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References
For a discussion of this letter, see François Tricaud, ‘Quelques questions soulevées par la comparaison du Léviathan latin avec le Léviathan anglais,’ Hobbes-Forschungen ed. by Reinhart Koselleck and Roman Schnur (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1969), pp. 237–244, 240–241, n. 7. See ‘Letter 179: Pieter Blaeu to Thomas Hobbes, 9 December 1667,’ ‘Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes,’ ed. by Noel Malcolm vol. 2: 1660–1679 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 693–696 (letters hereafter cited as Correspondence). Tricaud discusses the two versions again in his French edition of Leviathan, Léviathan Traité de la matière, de la forme et du pouvoir de la république ecclésiastique et civile (Paris: Éditions Sirey, 1971), xvi–xxix.
Hobbes suffered from a shaking of the hands which eventually rendered his handwriting illegible; see, for example, Correspondence, Letters 190 and 202, dated May, 1671, and March, 1678. More circumstances of Hobbes’s life can be glimpsed in the account given by his long-time friend John Aubrey; see ‘Brief Lives’ chiefly of contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), pp. 321ff. The biography of Hobbes is the longest in the collection and is well-regarded, though Wood says in his Athenae Oxonienses that Aubrey ‘was a shiftless person, roving and magotieheaded, and sometimes little better than crased’; see Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses Life of Wood, 1 (Oxford: Ecclesiastical History Society, 1848), p. 152. For an explanation for this appraisal, see Malcolm, Correspondence, p. 781. See also A.P. Martinich, Hobbes A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Arnold A. Rogow, Thomas Hobbes: Radical in Service of Reaction (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986), and George Croom Robertson’s study in biographical form, Hobbes (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1905).
James Wheldon, the Earl of Devonshire’s baker at Chatsworth during the thinker’s last several years of life, then the executor of his estate and a residual beneficiary under his will. See Correspondence, letter 94 and General Introduction vol. 1, xxiii–v; Letter 168, dated August, 1664, n. 5, and Letter 202, dated March, 1578. See Aubrey’s Life, p. 385, for the bequest.
In dealing with Blaeu, Hobbes worked with one of the greatest publishing firms of the seventeenth century. Joan (or Johannes; c. 1599–1673) was a very active and prominent Amsterdam publisher, having worked in the firm with his father, Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1571–1638), from 1630; both names appear on the company’s maps starting in 1631. Willem Janszoon had studied with Tycho Brahe and, as a publisher, brought out works on cartography together with globes and maps of cities and countries as well as texts both by Grotius and his secretary Isaac Vossius and by the Dutch polymath Barlaeus (Gaspard van Baerle). Taking over direction of the firm following his father’s death, Joan’s most imposing work in cartography was the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, or Atlas Maior, as it was also called, leading to the 1663 production of the twelve large and lavishly decorated volumes of Le Grand Atlas, dedicated to Louis XIV’s minister Colbert. See I.C. Koeman, Joan Blaeu and his Grand Atlas: Introduction to the Facsimile Edition of Le Grand Atlas, 1663 (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., 1970). Like his father, Joan served as cartographer to the East India Company and had an active public life. The participation of Pieter (1637–1706) in the project with Hobbes indicates his father’s intention that Pieter succeed him in directing the firm, not the older son Willem, whose preparation was not in the book trade, nor the younger Joan II, who was too young. As early as 1660, Pieter was traveling throughout Europe on behalf of the firm. For his correspondence with the Florentine bibliophile and scholar Antonio Magliabecchi (1633–1714), see Alfonso Mirto and Henk Th. van Veen, Pieter Blaeu: Letters to Florentines Antonio Magliabecchi, Leopoldo and Cosimo III de’ Medici, and Others, 1660’1705 (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Press, 1993). Like his father, who held several public offices, Pieter was appointed in 1668 to serve as secretary to the Weeskamer (Orphans’ Court) at Amsterdam, a position of some responsibility and social standing; he would eventually withdraw from the firm in favor of Joan II. At its peak, in a space of four years, the firm’s presses produced over 1 million impressions from 1,000 copper plates. An anti-Orangist, Joan’s political career suffered as a result of the elevation of William III to Stadholder in 1672; he was dismissed from his position on the city council, following a service of some 21 years. Earlier that year, on February 23, the firm had suffered a devastating fire at its shop in the Gravenstraat; it continued to publish after the fire and Joan’s death, but disappeared in 1712, along with the Leiden house of another of Hobbes’s publishers, Elzevier, which would later be resurrected.
Du Verdus wrote in 1654 that he was making an interlinear translation (Correspondence, letter 67) and again in 1655 to express his hope of translating Leviathan into French (Correspondence, letter 75) and in 1656 with a promise of an exact translation (Correspondence, letter 100) and again in 1657 (Correspondence, letter 108). De Martel wrote in 1657, seeking a translation (Correspondence, letter 129), followed by du Bosc in 1659 (‘All ye learned men I know desire that Leviathan were in French or Latine;’ Correspondence, letter 137). Du Prat wrote in 1661 of his plan to translate Leviathan (Correspondence, letter 144) and again in 1663 regarding a translation (Correspondence, letter 155). And, Sorbière was directly involved in the volume’s production (Correspondence, letters 154, 156, 159, 162 and 166); see Karl Schuhmann, Hobbes Une Chronique: cheminement de sa pensée et de sa vie (Paris: J. Vrin, 1998), p. 195 (hereafter, Schuhmann, Chronique). In fact, it was probably during a visit to England in the summer of 1663 that Sorbière proposed such an edition, much as he had helped with the first public edition of De Cive in 1647, published by the Elzevier firm. See Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore ed. by Karl Schuhmann (Paris: J. Vrin, 1999), lxxxiiiff. Hobbes’s work had appeared under the Blaeu imprint prior to 1668; the Catalogus Universalis of Broer Jansz (c. 1579–1652), a record of the Dutch book trade catalogues of Amsterdam publications in the period 1640–1652, lists a French translation of De Cive (‘Fondemens de la Politique par Thomas Hobbes de Cive’), made by Sorbière, published in Amsterdam in August of 1649 and reprinted in Paris in 1651. See Broer Jansz, The Catalogus Universalis: A Facsimile Edition of the Dutch Booktrade Catalogues compiled and published by Broer Jansz, Amsterdam 1640–1652 with an introduction and indexes by H.W. de Kooker; translation of the introduction by A.E. Simoni (Utrecht: H&S Publishers, 1986), catalogue XIV, entry #143, and Schuhmann, Chronique, p. 195.
See Zbigniew Lubienski, Die Grundlagen des ethisch-politischen System von Hobbes (Munich: E. Reinhardt, 1932), pp. 254–273; F.C.Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes: An Interpretation of Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 54–56, and François Tricaud, Introduction à Léviathan, xvi–xxviii. For a comparison of the Latin and English texts, see also Julius Lips, Die Stellung des Thomas Hobbes zu den politischen Parteien der großen englischen Revolution (Leipzig: Ernst Wiegandt, 1927), pp. 75–82. Tricaud refers to a suggestion made by Hood that the disclosure in Blaeu’s letter of Hobbes’s work methods bolsters the thesis that the untrained secretary had a written text to read from, for it would scarcely have been possible for Hobbes to recite in Latin to him. On this, see Correspondence, General Introduction xxiiiff. The unfortunate Henry Stubbe has been conjectured as a possible source of such a Latin text; in 1656, Stubbe had worked on a translation and had proceeded as far as chapter 9. See Correspondence, letters 80, 87, 91, 104 and 113; dated respectively, April, 1656; July 1656; October, 1656; December, 1656, and January, 1657. Stubbe was a noted Latinist and, though indiscreet and intemperate, at times an intimate of Hobbes; a display of Stubbe’s erudition in Hobbes’s defense against the Oxford mathematician Wallis may be found in ‘An Extract of a Letter concerning the Grammatical Part of the Controversy between Mr. Hobbes and Dr. Wallis.’ See EW VII, pp. 401–428. But, the extant Latin text does not contain words which Stubbe had specifically suggested to Hobbes as desirable translations, so one may doubt that Hobbes incorporated his efforts, preferring to return to his own presumed Latin text. Indeed, Hobbes states (EW 4, p. 17) that he ‘converted’ Leviathan for fear that’ some other man might do it not to his liking.’ Stubbe’s death is recounted in a letter of Andrew Marvell to William Popple, dated July 15, 1676: ‘Dr. Stubbe physician atheist found dead I meane drowned betwixt Bath and Bristol. 23 guinnies and 3 broad pieces in his pockett suppost drunk. es magne (sic) Deus.’Marvell to William Popple, London, July 15, 1676, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H.M. Margoliouth; vol. 2 Letters, revised by Pierre Legouis with the collaboration of E.E. Duncan-Jones., 3d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 425.
The Latin Leviathan was the only text in the 1668 edition first printed there; it alone had a list of errata. The other works were reprints of texts that had appeared before 1668. See Schuhmann, De Corpore, op. cit., lxxxvii, n. 1.
But, in a letter to Gilbert Sheldon, Hobbes’s friend Robert Payne mentions Hobbes’s statement that, besides De Cive, which had been translated into English, he had ‘another trifle on hand, which is Politique in English, (of which he hath finished thirty-seven chapters, intending about fifty in the whole).’ See Schuhmann, Chronique, pp. 117ff. Leviathan itself is clearly focused on the England of the Civil War, particularly viewed in the light of the war’s climax, the execution of the king in 1649; as Hobbes said in the ‘Review and Conclusion,’ Leviathan was ‘occasioned by the disorders of the present time;’ later, he said: ‘The cause of my writing that book, was the consideration of what the ministers before, and in the beginning of, the civil war, by their preaching and writing did contribute thereto.’ Schuhmann, ibid. See also Glenn Burgess, ‘Contexts for Writing and Publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan,’ History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 675–702. The book’s style makes clear its audience; for example, the excuses he makes to his readers for the philosophic matters they may find difficult show that he did not write for the learned but for the educated lay reader, whose command of Latin might not be sufficient. He finished Leviathan in English; given that he had addressed it to his countrymen from the beginning, there was little reason for him ever to have started Leviathan in Latin. See below, n. 11.
This may also be taken, as Robertson does, to reflect a later desire for greater conciseness; see Robertson, op. cit., p. 197.
See Frithiof Brandt, Thomas Hobbes’ Mechanical Conception of Nature (Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard, 1927), pp. 166, 168, 171–172, 358. See OL 1, xcii: ‘Perfeci librum patrio sermone; ut ab Anglis/Posset saepe meis, utiliterque legi...’
On the history of revisions of this text, see Schuhmann, De Corpore, op. cit., ix–cv.
Latin was the medium of learned communication in which Newton published the Principia in 1687. Hobbes had presented his political ideas in the Latin De Cive, which he distributed privately, that is, without named publisher, in 1642 and then published in 1647; see Richard Tuck, ‘Warrender’s De Cive,’ Political Studies 33 (1985): 308–315. Hobbes’s friend de Martel wrote to Mersenne in January, 1643, that book had appeared at Paris ‘not indeed among the common sort, but among the ϰαϱιεντες (charientes; the accomplished ones)... since it contains many paradoxes about the state and Religion, and so is not available to everyone;’ quoted in Tuck, art. cit., p. 309. But, Leviathan shows considerable differences from the earlier text, for example, in its stress upon religion, in the theory of authorization in relation to the social contract and the theory of sovereign interpretation of the scriptures, so it is not surprising that Hobbes wanted a Latin version of his political masterpiece.
On Hobbes’s ties to Gassendi, see Gianni Paganini, ‘Hobbes, Gassendi e la psicologia del meccanismo,’ Hobbes Oggi: atti del convegno internazionale di studi promosso da Arrigo Pacchi (18–21 May, 1988) ed. by Arrigo Pacchi (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1990), pp. 351–445; Gianni Paganini, ‘Hobbes, Gassendi et le De Cive,’ Materia Actuosa: Antiquité, Âge Classique, Lumières: Mélanges en l’honneur d’Olivier Bloch ed. by Miguel Benitez, Antony McKenna, Gianni Paganini and Jean Salem (Paris: PUF, 2000), pp. 183–206, and Arrigo Pacchi, ‘Hobbes e l’epicureismo,’ Rivista critica di storia della filosofia 33 (1978): 54–71.
On Hobbes’s French connections, see Quentin Skinner, ‘Thomas Hobbes and His Disciples in France and England,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 8 (1966): 153–167, and Richard Tuck, ‘Optics and Sceptics: The Philosophical Foundations of Hobbes’s Political Thought,’ Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe ed. by Edward Leites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 235–263.
He mentions that he omitted’ some such passages as strangers are not concerned in;’ see EW IV, p. 317. This is not to say that the Latin Leviathan was not also meant for the English audience of 1668. For, while Hobbes had been solicited ‘from beyond the sea’ for the Latin volume, he surely also welcomed the opportunity to present new and modified positions in a version well adapted for the learned not only on the Continent but also at home. Thus, this version gave him a chance to write another book on politics, his fourth major work, after The Elements of Law of 1640, De Cive (1642 and 1647) and Leviathan in English in 1651. Pieter Blaeu assures him that he will send a number of copies of the volume to London for the booksellers there; Correspondence, letter 179. Also, the Appendix is, in part, intended as a response to English critics, whom readers on the Continent may not have known.
His correction of this ‘very careless’ error, as Hobbes refers to it in the Appendix, § 186, is subject to varying interpretations; cf. Richard Sherlock, ‘The Theology of Leviathan: Hobbes on Religion,’ Interpretation 10 (1982): 43–60, esp. pp. 50–51, and Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World trans. by John Bowden (Philadelphia; Fortress Press, 1985), pp. 194–222. See within, ‘Hobbes and the Economic Trinity.’
Hobbes and Bramhall (1594–1663) debated the problem of free will probably in the first half of 1645 at the request of the Marquis of Newcastle, probably at the nobleman’s Parisian residence. Hobbes later traveled to Rouen and likely replied in writing to Bramhall’s text during his stay there, July–September, 1645. Neither man envisaged the publication of their results. See Thomas Hobbes, De la liberté et de la nécessité: suivi de Réponse à la capture de Léviathan ed. by Franck Lessay (Paris: J. Vrin, 1993), pp. 31ff. A French acquaintance of Hobbes obtained a copy of his essay, entitled Of Liberty and Necessity, and then requested a French translation of it from John Davies, who lived in France between 1649 and 1651. Davies copied the English text and published it in 1654 in London without permission; for all this, see Schuhmann, Chronique, pp. 132ff. Bramhall felt deceived and published the whole controversy in 1655 under the title A Defence of the True Liberty of Human Actions from Antecedent or Extrinsic Necessity. Hobbes responded the following year with Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, Clearly Stated and Debated between Dr. Bramhall, Bishop of Derry, and Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesbury. Bramhall then brought out his Castigation of Hobbes’s Animadversions and The Catching of Leviathan the Great Whale, in 1658. Following Bramhall’s death, Hobbes’s final word, An Answer..., though written in 1668, appeared posthumously. The gap between 1658 and 1668 in this acrimonious exchange was occasioned, Hobbes says in his preface to the reader, by his ignorance of the existence of Bramhall’s last contribution,’ so little talk there was of his Lordship’s writings.’ See EW IV, p. 282, and his comments in The Questions..., EW V, p. 434. Bramhall had been a highly successful administrator of the affairs of the church in Ireland, where he had gone as chaplain with Wentworth in 1633. Severe and conventional, he suffered the same troubles as many others with his royalist and Anglican commitments during the 1640’s, being accused of treason, losing the large holdings in land that had made him a rich man, having to flee abroad on various occasions. Presbyterians hated the name of ‘Bishop Bramble,’ and Cromwell called him the ‘Irish Canterbury,’ with reference to the hated and condemned William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. Bramhall returned to England in 1660 with Charles II; defending his property in a law suit at Omagh, he suffered a paralytic stroke and died on June 25, 1663. Jeremy Taylor preached his funeral sermon. He was championed by the royalist, Anglo-Catholic poet T.S. Eliot; see ‘John Bramhall,’ in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1951), pp. 354–362. The debate with Hobbes is discussed by Leopold Damrosch, ‘Hobbes as Reformation Theologian: Implications of the Free-Will Controversy,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979): 339–353. On these and related points, see also J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,’ in Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 148–201; Dorothea Krook, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Doctrine of Meaning and Truth,’ Philosophy 31 (1956): 3–22; and William B. Glover, ‘God and Thomas Hobbes,’ Church History 29 (1960): 141–168, reprinted in Hobbes Studies ed. K.C. Brown (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1965); and Patrick Riley, ‘Will and Legitimacy in the Philosophy of Hobbes: Is He a Consent Theorist?,’ Political Studies 21 (1973): 500–522.
See EW IV, pp. 316–318.
In the dedicatory epistle of the Seven Philosophical Problems, dated 1662 and presented to Charles II, Hobbes shows sensitivity to charges of atheism or heresy, brought against Leviathan: I will not break the custom of joining to my offering a prayer; and it is, that your Majesty will be pleased to pardon this following short apology for my Leviathan. Not that I rely upon apologies, but upon your Majesty’s most gracious general pardon. That which is in it of theology, contrary to the general current of divines, is not put there as my opinion, but propounded with submission to those that have the power ecclesiastical. I did never after, either in writing or discourse, maintain it. There is nothing in it against episcopacy; I cannot therefore imagine what reason any episcopal man can have to speak of me, as I hear some of them do, as of an atheist, or man of no religion, unless it be for making the authority of the Church wholly upon the regal power; which I hope your Majesty will think is neither atheism nor heresy. But what had I to do to meddle with matters of that nature, seeing religion is not philosophy, but law? This ingratiating letter seeks Charles’s support but is hardly a retraction of his views, and ‘apology’ here surely means defense, at least equivocally. And, of course, many Anglican ministers can only have taken umbrage at the total subordination of the church to the sovereign that is the object of Leviathan. For details of this period of Hobbes’s life, see Schuhmann, Chronique, pp. 127ff., and Leslie Stephen, Hobbes (London: Macmillan and Co., 1904), pp. 1–70, esp. 60–61.
On his possible links to English Catholics seeking political toleration, see Jeffrey R. Collins, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649,’ Historical Journal 45 (2002): 305–331; but see below, n. 44.
On the dating of the appointment, see Correspondence, letter 45, dated September 24, 1646 (Doceo enim Mathematicam, non Politicam; ‘for, I teach mathematics, not politics.’).
For both letters, see Schuhmann, Chronique, p. 96.
See Correspondence, letter 45.
See Correspondence, letter 52. As Malcolm remarks, it is peculiar that Hobbes’s closest French friends were Huguenot Protestants and Catholic religious, whereas his bitterest English enemies were Presbyterians and Anglicans like Bramhall, see Malcolm, Correspondence, xxxiv. One explanation of the hostility may be found in Hobbes’s attitude toward patristic theology. Like Hooker before, Bramhall largely accepted the work of the Fathers and was far more broadly accepting of the Christian theological tradition in general than Hobbes, who was thorough-going in his rejection of philosophical theology, which, in the 1655 dedication to his Elements of Philosophy (De Corpore), he likened to a character in Aristophanes’ The Frogs, Empusa, walking on one leg of copper, the other of dung: There walked in old Greece a certain phantasm, for superficial gravity, though full within of fraud and filth, a little like philosophy; which unwary men, thinking to be it, adhered to the professors of it, some to one, some to another, though they disagreed among themselves, and with great salary put their children to them to be taught, instead of wisdom, nothing but to dispute, and, neglecting the laws, to determine every question according to their own fancies. The first doctors of the Church, next the Apostles, born in those times, whilst they endeavoured to defend the Christian faith against the Gentiles by natural reason, began also to make use of philosophy, and with the decrees of Holy Scripture to mingle the sentences of heathen philosophers; and first some harmless ones of Plato, but afterwards also many foolish and false ones out of the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle; and bringing in the enemies, betrayed unto them the citadel of Christianity. From that time, instead of the worship of God, there entered a thing called school divinity, walking on one foot firmly, which is the Holy Scripture, but halted on the other rotten foot, which the Apostle Paul called vain, and might have called pernicious philosophy; for it hath raised an infinite number of controversies in the Christian world concerning religion, and from those controversies, wars. It is like that Empusa in the Athenian comic poet, which was taken in Athens for a ghost that changed shapes, having one brazen leg, but the other was the leg of an ass, and was sent, as was believed, by Hecate, as a sign of some approaching evil fortune. Against this Empusa I think there cannot be invented a better exorcism, than to distinguish between the rules of religion, that is, the rules of honouring God, which we have from the laws, and the rules of philosophy, that is, the opinions of private men; and to yield what is due to religion to the Holy Scripture, and what is due to philosophy to natural reason. And this I shall do, if I but handle the Elements of Philosophy truly and clearly, as I endeavour to do. Therefore having... long since reduced all power ecclesiastical and civil by strong arguments of reason, without repugnance to God’s word, to one and the same sovereign authority; I intend now, by putting into a clear method the true foundations of natural philosophy, to fright and drive away this metaphysical Empusa; not by skirmish, but by letting in the light upon her. The tone of superiority and scoffing, present in the religious criticism brought against Hobbes, suggests that critics were unwilling and unable to conceive of Christianity without Greek metaphysics, though this was precisely what Hobbes sought. See below, n. 35, andwithin, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’
Just prior to his return to England, Catholic authorities in France had threatened him with arrest: in Leviathan, which he was discussing with friends in France, he called the pope the ‘king of the fairies.’ See Collins, art. cit., p. 325. In his Considerations, he said that he left France because ‘he would not trust his safety to the French clergy.’ These movements against him in part explain his wish to return to England, as he confided to fellow exile Edward Hyde, later Lord Clarendon, who himself had a part in ‘discountenancing’ Hobbes before Charles’ court. See Schuhmann, Chronique, pp. 122 and 129. But, Hobbes was considering the circumstances of a return to England from at least 1647, when Sorbière’s generous but rather clumsy assistance in publishing De Cive caused him, he believed, some difficulty; see Correspondence, letters 52 and 62. While Hobbes’s seeming closeness to Charles might have been thought likely to prejudice his chances of returning unmolested to the England of the Commonwealth, he entered England in the winter of 1651, made a submission to the Council of State and entered upon an active, private life in London, eventually resuming and gaining the friendship and conversation of such men as Davenant, Cowley, Harvey and Selden. In fact, he returned as all three of his political treatises appeared in England: the first, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, in 1650; the English translation of De Cive by March 12, 1651, and Leviathan by the end of April, 1651.
Charles Cavendish indicated that it was Lord Jermyn, Queen Maria Henrietta’s chamberlain in exile, who arranged the appointment, but, in that Jermyn had served under Hobbes’s former patron Newcastle during the Civil War, the latter’s influence is conjectured. See Cavendish’s letter to Pell (British Library, MS Add. 4278, fol. 265), discussed by Lisa Sarasohn, ‘Was Leviathan a Patronage Artifact?,’ History of Political Thought 21 (2000): 606–631.
This ban figures in the Latin editions of some of Hobbes’s works and in the posthumous publication of Hobbes’s Behemoth and certain of the texts arising from the exchange with Bramhall. See Correspondence, letters 206, 207 and 208. For a discussion of the texts from this period, see Thomas Hobbes, Textes sur l’hérésie et sur l’histoire ed. by Franck Lessay (Paris: Vrin, 1993).
Robertson reports the entry in the Journal of the Commons for Wednesday, October 17, 1666, ordering ‘that the Committee to which the Bill against Atheism and Profaness is committed be impowered to receive information touching such books as tend to atheism, blasphemy and profaness, or against the essence and attributes of God, and in particular the book published in the name of one White and the book of Mr. Hobbes called “The Leviathan,” and to report the matter with their opinion to the House.’ The bill passed on January 31 following, was then referred to a select committee of the Lords, dropped, reintroduced but not finally sent on to the House. See Robertson, op. cit., pp. 193–194; Schuhmann, Chronique, p. 195, and Samuel Mintz, The Hunting of ‘Leviathan’: Seventeenth-century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 60ff. On atheism, see Nigel Smith, ‘The Charge of Atheism and the Language of Radical Speculation, 1640–1660,’ Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment ed. by Michael Hunter and David Wootton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 131–158.
See Aubrey, Brief Lives, p. 339.
See the entry for September 3, 1668, The Diary of Samuel Pepys ed. Henry Wheatley 2 (New York, NY: Random House, 1946), p. 927.
See Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 33; Johann Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Context (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), xiv, and Patricia Springborg, ‘Hobbes, Heresy and the Historia Ecclesiastica,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994): 553–571, p. 556.
This text echoes, in some cases, textually, many elements of especially the second chapter of the present Appendix. I consulted the version found in Somers’ Tracts ed. by Walter Scott, Esq. (1812) vol. 7, pp. 373–381, printed with Scargill’s 1669 Recantation and the 1680 collection of Hobbes’s ‘Last Sayings,’ made by Charles Blount. The first editor of the tract states that it resulted directly from the 1666 commotion, as is possible if its size and complexity are compared to the much more detailed and lengthy text appearing in 1668. But, Hobbes’s account of the Anthropomorphites is more correct in the tract; see Appendix, §§ 174 and 180. Also, there is material in the tract that might be seen as supplementary to the Appendix. Held back until after his death, thus subject to correction following the 1668 publication, the tract may thus reflect Hobbes’s first and last intentions in these areas.
These issues were still hotly contested in the period following the Restoration Church Settlement of 1662. Indeed, ‘Hobbism’ was a term of abuse brought against many who had more than a passing acquaintance with Hobbes’s religious and ecclesiological views; see John Marshall, ‘The Ecclesiology of the Latitude-men 1660–1689: Stillingfleet, Tillotson and “Hobbism”,’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985): 407–427, and Jan Wojcik, “‘Behold the Fear of the Lord’: The Erastianism of Stillingfleet, Wolseley, and Tillotson,” Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-eighteenth-century Europe: Studies on the Traité des Trois Imposteurs ed. by Silvia Berti, Françoise Charles-Daubert and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), pp. 357–374. Here too, we may note another source of vindictive hostility against Hobbes’s religious beliefs, namely, that those who could not share his materialism and its ramifications and reacted strongly against them nonetheless shared many of his views on the place and role of the church.
Hobbes’s claim rests on the abolition of the High Commission, the court of heresy put down by the Long Parliament through the Star Chamber Act of 1641. See the discussion of this point in the Appendix, §§ 134–135, and nn., and §§ 175ff., and nn.
See Appendix § 175.
On the thesis that Hobbes’s religious pronouncements were veiled assertions of atheism and unbelief, see Wright ‘Curley and Martinich in Dubious Battle,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 40 (2002): 461–476.
See Mintz, op. cit., passim; J. Bowle, Hobbes and His Critics: A Study in Seventeenth Century Constitutionalism (NY, NY: Barnes and Noble, 1969), andMalcolm, Correspondence General Introduction, xxxiiiff.
Thus, like Leo Strauss, Raymond Polin has said that Hobbes chose to disguise his true thoughts, hoping his sympathetic reader would read between the lines his true intentions; see Raymond Polin, Hobbes, Dieu et les hommes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), pp. 7–10.
Among the Germans are Karl Holl, Emanuel Hirsch, and Erich Vogelsang, though Karl Barth, Paul Althaus, Karl Barth, Friedrich Gogarten and Werner Elert may also be mentioned in reacting similarly to what they called the Kulturprotestantismus of their nineteenth-century predecessors, Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack and Ernst Troeltsch. See James Stayer, Martin Luther, German Savior: German Evangelical Theological Faculties and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917–1933 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), for a reading of political motivations within this diverse group of theologians. Among the Scandinavians are Gustaf Aulen, Anders Nygren, Ragnar Bring, Gustaf Wingren and, more recently, those associated with the theology of ‘theosis,’ especially Tuomo Mannermaa.
See, for example, Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1967); The Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reformation Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1992), and The Reformation: Roots and Ramifications trans. by Andrew Colin Gow (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1994).
It is the great merit of Prof. Lloyd’s work to have emphasized the large religious element in Hobbes’s theoretical project. See S.A. Lloyd, Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and ‘Contemporary Uses of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,’ Rational Commitment and Social Justice Essays for Gregory Kavka ed. by Jules L. Coleman and Christopher W. Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 122–149. I do not agree however that Hobbes considered all religious devotion self-interested. See within, n. 50 and ‘Hobbes in Exile.’
Correspondence, letter 37, dated August 1641, to William Cavendish, third Earl of Devonshire. Hobbes’s preference for episcopacy as expressed later in De Cive rests on his reading of the practices of the early church, which could not in any case preclude the natural rights of the sovereign to regulate religion. While Prof. Collins has added important new information regarding Hobbes’s actions in the period before his return to England, I do not believe he has made out the case that Independency was his key concern in the English Leviathan. For one, he does not show that Hobbes knew of Blacklo’s plans. Like his response to the Engagement Controversy in ‘The Review and Conclusion,’ his tilt toward Independency seems a somewhat opportunistic diversion from his main targets, and in fact one may doubt whether the Independents’ program could ever have won his approval. He always sought to place the interest of the sovereign above that of ecclesiastical authorities, and the seeming endorsement of Independency must be read as qualified by that overriding goal. Thus, in Leviathan, he introduced his theory of the public pastor focused on Constantine, who recognized Christianity in the interest of peace. The emperor, whom, in chapter 42 of Leviathan, he calls the supreme bishop of the Roman Empire, was certainly competent to alter church organization, just as he played a role in formulating church doctrine, so to say episcopacy or any form of ecclesiastical government is for some reason preferable to another is not to argue that the public pastor cannot change it. In Leviathan, in advocating the power of the sovereign in church affairs, Hobbes does not modify views in order to advocate Independency; he had long held that view, as the letter to Newcastle shows. Finally, the intersection is not great between his views and those of the Independents. In Behemoth, he saw them as the progeny of the Presbyterians, who: distracted their auditors into a great number of sects, as Brownists, Anabaptists, Independents, Fifth-monarchy-men, Quakers, and divers others, all commonly called by the name of fanatics: insomuch as there was no so dangerous an enemy to the Presbyterians, as this brood of their own hatching. See EW VI, p. 307. See within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’ Moreover, ‘unpleasing priests’ were found not only within the Catholic Church, according to Hobbes, but ‘even in that church that hath presumed most of reformation;’ see Leviathan 1.12.32.168. This is most likely a reference not to the middle way taken by Anglicanism but to Presbyterianism, which, along with Catholicism and the ‘fanatics,’ are Hobbes’s targets in the English Leviathan. Cf. Collins, art. cit., passim, and Johann Sommerville, ‘Hobbes and Independency,’ Nuove prospettive critiche sul Leviatano di Hobbes ed. by Luc Foisneau and George Wright (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2004), pp. 155–173. See also Glenn Burgess, ‘Contexts for Writing and Publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan,’ History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 675–702, and M.M. Goldsmith, ‘Hobbes Ambiguous Politics,’ History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 639–673.
The importance of such evidence should not be underestimated, given Hobbes’s own involvement in its production as well as the important role such devices played in advertising and selling books in this period. Thus, after he has asked Sorbière to remove an offending engraving and inscription from an edition of De Cive, he says, ‘We shall have to pay [the Elsevier firm] if they think the book will be less vendible without the portrait or the inscription; I do not think it will, but still we must pay them if necessary;’ Correspondence, letter 52; see also letter 154, dated September 1663. Bredekamp states, ‘With no other sense did the founder of the modern theory of the state... concern himself more strongly or for a longer period than with the eye. He conducted optical studies for several years, and he furnished his early masterpieces with such well thought-out frontispieces that one must really speak of targeted visual strategies;’ see Horst Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes Visuelle Strategien der Leviathan: Urbild des modernen Staates: Werkillustrationen und Portraits (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), p. 7.
See below, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’
For a discussion of the relation between Hobbes’s views on religion and politics to ‘early liberal thought,’ see Joshua Mitchell, ‘Luther and Hobbes on the Question: Who was Moses, Who was Christ?,’ Journal of Politics 53 (1991): 676–700. See below, n. 53.
For the phrase ‘Protestant Era,’ see Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era abridged ed., trans. by James Luther Adams. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1957), esp ‘The End of the Protestant Era,’ pp. 222–238. On Hobbes as a Protestant thinker, see A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Hobbes is probably best located within the school of Protestant natural law. See Stephen A. State, ‘Text and Context: Skinner, Hobbes and Theistic Natural Law,’ The Historical Journal 28 (1985): 27–50. Note Reventlow’s statement: So, if Hobbes towers above the circle of his intellectual contemporaries as an original thinker and his efforts towards strict rational consistency have produced an impressive system providing a basis for sovereignty over the state and the state church, in his intrinsic presuppositions and his religious attitudes, which are also the basis of his entire thought, he is completely a child of his time. See Reventlow, op. cit., pp. 221–222. Hobbes’s adoption of a skeptical view of human sociability implicates the much broader question of Protestant anthropology, viz., the understanding of ‘fallen man,’ that underlies both the thinker’s political philosophy and the rhetorical position he takes in Leviathan.
Prof. Springborg has pointed out, I believe correctly, that Hobbes considered the settlement of ecclesiastical authority crucial to his case for political authority; see Patricia Springborg, ‘Leviathan and the Problem of Ecclesiastical Authority,’ Political Theory 3 (1975): 289–303. I would add that his case for political authority, based on natural law, rests on his natural theology. See below, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’
For the argument that Hobbes was an orthodox Christian, see A.P. Martinich, op. cit.
For an analysis of Hobbes’s biblical typology, see Henning Graf Reventlow, Reventlow op. cit., pp. 195–222, esp. pp. 209ff. Figural representation, that is, typology, was Hobbes’s means of relating the Old and New Testaments by way of the notion of promise.
Thus, for example, Hobbes can doubt whether the writers of the New Testament were influenced by Homer, Hesiod and Vergil in their descriptions of hell; see Appendix, §27. On Hobbes’s adoption of Humanist techniques of biblical interpretation, see Henning Graf Reventlow, Reventlow op. cit., pp. 194–222, esp. 212ff. Apart from questions of biblical interpretation, Hobbes’s historical way of thinking is applied to the practices of the church itself, as evidenced several times in the Appendix, for example, throughout the commentary on the Nicene Creed, §§1–104; in his analysis of liturgical practices, such as the introduction of the Gloria Patri, §38, and in the definition of the church, with its emphasis on the historical context and character of the Christian proclamation, passim While Hobbes urges a similar task of private interpretation of the Bible upon his reader, as in Appendix, § 104, he in no way invites public expression of private views if they are contrary to the views promulgated by political authorities.
Compare the position espoused by Martin Luther in his address to the Diet of Worms in 1521: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. Quoted in ‘Career of the Reformer II,’ Luther’s Works, ed. and trans. by George W. Forell (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1958), p. 112. Such an understanding of Scripture is consistent with an acceptance of the biblical miracles; Hobbes is not Hume. Hobbes affirms the view, espoused among many others by Thomas Aquinas, that claims for miracles should be tested; see Kinch Hoekstra, ‘Disarming the Prophets: Thomas Hobbes and Predictive Power,’ Nuove prospettive critiche sul Leviatano di Hobbes ed. by Luc Foisneau and George Wright (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2004), pp. 97–154. They are not in any case the result of special power in the miracle-worker, but God’s direct and special boon to make manifest the prophet’s mission; see Leviathan 3.37.7.473. And, like the Anglican clergy of his era, he believes that miracles have ceased; see within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’
Ibid.
Ibid.
Appendix, § 56.
See P.O. Kristeller, ‘The Immortality of the Soul,’ Renaissance Thought and its Sources (NY, NY: Columbia University Press, 1979), 181–196. This essay first appeared in the volume Renaissance Concepts of Man and Other Essays (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972). The Council of Vienne was called in 1311 by Clement V at the insistence of Philip the Fair in order to condemn the Order of the Knights Templar. The pope also hoped to prevent or forestall condemnation of the memory (damnatio memoriae) of his predecessor, Boniface VIII, whom Philip had outraged at Anagni. In one of its decrees on the faith, the council defined the rational or intellectual soul as per se and essentially the form of the human body; in so doing, it held Thomas Aquinas blameless of criticisms made by Peter John Olivi, following Tempier’s condemnations of 1277. The Fifth Lateran Council was called by the great Renaissance pope, Julius II, who died February 21, 1513. It was under his successor, the Medici pope, Leo X, that the council decreed in December, 1513, against Pomponazzi, that ‘we condemn and reject all those who insist that the intellectual soul is mortal, or that it is only one among all human beings, and those who suggest doubts on this topic. For the soul not only truly exists of itself and essentially as the form of the human body, as is said in the canon of our predecessor of happy memory, pope Clement V, promulgated in the general council of Vienne, but it is also immortal; and further, for the enormous number of bodies into which it is infused individually, it can and ought to be and is multiplied.’ For Luther’s indignant reaction to the council’s pronouncement, see below, p. 25.
See within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’
This notion is not new in Hobbes. Reginald Scot (c. 1538–1599) made the same charge against the Roman clergy in his Discourse of Devils and Spirits: And first... you shall understand that they hold that all the soules in heaven may come downe and appeare to uswhen they list, and assume anie body saving their owne: otherwise (saie they) such soules should not be perfectlie happy. They saie that you may know the good soules from the bad verie easily. For a damned soule hath a very heavie and sowre looke; but a sainte’s soule hath a cheerful and a meerie countenance: these also are white and shining, the other cole black. And these damned soules also may come up out of hell at their pleasure, although Abraham made Dives beleeve the contrarie. They affirme that damned soules walke oftenest: next unto them, the soules of purgatory: and most seldome the souls of saints. Also they saie that in the old lawe soules did seldom appear; and after doomesdaie they shall never be seene more: in the time of grace they shall be most frequent. The walking of these souls (saith Michael Andræas) is a most excellent argument for the proof of purgatory; for (saith he) those souls have testified that which the popes have affirmed in that behalfe; to wit, that there is not onlie such a place of purgatory, but that they are released from thence by masses, and such other satisfactorie work; whereby the goodnes of the masse is also ratified and confirmed. Quoted by Samuel Hibbert, Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions, or An Attempt to Trace Such Illusions to Their Physical Causes (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1824), pp. 160–161.
Emphasis added; Leviathan 4.44.16.638. The impact of these religious ideas on political behavior in the Tudor and Stuart periods cannot be doubted; for example, itwas the demolition of purgatory that had served Henry VIII as pretext for the spoliation of the vast property of the chantries and monasteries of England.
Leviathan 4.46.18.691. Hannah Arendt commented on Hobbes’s offer of an excuse to Aristotle for the doctrine of separated essences: In the Leviathan (chap. 46) Hobbes explains that ‘disobedience may lawfully be punished in them, that against the laws teach even true philosophy.’ For is not ‘leisure the mother of philosophy; and Commonwealth the mother of peace and leisure?’ And does it not follow that the Commonwealth will act in the interest of philosophy when it suppresses a truth which undermines peace? Hence the truth-teller, in order to cooperate in an enterprise which is so necessary for his own peace of body and soul, decides to write what he knows ‘to be false philosophy.’ Of this Hobbes suspected Aristotle of all people, who according to him ‘writ it as a thing consonant to, and corroborative of [the Greeks’] religion; fearing the fate of Socrates.’ It never occurred to Hobbes that the search for truth would be self-defeating if its conditions could be guaranteed only by deliberate falsehoods. Then, indeed, everybody may turn out to be a liar like Hobbes’s Aristotle. Unlike this figment of Hobbes’s logical fantasy, the real Aristotle was of course sensible enough to leave Athens when he came to fear the fate of Socrates; he was not wicked enough to write what he knew to be false, nor was he stupid enough to solve his problem of survival by destroying everything he stood for. Quoted from Hannah Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics,’ Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought enlarged edition (NY, NY:Viking Press, 1968), pp. 297–298, n. 3. But, Hobbes, too, was sensible, as his exit from England at the outbreak of the Civil War shows. Nor did he assert what he knew to be false. And, when he disagreed with the officially sanctioned opinion, he was able to make his disagreement known, all the while respecting the law; for example, see Appendix, §§95–96. See below, n. 85.
See Etienne Gilson’s study of Descartes’ debts to Thomas Aquinas, Études sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du système cartésien 3d ed. (Paris: J.Vrin, 1967). On Hobbes’s debts to Aristotle and his followers among Hobbes’s contemporaries, especially through the literature of commentaries, see Cees Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes’ Natural Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2002), and ‘Hobbes’s Theory of Causality and Its Aristotelian Background,’ The Monist 79 (1996): 426–447. See also Karl Schuhmann, ‘Thomas Hobbes und Francesco Telesio,’ Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 68 (1986): 253–279; by the same author, ‘Hobbes and Telesio,’ Hobbes Studies 1 (1988): 109–133; by the same author, ‘Zur Entstehung des neuzeitlichen Zeitbegriffs: Telesio, Patrizi, Gassendi,’ Philosophia Naturale 25 (1988): 37–64; by the same author, ‘Hobbes and Renaissance Philosophy,’ Hobbes Oggi Actes du Colloque de Milan (18–21 May, 1988) ed. by Arrigo Pacchi (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990), pp. 331–349, and several essays by the same author in Selected Papers on Renaissance Philosophy and on Thomas Hobbes ed. by Piet Steenbakkers and Cees Leijenhorst (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004).
See, for example, Brandt, op. cit., pp. 129–142, 161 ff. See within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’
Hobbes’s polemical opponents among the schoolmen surely include Thomas Aquinas, but, apart from some references to Thomas’ idea of the nunc stans, there is little evidence as to how well Hobbes knew him or other medievals, though he is always happy to dismiss school philosophy as vain and, in Behemoth, he infers that Peter Lombard and Duns Scotus are ‘two of the most egregious blockheads in the world, so obscure and senseless are their writings.’ He may have contented himself with the knowledge of these authors that he had gained as a scholar at Oxford, though he says in his autobiography that, while there, he preferred catching crows to studying, though this is likely bravado. He continued and expanded his reading after leaving Oxford, but Aubrey quotes him as having replied to the assertion that he was not well read that, had he read as much as other men, he would have known as little as other men. Still, in the Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, he says of a certain problem, ‘It is more than the Schoolmen or metaphysicians can understand; whose writings have troubled my head more than they should have done, if I had known that amongst so many senseless disputes, there had been so few lucid intervals;’ EW V, p. 342. The Appendix itself gives some evidence of his reading of the Fathers, such as John Damascene, but unfortunately nowhere does he devote the attention to them or to the medievals that is shown to Bellarmine in Leviathan.
Typical of Hobbes’s views of scholastics and medieval universities is this quotation from Behemoth: The profit the Church of Rome expected from [the universities], and in effect received, was the maintenance of the Pope’s doctrine, and of his authority over kings and their subjects, by school-divines; who striving to make good many points of faith incomprehensible, and calling in the philosophy of Aristotle to their assistance, wrote great books of school-divinity, which no man else, nor they themselves, were able to understand; as any man may perceive that shall consider the writings of Peter Lombard, or Scotus, or of him that wrote commentaries upon him, or of Suarez, or any other school-divine of later times. See EW IV, p. 185.
Appendix, §56.
Appendix, §54.
Ibid.
Hobbes’s rejection of the doctrine of natural immortality and the analysis of Arianism which he conducts in the Appendix can be understood best in the context of a continuing tradition of thought. Paul Tillich discusses both in respect of God’s creation of the world ex nihilo: Being created out of nothing means having to return to nothing. The stigma of having originated out of nothing is impressed on every creature. This is the reason why Christianity has to reject Arius’ doctrine of the Logos as the highest of the creatures. As such he could not have brought eternal life. And this also is the reason why Christianity must reject the doctrine of natural immortality and must affirm instead the doctrine of eternal life given by God as the power of being-itself. Quoted from Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 188.
Cited in Norman T. Burns,Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 30–31; I have modernized the spelling of this passage. See also, op. cit, pp. 183 ff. In saying that hell is a grave or pit, Luther is referring to the Hebrew word Gehenna, the name of a ravine, the valley of Hinnon, which served as a place of worship of the Semitic god Moloch; see Luke 12:5 and Leviathan 3.38.10.487. Hobbes dispenses with Luther’s idea that the soul’ sleeps’ in order to collapse the time/eternity and spirit/matter distinctions. Also, for Hobbes, the abode of the resurrected will be in time and on the earth, not ‘clear from place and time;’ see Leviathan 3.38.3.480. One point of collapsing these distinctions is political: ‘temporal and spiritual government, are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and mistake their lawful sovereign;’ Leviathan 3.39.5.498. While Hobbes’s scientific assumptions also require the collapse of the spiritual into the temporal, the historical relation between them and his religious views remains unclear, given that the development of his theology has been so little studied.
Emphasis added; cited in Burns, op. cit., p. 28. Luther’s mention of vain ‘human dreams’ recalls his stricture that men are deluded in thinking that their sins can be forgiven apart from the redemption offered by Christ. For him, the doctrine of natural immortality stems from human pride and the desire to slip the bonds of human nature.
Hobbes discusses incorporeal substances in several places in Leviathan: 1.4.21.108; 1.12.7.170; 3.34.2.428; 3.34.10.432; 3.34.15.433; 3.34.24.439; 4.44.16; 638, and 4.46.19.693. See within, “The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.”
See Werner Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism: The Theology and Philosophy of Life of Lutheranism especially in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries trans. by Walter A. Hansen (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1962), pp. 20ff., and John S. Dunne, A Search for God in Time and Memory (NY, NY: Macmillan Company, 1969), pp. 83ff.
Defining and identifying atheism in both Luther’s and Hobbes’s day is fraught with difficulty; see G.E. Aylmer, ‘Unbelief in Seventeenth-Century England,’ Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-century History Presented to Christopher Hill, ed. by Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 22–46; Michael Hunter,’ science and Heterodoxy: An Early Modern Problem Reconsidered,’ Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution ed. by David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 437–460; Richard Tuck, ‘The Christian Atheism of Thomas Hobbes,’ and Nigel Smith, ‘The Charge of Atheism and the Language of Radical Speculation, 1640–1660,’ Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment ed. by Michael Hunter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 111–130 and pp. 131–158, respectively. In calling Hobbes an atheist, his contemporaries were often indulging in name-calling: they meant at least that his views tended to ‘irreligion,’ which they conceived of in doctrinal but, probably more importantly, in social terms. More generally, against the background of opinion in which Hobbes wrote, it seems increasingly clear that he was relatively moderate among radical thinkers, especially if one considers pamphleteers.
In chapter 12 of Leviathan, Hobbes describes humans as naturally, inevitably and uniquely religious; see Richard Sherlock, ‘The Theology of Leviathan: Hobbes on Religion,’ Interpretation 10 (1982): 43–60, esp. pp. 46ff. In my view, we do not yet know enough about the growth of Hobbes’s theology in relation to his politics to know whether he reinterpreted Christianity in order to make it more conformable to his political purposes; the reverse may easily have been the case, if the relationship was not reciprocal.
Cf. Hobbes, De Cive ed. by Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 234. See also Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Its basis and its genesis trans. by Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 76–78. On the question of atheism, see Tillich’s essay, ‘The Two Types of a Philosophy of Religion,’ Theology of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 10–29, and note the discussion of Hegel’s atheism by Paul Lakeland in The Politics of Salvation: The Hegelian Idea of the State (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), pp. 105–123.
In fact, Hobbes’s account of the origin of religion includes more motives than fear; on this point and for a discussion of Hobbes’s use of the words ‘feign’ and ‘imagine’ in this passage, see Paul J. Johnson, ‘Hobbes’s Anglican Doctrine of Salvation,’ in Thomas Hobbes in His Time, ed. by Ralph Ross, Herbert W. Schneider and Theodore Waldman (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1974), pp. 102–125, esp. 114–118.
Appendix, §§183ff., quoting Psalms 111:10. Hobbes had given a fuller explanation of his views in Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society: Many find fault that I have referred atheism to imprudence, and not to injustice; yea, by some it is so taken, as if I had not declared myself an enemy bitter enough against atheists. They object further, that since I had elsewhere said that it might be known that there is a God by natural reason, I ought to have acknowledged that they sinat least against the law of nature, and therefore are not only guilty of imprudence, but injustice also. But I am so much an enemy to atheists, that I have both diligently sought for, and vehemently desired to find some law whereby I might condemn them of injustice. But when I found none, I inquired next what name God himself give to men so detested by him. Now God speaks thus of the atheist: The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God. Wherefore I placed their sin in that rank which God himself refers to. Next I show them to be enemies of God. But I conceive the name of the enemy to be somewhat sharper than that of an unjust man. Lastly I affirm that they may under that notion be justly punished both by God, and supreme magistrates; and therefore by no means excuse or extenuate this sin. Now that I have said, that it might be known by natural reason that there is a God, it is so to be understood, not as if I had meant that all men might know this; except they think, that because Archimedes by natural reason found out what proportion the circle hath to the square, it follows thence, that every one of the vulgar could have found out as much. I say therefore, that although it may be known to some by the light of reason that there is a God; yet men continually engaged in pleasures or seeking of riches and honor; also men that are not wont to reason aright, or cannot do it, or care not to do it; lastly fools, in which number are atheists, cannot know this. See EW II, pp. 198–199. Hobbes hardly wished to deny the possibility of a natural knowledge of the existence of a deity since ancient philosophers had arrived at this conclusion centuries before the coming of Christ. Hobbes’s point here is that few are likely to spend the mental effort required to reach this result. On this, see within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’
Tillich makes the point that every religion is based on a revelation and that every revelation is expressed in a religion; see his Systematic Theology, vol. 3, pp. 104ff. In this sense, even, or especially, as a revealed religion, Christianity cannot be distinguished from other religions, and I believe this understanding is at the root of Hobbes’s definition of religion in the Appendix, §§183ff. His emphasis on the proclamation of the early church stems from this realization, which is also implied in his recognition of the wisdom and legitimacy of Roman laws proscribing Christianity; see Appendix, §§116ff., esp. §133 and nn.
Hobbes often points out that, in the case of Christianity, as miracles and visions ceased, the Christian faith was propagated by the recounting of stories first told by ‘martyrs’ (μαϱτύϱες; martyres), that is, as the Greek makes clear, by witnesses. Martyrdom itself is a means of giving witness to one’s faith. The mediation of salvation is thus made to depend on preaching of the promise God has made to His people, Israel first and then the nations through the apostolic church. That Hobbes urges royal licensing of preachers is consistent with historical precedent, and, though subject to error and vagaries of policy, the Christian sovereign’s public theology is not likely to require denial of the central tenet of Christianity, namely, that Jesus is the Christ, a point he frequently makes. And, finally, compulsory public profession of false doctrine does not bind the Christian or implicate him or her in the sovereign’s error; see Appendix §§205ff. Hobbes is nowhere farther from Calvin than in condoning religious dissimulation. Hobbes encourages reading the Scriptures as well as private theological development: Leviathan 3.32.2.409: Nevertheless, we are not to renounce our senses, and experience; nor (that which is the undoubted word of God) our natural reason. For they are the talents which he hath put into our hands to negotiate, till the coming again of our blessed Saviour; and therefore not to be folded up in the napkin of an implicit faith, but employed in the purchase of justice, peace, and true religion. For though there be many things in God’s word above reason; that is to say, which cannot by natural reason be either demonstrated, or confuted; yet there is nothing contrary to it; but when it seemeth so, the fault is either in our unskilful interpretation, or erroneous ratiocination. Ultimately, individual Christians are free to believe as they wish, ‘for internall Faith is in its own nature invisible, and consequently exempted from all humane jurisdiction;’ Leviathan 3.42.43.550.
This is why Hobbes can insist that the definition of heresy in no way pertains to the truth or falsity of a given revealed teaching, though of course he himself accused the tradition of tritheism in its Trinitarianism; see Appendix, §§111ff. Hobbes’s point is complicated by the status of natural theology in his thought; on ‘true religion,’ see Leviathan 1.6.36.124 and 3.32.2.409 and this statement from Leviathan 4.46.42.703: With the introduction of false, we may join also the suppression of true philosophy, by such men, as neither by lawful authority, nor sufficient study, are competent judges of the truth. Our own navigations make manifest, and all men learned in human sciences, now acknowledge there are antipodes: and every day it appeareth more and more, that years, and days are determined by motions of the earth. Nevertheless, men that have in their writings but supposed such doctrine, as an occasion to lay open the reasons for, and against it, have been punished for it by authority ecclesiastical. But what reason is there for it? Is it because such opinions are contrary to true religion? That cannot be, if they be true. Let therefore the truth be first examined by competent judges, or confuted by themthat pretend to know the contrary. Is it because they be contrary to the religion established? Let them be silenced by the laws of those, to whom the teachers of them are subject; that is, by the laws civil. For disobedience may lawfully be punished in them, that against the laws teach even true philosophy. Is it because they tend to disorder in government, as countenancing rebellion, or sedition? Then let them be silenced, and the teachers punished by virtue of his power to whom the care of the public quiet is committed; which is the authority civil. For whatsoever power ecclesiastics take upon themselves (in any place where they are subject to the state) in their own right, though they call it God’s right, is but usurpation. See within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’
See F.C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes, pp. 38ff. and 124ff.; cf. Appendix, §15.
It is problematic whether early Christianity was a superstition according to this definition; Hobbes earlier in the Appendix, §133, had called it a sect. What Roman authorities reprehended in their behavior was the Christians’ refusal to comply with the demands of the state, especially in the matter of sacrifice to the divinity of the emperor. As the emperor Trajan and his magistrate Pliny reflect in their famous exchange of letters, the exclusivity at the root of Christian monotheism was opposed in spirit to Roman syncretism and in practice to the Roman ruler cult. The miracles which the Christians claimed posed no threat to the Romans; they differed only in some particulars from similar claims made in the ancient world by licit religions. While Jews enjoyed religious immunities from Roman religious requirements, adherents to Christianity, as it came to be distinguished from Judaism, lost such protection. Certainly, early Christianity was a superstition in this sense, that it was an illicit, that is, unauthorized, minority opinion, to be apprehended only through faith in the apostolic witness. Its recognition by Constantine as a religion permitted by the state made it an authorized religious opinion, though his action no more certified the truth of its claims than a sovereign’s interpretation determines the true sense of Scripture. As Hobbes said in his Answer to Bramhall: There is no doubt but by what authority the Scripture or any other writing is made a law, by the same authority the Scriptures are to be interpreted, or else they are made law in vain. But to obey is one thing, to believe is another; which distinction perhaps his Lordship never heard of. To obey is to do or forbear as one is commanded, and depends on the will; but to believe, depends not on the will, but on the providence and guidance of our hearts that are in the hands of God Almighty... If it be not from the king’s authority that the Scripture is law, what other authority makes it law? EW IV, p. 339.
See Appendix, §15. While one may claim that Hobbes’s minimalist religious criterion, namely, the simple confession that ‘Jesus is the Christ,’ is cynically reductive, it is also clear to what extent the notion of revelation determines Hobbes’s thought as presupposition. See Karl Marx’ probing essay Zur Judenfrage.
On this point, see the discussion of heresy in the second chapter of the Appendix, esp. §§15 and 110–112.
See James S. Preus, ‘Old Testament Promissio and Luther’s New Hermeneutic,’ Harvard Theological Review 60 (1967): 145–161, followed by the same author’s From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969). Preus’s point of view is criticized by Scott H. Hendrix, Ecclesia in Via: Ecclesiological Developments in the Medieval Psalms Exegesis and the Dictata super Psalterium (1513–1515) of Martin Luther (Leiden: Brill, 1972).
See Werner O. Packull, ‘Luther and Medieval Mysticism in the Context of Recent Historiography,’ Renaissance and Reformation 6 n.s. (1982): 79–93.
See Preus, ‘Old Testament Promissio and Luther’s New Hermeneutic.’
‘Hobbes follows in the tradition of the great Protestant reformers, Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and those representing the new Biblical hermeneutic, for whom Christ, as opposed to the Neo-Platonist Word, was the Text;’ quoted from Springborg, op. cit., p. 554. The background of this opposition is of course the tension within Christian theology between its Greek and Judæo-Christian inheritances, especially as this is reflected in the medieval distinction between God’s absolute and ordained powers in the vindication of God’s transcendent omnipotence. For Hobbes’s use of the distinction in his discussion of miracle, see Leviathan 3.37.7.433. On this tension, see Francis Oakley, Omnipotence and Promise: The Legacy of the Scholastic Distinction of Powers (Toronto, Canada: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2002), and Luc Foisneau, Hobbes et la toute-puissance de Dieu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000). See within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’
Gerhard Ebeling, ‘Die Anfänge von Luthers Hermeneutik,’ Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 48 (1951): 172–230, esp. pp. 202 and 220, where he says, ‘die Psalmen ad literam auf Christum zu beziehen sind,’ and p. 255, ‘Christus ist jetzt der Text;’ Preus discusses this article in ‘Old Testament Promissio and Luther’s New Hermeneutic,’ esp. p. 147, n. 9.
Cf. Hobbes’s statement in chapter 17 of De Cive, §12, that Christ did not come to settle disputes over words or to teach logic.
On the ‘onset of the Gospel’ (evangelischer Ansatz), see Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism, passim, and below, n. 99.
This discussion should not be thought to suggest that Luther approximated the ideal of modern historical scholarship; quite the opposite, he became an important and influential innovator in the apocalyptic interpretation of Revelations, Daniel and the Prophecy of Elias, the chief texts used by Protestants to foretell the future. See Katharine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 9–23.
Elert explains how the иήρνγμα (kerygma) or proclamation of the historical witnesses to the Gospel achieves God’s purpose in the elect: When the Gospel, that is, information concerning Christ, is designated again and again as a promise, the ‘offering’ (offerre) and the ‘promising’ (promittere) are not something that is then added to the historical information. No, this information itself is the Gospel. The historical indicative becomes a promise by being announced to me. When it turns to me, I hear the ‘for me’ which makes of the historical faith (fides historica) a’ saving faith’ (fides salvifica). Emphasis added. See Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism vol. 1, p. 205.
Quoted from and discussed by Ronald F. Thiemann in Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), pp. 96ff.
For an analysis of the theological use of λόγος in Philo and in Christian theology, see, for example, Jaroslav Pelikan’s discussion in What Has Athens to do with Jerusalem?: Timaeus and Genesis in Counterpoint (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 67–110.
Cf. Leopold Damrosch, Jr., ‘Hobbes as Reformation Theologian: Implications of the Free-will Controversy,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979): 339–353, and Cornelio Fabro, God in Exile: A Study of the Internal Dynamic of Modern Atheism, from Its Roots in the Cartesian Cogito to the Present Day trans. and ed. by Arthur Gibson (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1968). Hobbes, like the Reformers and medieval theologians before them, drew a distinction between God’s ordained power (potentia ordinata) and His absolute power (potentia absoluta), precisely in order to vindicate God’s absolute sovereignty as creator of the world, as well as His grace and faithfulness after having chosen a way for men to take to salvation; see Leviathan, 3.37.7.473, and Appendix, §§62ff. and nn. See also Francis Oakley, ‘The Absolute and Ordained Power of God in the Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-century Theology,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 437–461, and, by the same author, ‘The Absolute Power of God and King in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Philosophy, Science and Politics,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 669–690. What Gilson insisted regarding Scotus and Ockham is true also for Hobbes: his philosophy, and particularly his political philosophy, cannot be understood without understanding his theology.
Luther discusses a similar announcement in his 1521 Christmas sermon on Luke 2:15–20, describing the angels’ appearance to the shepherds to tell of Jesus’ birth; see The Sermons of Martin Luther ed. by John Nicholas Lenker (Grand Rapids, MI: Lutherans in All Lands Press, 1906) pp. 161ff. As Luther notes, Jerome’s Latin text has the shepherds replying to one another concerning the angels’ visit, videamus hoc verbum quod factum est, ‘let us see this word which is done.’
Appendix, §§19–26; cf. §§202–203. In establishing this point in Leviathan, Hobbes draws on his knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures in citing: Psalms 105: 19, an episode in the life of Joseph, recounted in Genesis 40: 13; 1Kings 18. 36, Elijah’s response to God; Jeremiah 17:15, a question put to Jeremiah; Ezekiel 12:28, Ezekiel’s answer to the people. In the New Testament, he cites Matthew 24:35, God’s promise as the end of time, and especially John 1:2 and 4, Christ as eternal life and God’s purpose; I John 1, Christ as the word of life; Revelations 19:13, Christ’s name as meaning, ‘He that was come according to the purpose of God from the beginning, and according to his word and promises delivered by the prophets.’ He cites Acts 1:4 and Luke 24:49, in referring to the Holy Spirit.
But see Keith Thomas, ‘The Social Origins of Hobbes’s Political Thought,’ Hobbes Studies ed. by K.C. Brown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 185–236.
Hobbes reproduces the council’s use of the Latin word symbolum (σύμβολον in Greek) to translate the English word ‘creed.’ The history of this term, which originated in the West, and several interesting conjectures regarding its first application to the church’s declaratory creeds are discussed by J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3d ed. (London: Longmans, 1972), pp. 52–61. Kelly concludes that symbolum derives from the name given recitations of the faith used at baptisms. See below, n. 7.
That is, while there may be other ways of interpreting the words of the creed, Hobbes is seeking explanations consistent with and derived from scripture. This passage establishes two assertions whose implications are developed throughout the Appendix: 1) scripture alone is the source and norm of doctrine, the so-called sola scriptura principle, see below, n. 130; and 2) though reason cannot show the truth of revealed religion, it is useful in explaining where it comes from and how to speak about it. Hobbes distinguishes religious belief from knowledge or science, so, in explaining the creed, he rejects any interpretation that rests on or derives from philosophic understandings, terms or argumentation, especially those from the Greek metaphysical tradition. On this point, see, for example, §§14–16, 24, 46, 56, 77–81, 88–89, and 120–121. For his attempt to accommodate the creed’s term ὡπόστασις, see my ‘Curley and Martinich in Dubious Battle,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 40 (2002): 461–476. Defining faith in opposition to knowledge allows Hobbes both to preserve its character as faith (see within, §15) and to specify that its source is the church: Leviathan 1.7.4.131: [W]hen we believe any saying whatsoever it be, to be true, from arguments taken, not from the thing itself, or from the principles of natural reason, but from the authority, and good opinion we have, of him that hath said it; then is the speaker, or person we believe in, or trust in, and whose word we take, the object of our faith; and the honour done in believing, is done to him only. And consequently, when we believe that the Scriptures are the word of God, having no immediate revelation from God himself, our belief, faith, and trust is in the church; whose word we take, and acquiesce therein. Emphasis added. The witness of scripture for Hobbes is the guarantee of apostolicity in the church; see within, nn. 8 and 68. Cf. Tracy B. Strong, ‘How to Write Scripture: Words, Authority, and Politics in Thomas Hobbes,’ Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 128–159. Application of the sola scriptura principle is explicit throughout the Appendix; among more important instances, see §§8, 26, 32, 46, 56, 84, 96, 122, 170, 178, 196 and 212.
In what follows, Hobbes stresses the council’s democratic procedures, as in §124, and its inherent lack of coercive power, a defect supplied only by the command of the sovereign under whose authority it met. This was the situation for all early Christianity, Hobbes says, for ‘there was then no government by coercion, but only by doctrine and persuading. The kingdom of God was yet to come, in a new world; so there could be no authority to compel in any church, till the commonwealth had embraced the Christian faith;’ Leviathan 3.42.56.557. The official recognition and then adoption of Christianity by Constantine and Theodosius respectively meant that outward religious conformity in word and deed could be required. But, Hobbes is troubled at the success which religious authority, once backed by civil authority, had had in infringing freedom of thought, first, against heretics, that is, those with minority religious views (see Chapter Two within, On Heresies), and later against those espousing the new science (see within, for example, §148). On the tying of the knots whereby people lost their liberty of conscience, see within, n. 194, and Leviathan 4.47.18.709. In Leviathan and throughout the Appendix, Hobbes proposes a return to the period before political authorities attempted to force subjects’ consciences on religious questions; this may have been the attraction of Independency. Hence also, the attraction we find here of the religious settlement during Elizabeth’s reign; see, for example, §154. But, cf. Christopher Haigh, Elizabeth I 2d ed. (London: Longman, 1998), p. 42, and Rafael E. Taragó, ‘Bloody Bess: The Persecution of Catholics in Elizabethan England,’ Logos 7 (2004): 117–133, for a different appraisal of Elizabeth’s policy. On Hobbes’s doctrine of the national church, see within, §§ 126 and nn. For the proposition that Christianity imposed no new laws, that is, that Christ was no legislator, see below, n. 145, and within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’
In fact, although, as Hobbes says, the construction is not found in classical Greek or in the Septuagint version of the Hebrew scriptures, the construction, πιστεύω (pisteuo) with είς (eis) followed by an accusative, is found, rarely in a number of New Testament writings, but principally in the Gospel of John, where its use is characteristic. There, it is likely an imitation of the correlative Hebrew verbs, indicating an attempt on the part of the Gospel writer to import into Greek the early Judaeo-Christian understanding of faith. C.H. Dodd states, ‘It would seem that pisteuein with the dative so inevitably connoted simple credence, in the sense of an intellectual judgment, that the moral element of personal trust or reliance inherent in the Hebrew and Aramaic phrase — an element integral to the primitive Christian conception of faith in Christ — needed to be otherwise expressed.’ See The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 183–186. The use of this construction by the Gospel writer and then in baptismal recitations, where the corporate context of such confession is emphasized, casts doubt on Hobbes’s explanation of its employment in creedal statements.
Hobbes begins here an analysis of the relation between ways in which we think about language and their impact upon religion and politics. While Aristotle is a central figure throughout, it is difficult to know just what Hobbes read of the Stagirite because he rarely gives citations. This lack likely stems from Hobbes’s desire to replace the Humanists’ dialectic method of exposition by way of quotation and authority with the demonstrative procedure of the new science; see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), for example, p. 300. The desire both to be and to seem new and revolutionary also leads to the paucity of evidence as to others’ impact on his thought.
Hobbes’s point is that the attribution of being to an entity is not a proper predicate. Here as elsewhere, he states that languages do not need verbs to express predication, whose function is merely to signal a joining, or copulation, of words, that is, of names. We may illustrate Hobbes’s point by borrowing Professor Tricaud’s convention of denoting the copulative function of the verb with an equal sign, as in Socrates = mortal. Applied to Hobbes’s examples in the text, these propositions may be rendered as ‘God = =,’ which is meaningless, and ‘God = God,’ which is tautological. On the existential and copulative functions of the verb to be, see Etienne Gilson, ‘Knowledge and Existence,’ Being and Some Philosophers 2nd ed. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952), pp. 190–215. See below, nn. 11 and 107.
Inusing the term verbum substantivum (or, in fact, the rare verbum substantiale), Hobbes adopts a terminology that dates in Latin from at least Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae. Used as a grammatical term for centuries, the Latin term copula, meaning ‘link’, denotes here the combining of a subject and a predicate in a sentence conceived of as a proposition, which Hobbes elsewhere defines as ‘a speech consisting of two names copulated, by which he that speaketh signifies he conceives the latter name to be the name of the same thing whereof the former is the name;’ see EW I, p. 30. The key here is Hobbes’s zeal to transform grammatical elements from symbolizations of reality to mere names, that is, to items of lexis. Rejecting the thought that words reflected understanding of the essences of the entities under consideration, Hobbes describes words and names as mere expedients for memory and communication: ‘A name is a word taken at pleasure to serve for a mark, which may raise in our mind a thought like to some thought we had before;’ op. cit., p. 15. Words in connected discourse are speech, ‘of which every part is a name’; op. cit., p. 16. But, Hobbes postulates no relationship of truth between name and thing other than in the right ordering of the names they contain. This definition may be contrasted with the traditional conception of truth, occasioned by Aristotle’s saying that the soul’s experiences, its noemata, are likenings of things. See Fred D. Miller, ‘Aristotle’s Philosophy of Soul,’ Review of Metaphysics 53 (1999): 309–337; Alessandro Lenci, ‘The Structure of Predication,’ Synthese 114 (1998): 233–276; Michael Golluber, ‘Aristotle on How One Becomes What One Is,’ The Review of Metaphysics 53 (1999): 363–382; A. Mark Smith, ‘Getting the Big Picture in Perspectivist Optics,’ Isis 72 (1981): 568–589. Thomas Aquinas says that truth is the ‘adequation of the intellect and the thing’, that is, the agreement of knowledge with its object (adaequatio intellectus et rei). On Aristotle and Aquinas, see the series of articles by John P. O’Callaghan, ‘Concepts, Beings and Things in Contemporary Philosophy and Thomas Aquinas,’ The Review of Metaphysics 53 (1999): 69–98; ‘Verbum Mentis: Philosophical or Theological Doctrine in Aquinas,’ American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 74 (2000): 103–119; ‘Aquinas, Cognitive Theory, and Analogy: A Propos of Robert Pasnau’s Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages,’ American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76 (2002): 451–482. On adaequatio intellectus et rei, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (NY, NY: Harper and Row, 1962), H214ff. Padley points out that it is an aspect of the nominalism that Hobbes has transmitted to modern times that he does not relate names and things. See G.A. Padley, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe, 1500–1700: The Latin Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 141ff.
The reference is to a passage in Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth, I Corinthians 8:4ff., where he discusses eating meat sacrificed to idols: 4 As concerning therefore the eating of those things that are offered in sacrifice unto idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is none other God but one. 5 For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,) 6 But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him. In arguing that idols are no more real than the apparitions of sense and no less subject to explanation, Hobbes counters the animism of popular Greek religion, which, he feels, was taken up by the Greek philosophers and both patristic and scholastic theologians; see within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’
Interlocutor A is failing to distinguish between the graven images themselves and the divine beings thought to be attached to them. Paul Tillich notes that the Christian attitude toward strange gods was shaped in the thought-world evidenced in the Hebrew Scriptures. He states that, in the earlier Jewish prophets, pagan gods were recognized as powers existing among men but inferior to Jahweh, particularly in foreseeing and determining the future, in hearing prayers, and in executing justice; they were regarded as competing powers. As Jewish religious thought and experience developed, these gods’ loss of power led to a loss of being, for a god without ultimate power is a ‘nothing,’ as Paul later called them. Jahweh, he says, then came to be esteemed less as a tribal god than as the God of justice, in virtue of which He rules the world. Amos was thus able to threaten Israel itself, the nation of Jahweh, in the name of Jahweh, because of its injustice. The covenant between Jahweh and the nation did not give the nation a claim to Jahweh’s championship, and He might turn against them if they violated justice. The exclusive monotheism of the prophetic religion was thus not due to the absoluteness of one particular god as against the others; it was the universal validity of justice which produced the exclusive monotheism of the God of justice. Justice was thus conceived as a principle which transcended every particular religion, making the exclusiveness of any particular religion conditional. Both Jesus (Matthew 25:31ff.) and Paul (Romans) emphasized the universality of the event of the Christ and in so doing freed interpretation of its significance from a particularism which would have made it the property of a single religious group. In early Christianity, the judgment of other religions was determined by the idea of the Logos. The Church Fathers emphasized the universal presence of the Logos, the Word, the principle of divine self-manifestation, in all religions and cultures. The presence of what they learned from Philo and the Stoics were’ seminal reasons’ (λόγοι σπερματιχοί logoi spermatikoi) or rationes seminales, that is, traces they found in pagan culture of divine truth, they viewed as preparation for the epochal, central appearance of the Logos in an historical person, the Christ. On this basis, the Fathers took into Christianity some of the highest conceptualizations of Greek thought as positive creations, freely adopting such words as physis, hypostasis, ousia, prosopon and, above all, logos. See Paul Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 31ff. It is primarily this work of the Fathers that Hobbes takes up in the chapters of the Appendix, largely to obviate and criticize the residue of Greek philosophic thought and experience he found in Christian theology, especially the concept of the logos and the theory of ideal essences he believed it entailed. What deserves emphasis is his historical awareness of the Hellenization of Christianity, a process which the Nicene Council advanced. Our own judgments as to possible fideism and dissimulation on Hobbes’s part must take account of his radical questioning of the intellectual framework and tendency of post-Nicene Christianity.
Hobbes must have learned some Hebrew in the interval between the publication of the English Leviathan and De Corpore, since what is discussed in the first book as a logical possibility, namely, the existence of a language without the copula, is in the second attributed to Hebrew. Hobbes notes the discovery in his Response to Bishop Bramhall; see EW, IV, p. 304.
Port Royale grammarians had a similar view of the function of the verb to be. For this and other correspondences in linguistic matters, see G.A. Padley, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe 1500–1700: The Latin Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 141ff., 151, 186–187 and 228.
Hobbes may be referring to Genesis 1:2, where the world is described as without form and void.
Aristotle makes his first appearance here in the Appendix, though his presence is felt throughout. Despite evident debts to the Stagirite, Hobbes is always happy to abuse him: Leviathan 4.46.11.686: To conclude, there is nothing so absurd, that the old philosophers (as Cicero saith, who was one of them) have not some of them maintained. And I believe that scarce any thing can be more absurdly said in natural philosophy, than that which now is called Aristotle’s Metaphysics; nor more repugnant to government, than much of that he hath said in his Politics; nor more ignorantly, than a great part of his Ethics. See also Leviathan 4.46.14.688.
Aristotle argues against the creation of the world, as in De Caelo 279b12ff., 301b31; for him, matter is ungenerated, eternal.
Note that Hobbes explains the creed’s ascription of attributes to God by reference to the Scriptures. Leo Strauss asserted that Hobbes’s ‘Biblicism’ grew more pronounced as he abandoned an earlier dependence upon the arguments of natural theology; see Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Genesis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 76–78. The reverse seems the case in that natural theology plays a more conspicuous role in the 1651 text than in earlier ones. Also, with respect to revealed religion, in the later text, Hobbes develops arguments for positions which he had earlier simply stated and held to be required by the Christian faith. See within, for example, nn. 27 and 184.
See such passages as Isaiah 51:6, 65:17 and 66:22, in the Hebrew scriptures, and 2 Corinthians 5:17, especially 2 Peter 3:10 and Revelation 21, in the New Testament.
Curley suggests that Hobbes intends divine simplicity as worked out by Aquinas, ST 1.2.1-8, in largely Aristotelian terms. That is, Hobbes employs Aquinas’ discussion of the term σύντεροσ (synteros), which designates material objects composed of ὔλη (hyle; matter) and εἶδος (eidos; form), to describe God’s immunity to change. While the reference to Aquinas is quite helpful, his discussion may not have been present to Hobbes’s mind, and the text’s reference to ‘Aristotelian mixture’ more likely points the reader to such texts as De generatione et corruptione bk. I, chap. 10, and Metaphysics, bk. 4. On God as first cause and the distinction he draws between God discovered by reason as first cause and God revealed to faith as person, see within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’
The glass Hobbes envisions here seems to be something like a kaleidoscope. For a similar device, see Noel Malcolm, ‘The Title Page of Leviathan: Seen in a Curious Perspective’ Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 200–233.
This discussion may refer to the point made by Aristotle in De Mundo, 395, where one reads that, among certain phenomena produced in the air, some exist according to appearance and others in reality. There is an echo of this in the Latin autobiography. See below, §28.
See, for example, Quaestiones aliae, in Migne, Graeca Patrologia, vol. 28, question IV, col. 780, now held a doubtful work of Athanasius.
On this point, Curley refers to Athanasius’ Quaestiones aliae, Migne, Patrologia Graeca vol. 28, coll. 597–600.
The Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem, in Migne, Graeca Patrologia, vol. 28, cols 598–600, may be Hobbes’s source for Athanasius’ views on human understanding.
John 1:1.
John 1:3.
Atheological difficulty would be implied for a Christian in the Stoic notion of providence as cosmic necessity. For the Stoics, ‘fate,’ with its etymological roots in both Greek and Latin in the verb ‘to say’ or ‘to decree,’ was the invariant expression of order in the universe, that which had been decreed for all time. Man was certainly subject to fate and part of the structure of the universe but in a special way in that he could attune his thoughts and actions through his reason to the dictates of nature for the benefit of himself and others. Appropriating materials available in popular Greek religion, the Stoics had described Zeus as the great figure of order in the pantheon of heaven, subordinated nonetheless to the necessity immanent in the cosmos. Both man and the gods were thus beneficiaries of cosmic order; Stoic anthropology and theology were based on cosmology. Hobbes recognizes that to ground God’s nature and human happiness in the world in this way was intolerable in the Christian framework. For man, happiness, that is, salvation, results only from the redemption offered in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. And, to impute an element of necessity either to the relation among the divine persons or to God’s dealing with His creation would be similarly impermissible to Hobbes, who seeks rather to vindicate the freedom of God’s action, even at the expense of human free will. Hobbes is at pains to distinguish his point of view from both classical and Humanistic models; his is theocentric, not cosmological or anthropocentric. See the Introduction and the discussion on Hobbes’s understanding of the Word, §§204ff. See also Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 175ff.
See, for example, Isaiah 55:10–13, and Psalms 33:4–9. See also the Introduction.
I doubt whether the question of Hobbes’s sincerity in making professions of the Christian faith can finally be resolved, as though that would be necessary or helpful. For a discussion of these matters, see Wright, ‘Curley and Martinich in Dubious Battle,’ op. cit.
Gehenna was a ravine south of Jerusalem, associated by early Jewish writers with sacrifices to Moloch, the god of the Semitic tribes in the area (2 Kings 16:3, 21:6), and cursed by Jeremiah for that reason (Jeremiah 7:29–34, 19:1–20:6; cf. Isaiah 31:9; 66:24). Equated with the hell of the last judgment in apocalyptic literature from the second century B.C., Gehenna was used in this sense by the writers of the Gospels to indicate the place where the unjust would receive punishment. Goshen is mentioned in Genesis 47, as the fertile northeast sector of Lower Egypt allotted to the Israelites by Pharaoh, in which there was light, and hence salvation, during the plague of darkness, described in Exodus 10. The name was applied to the church by New Testament writers. Used also in the Hebrew scriptures, fire imagery, such as the lake of fire, is a common figure of divine anger and judgment, and a sulfurous lake of fire is mentioned frequently in Revelations.
Bellarmine says as much in his Disputationes, De Christo, bk 4, chap. 10, and in De Gemitu Columbae, bk 2, chap. 2.
See 2 Peter 2:4 and Leviathan, chap. 38. The opposite of the Elysian fields, Tartarus was the name of a subterranean region regarded by the ancient Greeks as the doleful abode of the wicked dead, where they suffered punishment for evil deeds. Peter’s use of the term is most uncommon among New Testament writers, and, in noting the lack of agreement among the Greek and Roman writers who spoke of the place, Hobbes is on firm ground in concluding that its use by the apostle is metaphorical and not meant to give information as to a specific place. The aim of Hobbes’s analysis of biblical references to hell is to dispose of the apparatus of purgatory and of the harrowing of hell legends, so popular in medieval times, by seeing them as literary conventions, metaphors or borrowings from pagan mythology, a conclusion certainly fostered by the Reformation.
Theogony, lines 722–725. Born around 700 B.C. in Boeotia, Hesiod, shepherd and rhapsode, wrote his epic poem as a theological justification of the reign of Zeus as the god of justice. The first to develop a poetic persona among the Greeks, Hesiod, together with Homer, established the conceptions of the gods by which Greek religious consciousness was shaped. The anvil Hobbes refers to is found in Hesiod’s description of the distance of the Titans from heaven: ‘[The Three] drove [the Titans] as far underground as earth is distant from heaven./Such is the distance from earth’s surface to gloomy Tartaros./For a brazen anvil dropping out of the sky would take nine/nights, and nine days, and land on earth on the tenth day,/and a brazen anvil dropping off the earth/would take nine/nights, and nine days, and land in Tartaros/ on the tenth day.’ Richmond Lattimore, Hesiod (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), p. 59.
Aeneid 6:577–579. Hobbes’s reference is to Vergil’s description of Aeneas’ underground journey to visit his father Anchises in search of the tale of Roman greatness. The lines in Fitzgerald’s translation are: ‘Then Tartarus itself goes plunging down/In darkness twice as deep as heaven is high/For eyes fixed on ethereal Olympus.’ Vergil, The Aeneid, trans. by Robert Fitzgerald (NY, NY: Random House, 1983), p. 180.
The Roman Breviary contains the same resume of the articles of the Christian faith under the name Quicunque vult salvus esse. Kelly points out that the Quicumque was not originally called a creed (symbolum), a word generally applied to it only from the thirteenth century on. See J.N.D. Kelly, The Athanasian Creed (NY, NY: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 1; but see also Herbert Richardson, ‘On the Athanasian Creed,’Harvard Theological Review 60, (1967): 483–484. Its attribution to Athanasius is today abandoned due largely to two arguments, advanced in 1664 by Gerard Voss in his ‘De Tribus Symbolis,’ namely, that 1) no early writer of authority speaks of it as the work of this doctor, and 2) its language and structure point to a Western, rather than to an Alexandrian, origin.
In fact, in what follows, as Tricaud points out, one finds an explication of the Latin word substantia, not subsistentia, and, while the words are often used interchangeably, in discussing the Trinity, authors often use subsistentia as the Latin equivalent of the Greek hypostasis. See Albert Blaise, Dictionnaire latin-française des auteurs chrétiens, sub voce subsistentia (Paris: Librairie des Méridiens, 1954).
This discussion resumes below, §§64–104.
This refers to the famous ‘filioque’ debate.
John 15:26.
John 20:22, 25.
Hobbes’s point is that the phrase was added to the Nicene Creed; the original text did not have it. He has misread Bellarmine (De Christo, I, II, c. 23), who says the phrase was added at the seventh general council, held in Nicaea, not the second council of Constantinople. On the filioque dispute, see J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, pp. 358–367.
The Gloria Patri.
In this section, Hobbes develops his idea that the soul is either the same as life or that it dies at the end of life. The corporeality of the soul was a key doctrine of the Libertines, one of whose strongest spirits in France was Hobbes’s close friend Sorbière; see Giuseppe Ricuperati, ‘Il problema della corporeità dell’anima dai libertini ai deisti,’ Il Libertinismo in Europa ed. Sergio Bertelli (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1980), pp. 369–415. Still, both the formulation and tendency of Hobbes’s thought differ from those associated with the free-thinkers. This is true also in regard to the arguments of Pietro Pomponazzi, set out in De immortalitate animae (1516).
The interpretive principle adopted by Protestants, namely, that scripture alone is the norm of belief, no doubt served Hobbes, as it did Luther, to undercut Catholic reliance on traditio, with its association with doctrines, practices and attitudes they both condemned; see below, n. 129. But, this reliance was itself problematic, and a characteristic Catholic response was to undercut the intelligibility of scripture. On this point, see Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 68ff. Hobbes’s approach, in emphasizing the witness given by the apostles as contained in the scriptures, is an attempt to define apostolicity, that is, the continuity of message and mission within the church, without resort to Catholic tradition (traditio), Anglican apostolic succession through imposition of hands, Lutheran creeds, Anabaptist inner inspiration or, necessarily, miracle.
That is, once I have the scriptures, I have no need of philosophers. In Considerations upon the Reputation, Manners, Loyalty and Religion of Thomas Hobbes, he asks, ‘And would you learn Christianity from Plato and Aristotle?’ EW IV, p. 426.
This would be rather ineffective if it was Hobbes’s attempt to do away with the possibly seditious consequences of the Christian doctrine of heaven and hell; in one or the other case, one experiences an infinite gain or loss, so that the doctrine hardly loses its power at Hobbes’s hands. See below, §§ 48 and 104 and n. 136. As he says in his Answer to Bishop Bramhall, ‘It is a sad thing to lose this present life untimely. Is it not therefore much more a sad thing to lose an eternal happy life?’ Cf. David Johnston, ‘Hobbes’s Mortalism,’ History of Political Thought 10 (1989): 647–663. The thesis cannot be sustained that changes in Hobbes’s theology were wholly determined by his changing assessments of the requirements of his political theory, nor can we assume that argumentative strategies, rather than intellectual development, determined all expressions of his thought. Both theses are too limiting. It seems both safer and far more reasonable to postulate not only an independent theological development and also reciprocal influences between it and his political thinking. His constant complaint against the natural immortality of the soul is evangelical, namely, that it slights God’s omnipotence and grace and wrongly exalts human nature; see Appendix, § 56 and Leviathan 3.38.4.483: That the soul of man is in its own nature eternal, and a living creature independent on the body; or that any mere man is immortal, otherwise than by the resurrection in the last day, (except Enos and Elias,) is a doctrine not apparent in Scripture. The whole of the 14th chapter of Job, which is the speech not of his friends, but of himself, is a complaint of this mortality of nature; and yet no contradiction of the immortality at the resurrection. There is hope of a tree (saith he verse 7) if it be cast down. Though the root thereof wax old, and the stock thereof die in the ground, yet when it scenteth the water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. But man dieth, and wasteth away, yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? And (verse 12) Man lieth down, and riseth not, till the heavens be no more. But when is it, that the heavens shall be no more? St. Peter tells us, that it is at the general resurrection. For in his 2. Epistle, chap. 3. verse 7 he saith, that the heavens and the earth that are now, are reserved unto fire against the day of judgment, and perdition of ungodly men, and (verse 12) looking for, and hasting to the coming of God, wherein the heavens shall be on fire, and shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless, we according to the promise look for new heavens, and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. Therefore where Job saith, man riseth not till the heavens be no more; it is all one, as if he had said, the immortal life (and soul and life in the Scripture, do usually signify the same thing) beginneth not in man, till the resurrection, and day of judgment; and hath for cause, not his specifical nature and generation; but the promise. For St. Peter says not, We look for new heavens, and a new earth, (from nature,) but from promise. See also Leviathan 3.38.13.489. The apparent shift in views that Johnston detects in his careful essay may derive from nothing more than a greater willingness on Hobbes’s part to spell out in Leviathan his understanding of the soul’s immortality, that is, as he states here, that it is not its natural property but the object of human hope in and faithfulness to God’s promises. Moreover, we cannot say that Hobbes in his earlier works asserts the immortality of the soul; what he asserts is the doctrine of ‘eternal life,’ not a speculative doctrine regarding the soul. On Hobbes’s understanding of promise, see Introduction.
Genesis 2:17.
Genesis 3:5.
For Athanasius on Genesis, see Oratio de Incarnatione Verbi, in Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 25, col. 101. As in the Response to Bishop Bramhall, Hobbes cites the translation of the Hebrew scriptures made by Santes Pagnino, a Dominican, born 1470 at Lucca, and died 1541 at Lyons. This interpretation of the passage supports Hobbes’s evidently unorthodox view, shared by his contemporary Samuel Hoard, that the punishment of the reprobate will not be eternal in the sense of constant torment, though their second death will last for all eternity.
Romans 5:12. The point is that, following his disobedience and punishment, Adam was kept from the tree of life and hence mortal and in need of salvation, a characteristic affecting not only him but all his progeny. Hobbes thus touches on a key tenet of Christianity, namely, the race’s genetic involvement in one man’s fall, Adam’s, as the occasion for redemption, brought also by one man, namely, Jesus Christ, the second Adam. Augustine would develop the notion of inherited sinfulness as a species-wide quantity of corruption in men’s hearts. The Jansenists, with whom Hobbes is compared by Condorcet and Sainte-Beuve, similarly emphasized the loss and consequent need of grace, given to the elect gratuitously. Those who do not receive the gift of faith are motivated always only by self-seeking passions, cooperation among them being only a false image of charity. This Pascalian view differs from that of Hobbes, for whom law binds in the conscience. See J.S. Spink, French Free-thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (London: The Athlone Press, 1960), pp. 67ff. Hobbes did however develop the Augustinian doctrine in the direction of the Reformation in stating, in chapter 31 of Leviathan, pp. 397ff., that sin need not be thought the cause of a man’s affliction, For, according to Hobbes, one cannot assert that God might not justly have afflicted the righteous man Job without regard to his sin, as he says in Leviathan 2.31.6.398 and cf. Of Liberty and Necessity: This I know: God cannot sin, because his doing a thing makes it just, and consequently, no sin; as also because whatsoever can sin, is subject to another’s law, which God is not. And therefore it is blasphemy to say, God can sin; but to say, that God can so order the world, as a sin may be necessarily caused thereby in a man, I do not see how it is any dishonour to him. At the root of this assertion is an intuition as to the omnipotence of God; see Luc Foisneau Hobbes et la toute-puissance de Dieu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000). On these points, Hobbes’s thinking is anything but original in tone or progressive in intention. Cf. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 52ff. However, he also held men blameless to one another for the passions that set them at odds, as at Leviathan 1.13.10.186, ‘The desires, and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin.’ But, cf. Leviathan 2.27.1.335. On this point, see below, n. 183.
On this text, see above, §42.
Luke 23:43.
Though never widely accepted, mortalism, the belief that the soul’ slept’ or ceased to exist after death, was shared by some of Hobbes’s contemporaries, including Milton; see Franck Lessay, ‘Mortalisme chrétien: L’étrange rencontre entre Hobbes et Milton,’ Bulletin de la société d’études anglo-américaines des XVII e et XVIII e siècles 32 (1991): 21–33. Its effect, the annulment of the doctrine of purgatory, is consistent with Protestant belief, and a version of it had an important proponent in Martin Luther, though this was later obscured by his followers. See the Introduction and Norman Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 34.
Cf. 1 Corinthians 15:32.
This polyglot version is most likely that of Bishop Walton, known as the Biblia Sacra Polyglotta, produced between 1652 and 1657 in London; see note 86. Hobbes’s friend Selden had left money in his will to pay for its printing; see Harry Carter, A History of the Oxford University Press (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. 1 pp. 41ff. Hobbes’s Latin text lacks the sentence, ‘All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.’
See Ecclesiastes 3:17, 11:9, and 12:17. In this section of the Appendix, he so emphasizes the need for salvation that it is doubtful that, in rejecting the ancient teaching as to reason, language and linguistic sign, he intended the secularization of speech and world that has been attributed to him; see, for example, Margreta de Grazia, ‘Secularization of Language in the Seventeenth Century’ Journal of the History of Ideas 41 (1980): 319–329; Angelo Campodonico,’ secularization in Thomas Hobbes’s Anthropology,’ Thomas Hobbes: His View of Man Proceedings of the Hobbes symposium at the International School of Philosophy in the Netherlands, Leusden, September 1979 ed. by J.G. van der Bend (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982), pp. 113–123, and Paul Dumouchel, ‘Hobbes and Secularization: Christianity and the Political Problem of Religion,’ Contagion 2 (1995): 39–56. It is false, both historically and theologically, to assert that the decline of magic is an indicator of secularization, as is clear from the behavior of the Anglican clergy throughout this period. And, in fact, Hobbes’s civil theology, a key aspect of his political theory, still employs the language and conceptual apparatus of ‘God’s words;’ see within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’ On the ‘laws of nature’ as ‘God’s commands’ and as the ‘dictates of reason,’ see within ‘Hobbes in Exile.’ Cf. Perez Zagorin, ‘Cudworth and Hobbes on Is and Ought,’ Philosophy, Science and Religion in England 1640–1700 ed. by Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 128–145, esp. 134ff.
Hobbes had expressed a deflationary view of reason as early as his response to Descartes’ Meditationes de Prima Philosophia in January of 1641: But, what shall we say now, if reasoning chance to be nothing more than the uniting and stringing together of names and designations by the word ‘is’? It will be a consequence of this that reason gives us no conclusion about the nature of things, but only about the terms that designate them, namely, whether or not there is a convention (arbitrarily made about their meanings) according to which we join these names together. This is perhaps the clearest indication of that cast of mind according to which Hobbes criticizes the ancients’ stress upon reason in preference for biblical religion. Rather than the mark of human superiority, reason for Hobbes is instrumental in essence, scarcely distinguishable from the cunning and skill of the animals. Thus, according to Hungerland and Vick, Hobbes describes communication as an inter-species phenomenon, observable in the grunts and cries of animals as well as the precision and clarity of the geometer. Differing from Aristotle, Hobbes holds that animals have foresight. See Isabel C. Hungerland and George R. Vick, ‘Hobbes’s Theory of Language, Speech and Reasoning,’ in Thomas Hobbes: Part One of De Corpore (NY, NY: Abaris Books, 1981). See also the more critical account given by Edward Thomas Fitzgerald, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Philosophy of Language: A Study of Naming and Signifying,’ Master’s thesis, deposited in the UC, Berkeley, Library, 1961. See also Federigo Enriques, The Historic Development of Logic: The Principles and Structures of Science in the Conception of Mathematical Thinkers trans. by Jerome Rosenthal (NY, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1929), pp. 68ff. For Heidegger’s insistence upon the human/animal distinction, see Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). See below, n. 93.
On the Adamic language and its loss, see Leviathan, 1.3.12.100.
Both Augustine and Aquinas discussed what they called the internal word or ‘word of the heart’ (verbum cordis), that which the rational speaker intends in uttering external words. The angels too possess the interior word along with humans, though, as immaterial entities, they need no external device to communicate with one another. Even Ockham exploited the idea that humans and angels were alike in their possession of this mental language; see John A. Trentman, ‘Speculative Grammar and Transformational Grammar: A Comparison of Philosophical Presuppositions,’ History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics ed. by Herman Parret (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1976), pp. 279–301. In place of the comparison to the angels, Hobbes develops a distinction between man and animal, based on the former’s possession of curiosity, from which the use of names and philosophy both arise: For when a beast seeth anything new and strange to him, he considereth it so far only as to discern whether it be likely to serve his turn, or hurt him, and accordingly approacheth nearer to it, or flieth from it: whereas man, who in most events remembereth in what manner they were caused or begun, looketh for the cause and beginning of everything that ariseth new to him. And from this passion of admiration and curiosity, have arisen not only the invention of names, but also supposition of such causes of all things as they thought might produce them. And from this beginning is derived all philosophy. From Human Nature (chap. IX, § 18), quoted by Jeffrey Barnouw, ‘Hobbes’s Psychology of Thought: Endeavors, Purpose and Curiosity,’ History of European Ideas 10 (1989): 519–545, p. 533. On the theological ramifications of curiosity, see within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’
Hobbes’s account of the virgin birth reflects his reduction of the traditional, four-fold account of causality, efficient, material, formal and final, to efficient and material causality only. His explanation reflects that of Aristotle in Metaphysics, book Z, 732a1-11, who says that, though they are deformed males, females have a vital role in reproduction in that, while males supply the form or principle of motion, females supply the matter. See also Generation of Animals 1.20.727a9-11. Of course, Hobbes’s sexual politics differs significantly from that of Aristotle; see Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); Joanne H. Wright, ‘Going Against the Grain: Hobbes’s Case for Original Maternal Dominion,’ Journal of Women’s History 14 (2002): 123–148, and Nancy A. Stanlick, ‘Lord and Mothers: Silent Subjects in Hobbes’s Political Theory,’ International Journal of Politics and Ethics 1 (2001): 171–193.
Note the resort to God’s power as a means of overcoming an apparent difficulty. Cf. Joseph Cropsey, ‘Hobbes and the Transition to Modernity,’ Ancients and Moderns: Essays in the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss, ed. by Joseph Cropsey (NY, NY: Basic Books, 1964), 213–238, esp. 231ff. The ubiquity of God as a material being would somewhat parallel the physical presence of the risen Christ, especially in the Eucharist; on this point, see Heiko Augustinus Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 276ff.
These terms were used in connection with Aristotelian, Stoic and Platonic notions of appearance, as contrasted with reality. On their use, see G.C. Stead, ‘Divine Substance in Tertullian,’ Journal of Theological Studies 14 (n.s., 1963): 46–66. See above, § 28.
In opposing hypostasis, that is, something real, to name and appearance, that is, to things that are not real or ‘nothing,’ Hobbes reveals the depth of his commitment to nominalism; see above, § 56. Hobbes lacked the hope for a universal language such as animated many of his contemporaries; see Gigliola Rossini, Nature e artificio nel pensiero di Hobbes (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988), pp. 27–35; Marshall Missner,’ skepticism and Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983): 407–427; William J. Courtenay, ‘Late Medieval Nominalism Revisited: 1977–1982,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983): 159–164. From this position, the step to experimentalism might seem small, but it was one Hobbes never took and even resisted. For an analysis of his rejection of experimentalism, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985) and Cees Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes’ Natural Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
See below, § 88 and nn.
It is necessary in the sense of furnishing linguistic tools by which to name and discuss different aspects of concrete objects. On the use of the abstracts in science, see Hungerland and Vick, ‘Hobbes’s Theory of Language, Speech and Reasoning,’ pp. 100ff.
For example, in Metaphysics, book Z, at 1032a, Aristotle is talking about the production of things which are made, that is, artifacts, such as health, and he clarifies: λέγω δὲ οὐσίαν ἄνευ ὖλης τὸ τί ἦν εἶνατ (ousian aneu hyles to ti en einai), which Ross translates, ‘when I speak of substance without matter, I mean the essence.’ For Hobbes, to be without or separate from matter is not to exist. Aristotle’s error lay in considering essence to be an existent thing without matter; this was to fail to understand the difference between real things and parts of speech (see §81). This error in Aristotle’s theory of language had deleterious effects not only in Greek philosophy but also later in Christian theology; see within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’ For a discussion of the word’ separate’ (χορτστός), see Donald Morrison, ‘CHORISTOS in Aristotle.’ Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 89 (1985): 89–105.
Essence here names the thought of the thing’s existence, that is, the thought that the thing exists; cf. EW I, p. 31. Heidegger says this of Hobbes’s attempt to understand the proposition as a purely verbal artifact: Hobbes takes the assertion as a pure sequence of words. But,... his nominalism cannot be carried through successfully. For Hobbes cannot persist in holding the assertion to be merely a sequence of words. He is necessarily compelled to relate the verbal sequence to some res, but without interpreting in further detail this specific reference to things and the condition for the possibility of this capacity for reference, the significative character of names. Despite his whole nominalistic attack on the problem, the ‘is’ means for Hobbes, too, more than a mere phenomenon of sound or script which is some how inserted between others. The copula as a coupling of words is the index of the thought of the cause for the identical referability of two names to the same thing. The ‘is’ means the whatness of the thing about which the assertion is made. Thus beyond the pure verbal sequence there emerges a manifold which belongs to assertion in general: identifying the reference of names to a thing, apprehension of the whatness of the thing in this identifying reference, the thought of the cause for the identifying referability. Subjected to the constraint of the phenomena involved in the interpretation of the assertion as a sequence of words, Hobbes more and more surrenders his own initial approach. This is characteristic of all nominalism. Quoted from Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology trans. by Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 191–192. Land comes to a similar conclusion regarding Hobbes’s theory of universals: ‘But this is a thinly disguised return to the philosophy of realism: the features by virtue of which particulars receive their common names are the universals whose real existence was initially denied;’ Stephen Land, The Philosophy of Language in Britain: Major Theories from Hobbes to Reid (New York: AMS Press, 1986), p. 20, quoted by Alexander Byrd,’ squaring the Circle: Hobbes on Philosophy and Geometry,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996): 217–231, p. 219.
The linguistic point that Hobbes has been making so far, §§64ff., leads to the conclusion that a faulty theory of predication resulted in theological confusions. See within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’
John of Damascus (675–749; the dates vary) has been called the last of the Greek Fathers; his most important and best known work is the ‘Fountain of Wisdom’ (Πεγε γνόσεος), the first attempt at a summa theologica that has survived. Divided into three parts, namely, ‘Philosophical Chapters,’ ‘Concerning Heresy’ and ‘An Exact Exposition (or Explication) of the Orthodox Faith,’ it is in some parts a summary of the logic and ontology of Aristotle.
The ‘Explication’ is chapter three of the ‘Fountain of Wisdom.’ The most important of the three books, it was translated into Latin at the command of Eugenius III by Burgundio of Pisa, in 1150, shortly before Peter Lombard’s ‘Book of Sentences’ appeared; it was used by Lombard and Thomas Aquinas.
De Oratore 2:102.
The reference is to De Christo, bk 2, chap. 5.
Προσωπολεψία (prosopolepsia), respect for persons, found in Romans 2:11, I Peters 1:7 and James 2:1, is a Hebraism in Greek from the Second Temple or inter-testamentary period. Hobbes uses the term ‘acception of persons’ to indicate a violation of equity or distributive justice twice in Leviathan, chapter 15. Wycliffe’s New Testament uses the phrase ‘acception of persons.’
Matthew 28:19.
I John 5:7.
See his Second General Controversy, Opera Omnia I.303.
The text is that of St. Augustine, De Trinitate, bk 7, chap. 4, with some minor changes.
On the sola scriptura principle, see below, n. 130.
Hobbes may be referring to his early espousal in the Short Tract of a species theory of perception, that is, the belief that sight was caused in the eye by the casting off of very slight material particles from the things seen hitting the eye. But, for the hypothesis that Robert Payne authored the’ short Tract,’ see Noel Malcolm, ‘Robert Payne and the “Short Tract”,’ Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 80–145.
Article I of the Thirty-nine Articles concerns the attributes of God and reads, ‘There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body (incorporeus), parts (impartibilis), passions...’ It is one of the original articles of 1553, and its language is quite close to that of the Lutheran reformers in the Confession of Augsburg. Hobbes is evidently referring to the edition of the Articles put out by Convocation early in 1563 (he has 1562, in conformity to the old calendar), though their number was reduced by one by Elizabeth, who struck out an article likely to give offense to Roman Catholics, whom she wished to retain in the English church, following advice given her at the beginning of her reign by Richard Goodrich. See Norman L. Jones, Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion 1559 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1982), pp. 20ff. In the final revision of 1571, that article (no. 29) was restored since all hope of reconciliation with Rome had ended and irreconcilable Catholics had left the Church of England in obedience to Pius V’s bull, Regnans in excelsis, excommunicating and deposing Elizabeth.
While it may have solved some problems, the Protestant sola scriptura principle also involves Hobbes in interpretive difficulties that it prevents him from solving in any other way than through the sovereign’s authority. For one, if scripture itself is put in doubt, as through the new biblical criticism in which he pioneered, there is no resort to an authority in the church higher than the biblical account. This impasse warrants his resort to the authority of the political sovereign to establish and settle points of interpretation in the interest of peace. It need not however have been the goal of his adoption of the sola scriptura principle; that is, his adoption and employment of that principle may not have been strategic. Also, there is a certain weakness inherent in the principle, at least in comparison to other means of insuring fidelity to the apostolic witness. For, the primacy which Luther accorded the biblical record on the basis of his evangelical break-through recapitulates the experience of the early church when it established the canon on evangelical grounds at such councils as those of Laodicea (363), Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), to say nothing of the so-called Muratorian Canon (170?). It was in this sense the church that produced the Bible. For Hobbes’s discussion of the formation of the canon, see Leviathan 3.33.20.422.
Article 20 concerns the church’s authority in doctrine: The Church hath power to decree Rites and Ceremonies, and Authority in controversies of Faith: And yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture that it be repugnant to another. Wherefore, although the Church be a witness and a keeper of Holy Writ, yet, as it ought not to decree any thing against the same, so besides the same ought it not to enforce any thing to be believed for necessity of Salvation. Except for the opening clause, from ‘The Church’ to ‘Faith,’ the article derives from the Forty Two Articles of Archbishop Cranmer, signed by Edward VI in May, 1553. The opening clause first appears in the Latin edition of 1563 and was probably added by the authority of Elizabeth. The article, ratified by Convocation in 1571, if not earlier, distinguishes the church’s power to legislate external elements of worship and ritual from its authority to adjudicate controversies touching the doctrine and belief of the Christian faith. In the latter area, the church is said to have no power to recognize or decree new doctrines but simply to declare what the truth of the faith is and always has been; it bears witness that a given teaching is in harmony or not with the message it has received and lives to proclaim. In so doing, it may arrive at formulas that give greater exactness to the content of its proclamation, but no novelty must be allowed to break the continuity of apostolic doctrine. Anglican teaching thus differs both from the Puritan view that all rituals not prescribed in the Bible are forbidden and from what has been a Roman Catholic view, namely, that the church is the locus of a continuing tradition of organic doctrinal development, apart from and as a supplement to the Scriptures; on the relation of Scripture and tradition, see Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology, pp. 361–422. Consistent with his indifferentism, Hobbes finds worship to be an external, subject to legislation, and he denies that there is an unimpeachable course of continuing revelation in the church, though he is clear that the sovereign is head of the church and as such competent to judge inquestions of doctrine and public worship. On this, see within, for example, §§207ff. and n. 287. In applying the sola scriptura principle, possibly known to him in this form through Chillingworth, his friend in the Falkland Circle, Hobbes wishes to show that there is little or nothing in the Nicene Creed that is not drawn from the Scriptures; see below, §104. His arguments undercut the Catholic concept of traditio and license the private interpretation of Scripture that Luther too at first enthusiastically urged; on this point, see §173. Although divergence of opinion in theology was a major cause of civil strife in Hobbes’s day, it presented no problem to him so long as the individual outwardly complied with the sovereign’s legislation in matters of public worship and profession, following the example of Naaman. See within, n. 277. Hobbes undercuts all pretense to an independent basis of priestly power in the commonwealth by recognizing the power of the sovereign as public interpreter of Scripture and by allowing for sacerdotal functions in the Christian king himself, whose anointing, according to Hobbes, provides an adequate basis for performing such duties. See below, n. 150 and §§206–207 and nn.
The reader should peruse Professor Tricaud’s learned explanation of Hobbes’s reference to Edward’s liturgy; see Tricaud, Léviathan Traité de la matière, de la forme et du pouvoir de la république ecclésiastique et civile (Paris: Éditions Sirey, 1971), p. 750, n. 70.
This is a position Hobbes either came to or espoused late in life; see within, ‘Hobbes and the Economic Trinity.’
See 1 John 5:7. The famous Comma Johanneum is a feature of the confession of the English-speaking church due to the King James translation, though internal and external evidence is against its authenticity. Hobbes’s reading is found only in eight late manuscripts, four of which have thewords in a marginal note. The formulamade its way into the third edition of Erasmus’ Greek text of 1522 because of anger at its absence in the first edition of 1516. He argued that he did not include the Comma because he found no Greek manuscripts that had it. When one was produced, Erasmus included the reading. Luther’s German translation was based on Erasmus’ second edition (1519) and lacked the Comma, though it was added later. But, the King James translators, basing their work principally on Beza’s tenth edition of the Greek text (1598), fundamentally based on Erasmus’ third and later editions, including the Stephanus editions, popularized the Comma for the English-speaking world. The earliest author in Latin who used it seems to be Priscillian around 380. Retained until 1927, the Comma has been rejected in modern Roman Catholic translations. Many scholars who doubt the Comma’s authenticity nonetheless defend the textual evidence for the Trinity in the New Testament, and Hobbes could easily have known of the evidence against it and still used it, given this fact and that it is found in the version authorized for use in the Anglican Church. Also, the’ spirit, and the water, and the blood’ of verse 8 may bolster his own attempt at paralleling the persons of the Trinity by way of Moses, Jesus and the church.
Hobbes used the words ‘civil amity’ in the ‘Review and Conclusion’ of the English Leviathan; see Leviathan 4.47.20.710. See Lisa Sarasohn, ‘Was Leviathan a Patronage Artifact?’ History of Political Thought 21 (2000): 606–631, for the view that affective ties may bind through an ‘ethic of sociability’ and may trump considerations of prudential calculation, though I would locate somewhat differently the binding force of obligations.
The author of the Acts of the Apostles, verses 6:1, 9:29 and 11:20, knows of Hellenizing Jews who spoke Greek, whereas Galatians 2:14, describes the Judaizers, that is, believers in Christ who required Jewish customs be retained by the new sect. Tricaud notes that Hobbes may have taken the discussion of ‘Grecism,’ Hellenism and Judaism from Epiphanius’ response to Acacius and Paul, perhaps in Petavius’ translation of 1622, which renders ‘Hellenism’ as Graecismus. Epiphanius also speaks there of the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, as had Hippolytus before him. On the fate of some Jewish followers of Jesus following the destruction of the Temple, see Ray A. Pritz, Nazarene Jewish Christianity: From the End of the New Testament Period until its Disappearance in the Fourth Century Studia Post-Biblica, v. 37 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, and Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988).
Galatians 5:19–21 states, ‘Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, strife, jealousy, wrath, factions, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings and the like.’
Anathema, with an eta (-η-), means ‘that which is set up,’ as a tripod or votive offering in a temple. With an epsilon (-ε-), anathema in the Septuagint includes the meaning of being handed over to evil, as in Leviticus 27:28, and Deuteronomy 7:26, 13:17. It is applied to persons in Romans 9:3 and 1 Corinthians 12:3. Hobbes may also be referring to the Roman notion of devotio.
The organological metaphor of the ruler as head of the body politic, which is quite old, is rendered visually in the famous picture on the title page of the 1651 Leviathan. The figure’s facial features have variously been identified as those of Hobbes, Charles I, Charles II, Cromwell or Hobbes’s patron; cf. Arnold A. Rogow, Thomas Hobbes: Radical in the Service of Reaction (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986), pp. 158ff. See also Malcolm, op. cit., pp. 200–233. But, see also Horst Bredekamp, ‘From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes,’ Critical Inquiry 25 (1999): 247–266, and Margery Corbett, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-page in England, 1550–1660 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 219ff. Corbett identifies the page’s engraver as the Frenchman Abraham Bosse (1602–1676), working under Hobbes’s direction. Cf. Keith Brown’s statement: ‘The conclusion seems inescapable: Wenzel Hollar is the artist of the drawn title-page presented to Charles II, and the engraved title-page was made in England from a Hollar drawing sent over by Hobbes along with his manuscript;’ Keith Brown, ‘The Artist of the Leviathan Titlepage,’ The British Library Journal 4 (1978): 24–36. See also Christopher Pye, ‘Hobbes and the Spectacle of Power,’ Representations 8 (1984): 84–106, and M.M. Goldsmith, ‘Hobbes’s Ambiguous Politics,’ History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 639–673.
This is the position Henry VIII enunciated in the Peter Pence and Dispensation Act (25 Henry VIII, c. 21): This your Grace’s Realm, recognising no superior under God, but only your Grace, has been and is free from subjection to any man’s laws, but only to such as have been devised, made and obtained within this realm for the wealth of the same, or to such other as by sufferance of your Grace and his Progenitors, the People of this your Realm have taken at their free liberty, by their own consent to be used among them, and have bound themselves by long use and custom to the observance of the same, not as to the observance of laws of any foreign prince potentate or prelate, but as to the customed and ancient laws of this Realm. Whether the pope exercised jurisdiction in England was a point argued by Maitland and Stubbs, though it seems clear that royal interests were asserted over papal as early as the reign of Edward I (1272–1307). Note what J. Robert Wright says in his The Church and the English Crown 1305–1334: A Study Based on the Register of Archbishop Walter Reynolds (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), p. 153
Hobbes recalls the sweeping language of Henry VIII’s claim to be ‘head’ of the Church of England, 26 Henry VIII, c. 1, of 1534: Albeit the King’s majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the church of England, and is so recognized by the clergy of this realm in their convocations, yet nevertheless for corroboration and confirmation thereof, and for increase of virtue in Christ’s religion within this realmof England, and to repress and extirp all errors, heresies, and other enormities and abuses heretofore used in the same: be it enacted by authority of this present parliament, That the King our sovereign lord, his heirs and successors, Kings of this realm, shall be taken accepted and reputed theonly supreme head in earth of the church of England, called Anglicana Ecclesia; and shall have and enjoy, annexed and united to the imperial crown of this realm, as well the title and style thereof as all honours, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits and commodities to the said dignity of supreme head of the same church belonging and appertaining; and that our said sovereign lord, his heirs and successors, Kings of this realm, shall have full power and authority from time to time, to visit, repress, redress, reform, order, correct, restrain and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offences, contempts and enormities, whatsoever they be, which by any manner spiritual authority or jurisdiction ought or may lawfully be reformed, repressed, ordered, redressed, corrected, restrained or amended, most to the pleasure of Almighty God, the increase of virtue in Christ’s religion, and for the conservation of the peace, unity and tranquillity of this realm; any usage, custom, foreign laws, foreign authority, prescription, or any other thing or things to contrary hereof notwithstanding. Henry’s daughter Elizabeth later contented herself with the title ‘governor.’ The phrase regarding the imperial crown of Henry’s realm, which is found in several contemporary acts, as in the Act in Restraint of Appeals (24 Henry VIII, c. 12), recalls his surprising claim that his crown descended from that of the emperor Constantine; see Richard Koebner, ‘Constantine the Great and Polydore Vergil,’ Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 26 (1953): 29–52. The claim took on significance when, in the context of the royal divorce and with news of Valla’s discrediting of the Donation of Constantine received in England by way of Ulrich von Hutten, the imperial status could be used to compass the headship of both church and state. There are elements of this theory throughout the Appendix, especially in its emphasis on Constantine and other Christian emperors in the life and reform of the church, in the juridical position of the church and in regard to the purity of its doctrine. Hobbes adopts this theory first in the English Leviathan; drops the historical justification, which was always weak, not to say fanciful, and sustains the claim on the basis of natural right. See below, n. 280. The frontispiece of the English Leviathan gives a pictorial rendering of this theory in the imperial crown which the chief figure wears, and chapter 26 shows resemblances between the legal forms of the Romans and the English.
Thus, while all Christians are members of the invisible, universal church, they are organized on earth in visible, national churches. In contrast to Catholic and Calvinist theories of the church, there is some similarity between Hobbes’s conception and that of Melanchthon, as stated in his Apology of the Augsburg Confession 7, 5; see The Augsburg Confession in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church ed. by Robert Kolb et al., trans. by Charles Arand et al. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), pp. 174–177. The national Lutheran churches under princely rule came to distinguishbetween the visible church, that is, the national church inclusive of all citizens, where the prince and his ministers could rule, and the invisible church, that is, the association of faith in men’s hearts, where the prince could not rule. Hobbes reproduces this distinction and goes well beyond its implementation among Lutherans: first, he allows the sovereign full authority to legislate for the church in matters of doctrine and practice and even to preach and administer the sacraments; see within, §§207ff.; and, second, he enshrines the principle of freedom of thought, applied in both religious and political matters. In accord with Troeltsch’s definition, the distinction between the visible and invisible church lies at the base of any religious organization that is inclusive and not a sect.
See Leviathan 3.39.5.498
Arius was born in Egypt in 256 and studied under Lucian of Antioch, who held that Christ was only a man and thus subordinated to God. As Arius developed this view, the differences among the persons were held not to be eternally present in the godhead but only the work of the Father, meaning that the Son derived from the Father and was no more than a power or quality of the Father. Given that there was a time when the Son was not, the Son was not eternal. The same analysis was made of the Holy Spirit. On the Arian heresy, see Manlio Simonetti, La crisi ariana nel IV secolo (Rome: Institutum Patristicum ‘Augustinianum,’ 1975).
Instead of ‘homoousios,’ Molesworth’s edition bears the word ‘homousios,’ which reflects Hobbes’s own or his printer’s usage. Souter reports its use from the fourth century on; see Alexander Souter, AGlossary of Later Latin to 600 A.D. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), p. 176.
That the Fathers at Nicaea went no farther in writing the third article of creed is attested in Eusebius’ ‘circular letter’; see §179.
See Leviathan 3.42.68.568. That the civil sovereign was chief pastor was the point of view in Leviathan that concerned Hobbes’s friend Robert Payne. In a letter to Gilbert Sheldon of May 13, 1650, Payne worried that those hostile to episcopacy would be made to feel justified by Leviathan and those not yet opposed to it would be encouraged to become so. His fear, however, was not evidently based on principle but on the bad political effect the book would have at that moment; he says, ‘[A]ll truths are not fit to be told at all times.’ Quoted from Richard Tuck, ‘The “Christian Atheism” of Thomas Hobbes,’ Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment ed. by Michael Hunter and David Wootton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 111–130, p. 112. Neither does Payne express dismay at the basis of religious power in Hobbes’s state, namely, natural right in the sovereign, rather than the iure divino claim made by many Anglican divines. As Hobbes says regarding consecration and the imposition of hands in An Answer, ‘The bishop consecrates, but the king both makes him bishop and gives him his authority.’ See EW IV, p. 344.
1 Elizabeth c. 1. Hobbes refers to a provision, section 20 in the printed Act, which was one of three annexed to the Parliament Roll and read in the House of Lords on April 25, 1559: Provided always... that [the High Commission]... shall not in any wise have authority or power to order, determine, or adjudge any matter or cause to be heresy, but only such as heretofore have been determined, ordered, or adjudged to be heresy, by the authority of the canonical Scriptures, or by the first four general Councils, or any of them, or by any other general Council wherein the same was declared heresy by the express and plain words of the said canonical Scriptures, or such as hereafter shall be ordered, judged, or determined to be heresy by the High Court of Parliament of this realm, with the assent of the clergy in their Convocation; anything in this Act contained to the contrary notwithstanding. The addition may have came from Catholics, who feared that, in breaking with Rome, England must also break with the early councils, which recognized the primacy of the pope. This insertion thus limited which of their beliefs the High Commission could define as heresy. See Norman L. Jones, Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion 1559 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1982), pp. 142ff.
Legislation of July 5, 1641, (17 Carolus I, c. 11) repealed the eighth section of the Act of Supremacy, abolished the High Commission, the court of heresy, and forbade the erection of a similar court in the future; see n. 172.
Hobbes has recounted the history whereby Elizabeth, in her Act of Supremacy of 1559, restored to the Crown the ancient jurisdiction it asserted over the administration of the church and abolished all foreign power contrary to that jurisdiction. The Act authorized the Queen and her successors to set up inspectors in matters of the church, church discipline and dogma. Accordingly, later in the first year of her reign, Elizabeth named six to carry out these functions under letters patent. This group formed the nucleus of the High Commission, so called beginning in 1570, or Court of High Commission, as it was known from around 1576 on. It functioned as a kind of ecclesiastical court of administration and heresy and satisfied few; as Hobbes notes, it was abolished early on during Charles’ troubles with Parliament. Star Chamber got its undeserved, bad reputation from having taken over some of the court’s procedures and responsibilities. See Roland G. Usher’s The Rise and Fall of the High Commission (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913), with the corrections and changed emphases contained in a new introduction by Philip Tyler in the 1968 edition; T.G. Barnes,’ star Chamber Mythology,’ American Journal of Legal History 5 (1961): 1–185; T.G. Barnes, ‘Due Process and Slow Process in the Late Elizabethan-Early Stuart Star Chamber,’ American Journal of Legal History 6 (1962): 221–315, and T.G. Barnes, List and Index To The Proceedings in the Star Chamber For The Reign Of James I (1603–1625), In The Public Record Office, London, Class STAC8 (Chicago, IL: American Bar Foundation, 1975); T.G. Barnes, ‘The Archives and Archival Problems of the Elizabethan and Early Stuart Star Chamber,’ Journal of the Society of Archivists 2 (1963): 345–360. See also Ronald A. Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York 1560–1642 (Aberdeen: Longmans, 1960), for the operations of these commissions in that diocese.
Hobbes may have the rationale of Justinian’s Novella 77 in mind here; see §§171ff.
Note Hobbes’s utilitarian understanding of punishment, as well as his recognition of limits upon the powers of the sovereign consistent with the aims to be pursued through the criminal law. Nulla poena sine lege: no penalty without a law, referring to the legal principle that one cannot be penalized for something not prohibited by a law; this is to say that penal law cannot be applied retroactively. Whatever his views of extra-territorial jurisdiction were, in describing undivided sovereignty within the polity, he did not intend to recognize wholly arbitrary powers of life and death in the sovereign. This is clear from the views he expresses here and on self-defense and military service. See also Wright, ‘Authority and Theodicy in Hobbes’s Leviathan: “We are God’s Slaves”,’ Rivista di storia della filosofia 60 (2004): 175–204.
The place of natural law theory in Hobbes’s moral teaching has been the subject of intense and prolonged controversy; for an overview of some of the positions, see W.H. Greenleaf, ‘Hobbes: the problem of interpretation,’ Hobbes-Forschungen eds. Reinhart Koselleck and Roman Schnur (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1969), 9–31; David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 35–40, 178ff., and Pierre-FrançoisMoreau, ‘Loi divine et loi naturelle selon Hobbes,’ Revue internationale de philosophie 33 (1979): 443–451. On Hobbes and natural theology, see §183, and within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’
That is, once the sovereign and law have been established, subjects do not have the right to inflict harm on one another for perceived violations of religious belief or practice, though the authority of the sovereign in this area is unlimited. If people did have a right to inflict penalties for perceived offenses beyond those described in the law, given that each would be judge both of his or her own (religious) sensibilities and of others’ violation of them, there would be no limit to the effect of individual preferences and no limit to the infliction of penalties. They would be returned to a state of nature, in which each individual is judge and executor in his or her own case. On this point, see S.A. Lloyd, Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Hobbes’s reply, that religion is at the basis of civil obligation, puts him in line with Francis Bacon and the Middle Ages against Pierre Bayle, John Locke and other proponents of the principle of toleration. Still, Hobbes’s attempt to articulate an objective concept of atheism, based not on imputed beliefs or as a result of inferences drawn from observation of given actions, but only direct statements, and his moderation regarding punishment, may be cited as evidence of a liberal temper. If it is the case that Hobbes’s concept of ‘true religion’ advances God’s omnipotence as the source of natural obligation (see within, ‘Hobbes in Exile’), then Hobbes requires only that subjects be theists. Cf. S.A. Lloyd’s gracious contribution to a memorial volume for Greg Kavka, ‘Contemporary Uses of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,’ Rational Commitment and Social Justice ed. by Jules L. Coleman and Christopher W. Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 122–149. Onoath, cf. Leviathan 1.15.33.201.
A public nuisance is an interference with the common right of the general public or an unreasonable interference with the health, safety, peace, or comfort of the community. Hobbes seems to have cast the question of atheism in this way in order to cut off private rights of action against the atheist in that one of the conditions of private suits for a public nuisance was injury of a type greater than or different in kind from that suffered by the king or the public. This, presumably, no private citizen could allege; see §135. In his Institutes, Edward Coke discussed a 1535 case in which the plaintiff sought a writ, alleging that the defendant had obstructed the King’s highway so as to prevent him from traveling from his house to his fields. The judge in the case held against the plaintiff because he had suffered no special injury; Coke reasoned: But here is to be observed a diversity betweene a private way, whereof Littleton here speaketh, and a common way. For if the way be a common way, if any man be disturbed to go that way, or if a ditch be made overthwart the way so as he cannot goe, yet shal he not have an action upon his case; and this the law provided for avoiding of multiplicity of suites, for if any one man might have an action, all men might have the like. See Edward Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Law of England §56a (1832; reprinted, 1979 by Professional Books Limited, Abingdon, England), unpaginated. Coke’s authority established the precedent as the source of public nuisance law since then. See Denise E. Antolini,’ Modernizing Public Nuisance: Solving the Paradox of the Special Injury Rule,’ Ecology Law Quarterly 28 (2001): 755–894.
Hobbes, who stresses that our ‘knowledge’ of God is negative, is wary of explaining God’s purposes to men. For one, he believes that statements about God, except that He exists, are not proper propositions, given that our finite imaginations can contain no concept of the infinite; they are merely evidences of a desire to praise God. Also, he thinks it presumptuous to assert some need or purpose in God to be fulfilled through action in the world. He says in the critique of Thomas White’s De Mundo, on the question whether God established the world out of His goodness: Here it is asked: ‘To what end has God established the world?’ Now whatever men do, they do with the desire of securing something pleasant; and the ‘end’ they always take to be that which, through the imagination that it generates, moves or urges them to secure it. Yet as soon as they have obtained what they sought, then what was once their goal is no longer so, but they press forward to other things, because in his lifetime no one is without the wish to acquire things. No desire exists except that of reaching a goal, or self-benefit, which people think they can gain through their own efforts. But, if anyone ascribed such a purpose to God when He established the universe, clearly such a person has claimed that He has not been the Most Blessed from all time, and that He has appetite and need. If such a person wishes to interpret ‘purpose in God’ differently from ‘purpose in animals,’ i.e., as something analogous and above human understanding, then the present disputation does not pertain to philosophy, or to any natural theology; it has to do with religion, in which case the argument should have been conducted not according to man’s reasons but according to Holy Scripture and the decrees of the Church. See Thomas White’s De Mundo Examined trans. by Harold Whitmore Jones (London: Bradford University Press, 1976), pp. 400–401. Note Hobbes’s early use of the three-part division: 1) ‘philosophy,’ 2) ‘natural theology’ and 3) (revealed) ‘religion;’ it is central in the English Leviathan. See within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’ Note also what he says in The Questions concerning Liberty, etc., # 38: Pious men attribute to God Almighty, for honour sake, whatsoever they see is honourable in the world, as seeing, hearing, willing, knowing, justice, wisdom, &c.: but deny him such poor things as eyes, ears, brains, and other organs, without which we worms neither have nor can conceive such faculties to be: and so far they do well. But when they dispute of God’s actions philosophically, then they consider them again as if he had such faculties, and in that manner as we have them. This is not well; and thence it is they fall into so many difficulties. We ought not to dispute of God’s nature; he is no fit subject of our philosophy. True religion consisteth in obedience to Christ’s lieutenants, and in giving God such honour, both in attributes and actions, as they in their several lieutenancies shall ordain. Hobbes here eschews what theologians call analogia entis, the theory, especially associated with Aquinas, for example, that there exists a correspondence or analogy between the created order and God, as a result of the divine creatorship. The idea gives theoretical justification to the practice of drawing conclusions from the known objects and relationships of the natural order concerning God. (Cf. the so-called analogia fidei of Karl Barth, who held that any correspondence between the created order and God is established only on the basis of the self-revelation of God. For Barth’s critique of the Roman Catholic analogia entis, see Church Dogmatics II/1 ed. by G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance trans. by G.W. Bromiley [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975], pp. 79–84.) On the question of inference by analogy, see §200 and nn. Cf. Jeffrey Barnouw, ‘The Separation of Reason and Faith in Bacon and Hobbes, and Leibniz’s Theodicy,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (1981): 607–628, esp. 617.
A reference to the practice established for dealing with recalcitrant members of the early church in Matthew 18:16–17: 16 But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. 17 And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican.
Athanasius was exiled five times in his life, twice by Constantine (335 and 339), by Constantius (357), by Julian (362) and by the Arian Valens (365); the exile mentioned in the text would seem to be the first. During the proceedings marking Constantine’s dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in 335, Arius was received back into the church after having submitted a confession of the faith susceptible to orthodox interpretation, whereas Athanasius was condemned and exiled to Trier in Gaul. Athanasius’ opposition to Arianism may have sprung from his rejection of the Arian demigod Christ as capable of bringing salvation; this would be no more than a subtle form of paganism. See James Breckenridge, ‘Julian and Athanasius: Two Approaches to Creation and Salvation,’ Theology 76 (1973): 73–81. If Hobbes read Athanasius’ own account of his troubles, then he omits to mention the charge against the bishop, namely, that he had threatened to obstruct the grain supply from Alexandria to Constantinople. T.D. Barnes has written, ‘Athanasius... maintained the popular support... by organizing an ecclesiastical mafia... Like a modern gangster, he evoked widespread distrust, proclaimed total innocence — and usually succeeded in evading conviction on specific charges;’ quoted by Michael Di Maio and Fr. Arnold, ‘Per Vim, Per Caedem, Per Bellum: A Study of Murder and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Year 337A.D.,’ Byzantion 62 (1992): 158–211, p. 182, n. 141.
Hobbes’s teaching reflects what has been called Erastianism, the doctrine of the subjection of the church to the power of the state, named after Erastus (Thomas Lueber, Lieber or Liebler, 1524–1583), an amateur Swiss theologian. M.I. Fell, sub voce ‘Erastianism’ New Catholic Encyclopedia 5 (1967), 511–512, states: ‘Erastus’ real purpose seems to have been to deny to the Church any right to coercive authority apart from the State. He was opposed to any political role for the Church whether that in a theocracy or that of the Church as an independent society within the State... [H]e labored to prevent the Evangelical Church from embracing the Genevan doctrine that the Church is a perfect society in and by itself’; 512. Hobbes’s advocacy of the view places him with several others, for example, Henry Parker, Selden, Prynne, and, earlier, Christopher St. Germaine, in describing the role and legitimacy of the national church in England, though his views are extreme; see below, for example, §§207ff.
See Constantine’s law of 326, in Justinian’s Code, bk 1, title 5, De haereticis et Manicheis et Samaritis.
A reference to Constantine’s law of 315, Code, bk 1, title 9, De Judaeis et Caelicolis.
The legal science of the Bolognese Glossators was based on the theory that the German emperor, by right of the translatio imperi to Charlemagne, rightfully stood in the place of the Roman emperor, an argument at the root of Dante’s De Monarchia. The constitutions of Frederick I (Barbarossa) and II were thus regularly included in medieval editions of the Code. But, the constitution to which Hobbes refers, De cumburendo haeretice, was not often included in medieval editions of the Code, probably because it was chiefly the work not of the emperor but of Pope Lucius III, who issued it as the decretal Ad abolendam. This decretal confirmed the agreement reached in 1177 between the emperor and Pop eAlexander III, Lucius’ predecessor, in the Treaty of Venice. With the emperor’s cooperation, the pope convened a synod at Verona in 1184, at which severe measures were taken against the prevalent heresies of those days, the Cathari, the Waldenses, and the Arnoldists. On the imperial dignity, see below, n. 280. Lucius’ decretal stresses the offensive contumacy (contumacia) of the heretic, specifies the heretical sects and outlines procedures for dealing with both heretical clergy and laity. (On contumacy, cf. §167.) It differs from earlier treatment of heresy largely in its clarity and forceful requirement that lay authorities cooperate fully with churchly authorities. But, in regard to penalties, Ad abolendam leaves the problem of criminal action to lay judges who are to act within locally prescribed legal forms. Thus, while whether it looks to the penalty of death by burning may be disputed, it clearly consigns the heretic to the secular arm for such punishment as was merited. See Edward Peters, Inquisition (NY, NY: Free Press, 1988), pp. 47ff.
Hobbes is referring to Henry’s statute, 2 Henry IV, c. 15. This section recalls Henry Tudor’s position that the pope had exercised no jurisdiction in England except as the king and people had freely accepted and taken it upon themselves; see n. 133.
1 Elizabeth, c. 20.
Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 263–339) seems to have written his ‘circular letter’ only for his own diocese, to explain his subscription to a creed he might have been expected to oppose; Athanasius reports its text in his discussion of the Nicene Council, De decretis Nicenae Synodi, as do Socrates the historian and Theodoret. Eusebius, the first great historian of ecclesiastical antiquities after Luke, had gone to Nicaea under the ban of excommunication of the recent Council of Antioch due to his espousal of Arian views. His appearance before the Nicene Fathers was likely an attempt on his part and Constantine’s to rehabilitate him to gain the advantage of his considerable prestige for use against the Arians. See J.N.D. Kelly’s discussion of the letter in Early Christian Creeds, pp. 220–226. A translation of the letter is given by J. Stevenson in A New Eusebius (London: SPCK, 1968), pp. 364–368. See below, §§179ff.
Hobbes reports this as a quotation, but in fact it is a paraphrase, linking elements that are scattered throughout the letter. If Eusebius subscribed rather reluctantly to the creed, it was in the hope that he would not be forced later to accept interpretations he considered repugnant. In this, he was evidently disappointed; see D.S. Wallace Hadrill, Eusebius of Caesarea (London: A.R. Mowbray & Company, 1960), pp. 29ff.
The respectful attitude Hobbes takes here toward at least the Nicene Creed is not repeated in what must be his later workHistoriaEcclesiastica; see Patricia Springborg, ‘Hobbes, Heresy and the Historia Ecclesiastica,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994): 553–571, p. 563.
Quite apart from the uneducated, the ignorance of Elizabeth’s clergy itself was legendary and likely known to Hobbes through personal experience: his father had served as a local vicar prior to deserting his family for parts ‘beyond London.’ Cartwright charged Archbishop Whitgift with the fact that ‘there be admitted into the ministry those of the basest sort,... such as are suddenly changed out of a serving-man’s coat into a minister’s cloak, making for the most part theministry their last refuge;’ quoted in J.R. Tanner, Tudor Constitutional Documents, 1485–1603 2d ed. (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1930; reprinted 1951), 151. See also A. Tindal Hart, The Curate’s Lot: The Story of the Unbeneficed English Clergy (London: John Barker, 1970), pp. 71ff. This laxness was also dangerous after the arrival in 1580 of learned priests from English colleges established at Douai, then at Rheims and Rome.
Coke discusses heresy in the third book of his Institutes; it is in book 4, chap. 74, p. 323, that the discussion Hobbes cites takes place. And, in it, Coke complains less of the commissioners’ tardiness than of their presumption and lawlessness. He notes twice that it was Lord Chancellor Ellesmere who had forced publication of the letters patent, so it seems clear that the reference is to the clash of jurisdictions that arose in James’ reign over the common law courts’ practice of frustrating the operation of the ecclesiastical courts; see below, §167 and n. The debates on ecclesiastical jurisdiction and practice which had occurred between the years 1607 and 1611 culminated in a conference before the Privy Council on May 23, 1611, with Coke, the Chief Justice, the main protagonist against Richard Bancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, with Lord Chancellor Ellesmere playing a mediating role. Ultimately, the King issued new letters patent which ended the conflict while leaving the Commission’s powers largely intact. Knafla proposes the work of Ellesmere as instrumental in arranging this measure of peace, based on greater acceptance of ecclesiastical authorities by common lawyers and of prohibitions by the civilians. See Louis A. Knafla, Law and Politics in Jacobean England: The Tracts of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 123–154, esp. 139–141. The royal letters to which Hobbes refers were the letters patent which set up the ecclesiastical commission envisioned in the Act of Supremacy; see §§ 207ff. Hobbes’s point in this section is that, although the Thirty-nine Articles of 1563, amended in 1571, stated the Anglican doctrinal position, this statement had no legislative authority as such, so that it did not clarify the juridical/legal situation of heresy.
See above, § 133 and n.
Typically, heretics would be cited into the bishop’s court, tried and then handed to civil authorities for punishment. On the procedure of the ecclesiastical courts, see Ronald Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York 1560–1642, pp. 1–7. In James I’s reign, the burning of two heretics, Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman, for Arianism is recorded; see Howell’s State Trials, vol. 2 (London: T.C. Hansard, 1809), col. 727ff. Thomas Fuller mentions that Legate, a native of Essex, was of ‘person comely, complexion black, age about forty years; of a bold spirit, confident carriage, fluent tongue, excellently skilled in Scriptures; and well had it been for him if he had known them less or understood them better’; from The Church History of Britain, quoted in Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, Penalties upon Opinion: Some Records of the Law of Heresy and Blasphemy 3d ed. (London: Watts and Company, 1934), p. 14. James had Legate brought before him to trick him into confessing that he prayed to Christ, but Legate, though he admitted having done so once in ignorance, said he had not for the past seven years. ‘Hereupon the King, in choler, spurned at him with his foot: “Away, base Fellow,” saith he, “it shall never be said that one stayeth in my presence that hath never prayed to our Saviour for seven years together”;’ pp. 14–15. Legate served time as a prisoner at Newgate but was finally declared an ‘obdurate, contumacious and incorrigible heretic’ by a large assembly of clergymen. James gave order that a writ de haeretice comburendo be directed to the sheriff of London, and Legate was burned March 18, 1611. The writ de haeretico comburendo was later abolished by Charles II (29 Carolus II, c. 9).
Hobbes is referring to the hated ‘oath ex officio,’ by which an accused, called before the Commission, swore to answer truly and fully all questions asked him without knowledge of either the charges against him or, in some cases, of his accuser, ‘least after perusal (afore his oath taken) he may be drawen by counsell to answere cautelously, indirectly, or wholly to refuse to make answere: perhaps because he sees they touche him over neerely, as conjecturing by whom they may be prooved;’ from Richard Cosin, An Apologie: of and for sundrie proceedings by jurisdiction ecclesiastical (London, 1591), part II, p. 50, cited by Mary Hume Maguire, ‘Attack of the Common Lawyers on the Oath ex officio as Administered in the Ecclesiastical Courts in England,’ Essays in History and Political Theory in Honor of Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), pp. 199–229, 215. Fear of the Lollards in England had allowed the bishops to force the enactment of 2 Henry IV, c. 15, the writ de haeretico comburendo, in 1401, which gave them power to imprison heretics and set secular machinery in motion to stamp out those propagating the heresy. This law also authorized the ex officio oath. During Henry VIII’s reign, Christopher St. Germaine and Thomas More had expressed sharply divided views as to its legality under common law. At that time, Parliament repealed Henry IV’s law (25 Henry VIII, c. 14), but it was restored under Mary (1 and 2 Philip and Mary, c. 6). Elizabeth in turn restored her father’s repeal of the medieval law (1 Elizabeth, c. 15). But, Elizabeth’s policy of enforcing outward conformity to the established church’s confession and practices made the High Commission and its procedures an effective instrument of state policy; the ex officio oath was specially authorized in the letters patent of 1583. Late in Elizabeth’s reign, the issue of the legal position of the commission rose to prominence in the context of the clash of ecclesiastical and common law jurisdictions. James’ reign saw Chief Justice Coke, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere and Archbishop Bancroft dispute the common law courts’ practice of issuing writs of prohibition against ecclesiastical courts, with the effect of stopping their proceedings, precluding execution of their judgments and releasing those committed by them on writs of habeas corpus. On the goal of civil punishment for ecclesiastical offenses, see below, n. 217.
17 Carolus I, c. 11.
An allusion to Paul’s statement in Romans 8:27: ‘And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what [is] the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to [the will of] God.’
See Acts 2:41ff. and 4:32ff.
Hobbes is referring to the view that faith in Christ must be voluntary and cannot be coerced by law, the position espoused, for example, by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae, II-I, q. 10, art. 8. For a modern statement rejecting coerced religious belief, see the Vatican II document Dignitatis Humanae in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, NY: Costello Press, 1975). As Curley notes, coercion was advocated in certain circumstances; see his note 42, p. 537.
Charles’ Archbishop of Canterbury throughout this period was William Laud. A strong-willed man, Laud hoped with Charles that, once the forces of the anti-episcopal faction within Calvinism had been put down in England, the Anglican Church might at last both realize the ideals of the Reformation and be invested with the authority of a pious king, the enlightened guide to his people on matters spiritual as well as temporal. It was Laud who sought to strengthen the episcopal system so hateful to Scottish Presbyterians, and it was he who insisted on the high ritual that was so distasteful to English Presbyterians. Fourteen articles of impeachment for high treason were brought against Laud in 1640 by the Commons, but he was executed in 1645, Hobbes says, ‘for the entertainment of the Scots.’ See §§133, 157 and 167, and nn. On Laudian divines’ claim to office by divine right, see J.P. Sommerville, ‘The Royal Supremacy and Episcopacy “Jure Divino,” 1603–1640,’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 34 (1983): 548–558. Hobbes undercut the authority of the bishops through the sovereign’s teaching office and possession of sacramental powers; see below, §§207ff. and nn.
In this statement, Hobbes addresses a number of issues which scholars today have looked at to understand the drift to war following the Scottish troubles. Clearly, he has included the ‘Puritans’ among the ‘Presbyterians,’ so that, at least as regards the situation in 1642, Hobbes’s account agrees with current opinion that the clear division was religious and cultural. As Conrad Russell has said, ‘It is almost universally true that Puritans fought for the Parliament, and high churchmen and Catholics for the king;’ quoted from The Crisis of Parliaments: English History 1509–1660 (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1971), 343. On the question of Arminianism, see Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 26–32, 428ff.
Hobbes was among the first to leave England following establishment of the Long Parliament in 1640, for fear of reprisals exacted for his defense of the king in Elements of Law. Also, he had seen Bishop Manwaring taken to the Tower for espousing views like his.
An act of September 20, 1649, ‘Against Unlicensed and Scandalous Books and Pamphlets, and for better regulating of Printing,’ lapsed on September 29, 1651, so that, while the law authorizing censorship was not repealed, its enforcement was rendered difficult. But, Leviathan was entered at Stationers’ Hall in January of that year and was in the press during the winter and early spring. The dedication is dated April, 1651, and it must have appeared toward the end of that month, since it is mentioned in a letter from Robert Payne dated May 6. See B.D. Greenslade, ‘The Publication Date of Hobbes’s Leviathan,’ Notes and Queries n.s. 22 (1975): 310. Evidently, the window of opportunity to which Hobbes refers is not the lapse in the 1649 act but the earlier removal of the bishops’ power through abolition of the High Commission.
Leviathan 1.2.8.92. The cynicism that is evident here as to these practices of the medieval church was sharedby all the Reformers. On the question of miracles, see Robert M. Burns, The Great Debate on Miracles: From Joseph Glanvill to David Hume (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981).
Matthew 27:52.
Hobbes allows for the existence of invisible beings, like God, composed of diaphanous, but material, substance. As aspects of his political program, materialism and mortalism serve to counter the superstitious fear of ghosts that made the people a prey of pope, priest and presbyter; see within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’ But, the point is a difficult one. The key seems to be rejection of the possibility of possession by immaterial spirits and unknown agencies, as if, assured as to the actual, physical reality of spirits, individual and material like themselves, and thus incapable of occupying their bodies or minds, the people would cease to fear them or seek the remedy of their fears from seditious priests. Still, the mirror he holds up to politics must be for princes’ political and religious edification because he is thoroughly realistic in his appraisal of the people’s appetite for abstract thought, such as comprehension of his system and of its bases and elaboration would require. On this and related points, see David Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), but also the review of Dennis T. Brennan in The Review of Politics 49 (1987): 448–453. See also D.P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
One can translate this statement plausibly in at least two ways: 1) God is body, and 2) God is a body. While both state the proposition that God is material, the first seems preferable, especially if the second is taken to suggest limitation and specification, which is contrary to Hobbes’s intentions. The first, however, need not in my view imply pantheism or the identification of God with the world. The clearest refutation of that assertion is Hobbes’s statement, Leviathan 2.31.15.401ff., ‘those philosophers, who said the world, or the soul of the world was God, spake unworthily of him; and denied his existence. For by God, is understood the cause of the world; and to say the world is God, is to say there is no cause of it, that is, no God. Thirdly, to say the world was not created, but eternal, (seeing that which is eternal has no cause,) is to deny there is a God.’ On Hobbes’s mereology, see Cees Leijenhorst, ‘Hobbes’s Corporeal Deity,’ Nuove prospettive critiche sul Leviatano di Hobbes ed. by Luc Foisneau and George Wright (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004): 73–96, pp. 81ff., and, more generally, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, sub voce ‘mereology,’ found at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology.
On this point, see Cees Leijenhorst, George Wright (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004): 73–96 ibid.
In his essay De carne Christi, written in 208, Tertullian wrote against Marcion, who believed that Christ was not actually born of the flesh but was a phantasm of human form. In defending the orthodox belief in a genuine incarnation, Tertullian expressed the famous paradox, certum est, quia impossibile: ‘it is certain because it is impossible.’ On Tertullian, see G.C. Stead, ‘Divine Substance in Tertullian,’ Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 14 (1963): 46–66.
Hobbes has conflated a statement from Tertullian’s De Carne Christi, XI, ‘All that is is body after its own kind; nothing is incorporeal except that which does not exist’; with one from Adversus Praxeam, VII: ‘Who will deny that God is body even though He is spirit? For spirit is body after its own kind and in its own form.’ In his Considerations upon the Reputation of T. Hobbes, Hobbes discusses the materialist conception of God: ‘... that doctrine served [Tertullian’s] turn to confute the heresy of them that held that Christ had no body, but was a ghost; also of the soul, he speaks as of an invisible body. And there is an epitome of the doctrine of the Eastern Church, wherein is this, that they thought angels and souls were corporeal, and only called incorporeal, because their bodies were not like ours. And I have heard that a Patriarch of Constantinople, in a council held there, did argue for the lawfulness of painting angels, from this, that they were corporeal. You see what fellows in atheism you join with Mr. Hobbes.’ See EW IV, p. 429. Hobbes may be referring to a garbled account of Nicephorus (c. 758–828), the patriarch of Constantinople who was deposed as a result of the Iconoclastic Controversy. In his Antirrheticus, ii, 7, he says angels may be painted, not because they are corporeal, but because, in having a beginning and a comprehensible nature, they may be circumscribed; see Paul J. Alexander, The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople: Ecclesiastical Policy and Image Worship in the Byzantine Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. 206ff.
See Colossians 2:9.
The commentary on the passage from Paul is found in the third book of a work entitled De Trinitate, whose author may have been Athanasius, as Hobbes says, or possibly Virgil of Thapsus; see Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 62, col. 253. The word dealiter is otherwise unknown in Latin.
Acts 17:28.
That is, if we are all in God and have our being in Him and we are material, then God too must be material. Hobbes is constantly drawn to make statements as to the nature of God which his own epistemological assumptions would seem to rule out of order. One might call Hobbes’s theology pre-critical in that it does not proceed on the basis of an analysis of the conditions of its own possibility; in this sense, it is naively realist, particularly in its reliance on the notion of substance. Cf. Christopher J. Insole, ‘Why John Hick Cannot, and Should Not, Stay out of the Jam Pot,’ Religious Studies 36 (2000): 25–33.
Hobbes has earlier discussed the circular letter of Eusebius of Caesarea, in §156, and it has led him to make this assertion. The emperor is represented there as having taken the initiative in proposing the word to the council, following Eusebius’ appearance before the council, with the explanation that ‘homoousios was not used in the sense of bodily affections, for the Son did not derive His existence from the Father by means of division or severance, since an immaterial, intellectual and incorporeal nature could not be subject to any bodily affection. These things must be understood as bearing a divine and ineffable signification’; quoted in J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 214. The term was the rallying point of no party and wide enough to allow as many different schools of thought as possible to embrace it, except the Arians. (In what follows, ‘co-essential’ and ‘consubstantial’ are used interchangeably.)
Hobbes is accurate as to the objection of not only Arians but many others at Nicaea against the use of terms not found in the Bible. The orthodox countered that, while they would have preferred terms more Scriptural than ‘consubstantial’ and ‘from the substance of the Father,’ none of the scriptural titles or images had been proof against Arian twisting. Athanasius was later to argue that, if the term ‘consubstantial’ was not in the Scriptures, the meaning it stood for was; see De decretis Nicaeae synodi, cited in J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 239, n. 1. The Fathers’ use of the term was intended to clinch their anti-Arian position that Christ was fully God, not a created, if perfect, being, to be distinguished from the Godhead by divinity, truth, origin or substance. While Hobbes’s objection is valid to a point, he may obscure the real issue underlying the dispute over usage, namely, the Arian devaluation of Christ. The corporeality of God was an issue for no one, either Arian or orthodox, at the council, and obviating the term co-essential as an inappropriate use of Greek terminology would not advance that view. The linchpin for that argument is Tertullian. See within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’
That the Nicene Fathers considered this doctrine is not supported by the reports of their deliberations, nor is the word itself attested until after their meetings. One of early proponents of this heresy was Audaeus, founder of the Audians, a sect that formed in Syria around the time of the Nicene Council. See above, n. 216. Hobbes’s view in the Historical Narration Concerning Heresy is more correct, namely, that the group arose during the time of Emperor Valens (364–378), some forty to fifty years after the Council of Nicaea; on this discrepancy, see the Introduction. The view of the Anthropomorphites differed from that of Tertullian, who, although he believed that God was body, did not assert that the image of God ( Phillipians 2:6) entailed possession of the parts of the human body. To Tertullian, God was material but not figurate. Augustine, in discussing his conversion in the Confessions, mentions his early consideration of a similar view; he does not condemn Tertullian and even exonerates him of heresy for holding the view (De Haereticis, 86). Hobbes seems to cite the heresy in order to distinguish it from his version of materialism and thereby vindicate his belief that materialism neither entails this heresy nor is inconsistent with scriptural statements about God.
This text is drawn from John Damascene’s De Fide Orthodoxa, found in Patrologia Graeca, vol. 94, col. 845.
Hobbes is referring to those chapters of John’s summa, The Fount of Knowledge, known under the name Dialectica.
In fact, John’s intention is not hard to understand; note what Tillich says: There can be little doubt that the arguments [for the existence of God] are a failure in so far as they claim to be arguments. Both the concept of existence and the method of arguing to a conclusion are inadequate for the idea of God. However it is defined, the ‘existence of God’ contradicts the idea of a creative ground of essence and existence. The ground of being cannot be found within the totality of beings, nor can the ground of essence and existence participate in the tensions and disruptions characteristic of the transition from essence to existence. The scholastics were right when they asserted that in God there is no difference between essence and existence. But they perverted their insight when in spite of this assertion they spoke of the existence of God and tried to argue in favor of it. Actually, they did not mean ‘existence.’ They meant the reality, the validity, the truth of the idea of God, an idea which did not carry the connotation of something or someone who might or might not exist. Yet this is the way in which the idea of God is understood today in scholarly as well as popular discussions about the ‘existence of God.’ It would be a great victory for Christian apologetics if the words ‘God’ and’ existence’ were very definitely separated except in the paradox of God becoming manifest under the conditions of existence, that is, in the christological paradox. God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him. See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), vol. 3, pp. 104ff. On the analogia entis, see Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology vol. 1 (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 238–241; Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 259–280; and John Herman Randall, Jr. Hellenistic Ways of Deliverance and the Making of the Christian Synthesis (NY, NY: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 156–158, esp. n. 9.
The reference is to 1 Corinthians 8:4; see above, §12.
Leviathan 1.6.36.124. Hobbes’s account of the origin of religion includes more motives than fear; on this point and for a discussion of Hobbes’s use of the words ‘feign’ and ‘imagine’ in this passage, see Paul J. Johnson, ‘Hobbes’s Anglican Doctrine of Salvation,’ in Thomas Hobbes in His Time, eds. Ralph Ross, Herbert W. Schneider and Theodore Waldman (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), 102–125, esp. 114–118, and A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. See also within,’ The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’
This saying is found in Psalms (111:10), Proverbs (1:7, 9:10), and in the apocryphal Ecclesiasticus, also known as the Wisdom of Sira; I do not find it in Ecclesiastes. It is no accident that Hobbes refers to the Hebrew Scriptures, here as elsewhere. In stressing God’s freedom and graciousness, he is seeking to reflect a more biblically rooted thought-world in which deed, event, decision and promise are the principal categories; that is, Hobbes as Protestant theologian is attempting to recover the historical emphasis on a conception of God whose roots are ultimately Hebraic. See R.J. Halliday, Timothy Kenyon and Andrew Reeve, ‘Hobbes’s Belief in God,’ Political Studies 31 (1983): 418–433. Cf. John L. Farthing, Thomas Aquinas and Gabriel Biel: Interpretations of Thomas Aquinas in German Nominalism on the Eve of the Reformation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), pp. 7ff.
See Psalms 14:1 and Psalms 53:1.
Leviathan 1.16.12.220. ‘Reduce’ here means to lead back or return, as is evident from
Leviathan 3.34.15.434. The Greek word ἃγγελος (angelos) means ‘messenger.’
See Genesis 28:11–15.
The Sadducees, the aristocratic rivals of the Pharisees and often referred to in the New Testament, as in Acts 23:6–8, denied the doctrines of the resurrection of the dead and of the existence of angels, both of which beliefs had arisen in Palestine in the years prior to the birth of Jesus.
Leviathan, chap. 38, passim.
‘Morientesque mortui remanserunt’ would seem to be Hobbes’s imitation of the Hebrew phrase which he references above at §70.
See the first chapter of this Appendix, §§41–56. This cross-reference would indicate that the third chapter at least was written or edited with conscious reference to the other.
See Leviathan 3.38.3.480.
Isaiah 33:20ff. and 65:20ff.; Obadiah 1:17; Joel 2:30ff.
2 Peter 2:5 and 3:13.
Revelation 5:18ff.; Hobbes has written ‘124 elders.’
Hobbes may be referring here to such passages in Revelations as 13:7, 20:8–9 and 20:14.
Leviathan 3.39.4.498. The prohibition to assemble recalls Elizabeth’s ‘Proclamation to Forbid Preaching’ of December 27, 1558, and Charles I’s proclamation of June 22, 1643, that the Presbyterians’ Assembly of Divines not meet at Westminster as directed by the act of Parliament of June 12 of the same year.
In the first of these two passages, Psalms 105:19, the psalmist alludes to a promise made in a story about Joseph, which is related in Genesis 40:13. The promise is the assurance which Joseph gives to his fellow-prisoner, Pharaoh’s ‘butler’ or chief steward, now fallen into disfavor, that he would be restored by Pharaoh to a place of honor. On this meaning of promise, see the Introduction.
The eternal procession of the Son, that is, the teaching that Christ was eternally begotten of the Father before all time, was a tenet of Origen, adopted by the church in general and in particular by Athanasius in his fight with Arianism; see Breckenridge, art. cit., pp. 73ff. Origen’s highly evolved understanding of time in contradistinction to eternity was likely the source of Augustine’s famous and influential account of time and creation in De Genesi ad litteram; see Panayiotis Tzamalikos, ‘Origen and the Stoic View of Time,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (1991): 535–561. In any case, in collapsing the’ spiritual’ into the ‘temporal,’ Hobbes is self-consciously retracing the early Church Fathers’ steps, as his Anglican opponent Bramhall realized; see within, ‘Hobbes and the Economic Trinity.’ In so doing, he reverts to the materialism which the Fathers had rejected in the Stoics, without, however, adopting the Stoics’ accommodation to such ‘incorporeals’ as time (ὁ χϱόνος), space (ὁ χῶϱος), expression (το λεχτόν) and the void (το χενόν), which were things (τίνα) intermediate between true, existent things (ὄντα) and merely mental phenomena (ἐννοήματα). Hobbes consigns all mental conceptions, including secondary qualities, moral evaluations, theology, the commonwealth itself, to the latter category of non-existence; he evidently saw no other way to prevent the reintroduction of the ghost into the machine, as Pocock expresses it. Note Patrick Riley’s comment, ‘There is a disjunction between his psychology and his ethical theory that is not overcome and could not have been overcome except by adopting a notion of will that is more or less suggested by Bramhall but brought to complete adequacy only by Kant;’ Patrick Riley, Will and Political Legitimacy: A Critical Exposition of Social Contract Theory in Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 33; cf. William R. Lund, ‘Tragedy and Education in the State of Nature: Hobbes on Time and the Will,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 393–410.
On ‘eternal decree,’ see the Introduction and above, §§ 19–26.
Luke 24:49. Molesworth corrects Hobbes’s citation to verse 49 from 43.
Leviathan 3.42.10.527. The episode referred to here takes place between Naaman, ‘captain of the host of the king of Syria,’ that is, a Syrian general, and the prophet Elisha. It is found in 2 Kings 5:1–19. Naaman was cleansed of his leprosy by Elisha, who had instructed him to bathe in the Jordan River. But, the prophet did not require Naaman, who then converted to Elisha’s God, to forsake the corporate worship of Rimmon with his sovereign, the king of Syria. Naaman and Nicodemus, Jesus’ reluctant disciple, had been taken since the Reformation as examples of licit religious dissimulation in the Bible; see Carlo Ginzburg, Il Nicodemismo: Simulazione e dissimulazione religiosa nell’Europa del cinquecento (Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1970) and Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 325ff. But cf. Carlos Eire, ‘Calvin and Nicodemism: A Reappraisal,’ Sixteenth Century Journal 10 (1979): 45–69.
According to Hobbes, the power implicit in sovereignty carries with it the office of ‘pastor of the people,’ which the nations’ conversion to Christianity did not remove, for it devolves upon the sovereign by natural right, for the preservation of peace. See Leviathan 2.18.9.233: ‘It belongeth to him that hath the sovereign power to be judge or constitute all judges of opinions and doctrines as a thing necessary to peace, thereby to prevent discord and civil war;’ and chap. 42. Moreover, the sovereign power encompasses the right to perform all rites and ceremonies usually performed by the clergy, even should rulers lack ‘laying on of hands’ as sign of apostolic succession. Hobbes gives Solomon as example; see Leviathan 3.42.78.573. The conception of the king as priest (rex-sacerdos) is one of great antiquity, recalling Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic ruler cults, such as that created by the Ptolemaic rulers; the divinity of the Roman emperor; the sacred person of European kings, and the imperial dignity as the Lord’s anointed (Christus Domini). The Caesars had had the power to teach and to restrain religious belief and profession as pontifex maximus, a style which even Christian emperors retained, culminating in Justinian, who introduced imperial legislation regarding key aspects of Christian life and practice. Not long into his reign, in 30, Tiberius abolished foreign cults from Rome, especially the Egyptian and the Jewish rites, compelling their devotees to burn their religious vestments and all their paraphernalia. Trajan’s correspondence with Pliny regarding treatment of the Christians is well known. Constantine was described by Eusebius, his court theologian, as having acted like a bishop at the Nicene Council; see Leviathan 3.42.86.580 and Claudia Rapp, ‘Imperial Ideology in the Making: Eusebius of Caesarea on Constantine as “Bishop”,’ Journal of Theological Studies ns 49 (1998): 685–695. The emperor Julian (360–363), known as the Apostate, claimed that, as emperor and supreme pontiff, he represented the link between general society and the divine; his campaign against Christianity was in part motivated by a desire to assert this role in the face of Christians’ social benevolence. Moving against paganism and its supporters, the Western emperor Gratian (367–383) rejected the title pontifex maximus; see Leviathan 4.45.35.679 and Alan Cameron, ‘Gratian’s Repudiation of the Pontifical Robe,’ Journal of Roman Studies 58 (1968): 100–114, and James J. O’Donnell, ‘The Demise of Paganism,’ Traditio 35(1979), 45–88. Gratian also removed the Altar of Victory from the Senate Curia at the urging of Ambrose against Symmachus and denied state subsidies that funded many pagan activities. (Octavian had placed such an altar in the Curia in celebration of his victory over Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium in 31.) Constantius II (337–361), the second son of Constantine, ordered its removal during a visit in 357, but it was returned by Julian, his successor. Also, Gratian’s successor Maximus seems to have sanctioned the first Christian execution for heresy with the beheading of the Spanish ascetic Priscillian at Triers in 385. At the urging of the bishop of Milan, Theodosius kept the altar of Victory from the Roman Senate in 391. After Symmachus, who opposed him, had been disgraced and banished, the emperor asked the senators whether the Romans should worship Jupiter or Christ, a choice which drew this rather Tacitean comment from Gibbon: The liberty of suffrages, which he affected to allow, was destroyed by the hopes and fears that his presence inspired; and the arbitrary exile of Symmachus was a recent admonition that it might be dangerous to oppose the wishes of the monarch. On a regular division of the Senate, Jupiter was condemned and degraded by the sense of a very large majority; and it is rather surprising that any members should be found bold enough to declare, by their speeches and votes, that they were still attached to the interest of an abdicated deity. See Edward Gibbon, ‘Decline and Fall,’ chapter. xxviii. Some European kings also claimed sacerdotal rights, quite apart from special powers, such as the ability to cure scrofula. Henry IV’s minister William Lyndwood (c. 1375–1446), in his Canterbury Provinciale, reflects the discussion that had occurred in France in support of the Gallican liberties claimed by the French church and king through the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges in 1438. Lyndwood states that the anointed king is not simply a lay person but amixed person, ‘according to some’; see Percy Ernst Schramm, A History of the English Coronation, trans. Leopold G. Wickham Legg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), p. 138. During Hobbes’s formative years, James I believed that the person of the king was mixed with that of the priest, and Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury who crowned the king, was of the opinion that he was directly inspired by the Holy Spirit. James also made detailed comparisons between kings and God. See Political Writings of King James VI and I ed. by Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). But, in that the sovereign lacked the cure of souls (cura animarum) and other aspects of the priest’s ordination, Christian writers rarely asserted that a king could administer the sacraments, though the ‘Norman Anonymous’ had earlier held that he could offer the elements in the Eucharist; see George Huntston Williams, The Norman Anonymous of 1100 A.D.: Toward the Identification and Evaluation of the Socalled Anonymous of York Issued as an extra number of the Harvard Theological Review, vol. 18 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 168ff. (In fact, the practice of anointing kings, and only later the emperor and priests, including the pope, began among the Franks in imitation of the rite mentioned in biblical accounts of kingship (I and II Kings) in connection with Saul, David, Solomon and others; see Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government: A Study in the Ideological Relation of Clerical and Lay Power 3d ed. (London: Methuen and Co., 1970), pp. 24, n. 1; 67 and 150ff.).
Elizabeth’s clarification of her position is found in an Appendix, published contempo-raneously with the Act, entitled ‘An admonition to simple men deceived by malicious:’ The queen’s majesty being informed that in certain places of this realm, sundry of her native subjects, being called to ecclesiastical ministry of the Church, be by sinister persuasion and perverse construction induced to find some scruple in the form of an oath, which by an Act of the last Parliament is prescribed to be required of divers persons for their recognition of their allegiance to her majesty, which certainly never was ever meant, nor by any equity of words or good sense can be thereof gathered — would that all her loving subjects should understand that nothing was, is, or shall be meant or intended by the same oath to have any other duty, allegiance, or bond required by the same oath, than was acknowledged to be due to the most noble kings of famous memory, King Henry VIII, her majesty’s father, or King Edward VI, her majesty’s brother. And further, her majesty forbids all manner her subjects to give ear or credit to such perverse and malicious persons, which most sinisterly and maliciously labour to notify to her loving subjects, how by the words of the said oath it may be collected, that the kings or queens of this realm, possessors of the crown, may challenge authority and power of ministry of divine offices in the church; wherein her said subjects be much abused by such evil-disposed persons. For certainly her majesty neither does nor ever will challenge any other authority than that was challenged and lately used by the said noble kings of famous memory, King Henry VIII and King Edward VI, which is and was of ancient time due to the imperial crown of this realm; that is, under God to have the sovereignty and rule over all manner persons born within these her realms, dominions, and countries, of what estate, either ecclesiastical or temporal, soever they be, so as no other foreign power shall or ought to have any superiority over them. Quoted from Documents Illustrative of English Church History ed. by Henry Gee and W.H. Hardy (NY, NY: 1896), pp. 417–442.
During the debate in the House of Lords over the Act of Supremacy, Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York, stated that the granting of supremacy to Elizabeth would be the granting of a spiritual supremacy, carrying with it the power to loose and to bind, to teach, to strengthen believers and to excommunicate. Parliament, he said, did not have this authority, nor could it commission anyone to teach in the church. Moreover, he denied that Elizabeth could be supreme head of the church, given that no woman had the right to preach or administer the sacraments; Hobbes evidently draws the inference that Heath and others believed that, had she not been a woman, in assuming the supremacy, she would have been able to preach and administer the sacraments. See Carl S. Meyer, Elizabeth I and the Religious Settlement of 1559 (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1960), pp. 115ff., and Norman L. Jones, ‘Elizabeth’s First Year: The Conception and Birth of the Elizabethan Political World,’ The Reign of Elizabeth I ed. by Christopher Haigh (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 44. Heath, who had been Mary’s chancellor, was deprived of his see after ultimately refusing to swear to the oath. At that point, he and the other deprived bishops wrote the queen and urged her not to be ‘led astray through the interventions of those evil counselors who are persuading your Ladyship to embrace schisms and heresies in lieu of the ancient Catholic faith.’ She responded by pointing out that Heath had given advice to her father much like that upon which she was now acting; see The Letters of Queen Elizabeth I ed. by G.B. Harrison (NY, NY: Funk and Wagnall’s, 1968), pp. 29ff.
See Leviathan 3.42.72.570.
An allusion to Paul’s proscription in 1 Corinthians 14:34. The Presbyterian John Knox defended Paul in his The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women of 1558, which concludes with an incitement to rebellion: And now, to put an end to The First Blast. Seeing that by the order of nature; by the malediction and curse pronounced against woman, by the mouth of St. Paul, the interpreter of God’s sentence; by the example of that common wealth in which God by his word planted order and policy; and, finally, by the judgment of the most godly writers; God has dejected woman from rule, dominion, empire, and authority above man: moreover, seeing that neither the example of Deborah, neither the law made for the daughters of Zelophehad, neither yet the foolish consent of an ignorant multitude, are able to justify that which God so plainly has condemned; let all men take heed what quarrel and cause from henceforth they do defend. If God raises up any noble heart to vindicate the liberty of his country, and to suppress the monstrous empire of women, let all such as shall presume to defend them in the same most certainly know, that in so doing they lift up their hand against God, and that one day they shall find his power to fight against their foolishness. Zelophehad, as Numbers 27:1–11 relates, left no son, so his daughters, concerned that their father’s name might be ‘done away from among his family,’ made an appeal to Moses, who, by divine direction, appointed it as ‘a statute of judgment’ in Israel that daughters should inherit their father’s portion when no sons were left. Then, in Numbers 36, Moses prohibited marriage of such women outside the tribes to which they belonged, lest the inheritance be lost to the tribe. For his views, Knox, who led the Calvinist faction among the English exiles in Geneva, was barred from returning to England at the succession of Elizabeth.
John 20:31.
1 John 4:2.
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(2006). Introduction. In: Religion, Politics and Thomas Hobbes. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d’histoire des idées, vol 195. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4468-2_1
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