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References
See especially Appendix, §§ 82ff.
When, in 1615, the Holy Office condemned the heliocentric theory, it was Bellarmine’s duty to notify Galileo of the condemnation and receive his submission, which he gave. Bellarmine died prior to the much more serious trial of Galileo in 1633. He had also played a role in the condemnation and execution of Giordano Bruno for heresy in 1600. His views on the church were Hobbes’s target in the longest chapter of Leviathan, chapter 42.
In his letter of 1615 to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, Galileo quoted Augustine and Thomas in a defense of scientific discussion and debate in relation to theological matters; with his friend and co-worker Foscarini (1565–1616), he urged discussion of the Copernican system despite its threat to the Ptolemaic and Aristotelian systems under which much of the theology of the church had developed. In a marginal note to that letter, he said the intention of the Holy Spirit was to teach men to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. See Galilei Galileo, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo trans. by Stillman Drake (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), pp. 173ff., esp. 186 and 201. For an analysis of the political and social context of Galileo’s trial, see Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); see also J.J. Langford, New Catholic Encyclopedia vol. 6 sub voce Galilei, Galileo (NY, NY: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967), pp. 250–255. On the’ scope’ of scripture, see Leviathan 1.8.26.145, especially chapter 33, 3.43.12.615, 3.43.15.637 and 4.44.15.637.
For Luther’s letter, see Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil trans. by Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 121.
See Rationis Latominianae confutatio of 1521, D. Martin Luthers Werke vol. 8 (Weimar: Hermann Bühlau, 1889), p. 127. Luther’s successors in the seventeenth-century and later would revert to a form of Protestant scholasticism that was highly and self-consciously indebted to Aristotle; cf. Richard Tuck, ‘The “Modern” Theory of Natural Law,’ The Languages of Political Theory in Early-modern Europe ed. by Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 99–119, p. 102, and see within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’
See The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, Clearly Stated and Debated between Dr. Bramhall and Thomas Hobbes, EW V, pp. 64, 63, 102ff., 266 and 298ff.
See Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England trans. by James P. Pettegrove (Austin, TX: University ofTexas Press, 1953); ‘Introduction’ to The Cambridge Platonists ed. by C.A. Patrides (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), esp. pp. 28–30, and The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context: Politics, Metaphysics, and Religion ed. by G.A.J. Rogers, J.M. Vienne, and Y.C. Zarka (Dordrecht, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), esp. the article by David W. Dockrill, ‘The Heritage of Patristic Platonism in Seventeenth-century English Philosophical Theology, op. cit, pp. 55–78. On Leibniz, see Patrick Riley, Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
On seventeenth-century biblical interpretation, see Klaus Scholder, The Birth of Modern Critical Theology: Origins and Problems of Biblical Criticism in the Seventeenth Century trans. by John Bowden (Philadelphia, PA: Trinity Press International, 1990), and Richard H. Popkin, ‘Foreword,’ Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Three 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), viiff. On related textual issues, see Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Ezra and the Bible: The History of a Subversive Idea’, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 383–431.
For a description of this aspect of eighteenth-century Christianity, see Sheridan Gilley, ‘Christianity and Enlightenment,’ History of Western Ideas 1 (1981): 103–121.
See Edward Caird, The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers vol. 1 (Glasgow: MacLehose, Jackson and Co., 1923), pp. 359–360. It is somewhat strange that Caird’s discussion assumes little prior knowledge of this topic on the part of his audience. The ideas of the socalled Higher Critics, Schleiermacher, Strauss and Feuerbach, had made their way to England by way of Coleridge and then in George Eliot’s translations of Strauss’s Life of Jesus in 1846 and of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity in 1854. Coming one year after Darwin’s Origin of Species, the publication of Essays and Reviews in 1860, containing seven essays on religion by leading Anglican figures, caused considerable discussion. The future master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, in his essay, ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture,’ expressed the view that the Bible ought to be read to recover the authors’ original meaning within their own historical contexts and not so as to support Newtonian physics. The student of Heidegger, Rudolf Bultmann, is most identified with the movement in the last century to address the mythological elements in the scriptural witness, for he recognized that the myth and the proclamation of the New Testament could and must be distinguished. See, for example, Rudolf Bultmann, ‘New Testament and Mythology,’ Kerygma and Myth ed. by Hans Werner Bartsch (NY, NY: Harper & Row, 1961), pp. 1–44. For proclamation in Hobbes, see Leviathan 3.42.8.525.
‘Fundamentalism’ as a movement may be traced in origin to an exegetical position developed by theologians, some at Princeton Theological Seminary, who were opposed to the rise of Darwinism, liberal theology and the Social Gospel Movement. Chief among these was B.B. Warfield; see D.N. Livingstone and M.A. Noll, ‘B.B. Warfield (1851–1921). A Biblical Inerrantist as Evolutionist,’ Isis 91 (2000): 283–304. Their attitude toward the Bible, on which rests their understanding of inspiration and inerrancy, comes from Warfield’s notion of ‘plenary-verbal inspiration,’ meaning that the original autographs of the Bible were all inspired and that the inspiration extended not just to the message God wished to convey, but to the very words chosen by the sacred writers. The term ‘fundamentalist’ itself stems from a twelve-volume series entitled The Fundamentals, whose publication began in 1909 through the financial support of Lyman Stewart, one of the founders of the Union Oil Company, and his brother Milton. Through their subsidy of some $300,000, the books received wide distribution until about 1920.
Thus, a certain’ s.P.’ of Cambridge wrote in 1662, ‘Christian religion was never bred up in the Peripatetick school, but spent her best and healthfullest years in the more Religious Academy, amongst the primitive Fathers; but the Schoolmen afterwards ravished her thence, and shut her up in the decayed ruins of Lyceum, where she served an hard servitude, and contracted many distempers; let her alone be Mistress, and choose her Servants, where she likes best: let her old loving Nurse, the Platonick Philosophy be admitted again into her family;’ quoted by D.W. Dockrill in his essay in the Rogers-Vienne-Zarka collection, op. cit., p. 55.
Prof. Mintz’s The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), relates little as to the specific doctrinal content of Leviathan or its connection to Hobbes’s theory of obligation. On Hobbes’s theology, see Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World trans. by John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), and A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
See Mintz, op. cit., pp. 69, 78, 83, 143, esp. 150ff. But cf. Robert E. Stillman, ‘Hobbes’s Leviathan:Monsters, Metaphors and Magic,’ English Literary History 62 (1995): 791–819, and David Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Hobbes’s source for this may be Suetonius, who mentions ‘tensam et ferculum’ and several other honors in his life of Caesar, chap. 76.
Another instance of Hobbes’s analysis of the church’s debts to antiquity is found in his discussion of baptism; see Leviathan 3.41.8.519.
Necessarily schematic, the account given here follows the work of Manlio Simonetti, La crisi ariana nel IV secolo (Rome: Institutum Patristicum ‘Augustianum’, 1975). On its preeminence, see Richard Hanson, ‘The Achievement of Orthodoxy in the Fourth Century AD,’ The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick ed. by Rowan Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 142–156.
See Edwin Curley and A.P. Martinich, ‘Calvin and Hobbes, or Hobbes as an Orthodox Christian,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 34 (1996): 257–287. See Wright ‘Curley and Martinich in Dubious Battle,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 40 (2002): 461–476. The work of the late Arrigo Pacchi is indispensable here; see the collection of his essays, Scritti Hobbesiani (1978–1990) edited by Agostino Lupoli with an introduction by François Tricaud (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1998), especially ‘Hobbes e la Bibbia’ of 1983, pp. 47–52; ‘Hobbes e il Dio delle cause’ of 1986, pp. 53–66, and ‘Hobbes e la potenza di Dio’ of 1986.
See Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 13–16 et passim. Jürgen Overhoff takes a similar line in ‘The Theology of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan,’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51 (2000): 527–554. Overhoff misrepresents Hobbes as saying that he numbers the doctrine of the Trinity among the sorts of madness. Hobbes does not say this; he calls into question the ‘schoolmen’s’ discussions of such ‘difficult’ doctrines as free will, the Trinity, the nature of Christ and transubstantiation. See Leviathan 1.8.27.146. Hobbes does not’ spour scorn on the doctrine of the Trinity,’ a fact made evident by his restatement and development of that doctrine seventeen years later in the Latin Leviathan; see above, Appendix, passim. Nor is it true that the Holy Spirit plays no role in Hobbes’s Trinitarianism, given that the third person of the Trinity is present in the life of the church; this is Hobbes’s point in saying that the apostles and their successors’ personate’ God as Holy Spirit. This is why Hobbes calls his opponent Bishop Bramhall a’ prophet:’’ Of those that in the Scripture are called prophets without miracles, (and for this cause only, that they spake in the name of God to men, and in the name of men to God), there are, have been, and shall be in the church, innumerable. Such a prophet was his Lordship, and such are all pastors in the Christian church.’ See EW IV, p. 326. The existence of the Holy Spirit in respect of the Immanent Trinity differs in no way from that of the other persons of the Trinity, so that to describe the personality of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is precisely to preserve their representative character, as Hobbes understood it. In fact, the doctrine plays a central role in Hobbes’s political theory in that it shows that the Savior has bequeathed to His successors no coercive power through the Holy Spirit, but only the duty to preach and teach. No issue concerned Hobbes more in the English Leviathan than the place and role of religion in the commonwealth. For him, it was the cause of the wars that made him an exile, as Behemoth makes clear. See within, ‘Hobbes in Exile’ and Wright, ‘Curley and Martinich in Dubious Battle,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 40 (2002): 461–476. Hobbes does not reject the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as ‘intolerable;’ what he rejects is the notion that salvation comes through possession by immaterial entities rather than through study and the teaching of sound doctrine; see Leviathan 4.45.25.673, and below, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’ At stake here is the question whether, in conversion, God acts in suspension of the natural order (potentia absoluta) or consistently with it (potentia ordinata); Hobbes stresses the latter. See Werner O. Packull, ‘Luther and Medieval Mysticism in the Context of Recent Historiography,’ Renaissance and Reformation n.s. 6 (1982): 79–93, esp. pp. 85ff. Also, the mediation of somebody that’ representeth Gods person’ does not address’ the spiritual person of God’ (?), as Overhoff says, but whether one can claim a covenant with God as pretext for civil rebellion, which Hobbes denies in these terms:’ But this pretence of covenant with God, is so evident a lie, even in the pretenders’ own consciences, that it is not only an act of an unjust, but also of a vile, and unmanly disposition.’ See Leviathan 2.18.3.229. On how the study and teaching of ‘historical faith’ (fides historica) becomes’ saving faith’ (fides salvifica) and on the doctrine of promise, see Introduction. On the presence of the Holy Spirit in his doctrine of the church, see Appendix, passim.On the question of possession, see within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’ Also, some of the emphases that Overhoff attributes to Luther are more clearly those of Calvin; see, for example, John Murray, Calvin on Scripture and Divine Sovereignty (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1978), pp. 55–69, esp. pp. 66ff. Finally, while some points Overhoff makes are unobjectionable, his adoption of the’ constructive subversion’ thesis vitiates his large conclusions. In my view, the Strauss thesis and its skeptical variants are a great obstacle to an historical understanding of Hobbes’s religious views as such and in relation to his political theory. Generally, their adoption bespeaks an inadequate understanding of the historical development of Christian theology, especially the role which Greek metaphysics has played as philosophic vehicle for theological expression. To see this is one reason why Hobbes is valuable. It can scarcely be said that Hobbes is orthodox, but the questions are closer than the over-confident and violent twisting of his views through such interpretive practices allows to appear. And, the Straussian argument tends to make impossible that careful and conscientious reading of one’s own heart that Hobbes recommends in the Introduction to Leviathan as necessary but ‘harder than to learn any language or science.’
See Alexandre Matheron, ‘Hobbes, la Trinité et les caprices de la représentation,’ Thomas Hobbes: Philosophie première, théorie de la science et politique ed. by Yves Charles Zarka and Jean Bernhardt (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990): 381–390; Franck Lessay, ‘Le Vocabulaire de la Personne,’ Hobbes et Son Vocabulaire ed. by Y.C. Zarka (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1992), 155–186, and Hans-Dieter Metzger, Thomas Hobbes und die englische Revolution 1640–1660 (Stuttgart-Bad Holzboog, 1991), pp. 218–225. I owe this last reference to the kindness of Johann P. Sommerville.
For Hobbes’s admission that his encounter with death in the late 1640’s made him more devout than ‘at other times,’ see EW VII, p. 464 (=Correspondence, letter 183) and Schuhmann, Chronique, p. 105.
On this point and generally, see Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
See Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 3ff., 38ff., 184ff., 191, 195, 206ff. and 235.
While Hobbes emphasizes the rupture between ancient and modern science, there are also of course large continuities, and he himself utilizes a concept of causality whose origin he acknowledges stems from the Greeks. On Hobbes’s theory of causal definitions, see Paolo Mancosu, Philosophy of Mathematics and Mathematical Practice in the Seventeenth Century (NY, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 86ff. More broadly, see also Cees Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes’s Natural Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
See within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’
Leviathan is replete with references to the unum necessarium (the one thing needful) of Luke 10:42, namely, the belief that’ Jesus is the Christ.’ Hardly cynically reductionist on Hobbes’s part, it is biblical. Several seventeenth-century figures referred questions of belief and practice to the authority of the primitive church, including Barclay, Baxter, Clarke, Clarkson, Croft, D’Ewes, Fox, Hammond, Hart, Herbert, Morton, Rogers, Stillingfleet and Ussher.
See Paul Tillich, ‘Religion and Secular Culture’ Main Works ed. by Michael Palmer (Berlin: De Gruyter-Evangelisches Verlagswerk GmbH, 1990), pp. 197–207. On the relation of a religious symbol’s power to its origins, see Paul Tillich, ‘The Religious Symbol/Symbol and Knowledge,’ Writings in the Philosophy of Religion ed. by John Clayton (Berlin: De Gruyter-Evangelisches Verlagswerk GmbH, 1987), pp. 253–278.
For a history of the words persona and πϱóσωπоν, see Siegmund Schlosmann, Persona und ПРОΣΩПОΝ im Recht und im christlichen Dogma,’ (Kiel and Leipzig: Lipsius und Tischer, 1906), esp. pp. 98ff. with respect to Augustine and Boethius, who had considerable impact on the development of scholasticism.
See Oscar Cullmann, ‘Les premières confessions de foi chrétiennes,’ in La Foi e le Culte de l’Église Primitive (Neuchatel: Delachaux and Niestle, 1963), and J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds 3rd edition (London: Longman, 1972).
The Greek word for proclamation, иήϱνуμα, derives from иήϱνξ (kerux), the word for’ town crier,’ that is, one who announces the news of the day; for us, this concept is of course most clearly associated with Rudolf Bultmann’s theology of proclamation. But, it did not escape Hobbes’s notice, for whom it meant evangelical freedom: Leviathan 3.42.16.531: Lastly, the points of [the apostles’] commission, as they are expressly set down in the gospel, contain none of them any authority over the congregation. We have first (Matthew 10) that the twelve apostles were sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and commanded to preach, that the kingdom of God was at hand. Now preaching in the original, is that act, which a crier, herald, or other officer useth to do publicly in proclaiming of a king. But a crier hath not right to command any man.
See George Foot Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the Taanaim (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962) pp. 401–413, esp. p. 405; Erwin R. Goodenough, By Light, Light (Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1969), pp. 276ff., and, on the influence of Hellenism on Judaism after Alexander the Great, Martin Hengel,’ The Interpenetration of Judaism and Hellenism in the pre-Maccabean Period,’ The Cambridge History of Judaism vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 167–228. Cf. Leviathan 3.40.14.326 and 4.45.4.437.
For a brief overview of recent literature on Gnosticism, see the introduction written by Manlio Simonetti, Testi gnostici in lingua greca e latina (Milan: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1993), xi–xxxi.
Thus, in distinguishing God from Dionysus, Apollo and Adonis, Justin, in his First Apology, §25, says: Θɛῷ δὲ τῷ ἀγɛννήτῳ иαί ἀπαϑɛĩ ἑαντοὺς ἀνɛϑήиαμɛν; ‘for, we are dedicated to the God ungenerated and impassible.’ See Saint Justin, Apologies, Introduction, texte critique, traduction, commentaire et index ed. by Andrè Wartele (Paris: Etudes Augustiennes, 1987), p. 131. Justin describes Jesus Christ as the word (λóγoς) of God, whichWartele translates into French as Verbe. Cf. Leviathan 3.36.4.454: So that our Saviour is there called the word, not because he was the promise, but the thing promised. They that taking occasion from this place, do commonly call him the verb of God, do but render the text more obscure. They might as well term him the noun of God: for as by noun, so also by verb, men understand nothing but a part of speech, a voice, a sound, that neither affirms, nor denies, nor commands, nor promiseth, nor is any substance corporeal, or spiritual; and therefore it cannot be said to be either God, or man; whereas our Saviour is both. See also Constantine Cavarnos, The Hellenic-Christian Philosophical Tradition (Belmont, MA: Institute for Modern Greek Studies, 1989).
On subordinationism and Sabellianism, see Scarpat’s edition of Tertullian’s Contra Prasseam, Contra Prassea Edizione critica con introduzione, traduzione italiana, note e indici (Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1985), pp. 23ff. Cf. Martinich, op. cit., pp. 203–208, and D.H.J. Warner,’ Hobbes’s Interpretation of the Doctrine of the Trinity,’ Journal of Religious History 5 (1968): 299–313. In that he describes both the co-divinity of the three persons of the Trinity and the centrality of the redemptive mission of Christ as Son of God, we can only infer Hobbes’s possible Socinianism, though there is evidence to the contrary, as, for example, in Appendix §35. But cf. Peter Geach, ‘The Religion of Thomas Hobbes,’ Religious Studies 17 (1981): 549–558, and the remarks of Franck Lessay in his edition of Hobbes’s Answer to Bishop Bramhall, De la liberté et de la nécessité ed. by Franck Lessay (Paris: J. Vrin, 1993), pp. 135ff.
On Tertullian, see, for example, Robert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1982), pp. 70–74.
Quis enim negabit Deum corpus est, etsi Deus spiritus est? Spiritus enim corpus sui generis in sua effigie; ‘For who will deny that God is body, even though He is spirit? For spirit [is] body of its own kind, in its own image.’ Scarpat, op. cit., 7, 8; p. 158.
See John Reumann, ‘OIKONOMIA = Covenant: Terms for Heilsgeschichte in Early Christian Usage,’ Novum Testamentum 3 (1959): 282–292, though the author may accentuate the historical and anthropological aspects of the term’s use and meaning over its development in Trinitarian discourse.
See Michel Malherbe, ‘La religion matérialiste de Thomas Hobbes,’ Thomas Hobbes: Le ragioni del moderno tra teologia e politica edited by Gianfranco Borrelli (Naples: Morano Editore, 1990), pp. 51–70; see also Emanuele Riverso, ‘Denotation and Corporeity in Leviathan,’ Borrelli, op. cit., pp. 467–482.
For Hobbes’s references to the corporeality of spirit in Leviathan, see 3.34.2.428; 3.34.10. 432; esp. 3.34.15.433; esp. 3.34.17.435ff., and 4.44.15.637.
In Considerations upon the Reputation of T. Hobbes, EW IV, 429, and Leviathan Appendix chapter 3, §§174ff., and passim, Hobbes’s discussion asserts that God had been described as material in the 1651 discussion. Thus, at §179, with reference to the 1651 text, Hobbes, in the voice of interlocutor B, states: Clearly, [Hobbes] asserts that God is body. But before him, Tertullian affirmed the same proposition in an argument against Apelles and other heretics of his time who taught that our Savior Jesus Christ was not a body but an apparition. Tertullian proclaimed this universal statement: ‘Whatsoever is not body is not an entity.’ Likewise, he affirmed against Praxeas, ‘all substance is body after its own kind.’ And this doctrine was not condemned by any of the first four general councils. See Cees Leijenhorst, ‘Hobbes’s Corporeal Deity,’ Nuove prospettive critiche sul Leviatano di Hobbes ed. by Luc Foisneau and George Wright (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2004), pp. 73–96.
Hobbes discussed these points at length in chapter 3 of the Appendix. That he should be drawn to assert the materiality of God in discussions subsequent to the 1651 text is not perhaps surprising; the logic of the attacks upon his doctrines allowed no other way by which to defend his views. This’ embarrassment in defense’ may be inherent in the ineffability thesis that Hobbes took over from a tradition dating from Dionysius the Areopagite, if not earlier. See Leviathan 1.3.12.99 and Thomas Hobbes, Critique du de mundo de Thomas White ed. by Jean Jacquot and Harold Whitmore Jones (Paris: Vrin Libraire, 1973), p. 312. For a criticism of the ineffability thesis, see William P. Alston, ‘Ineffability’ The Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 506–522. Those who have used the familiar analogia entis in religious language include Thomas Aquinas, Cajetan, Suarez, Cardinal Newman and most recently Paul Tillich, but not Luther or Calvin. For an introduction to the general topic, see Battista Mondin,The Principle of Analogy in Protestant and Catholic Theology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963). On analogy in Thomas, see George P. Klubertanz, St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy: A Textual Analysis and Systematic Synthesis (Chicago, IL: Loyola University Press, 1960). For a criticism of the theory of analogy, see Roy Clouser,’ Religious Language: A New Look at an Old Problem,’ Rationality in theCalvinian Tradition ed. by Hendrik Hart, Johan van der Hoeven and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), pp. 385–407. For criticism of Tillich’s use of the ineffability thesis, see Robert C. Coburn, ‘God, Revelation, and Religious Truth: Some Themes and Problems in the Theology of Paul Tillich,’ Faith and Philosophy 13 (1996): 1–33.
See within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’
Luke 24:3–7, recounts the Galilean women’s discovery of the empty tomb.
For a discussion of this point, see Walther Eichrodt, Theology of theOld Testament vol. 1 trans. by J.A. Baker (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961), pp. 210–215, esp. p. 214.
See within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’
On Christ’s having cast out demons, see Leviathan 4.45.4.659; see also the discussion in chapter 34. Hobbes’s answer is the traditional one that Christ accommodated His teaching to the understanding of the people; it would not be improved upon from an historical point of view until Reimarus. On accommodationism in Calvin, see Ford Lewis Battle, ‘God Was Accommodating Himself to Human Capacity,’ Interpretation 31 (1977): 19–38.
See Leviathan 4.46.18.691.
See above, p. 178. On ‘incorporeal substance,’ see Leviathan 1.4.21.108; 1.12.7.170; 3.34. 24. 439; 3.34.2.428; 3.34.10.432; 3.34.15.433; 3.34.24.439; 4.44.15.637, and 4.46.20.693.
See the rich development of such metaphors in chapter 47 of Leviathan, with its final warning regarding some others who pretend to have a power in the world distinct from the civil state. See also within, note 60.
For the climate of opinion, 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 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 111–130
See within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’
See Pacchi’s Convenzione e Ipotesi nella Filosofia di Thomas Hobbes (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1965), for an account of Hobbes’s conventionalism. See also Jacques Taminiaux, ‘Hegel and Hobbes’ in Dialectic and Difference: Finitude in Modern Thought ed. by James Decker and Robert Crease (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press Inc., 1985), pp. 1–37, esp. p. 37.
See within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’
On these points, see Manlio Simonetti, ‘Note sulla teologia trinitaria di Origene,’ Vetera Christianorum 8 (1971): 273–309, esp. pp. 279–280.
Hobbes nonetheless commends the piety of thosewho use the language of incorporeality; see Leviathan 1.12.7.170.
For Hobbes’ views on the question of incomprehensibility of God, see Leviathan 1.3.12. 15; 1.6.58.34; 1.8.27.46; 1.12.7.64; 2.31.28.240; 3.34.4.263; 4.46.12.457; 4.46.15.458; 4.46.22.461; 4.46.23.462, and 4.46.31.463. If God’s nature is incomprehensible, His existence as first cause is nonetheless a necessary conclusion of reason, as, led by curiosity, it traces cause and effect relations to their ultimate source; see Leviathan 1.12.6.169. On this point, cf. Pacchi’s essay, ‘Hobbes e il Dio delle cause,’ op. cit., pp. 53–66.
See Leviathan 1.4.13.105.
For this language, see Noel Malcolm’s 1985 Cambridge dissertation, ‘Thomas Hobbes and Voluntarist Theology,’ #12565, Cambridge University (undated).
In contravention of Exodus 20:7 and Deuteronomy 5:11. See also Leviticus 19:12 and Numbers 30:2.
On Christ’s prohibition of swearing an oath, see Matthew 5:33–37; see also James 5:12.
Greg Kavka was correct, in my view, in stressing that knowledge of God as first cause discovers nothing substantive regarding the content of natural law; that is, the natural laws, improperly so-called, remain formal prescriptions, though even as such they have a hypothetical validity. See Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 360ff., and Alan Ryan, ‘Hobbes and Individualism,’ Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes ed. by G.A.J. Rogers and Alan Ryan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 94ff.
For example, in his God, Passibility and Corporeality (Amsterdam: Kok Pharos Publishing House, 1992), Marcel Sarot has argued that the intensity of God’s love for humanity renders Him susceptible to intense emotions, as such, sentient, and thus necessarily embodied in some way. He cites authority for the proposition that rejection of the doctrine of divine impassibility has become a commonplace in our time; see Sarot, op. cit., p. 2.
Some methodological issues arise at this point which cannot now be treated. On the ‘fusion of horizon’ between reader and text, see the work both of Hans-Georg Gadamer, especially his Truth and Method, and of Hans Robert Jauss on the question of reception. For a history of the term horizon, from its origins in the Greek verb ὁϱίξειν meaning to limit or cut, through Thomas Aquinas’ use of it as confinium, to Heidegger’s analysis of horizon and temporality, see the illuminating article of M. Scherner, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, sub voce ‘Horizont’ ed. by Joachim Ritter (Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe & Co. Verlag, 1974), coll. 1187–1205.
On this distinction, see Pelikan, op. cit., pp. 196, 207–208, 250 and 265–266; Ted Peters, GodasTrinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), pp. 10, 20–23, 72–73, 106–107, 146–147 and 177, and Karl Rahner, Sacramentum Mundi vol. 6 sub vocibus ‘Trinity, Divine’ and ‘Trinity in Theology’ (Basel: Herder and Herder, 1970), pp. 295–308.
See Peters, op. cit., pp. 20–23, 70–73.
See Simonetti, ‘Note...,’ pp. 273ff.
Simonetti says that the Gnostic Valentinus was the first to substitute ὑηόστασις for ηϱόσωπον; see Simonetti, op. cit., note 30, page 11.
For a discussion of Augustine’s debts to the received view, see Marcia Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in Medieval Theory of Knowledge rev. ed. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). For a discussion of his substantial innovations and deviations from the received view, see Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982).
See Leviathan 3.33.20.422.
See Leviathan 3.42.5.524. Hobbes recurs to the medieval theory, with ancient precedent, that the political sovereign has authority over the religious welfare of the people; see Leviathan 3.42.57.560; 3.42.71.570; 3.42.117.596, and 4.45.35.679 and Appendix, §§206ff., and notes. See also Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), esp. ‘The Norman Anonymous,’ pp. 42ff.
Hobbes later modifies this use of Moses (Appendix §§185), though his intention in 1651 was clearly not to equate Christ with Moses and/or the apostles. In the English Leviathan 3.36.13.462, citing Colossians 2:9, he expressly described the Holy Spirit’s inspiration of Christ, in whom only, Hobbes said, the Godhead dwelt bodily, as differing in kind from the inspiration given Moses. In any case, the inspiration given Moses by God extended beyond him to the seventy elders described in Numbers 11:25; see Leviathan 1.8.25.142, just as the inspiration of the Holy Spirit extends to the apostles and other ministers in the church.
See Leviathan 3.42.3.522. ‘Trinity of heaven’ is presumably Hobbes’s term for Immanent Trinity.
For Hobbes’s response to Bramhall’s citation of the Athanasian Creed, see Appendix §§ 14, 33, esp. 84 and 210ff.
Bramhall is referring to Genesis 1:26: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. The shift in number, from singular (‘God’) to plural (‘us’), was held to be a Trinitarian intimation in the Hebrew scripture; see Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970). But, see EW IV, An Answer..., p. 317, for Hobbes’s response.
See Bramhall, The Catching of Leviathan or the Great Whale part iii, discourse iii vol. 4 (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1844), pp. 526–527 (=EW IV, p. 315, with some changes). The threat implicit in the last line of this quotation was not lost on Hobbes, who remarked at ‘His Lordship’s Scholastic charity’ and replied that Bramhall would have been at home seated among the bishops of Queen Mary’s day, perhaps condemning those with opinions opposed to their own to the flames. Note that the offense that Bramhall reprehended in Hobbes was the rashness and contumacy evidenced in his failure to accept the church’s traditional explanation of the Trinity, preferring willfully to pursue his own ideas; sincerity was not at issue. (‘Blind Bayard’ was a horse whose impetuosity led to a reputation for foolhardiness.) Hobbes’ response, with its tone of Protestant indignation, emphasized the inviolability of the individual conscience as against the terror of the Inquisition and Smithfield.
See Thomas, Summa Theologiae, 1.10.2 and 4, quoting Boethius. Hobbes’s criticism of Aristotle’s teaching on causality echoes in his criticism of Thomas. For a modern criticism of this concept of eternity, see Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, ‘Eternity’, The Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): 419–458, esp. p. 445.
See above, p. 197.
In the Adversus Hermogenem, Tertullian said, ‘For God is also a Father, and God is also a judge, but He has not always been Father and Judge for the simple reason that He has always been God; for He could not be Father before the Son was, nor Judge before there was sin;’ cited in The Treatise Against Hermogenes trans. by J.H. Waszink (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1956), chap. 3, p. 29.
See EW IV, 314ff.
See Matheron, Hobbes, la Trinité et les caprices de la représentation,’ Thomas Hobbes: Philosophie première, théorie de la science et politique ed. by Yves Charles Zarka and Jean Bernhardt (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990 op. cit., p. 390.
Curley notes in his edition of Leviathan, p. 103, that, in the so-called large-paper copy, the English concludes, ‘proceeded from them both on the day of Pentecost.’ Later, he will profess lack of understanding of the distinction between processions and missions; see Appendix, §101.
See Leviathan 1.6.53.127. On Hobbes’s theory of the will, see Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., The Politics of Motion: The World of Thomas Hobbes (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), pp. 114–115; and Patrick Riley, Political Legitimacy: A Critical Exposition of Social Contract Theory in Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 23–60, esp. pp. 34–37.
See above, pp. 196ff. Hobbes’s use of the term ‘Holy Ghost’ was common in his era, as in I John 5:7: ‘For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.’ See above, n. 89.
See above, pp. 178ff.
On infused virtues as those given with grace by God, see Thomas, Summa Theologiae 1a2ae. 55,4ff.; 1a2ae. 63.3ff.; 1a2ae. 65.3, and 1a2ae. 110.3. See also Leviathan 2.29.8.336.
In speaking of’ separated essences’ and ‘incorporeal substances’ in Aristotle, Hobbes likely intends such passages as Metaphysics, 1032a et seqq. See within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’
See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (NY, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993), xxivff.
Similarly, Richard Tuck has stated that the political and ethical theories invented at the end of the eighteenth century remain those by which we live today; see, for example, ‘The “Modern” Theory of Natural Law,’ TheLanguages of Political Theory in Early-modern Europe ed. by Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 99–119. To an extent, this is true, though one must add that developments within andbeyond these theories in such areas as the growth of international law, increased provision for social welfare, expansion of the franchise, racial and sexual/gender equality, broadened tort liability, environmental regulation, etc., represent real and desirable advances. Rawls’s great achievement was to elevate Kant to a pre-eminent position in political philosophy as a progressive move beyond both early-modern natural-law theory and Utilitarianism. Reviewing the pre-Kantian history of ethics, as Tuck urges, may yield important gains in understanding the strands of thought that lead to and from Hobbes, but the desire or attempt to make that history effective, more vivid or somehow normative now for our political forms and institutions can only be regressive.
Hobbes quotes Melanchthon in Liberty, Necessity and Chance EW V, 64. The quotation itself comes from the Reformer’s early defense of Luther, his mentor and friend, against the condemnation of the Paris theologians; see Adversus furiosum Parriensium Theologastrorum decretum Philippi Melanchthonis pro Luthero apologia, Melanchthons Werke Reformatorische Schriften ed. by Robert Stupperich (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1951) vol. 1, p. 143: Constat enimnatam esse Luteciae prophanam illam scholasticen, quam Theologiam vocari volunt, qua admissa, nihil salvi reliquum est Ecclesiae. Evangelium obscuratum est, fides extincta, recepta operum doctrina, et pro Christiano populo ne legis quidem, sed moralium Aristotelis populus sumus et ex Christianismo contra omnem sensum spiritus facta est quaedam Philosophica vivendi ratio. Thepolitical philosophies of Hobbes and Hegel present interesting contrasts due to the varying strands of Protestantism which they reflect. On religion in Hegel, see Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit 1770–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Hobbes’s views of Aristotle range from repudiation of what appears in Christian theology and moral teaching to both adoption and rejection of specific aspects of Aristotelian science. On Hobbes’s views of the Politics, see Karl Schuhmann, ‘Hobbes and Aristotle’s Politics,’ in Borrelli, op. cit., pp. 97–127; for natural science, see Cees Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes’ Natural Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
Hobbes does not exclude the possibility of a good life lived either on the basis of sanctity, though it is rare, or of reason, though it is defeasible to the right of self-defense. On the former point, see Leviathan 2.29.8.366; on the latter, see Ryan, art. cit., p. 94.
Agostino Lupoli has written of two key moments of intersection between the theology and the physics, namely, the encounters first with Descartes and second, twenty years later, with Boyle; see Agostino Luppoli, ‘“Fluidismo” e Corporeal Deity nella filosofia di Thomas Hobbes: A propositio dell’hobbesiano “dio delle cause”’ Rivista di storia della filosofia 54 (1999): 573–609. In a series of exchanges, the two disputed the existence of the void, the origin and nature of fluidity and hardness as well as the nature of the scientific enterprise as such, more specifically, whether Boyle’s new experimental model lacked the principles and deductions that alone make science true knowledge. See also Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). See within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’
I hope to write in the future regarding the cross-reference that links the definition of person given in chapter 16 of Leviathan to that given in chapter 42. His study of divine personality, it seems to me, led Hobbes to his use of persona in the theory of representation that distinguishes Leviathan from its predecessors. See below, n. 121. A careful re-reading of Hanna Pitkin’s chapter on the role of the representative person in Hobbes will repay careful attention; see Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 1–36. See also the exchange between Pitkin and Clifford Orwin, ‘On the Sovereign Authorization,’ ‘Comment on Orwin,’ ‘Reply to Pitkin,’ Political Theory 3 (1975): 26–52.
See above, pp. 197 ff.
To say that God cannot be a person, though He may be personated (see Leviathan 1.16.3.217 and De Homine § II, art. 15, EW IV, p. 130), is to say that, as substance, He cannot be a representation of substance; that is, He cannot be an artificial image or portrayal of Himself. In this sense, by stressing the unity or substantive reality of this common substance in distinction from the persons, Hobbes produces a doctrine that is somewhat reminiscent of that of Peter Lombard, whom the Lateran Council of 1215 cleared of doctrinal errors. For Hobbes’s similarity to Lorenzo Valla, see Gianni Paganini, ‘Hobbes, Valla e i problemi filosofici della teologia umanistica: la riforma “dialettica” della Trinità,’ Dal necessario al possibile: Determinismo e libertà nel pensiero anglo-olandese del XVII secolo ed. by Luisa Simonutti (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2001), pp. 11–45. See of the same author, ‘Thomas Hobbes e Lorenzo Valla. Critica umanistica e filosofia moderna,’ Rinascimento, Rivista dell’insituto nazionale di studi sul rinascimento 2d ser. 39 (1999): 515–558.
In fact, Hobbes refers in chapter 42 to chapter 13, but he must mean Leviathan 1.16.3. 217. Some editors silently emend the cross-reference.
See Leviathan 3.42.3.522.
See An Answer...., EW IV, pp. 300–318, esp. p. 316. Note his discussion there of the hypostatic union.
Hobbes’s point is that, while the Greek word πϱόσωπον may denote a face, persona denotes explicitly the representation of a face. The discussion in De Homine, §II, art. 15, is helpful here; see EW IV, pp. 130ff.
On the relation of Christ and Adam, see François Tricaud, ‘La Doctrine du salut dans le Leviathan,’ Borrelli, op. cit., pp. 3–14. Cf. Reventlow, op. cit., pp. 195ff.
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(2006). Hobbes and the Economic Trinity. 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_2
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