson tells us, “every Man understands in a figurative, and not in a strictly literal and absurd sense” (ibid., 192). Tillotson also treats transubstantiation as a form of idolatry, dismissing it as equivalent to the barbaric doctrine that a god has been made so “that we may eat him” (ibid., 202). Hume would, I think, take pleasure in these sallies, but they cannot be the texts he has in mind when he speaks of Tillotson’s “concise” and “elegant” argument, which his own argument concerning miracles is like in nature.

The closest we get to an argument of the sort Hume attributed to Tillotson, in broad outline, goes as follows: Let us suppose that the doctrine of transubstantiation is true. The thing we take to be bread is not bread but “the body of a man.” Let us further suppose that the thing we take to be wine is not wine but is blood instead. In that case, our eyes would be deceiving us in a most extraordinary way—so extraordinary that, as reasonable people, we should give up all reliance on them. If, however, we were to do this, we would also have to reject the eyewitness reports of miracles “wrought by our Savior and his apostles, the assurances whereof did at first depend upon the certainty of sense” (ibid., 203). Most strikingly, this skepticism with regard to the senses would destroy the credibility of the apostles’ reports of Christ’s appearing to them after his resurrection. In a most remarkable passage, Tillotson imagines the apostles challenging the risen Christ in these words:

Lord, it is but a few days ago since thou didst teach us not to believe our senses, but directly contrary to what we saw, viz. that the Bread which thou gavest us in the Sacrament, though we saw it and handled it and tasted it to be Bread, yet was not Bread, but thine own natural Body; and now thou appealest to our senses, to prove that this is thy body which we now see. If seeing and handling be an unquestionable Evidence that things are what they appear to our senses, then we were deceived before in the Sacrament; and if they be not, then we are not sure now that this is thy Body which we now see and handle, but it may be perhaps Bread under the appearance of Flesh and Bones; just as in the Sacrament, that which we saw and handled and tasted to be Bread, was thy Flesh and Bones under the form and appearance of Bread. (Ibid.)

In short, Tillotson argues that the doctrine of transubstantiation leads to a general skepticism in regard to the senses, which in turn undercuts the testimony in behalf of those miracles that serve as the foundation of the Christian religion. As he puts it, “never were any two things so ill coupled together as the doctrine of Christianity and that of transubstantiation” (ibid.). Whether this is a good argument or a bad one, it is certainly different from the argument attributed to Tillotson by Hume. It is not similar to Hume’s argument either.

There is, however, one place in Sermon 26 where the phrasing in Tillotson’s discussion of transubstantiation bears some similarity to Hume’s phrasing in his treatment of miracles. According to Tillotson the doctrine of transubstantiation, if taken up as a dogma of Christianity, would itself have to be certified by a miracle. This, Tillotson tells us, would prove a self-defeating enterprise:

For that there is a Miracle wrought to prove that what [one] sees in the Sacrament is not Bread but the Body of Christ, there is only the evidence of sense; and there is the very same Evidence to prove that what [one] sees in the Sacrament is not the Body of Christ but Bread. . . . And then the Argument for Transubstantiation and the Objection against it would just balance one another; and consequently Transubstantiation is not proved by a Miracle, because that would be, to prove to a Man by something he sees, that he doth not see what he sees. (Ibid.)

In other words, only the observation of a miracle could establish the doctrine of transubstantiation, but because—going back to Tillotson’s main argument—the doctrine of transubstantiation undercuts all reliance on the senses, observation could never establish the occurrence of the miracle needed to certify this doctrine. This is ingenious, but despite its reference to a balance between opposing arguments, it does not exhibit the structure of Hume’s reasoning concerning the balance between opposing testimony with respect to miracles. Beyond this, it is not the argument that Hume attributes to Tillotson in the opening paragraphs of “Of Miracles.”

Given these disparities, both in argumentative structure and in overall intention, what are we to think of Hume’s attribution of what he calls his own style of reasoning to Tillotson? I confess that I do not know the answer to this question. Perhaps Hume misremembered Tillotson’s argument and simply got it wrong. If so, he was a poor scholar. It is possible that he was intentionally trying to mislead his readers into believing that the Archbishop of Canterbury sanctioned the style of arguing he was about to employ. That would make Hume a scoundrel. Perhaps Hume was doing nothing more than having mischievous fun at the archbishop’s expense. Most charitably: Perhaps Hume intended no more than a general comparison between his treatment of miracles and Tillotson’s treatment of transubstantiation. Hume’s actual argument is similar to Tillotson’s actual argument in the following way: Both approaches exploit a relationship between a concept and the testimony needed to show that something actually satisfies the concept. Hume and Tillotson do not, however, exploit this relationship in the same way. Hume’s central argument, as I have represented it, is that, given the nature of a miracle, the standards for testimony establishing one must be extremely high. Tillotson argues that accepting the doctrine of transubstantiation leads to a skepticism that undercuts all testimony. In any case, both arguments turn crucially on a relationship between testimony and concepts. There seems to be no similarity deeper than this. If so, Hume’s invocation of Tillotson is either overblown or ironic.³²