Hobbes’s Natural Theology

Abstract

It is not a universally accepted view, but neither is it a shocking or novel one, that Hobbes was a critic of religion. So far from being novel, this was the view of many of Hobbes’s contemporaries, some of whom regarded him not just as a critic of religion but as a bitter enemy of it. Bishop Bramhall, for instance, accused Hobbes of devising “a trim commonwealth, which is founded neither upon religion towards God, nor justice towards man,” of undermining all traditional religious supports for morality, and of reducing God himself to “an idol of the brain, a mere nothing.” Hobbes’s principles, according to Bramhall’s accusation, are so “brim full of prodigious impiety” that they should be plucked and bundled like rank-smelling weeds that, if not banished from the garden, threaten to destroy all healthier growths (see Hobbes EW IV 286, 288–89, 348–49, 374–75).¹ This view of Hobbes, in its essentials if not its spirit, is hardly confined to Hobbes’s contemporary critics. To take an example as different as one can imagine from Bishop Bramhall in his tone and his deepest concerns, Leo Strauss, the greatest twentieth-century interpreter of Hobbes, gave a book-length manuscript on Hobbes the title Hobbes’s Critique of Religion.² He opens that work with the claim that Hobbes’s Leviathan is the most important document from “the classical age of the critique of religion,” a document more radical in its presentation of the foundation of the early modern critique than even Spinoza’s Theologico-political Treatise (Hobbes’s Critique of Religion, 2011, 23).