Abstract
Hobbes thought that religion was characteristic of human beings and thus could not be eliminated; he also thought that religious doctrines often destabilized government and hence needed to be controlled by the sovereign. Concerning specific concepts and issues related to religion, he believed that humans have no idea of God; spirits are bodies, subjects should obey their sovereigns in all matters except those that jeopardize salvation; and for Christians the only belief necessary for salvation is that Tesus is the Messiah.
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Notes and References
Aubrey, Brief Lives 1:353.
The strongest and most sustained case against his possible theism was presented by Edwin Curley, ‘“I durst not write so boldly” or How to read Hobbes’ theological-political treatise’, in Daniela Bostrenghi (ed.), Hobbes e Spinoza (Napoli, 1992). For other references, see the Bibliographical Essay.
For various interpretations, see: Eldon Eisenach, Two Worlds of Liberalism: Religion and Politics in Hobbes, Locke and Mill (Chicago, 1981);
Johann Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (New York, 1992);
Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford, 1989).
Ian T. Ramsey, Religious Language: An Empirical Placing of Theological Phrases (London, 1957).
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, introduction.
Kinch Hoekstra suggests an alternative interpretation, as follows. For Hobbes, religion and superstition are disjoint. Both are fear of invisible powers. Religion comes from tales publicly allowed; superstition comes from those not publicly allowed (L 6.36, 27.20; OL 3:18.16, Appendix 3.9; EL 26.11). Hoekstra thinks that these definitions are supposed to be relativistic in the same way that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are for Hobbes: just as something can be good for Tom and evil for Dick, something can be religion for Tom and superstition for Harry. Hoekstra’s interpretation is not consistent with EW 4:292, nor — in my opinion — with the whole of Chapter 8 of Leviathan. If only true religion were religion, then religion would not be characteristic of human beings. Also, the phrase ‘true religion’ would be pleonastic and would not have needed to be defined at all.
L 11.19, 42.130; B, p. 8–9; EW 4:376, 387, 399; EW 6:97, 104, 174.
Quentin Skinner argues that Hobbes is exploiting the rhetorical notion of ‘paradiastole’: see Skinner, ‘Thomas Hobbes: Rhetoric and the construction of morality’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 76 (1991), pp. 1–61;
Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 63–93,
and Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996).
Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL., 1952), p. 25;
David Berman, A History of Atheism in England: From Hobbes to Russell (London, 1988), pp. 66–7.
The translation of this passage is from Bernard Gert (ed.), Man and Citizen (Garden City, NY, 1972), p. 58.
Curley, ‘I durst not write so boldly’, Hobbes e Spinoza, pp. 577–84.
A theist is a person who believes that there is a God who is concerned with and takes care of the world. A deist is a person who believes that God exists but has no, or very little, concern with or care for the world.
For Hobbes’s treatment of prophets, see L 36.7–20.
John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge, 1994).
On the issue of Hobbes’s alleged English Calvinism, see E. M. Curley, ‘Calvin and Hobbes’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 34 (1996) no. 2,
A. P. Martinich, ‘On the proper interpretation of Hobbes’s philosophy’, in the same journal and issue, and Curley’s reply there.
For a survey of what Calvinism meant in Stuart England, see Margo Todd (ed.), Reformation to Revolution (London, 1995), pp. 54, 72–3, 179–207.
René Descartes is typically credited with discovering the laws of the rainbow. However, some have charged Descartes with plagiarizing some of his material from the ecumenist Marc Antonio De Dominis, whose work Hobbes could well have known about (Noel Malcolm, De Dominis (1520–1624), London, 1984).
John Locke, ‘The reasonableness of Christianity’ (London, 1695) par. 26;
John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility, pp. 427–9;
John Marshall, ‘Locke and Latitudinarianism’, in Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin (eds), Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 263–4;
Johann Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes (London, 1992), pp. 145–8;
C. F. D. Moule, The Birth of the New Testament, 3rd edn (San Francisco, 1982), pp. 30–2 and passim.
He has five prominent discussions of it: Behemoth, EW 6:164, 174–6; Dialogue … of the Common Laws, pp. 37, 96–109, 119, 128; ‘An historical narration on heresy and the punishment thereof’, EW 4:385–408; ‘Historia ecclesiatica’, OL 5:341–408, and Leviathan, Appendix, 2; OL 3. Important discussions of this topic are Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke on toleration’, in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory (Lawrence, KS, 1990), pp. 153–71;
and Robert Kraynak, History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes (Ithaca, NY, 1990), pp. 40–4.
Kraynak, History and Modernity, pp. 43, 42–3.
Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke on toleration’, p. 159.
Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke on toleration’, p. 163.
A number of distinguished scholars have argued that Hobbes favoured religious toleration. See, for example: two essays by Alan Ryan, ‘Hobbes, toleration, and the inner life’, in David Miller and Lary Siedentrop (eds), The Nature of Political Theory (Oxford, 1983), pp. 197–218,
and Alan Ryan, ‘A more tolerant Hobbes?’, in Susan Mendus (ed.), Essays on Toleration (Cambridge, 1988);
Johann Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (New York, 1992), pp. 149–56;
Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke on toleration’; Mary Dietz (ed.), Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory (Lawrence, KS, 1990), pp. 153–71;
and Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), 333–5.
L 47.20; B, pp. 13–14, 46, 90; ‘An answer to Bishop Bramhall’, EW 4:363; see also p. 354.
Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke on toleration’, p. 165.
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© 1997 A. P. Martinich
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Martinich, A.P. (1997). Religious Views. In: Thomas Hobbes. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25185-8_4
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