Religion, Politics and Thomas Hobbes

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RELIGION, POLITICS AND THOMAS HOBBES

ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDÉES INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

195

RELIGION, POLITICS AND THOMAS HOBBES by

GEORGE WRIGHT

Founding Directors: P. Dibon † (Paris) and R.H. Popkin † (Washington University, St. Louis & UCLA) Director: Sarah Hutton (Middlesex University, United Kingdom) Associate-Directors: J.E. Force (Lexington); J.C. Laursen (Riverside) Editorial Board: M.J.B. Allen (Los Angeles); J.R. Armogathe (Paris); A. Gabbey (New York); T. Gregory (Rome); J. Henry (Edinburgh); J.D. North (Oxford); J. Popkin (Lexington); G.A.J. Rogers (Keele); Th. Verbeek (Utrecht)

Religion, Politics and Thomas Hobbes

by

GEORGE WRIGHT University of Wisconsin-Superior

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-10 ISBN-13 ISBN-10 ISBN-13

1-4020-4467-4 (HB) 978-1-4020-4467-0 (HB) 1-4020-4468-2 (e-book) 978-1-4020-4468-7 (e-book)

Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Springer No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microﬁlming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied speciﬁcally for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed in The Netherlands.

To my sisters Joanne and Lucille for their support and affection and to my teacher Walter Bouman

CONTENTS Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii 1. Introduction to the 1668 Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Appendix to Leviathan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Chapter 1. On the Nicene Creed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Chapter 2. On Heresy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Chapter 3. Concerning Certain Objections to Leviathan. . . . . . . . . . 144 2. Hobbes and the Economic Trinity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 3. The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 4. Hobbes in Exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index of Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

311 313 337 343

PREFACE The essays that comprise this volume were written over the period of some ten years, for different purposes and on different occasions, but they are united by a number of features, which this preface may serve to indicate. While the collection begins with a translation drawn from the fourth presentation of Hobbes’s political thought, namely, the Latin Leviathan of 1668, after The Elements of Law (1640), De Cive (1642 and 1647) and the English Leviathan of 1651, the focus of the essays is largely on the English version of his masterpiece of political philosophy. It is the center of gravity in the twenty eight years spanning his departure from England for exile in France in 1640 till the publication in 1668 of the Latin Leviathan, with its lengthy and complex Appendix. The translation and introduction of the Appendix, previously published, appears here with several revisions and additions, as does the essay ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Economic Trinity.’ A second feature common to these essays is the deliberate attempt to make sense of the religious elements in Hobbes’s thought, both in their own right and in relation to his politics and natural science. These themes are woven together in complex ways. For instance, objecting to the use of Greek philosophic language and concepts to interpret the doctrines of the Christian religion, he propounds what he takes to be a more thoroughly scriptural interpretation, in pursuit of the goal of demolishing the basis for any power in the state independent of the civil sovereign. He is sure of the superiority of the new science over the old and conﬁdent that the new science does not conﬂict with authentic Christianity as contained in the scriptures. He applies rational techniques of interpretation to the received texts to prove that, while there may be some things above reason in religion, there is nothing contrary to it.1 He discovers the origin of certain features of Western thought and theology in Aristotle’s theory of language, which he relates to the magical and superstitious practices found in Greek popular religion; he then applies his views in the ﬁeld of Western politics.2

1 2

See within, ‘Hobbes and the Economic Trinity.’ See within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’

x

Preface

Finally, he describes the role of the political sovereign as public theologian, resting his case on a number of distinctions which he himself is not always able to keep straight.3 These distinctions raise the issue of ‘true religion.’ I once felt and stated that the phrase ‘true religion’ could only be oxymoronic in Hobbes’s scheme, given his often expressed assertion that religion was opinion, not susceptible to demonstration. That now seems to me in error. While the truths of religion cannot be demonstrated, Hobbes nonetheless gives proofs of God’s existence as ﬁrst cause, and he uses the expression ‘true religion’ in connections where its utility in the unfolding argument cannot be doubted. This change in conviction has in turn led me to allow for the existence and role of natural theology in Hobbes’s political theory. In discovering God as ﬁrst cause, according to Hobbes, we inescapably reach the correct conclusion, namely, that God exists as ﬁrst cause and, as such, should be worshipped for His irresistible power. This is true religion, elaborated in natural theology, universally valid for all times and in all places and known to the ancients. It must be distinguished not only from superstition but also from revealed religion, though, as I mentioned, Hobbes does not always succeed in maintaining this tri-partite division. A third feature is the concern to ﬁnd Luther in various ways in Hobbes’s rather eclectic thinking about religion. The purpose of this is three-fold: 1) to show Hobbes in a context in which his ideas are not so strange, as with the idea of soul-sleep or mortalism, something both Hobbes and Luther professed, for similar purposes, though in different ways; 2) to trace Hobbes’s belief that ecclesiastical authority had no power apart from what the civil authority yielded it to the peculiarly Lutheran view of the relationship between church and state, at variance with both Catholic doctrine and pronounced Calvinist/Presbyterian tendencies, and 3) to document Hobbes’s use of Luther and Melanchthon to repudiate Aristotelian ethics as inconsistent with the evangelical character of Christ’s message. A fourth feature is the need to see Hobbes not only with respect to medieval antecedents but also to the tradition of the Fathers. Generally, he is far more dubious of the value of patristic theology than his Anglican contemporaries. This move hopefully makes possible a more searching inquiry into the great division which Hobbes puts into use between Athens and Jerusalem. A word about citation style may be helpful. I quote throughout from Macpherson’s familiar edition of Leviathan, as reported in the Past Masters Series CD put out by Folio Infobase (1992). The citation form is as follows: Leviathan 2.17.2.223 means Leviathan, part 2, chapter 17, paragraph 2, page 223 in that edi-

3

See within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’

Preface

xi

tion. Citations to Hobbes’s other works are to the Molesworth edition, English Works (EW) or Opera Latina (OL). I have consulted Prof. Edwin Curley’s learned and helpful edition, published by the Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1994.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My heartfelt thanks go to Professors John Christian Laursen (University of California, Riverside), Series Editor, and Sarah Hutton (Middlesex University), General Editor, for their encouragement and support. Many people, most living, some dead, from many universities, both in the United States and in Europe, have helped me. But, I limit myself to those at the two institutions of higher learning that have led most directly to this book. First, to recognize my enduring debt to him, I thank the chair of my dissertation committee, Thomas Garden Barnes, UC, Berkeley, under whom in 1985 I wrote the thesis, The Protestant Hobbes, which is the basis of my work in this ﬁeld. Along this line, I am pleased also to acknowledge the invaluable contribution of others who read my work, namely, Robert Bellah, the late Reinhard Bendix, Hanna Pitkin and Martin Shapiro. They made it possible for me to pursue my intellectual interests as an academic. I owe a debt of gratitude to all the members of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, Boalt Hall, UC, Berkeley, especially Philip Selznick and Philippe Nonet, as well as to the late David Daube and the late Stephan Kuttner. I must also acknowledge a second alma mater, the University of WisconsinMadison, and, more particularly, its Institute for Research in the Humanities, at which I had the pleasure of spending two leaves. All of the essays appearing here are in some way the fruit of the time I happily spent there as a fellow. I am particularly grateful to David Lindberg and Paul Boyer, former directors of the Institute, and to its life-fellows, especially Robert Kingdon, Biruté Ciplijauskaité and Phil Hardt, to say nothing of its redoubtable secretary, Loretta Freiling. Sine quibus non. My thanks also go to William Courtenay, Laurence Dickey, Steven Nadler, Terry Penner, Johann Sommerville, Margaret Sommerville, as well as to Patrick Riley. Thanks are also due to the editors of Interpretation and the British Journal for the History of Ideas for their kind permission to reprint here the translation of the Appendix and ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Economic Trinity.’ Ms. Maja de Keijzer, now of Springer Publishing, was of great help in bringing this project to completion. Mr. Eric Platt, of the University of WisconsinMadison, provided invaluable bibliographical aid. He also prepared the indices and made the text freer of errors than it would have been without his care and attention.

xiv

Acknowledgements

Finally, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) has provided an unrivaled atmosphere of support and peace which allowed me to complete the manuscript. George Wright December 26, 2004 NIAS, Wassenaar The Netherlands

1. INTRODUCTION

Leviathan in Latin On December 9, 1667, the Dutch publisher Dr. Joan Blaeu, through his son Pieter, corresponded from Amsterdam with Thomas Hobbes in England, touching some details of a project which the three men had undertaken, namely, the publication of a Latin edition of Hobbes’s works, including Leviathan.1 Writing in French, the younger Blaeu records his father’s satisfaction at having learned that Hobbes had ﬁnished two-thirds of the work and was working steadily each day to complete what remained before the following Easter. He further recounts the author’s manner of proceeding in the work, forced upon him by the paralytic condition with which he had returned from France some sixteen years earlier.2 Hobbes, it seems, had employed an amanuensis,3 ignorant of Latin, to transcribe 1 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. 2 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 longtime friend John Aubrey; see ‘Brief Lives’ chieﬂy of contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), pp. 321 ff. 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). 3 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.

2

Chapter 1

the text, as well as a second, well-versed in the language, to reread and correct it. Blaeu ﬁnally assures Hobbes of the care that he will take in correcting the proofs, to be printed in the ﬁrm’s Amsterdam publishing house.4 Such, in brief compass, were the material conditions under which Hobbes sought to gratify his foreign admirers’ wish to have a more accessible text of the work that had caused such a stir in England.5

4 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. 5 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),

Introduction

3

But, however evident to us are Hobbes’s reasons and arrangements for producing a Latin edition of Leviathan, it has proven a difﬁcult question whether or in what form the writing of the Latin text ultimately published in 1668 may have preceded that of the English text published in 1651. Three scholars who have considered the matter, Lubienski, Hood and Tricaud,6 agree on the priority in time of at least some portions of a Latin text. This would mean that, during the period Hobbes resided in France preparing the English Leviathan, he had at

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. 6 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.

4

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least an outline or some chapters of the text in Latin upon which to draw, many parts of which eventually appeared in the text of 1668.7 Scholars have adduced several interesting but inconclusive arguments to support the existence of what Tricaud terms un hypothétique proto-Léviathan latin.8 For one, the English Leviathan is longer and more developed in several places9 and seems, subjectively at least, to be more exact. Where the English text shows fuller treatment of subjects than that of the Latin, the material is added at the ends of paragraphs, as though Hobbes, conﬁdent in his formulations and writing hurriedly, left an antecedent text largely intact, supplementing as further consideration required. The tone of the 1651 text is also more passionate than the Latin text, whose date of composition would thus be earlier than the egregious outcome of the English Civil War, the execution of the king, Charles I, in 1649.10 Finally, Hobbes’s late Latin autobiography states, ‘I ﬁnished the book [i.e., Leviathan] in my native tongue so that it could be both often and usefully read by my fellow Englishmen.’11 Variously editing and holding back texts in Latin and the vernacular seems to have been a characteristic aspect of Hobbes’s way of working, evidenced in the progress his De Corpore made to publication.12 Also,

7 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. 8 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. 117 ff. 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. 9 This may also be taken, as Robertson does, to reﬂect a later desire for greater conciseness; see Robertson, op. cit., p. 197. 10 It is of course possible that the resumption of the Stuart line on the English throne in 1660 had assuaged Hobbes’s anger by the late 1660’s. 11 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…’ 12 On the history of revisions of this text, see Schuhmann, De Corpore, op. cit., ix–cv.

Introduction

5

Hobbes may have wanted to memorialize Leviathan by way of an edition in Latin, which still retained a certain privilege as a vehicle for philosophic expression.13 Hobbes had claimed a place among the philosophers since his reception into that brilliant Parisian circle, gathered about the Franciscan friar Marin Mersenne, which included the atomist Pierre Gassendi,14 the mathematician Fermat, the libertine Sorbière, Martel and du Prat, with ties to Descartes.15 But, although the precise relation between Hobbes’s two texts remains unsettled, textual and historical reasons indicate that the Appendix ad Leviathan, placed at the end of the Latin text and translated here for the ﬁrst time into English, was surely written after 1651, possibly for the 1668 publication.16 For

13

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. 14 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. 15 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. 16 The collection which Blaeu produced contains eight of Hobbes’s works in Latin, the Problemata Physica, Στ γµαι (Stigmai), De Corpore, De Homine, De Cive, De Natura Aëris, De Principiis et Ratiocinatione Geometrarum, and Leviathan. The book itself was well made, with several illustrations, indicating the care Blaeu took. Facing the title page is an engraved portrait of Hobbes, at age seventy-six, by the eminent engraver William Faithorne (1616– 1691), a royalist who was conﬁned as a prisoner of war for a time at Aldergate, was released and, like Hobbes, left England and later returned, in 1650. His engravings depicted the major ﬁgures of the mid-century, including the Duke of Buckingham, William Laud, Thomas Fairfax, Orlando Bridgeman, with many of Charles I. Based on Abraham Bosse’s Traicté des manières de graveur en taille douce of 1645, Faithorne’s The Art of Graveing and Etching of 1662 was the ﬁrst systematic treatise on engraving in English, supplanting Sanderson’s Graphice of 1658, Browne’s Ars Pictoria of 1660 and Evelyn’s Sculptura of 1662. Around his engraving of Hobbes is the inscription, En quam modice habitat philosophia (Behold how modestly doth philosophy

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one, in line with its intended audience, the Latin Appendix substitutes for the English text’s ‘Review and Conclusion,’ an element of interest to an earlier English audience, given its focus on the situation in the wake of the Civil War.17 For another, the third chapter of the Appendix, a response to Leviathan’s critics, clearly postdates the text published in 1651 and the criticisms of it that arose from many sides. In both the Appendix and the corresponding Latin text of Leviathan, Hobbes deals with an error that had appeared in the English text, namely, that of apparently suggesting in a discussion of the Trinity that Moses ‘personiﬁed’ God the Father prior to the birth of Jesus Christ.18 He defends himself on this point against his critics, speciﬁcally the Bishop of Derry, John Bramhall,19 in An dwell). Each of the works is preceded by its own title page. There was also a Blaeu edition of the Latin Leviathan alone in 1670. Jacobus Wagenaar brought out a Dutch translation by Abraham van Berkel (1636–1686) as early as 1667 and again in 1672, in Amsterdam. The book was forbidden in 1674 as ‘Godslasterlijck ende zielverdervend,’ that is, insulting to God and destructive of the soul. 17 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. 18 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.’ 19 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. 31 ff. 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. 132 ff. 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

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Answer to a Book, published by Dr. Bramhall… (the title varies according to edition), written in 1668, though published for the ﬁrst time in 1682, that is, after Hobbes’s death. There, he states that the error has been eliminated in the Latin text of Leviathan, by then perhaps already printed ‘beyond the seas.’20 Also, the religious and theological issues which Hobbes takes up in the Appendix lay closest to his immediate interests in the period after the appearance of Leviathan in 1651, more particularly after the return of Charles II to England in 1660 and the agitation against Leviathan that followed upon the seating of the Cavalier Parliament in 1661.21 For, while the general impetus 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. 20 See EW IV, pp. 316–318. 21 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

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for writing on these matters was Hobbes’s profound interest in religious belief and practice, especially in relation to politics, the speciﬁc impetus was clearly the atmosphere of hostility in which he had lived since the late 1640’s, owing to suspicions of his orthodoxy overtly aroused already in France.22 Hobbes’s appointment as Prince Charles’ mathematics tutor, some time prior to October of 1646, was met by some with skepticism and concern.23 Robert Baillie, a Presbyterian minister, in a letter dated August 13, 1646, wrote to William Murray, a member of the Queen’s entourage, ‘If he doe not desire to ruine the innocent Prince with himself,… let [Thomas Hobbes] and such wicked men be put from about him.’ In a second, dated September 8, 1646, he stated to William Murray, another member of the queen’s entourage, ‘the placeing of [Hobbes] (a professed Atheist, as they speak) about the Prince as his teacher is ill taken.’24 In a letter of October, 1646, to Sorbière, Hobbes admits that he would be unable to teach the prince politics, given the resistance shown him by the royal advisors.25 And, in a letter, dated March 1647, he mentions the hostility which his political thought causes on all sides.26 Thus, at the instigation of royalist and ecclesiastic

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. 127 ff., and Leslie Stephen, Hobbes (London: Macmillan and Co., 1904), pp. 1–70, esp. 60–61. 22 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. 23 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.’). 24 For both letters, see Schuhmann, Chronique, p. 96. 25 See Correspondence, letter 45. 26 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

Introduction

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alike, Hobbes had been made unwelcome at Charles’ court in exile,27 and, after 1660, the restored monarch, while granting his former mathematics tutor an 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, and within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’ 27 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,

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annual pension,28 nonetheless placed him under a ban not to publish anything in English on politics or religion.29 Then, in 1666, likely as a result of recriminations that arose among the people following the twin disasters of plague and ﬁre in London, Leviathan was named as a cause of atheism and blasphemy, whose remedy was to be considered by a committee of the House of Commons.30 Aubrey mentions the fear Hobbes felt at a motion brought by a number of the bishops in the House of Lords to ‘have the good old gentleman burn’t for a heretique.’31 Pepys relates in his Journal that the price of Leviathan tripled as a result of the uproar.32 The bill failed in 1666, but similar ones came in 1674, 1675 and 1680. And, in 1683, Leviathan and De Cive were burned at Oxford.33

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. 28 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. 29 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). 30 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. 60 ff. 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. 31 See Aubrey, Brief Lives, p. 339. 32 See the entry for September 3, 1668, The Diary of Samuel Pepys ed. Henry Wheatley 2 (New York, NY: Random House, 1946), p. 927. 33 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.

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The Appendix is thus one of a number of Hobbes’s post-Restoration texts, for example, the Answer to Bramhall, his ecclesiastical history, the Historical Narration Concerning Heresie,34 and the Dialogue between a Phylosopher (sic) and a Student of the Common-Laws of England, all of which include some treatment of the nature of orthodoxy, political and ecclesiastical authority, the deﬁnition and punishment of heresy, and more broadly the relation of revealed religion, political authority and rational inquiry.35 And, all treat religious views like those of their author, and his immunity from a charge of heresy is either argued or assumed.36 But, while Hobbes, at the age of eighty in 1668, surely did not want to suffer punishment as a heretic, as before, he in no way abandoned positions he had long held in the face of ostracism, intimidation and even possible prosecution. Although, as here,37 he admits to holding novel views in theology, he defends them as derived from scripture. He evidently never believed he espoused heretical views.38 He thought he was right. And, it is in the pages of the Appendix that he has made an important, sustained effort to exculpate himself. 34 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. 35 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. 36 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 §§ 175 ff., and nn. 37 See Appendix § 175. 38 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.

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Contemporaries’ doubts as to his success are well-known; in England, he never escaped from the reputation of entertaining evidently heterodox, if sincerely held, opinions.39 Modern doubters dismiss his professions of faith as dissimulation and pronounce against the possibility of sincerity.40 Neither group’s conclusions need prejudice our own estimates of his thought. Indeed, rethinking these issues in a new light ought, in my view, to lead to a verdict as to Hobbes’s purposes and character different from that of some of his and our own contemporaries. For, new research allows us to check conclusions on many points against a more detailed and nuanced background in the history of Christian theology, especially among Protestants and more particularly among those inﬂuenced by Martin Luther. The ‘Luther Renaissance,’ carried on since the beginning of the last century, largely by German and Scandinavian scholars,41 has been accompanied, moreover, by investigations into the medieval antecedents of the Reformation. One thinks here especially of the work of Heiko Oberman.42 These lines of inquiry are particularly valuable in dealing with the vexed question of the place of religious belief in Hobbes’s thought. One answer has been to bracket off the religious themes and issues so conspicuous in his work.43 That approach was always contrary to evident indications 39 See Mintz, op. cit., passim; J. Bowle, Hobbes and His Critics: A Study in Seventeenth Century Constitutionalism (NY, NY: Barnes and Noble, 1969), and Malcolm, Correspondence General Introduction, xxxiiiff. 40 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. 41 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. 42 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). 43 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

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of the thinker’s interests as a theorist. Not long before arrived in Paris for fear of the protracted civil strife that was to ensue, he wrote to the Earl of Devonshire: I am of the opinion, that Ministers ought to minister rather than governe; at least that all Church government depend on the state, and authority of the Kingdom, without which there can be no unity in the church. Your Lordship may perhaps thinke this opinion, but a fancy of Philosophy. But I am sure that Experience teaches, thus much, that the dispute for [precedence] betwene the spiritual and civil power, has of late more than any other thing in the world, bene the cause of civill warres, in all places of Christendom.44

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.’ 44 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,

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Leviathan’s title page, with its careful and intricate juxtaposition of religious and political symbols, gives visual expression to the importance of religion for Hobbes.45 And, Behemoth gives ample witness to his view that the Civil War, whose grounds and outcome deeply affected the writing of Leviathan, was caused by differences in religion, focused on the person of the king and his men. Politics and religion belong together in Hobbes, even though he related them by way of a series of distinctions;46 in Leviathan, it is the key problematic driving his thinking about politics.47 For, speaking at a high level of abstraction, we may say that, as a political theorist, he is essentially a creature of the Protestant Era,48 both in terms of the problems he seeks to solve and in the means he chooses to do so. He addresses the large issues associated with the rise of Protestantism and furnishes answers to them framed largely within the terms supplied by its own culture and presuppositions.49 Bracketing these concerns 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. 45 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. 46 See below, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’ 47 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. 48 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). 49 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,

Introduction

15

withdraws from our consideration a large and complex area of Hobbes’s thought, together with the interesting connections it suggests between the thinker and his era. The argument advanced here is that Hobbes’s formulations of religious themes, in themselves and in relation to his doctrine of political obligation, are intrinsic to his theoretical project.50 His views on these matters are less heterodox in context51 and more revealing than usually thought. Critics have failed to appreciate some features of the Protestant tradition of which Hobbes was a trenchant proponent.52 This translation of the 1668 Appendix presents an opportunity brieﬂy to examine a few relevant points. The 1668 Appendix The 1668 Appendix deals with issues that Hobbes had treated earlier in his writings but now in a somewhat more sustained and focused way than before. Divided into three chapters, it takes up the status and meaning of the creedal statement of the Nicene Fathers in relation to the Bible, the immortality of the created soul as an interpretation of the Christian doctrine of eternal life, and the question of heresy and the nature of orthodoxy in the early church and in the Anglican Church. It ends with a response to critics of the English Leviathan, largely with reference to theological objections raised against his views. At issue throughout is Hobbes’s desire to vindicate an historically rooted understanding of faith, based on the primacy of Scripture over both church tradition and those whom he calls private theologians, and to show the congruity of

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. 50 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.’ 51 For the argument that Hobbes was an orthodox Christian, see A.P. Martinich, op. cit. 52 Pointing out similarities in thought and approach between Luther and Hobbes is useful in explaining what have seemed troubling or at least puzzling aspects of the latter’s thought. Hobbes cites Luther and Melanchthon approvingly, especially in the exchanges with Bramhall, where he calls him the ‘ﬁrst beginner of our deliverance from the servitude of the Roman clergy.’ In describing similarities in thought, we must not overlook important differences, however, as with respect to the Eucharist, the torments of hell, prophecy, the culpability of original sin, the existence of demons and devils or the religious depth shown by Luther.

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this understanding with the power of civil authority over liturgy and the public profession of the faith, maintaining throughout a sphere of free belief in the individual. Hobbes has here again attacked the view that the human soul, once created, is immortal and has defended again his view that the soul, if it is to be distinguished from bodily existence, dies with the body, to await the general resurrection of the dead at the Last Judgment. This, he believes, is the doctrine indicated historically both by the evidence of the Christian proclamation and by the context in which that faith was preached. The witness to that proclamation and the context in which it is to be understood is the biblical record. New Testament writers, in describing Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, supplied the essential content of the Christian faith within the context of the prophetic writers of the Hebrew scriptures.53 Their proclamation must be understood in a way that is consistent in its parts and in the context of the thought-world in which it spread.54 Scripture then is the positive source of doctrine, with reason its negative criterion.55 53

For an analysis of Hobbes’s biblical typology, see Reventlow, op. cit., pp. 195–222, esp. pp. 209 ff. Figural representation, that is, typology, was Hobbes’s means of relating the Old and New Testaments by way of the notion of promise. 54 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 Reventlow, op. cit., pp. 194–222, esp. 212 ff. 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. 55 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

Introduction

17

Thus, in response to the assertion of Interlocutor A that the created soul does not cease to exist as a self-subsistent entity for the least instant, Hobbes, in the person of Interlocutor B, states: I shall tell you nothing at all on this point apart from that which I ﬁnd expressly stated, without the least ambiguity, in the Scriptures, and that is not openly contradicted by some other text.56

Hobbes continues in this vein and makes explicit his recognition of the differences between the thought-worlds of the Greek philosophers and that of the biblical writers: That the human soul cannot die is a belief which you and almost all other men take from the philosophers. I, for my part, have no desire to have them as my masters after the Holy Scriptures.57

He pursues the point by appealing to Scripture and forcing a contrast between the Greek notion of natural immortality, putatively presented by such princes of philosophy as Plato and Aristotle, and the Judaeo-Christian idea of eternal life, with its emphasis on sin, human mortality and divine redemption: Nonetheless, if you brought me some passage from the Scriptures in which some type of immortality is ascribed to the human soul other than that which is given men under the name of eternal life, then I too shall hold with the philosophers.58

Clearly, Hobbes has set himself against the natural immortality of the soul and also against its traditional corollary, namely, the understanding of reason as that power located in the soul which participates in the eternal, noetic reality which it, to an extent, intuits.59 Reason for him is instrumental; it is not a means whereby the soul ascends from the sphere of genesis to that of being, as it was for Plato.

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.’ 56 Appendix, § 46. Hobbes’s dramatis personae in the Appendix are literary devices to express and discuss his own ideas; they generally lack both a sense of character and a consistent pattern of advocacy or argumentation and are made to appear rather dim by turn. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Hobbes’s target would presumptively be Plato, though he does not name him and in fact charges Aristotle with beliefs usually more associated with his teacher. See within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’ This hesitancy to charge Plato with error may derive from the belief that, in his dialogues, Plato sought to teach no doctrines but only raise questions.

18

Chapter 1

Indeed, later in the Appendix, Hobbes cites a passage from Ecclesiastes in support of his view that the possession of reason is scarcely sufﬁcient cause to place man above the animals: The soul, they say, thinks, remembers, reasons. What if, denying this, I were to say that it is the living being itself which thinks and remembers? How shall they refute this? And, what is it to reason except to place names upon things, to connect the names into assertions and to join these assertions into syllogisms? These are the source of logic. In paradise, before he had imposed names on things, how was Adam more rational than the other animals, except by potential only? It does not seem to me then that men are substantially distinguished from the brutes by the fact that they discuss matters in words and brutes do not.60

The claim that Hobbes here refutes, namely, that the human soul holds a privileged place in the great chain of being, had been made often enough in the Christian West, especially after the recovery of Aristotelian texts in medieval times and in the wake of the Platonic revival of Ficino during the Renaissance. Borrowing and adapting such ideas, theologians had made them key aspects of the church’s confession. Both the medieval council of Vienne and the Lateran council of 1512 had articulated somewhat differing conceptions of the soul’s immortality, each under the inﬂuence of classical thought, Aristotelianism in the case of the ﬁrst and Platonism in the second.61

60

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. 61

Introduction

19

Hobbes rejected what he considered a combination of Greek thought and Christian faith as erroneous and destructive: a false witness to the faith of the early church and a pernicious inﬂuence in politics. The speciﬁc focus of his attack was what he called the ‘doctrine of incorporeal substances,’ that is, the belief that certain disembodied, ideal, immortal and selfsubsistent entities really exist outside the mind.62 Importing this tenet of ancient thought into Christian theology, he believed, had led to the abuses of the bête noire of the seventeenth-century English Protestant, popish superstition: This window [the doctrine of incorporeal substances] it is, that gives entrance to the dark doctrine, ﬁrst, of eternal torments; and afterwards of purgatory, and consequently of the walking abroad, especially in places consecrated, solitary or dark, of the ghosts of men deceased; and thereby to the pretences of exorcisme and conjuration of phantasmes; as also of invocation of men dead; and to the doctrine of indulgences; that is to say, of exemption for a time, or for ever, from the ﬁre of purgatory, wherein these incorporeall substances are pretended by burning to be cleansed, and made ﬁt for heaven.63 For, men being generally possessed before the time of our Saviour by contagion of the dæmonology of the Greeks, of an opinion that the souls of men were substances distinct from their bodies, and therefore that when the body was dead, the soule of every man, whether godly or wicked, must subsist somewhere by vertue of its own nature, without acknowledging therein any supernaturall gifts of God’s; the doctors of the church doubted a long time, what was the place, which they were to abide in, till they should be re-united to their 62

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: 63

And ﬁrst… you shall understand that they hold that all the soules in heaven may come downe and appeare to us when 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.

20

Chapter 1 bodies in the resurrection; supposing for a while they lay under the altars; but afterward the church of Rome found it more proﬁtable to build for them this place of purgatory, which by some other churches in this later age, has been demolished.64

The more directly deadly, second effect of the doctrine of separated essences was realized in politics. For, Hobbes believed that it was fear of disembodied spirits or ghosts, such as the souls of the departed, that caused men to turn from their lawful sovereigns to seek solace from seditious priests: But, to what purpose (may some men say) is such subtilty in a work of this nature, where I pretend to nothing but what is necessary to the doctrine of government and obedience? It is to this purpose, that men may no longer suffer themselves to be abused by them, that by this doctrine of separated essences, built on the vain philosophy of Aristotle, would fright them from obeying the laws of their countrey, with empty names; as men fright birds from the corn with an empty doublet, a hat and a crooked stick. For it is upon this ground, that when a man is dead and buried, they say his soule (that is his life) can walk separated from his body, and is seen by night amongst the graves. Upon the same ground they say, that the ﬁgure and colour and tast of a peece of bread, has a being, there, where they say there is no bread; and upon the same ground they say, that faith and wisdome, and other vertues are sometimes powred into a man, sometimes blown into him from heaven; as if the vertuous and their vertues could be asunder; and a great many other things that serve to lessen the dependance of subjects on the soveraign power of their countrey. For who will endeavour to obey the laws, if he expect obedience to be powred or blown into him? Or who will not obey a priest, that can make God, rather than his soveraign; nay than God Himselfe? Or who, that is in fear of ghosts will not bear great respect to those that can make the holy water that drives them from him? And this shall sufﬁce for an example of the errors which are brought into the church from the entities and essences of Aristotle: which it may be he knew to be false philosophy but writ it as a thing consonant to and corroborative of their religion, and fearing the fate of Socrates.65

64 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, it was 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. 65 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

Introduction

21

Like Aristotle in ancient times and Martin Heidegger in ours, Hobbes conducted an extended conversation with his philosophic forebears, conspicuous, if for no other reason, for its brilliance and high commitment. But, as I believe the Appendix shows, like Aristotle and Heidegger in dealing with past thinkers, he was one-sided, in some points unfair, certainly peremptory and perhaps inaccurate. Nor is Hobbes as clear as might be desired in revealing the ground of his break with tradition. As others have remarked, he rarely acknowledges his intellectual debts, especially to thinkers who lived before the ‘century of genius.’66 Hobbes may have been put to some difﬁculty in vindicating his own originality, for example, in his dealings with Descartes.67 This may have led him to obscure his intellectual sources, particularly his reading of medieval thinkers. He himself stressed the revelatory character of the encounter with Euclid’s geometry during 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. 66 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: FrancoAngeli, 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). 67 See, for example, Brandt, op. cit., pp. 129–142, 161 ff. See within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’

22

Chapter 1

a trip to the Continent, but even this was possible only against the background of prior understandings. And, the conclusions he draws from Euclid are related largely to questions of proof, demonstration and language. His education, the preoccupations of his era, his own scientiﬁc and scholarly interests and aptitudes certainly shaped his later thought, though precisely how to sort out these factors remains problematic, especially with regard to his theological development. But, knowing the sources of an author’s thought makes it easier to grasp the character, uniqueness and signiﬁcance of his or her intellectual achievement; and these are better understood by identifying and studying those who, in either a positive or negative way, inﬂuenced the course of that development. Hobbes would have facilitated our understanding of his criticism of the philosophic past had he been clearer in specifying the relations of medieval theologians with their classical antecedents,68 to the extent he knew them.69 Nonetheless, the burden of his attack on incorporeal substances was not merely philosophic or scientiﬁc. For, though laying the fear of disembodied souls was a key feature of his political theorizing, the conclusion he drew from

68 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. 69 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 schooldivinity, 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.

Introduction

23

this line of reasoning, in the Appendix as elsewhere, was also evangelical. While he allowed for differences of opinion on the point, insofar as one reﬂected on his own orthodoxy and on the requirements of the Christian faith, he unwaveringly emphasized God’s saving activity in redeeming the soul; that is, he stressed God’s ‘supernatural gifts’ over the ‘natural’ immortality of the created soul. Thus, in response to Interlocutor B’s hesitation to break with what he takes to be the traditional teaching as to the soul’s immortality, Hobbes, in the person of Interlocutor A, states: Least of all do I censure those who feel this way. For, surely he who has such lofty thoughts about his own soul is most careful not to deﬁle it through baseness of life. Nonetheless, I do not concede that he is less careful in avoiding that result who steadfastly believes that his soul has been redeemed through the blood of Christ and made eternal.70

And, he remains convinced of the adequacy of his views on the soul, redemption and the hope of resurrection: And consider those words of Christ on the cross to the robber: ‘Today you shall be with me in paradise;’ and the other words to the disciples: ‘I am the tree of life;’ what purpose do these words serve except that the faithful may know that the great ﬂaming sword has been removed from the gate of paradise and the way made plain, through the sacriﬁce of Christ, to the tree of life, that is, to life eternal? What need is there then for the faithful man to attribute his immortality to creation, that is to nature, rather than to redemption?71

He concludes this discussion in the Appendix by saying: Let others look forward to what immortality they prefer. I look to that which Christ has acquired for us by His victory over death through His blood.72

Here, we may draw the ﬁrst of three parallels with the reformer Martin Luther, the reluctant founder of one of the churches that had demolished the place of purgatory. Luther’s teaching on the mortality of the soul was similar to that of Hobbes in motivation: opposition to the notion of ‘natural immortality’ in favor of an evangelical insistence upon human mortality and dependence upon God, symbolized in the doctrine of eternal life.73 70

Appendix, § 56. Appendix, § 54. 72 Ibid. 73 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: 71

24

Chapter 1

Luther developed this view in a commentary on two passages drawn from Ecclesiastes: one, already mentioned above and quoted by Hobbes in the Appendix, § 56, namely, Ecclesiastes 3:19, where the Preacher compares the animal and man to the disadvantage of man’s claimed superiority; the second, Ecclesiastes 9:10: ‘There is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.’ Luther comments on the second: Another place, proving that the dead have no perseverance or feeling. There is, says he, no device, no science, no knowledge, no wisdom there. Solomon judges that the dead are asleep and feel nothing at all. For the dead lie there [counting] neither days nor years, but when they are waked, they shall seem to have slept scarce a moment. Hell signiﬁes a pit or grave, but properly, as I judge, that secret withdrawing place, where the dead sleep out of this life, whence the soul goes to her place, whatsoever it be, for corporeal it is not, so that you may understand hell to be that place where the souls be kept, being a certain grave, as it were, of the soul, without this corporeal world, as the earth is the sepulcher of the body. But, what manner of place it is, we know not… For they that truly are holy, go not into hell to suffer anything there. The dead therefore are out of all place. For whatsoever is out of this life is out of place. Even as after the resurrection, we shall be clear from place and time.74

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. 74 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.

Introduction

25

Luther’s comments as to the Fifth Lateran Council’s position on the immortality of the soul bear a note of sarcasm and anger which cannot be mistaken: Hence the experts in Rome have recently pronounced a holy decree which establishes that the soul of man is immortal, acting as if we did not all say in our common creed, ‘I believe in the life everlasting.’ And with the assistance of the mastermind Aristotle, they decreed further that the soul is ‘essentially the form of the human body,’ and many other splendid articles of a similar nature. These decrees are indeed most appropriate to the papal church, for they make it possible for them to hold fast to human dreams and the doctrines of devils while they trample upon and destroy faith and the teaching of Christ.75

Although an insistence on the mortality of the soul, with its condemnation of the ‘demonology of the Greeks,’ as Hobbes calls it, or the ‘doctrines of devils,’ as Luther says, has been cited as evidence of Hobbes’s heretical, even atheistic views, he shared it with the reformer and persevered in it with the same evangelical ends. Both distinguish ‘eternal life’ or ‘life everlasting’ from the natural immortality of the soul, and both tax the Catholic Church for its use of the latter doctrine to tyrannize over men. Both also locate a source of the error in Aristotle, though it is Hobbes who will specify that the ‘doctrine of incorporeal substances’ is to blame.76 A second parallel between these two thinkers is found in their attitudes toward atheism and idolatry or superstition. For Luther, man is naturally religious in the sense that he is obliged to worship in order to propitiate powers whose demands he recognizes but cannot evidently either satisfy or evade.77 In experiencing fear, men are led to despair, so that idolatry, turning to false gods, is as difﬁcult to avoid as it is useless to practice. And atheism, that is, outright denial of the existence of a higher power, seems on this account more a species of foolishness in the face of evident and perceived need than a creditable stand of conscience.78 75 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. 76 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.” 77 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. 20 ff., and John S. Dunne, A Search for God in Time and Memory (NY, NY: Macmillan Company, 1969), pp. 83 ff. 78 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 Revolu-

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Hobbes agrees:79 it is foolish to deny the existence of powers before whom men are struck with fear.80 This was a position Hobbes espoused in the 1651 Leviathan, and he repeats it in the 1668 Appendix: A. As for the third doctrine, that author [Hobbes] states in the sixth chapter, [of Leviathan] toward the end: Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed [is] religion; not allowed, superstition. And when the power imagined is truly such as we imagine, true religion.81 B. The Preacher says the same thing: ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;’ as does the Psalmist: ‘The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.’82

tionaries: 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. 79 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. 46 ff. 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. 80 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. 81 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. 82 Appendix, §§ 183 ff., quoting Psalms 111:10. Hobbes had given a fuller explanation of his views in Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society:

Introduction

27

Religions spring from fear; they are ways in which people worship their divinities, whether true or false.83 The gods take their origin from personal experiences of what Rudolf Otto called the numinous or from what one imagines at hearing stories of the experiences of others.84 The truth or falsity of revealed

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 sin at 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.’ 83 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. 104 ff. 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, §§ 183 ff. 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, §§ 116 ff., esp. § 133 and nn. 84 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’ (µαρτ ρες; 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 §§ 205 ff. Hobbes is nowhere farther from Calvin than in condoning religious dissimulation. Hobbes encourages reading the Scriptures as well as private theological development:

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doctrines is not susceptible to proof.85 Superstition according to Hobbes is fear of invisible powers conceived from tales not publicly permitted. What distinguishes them from other religious stories is merely lack of the sovereign’s permission to tell them in public or as a part of corporate worship. History has numerous examples of cults whose rites and rituals were banned or proscribed, often for political reasons; the Bacchantes of ancient Greece, devotees of the cult of Cybele in republican Rome, celebrants of the Roman Catholic mass in Hobbes’s day, and, later, the Masons and Mormons all provide examples of proscribed groups.

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. 85 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, §§ 111 ff. 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 them that 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.’

Introduction

29

But, more broadly, tracing the origin of religions to fear and classing them in general as opinion implies no necessary denigration of them for Hobbes. Opinion, particularly in politics, is often, or generally, more fundamental and important than knowledge, and belief, of which faith is one type, is for Hobbes a form of opinion, given that its truths cannot be demonstrated.86 Thus, insofar as it involves revelation, any religion is opinion, which may be valid and illegal, as Hobbes presumably believes in the case of early Christianity, or idolatrous and lawful, as with the false religions established among nonChristian peoples. In considering faith from the standpoint of authorization, Hobbes’s concern is political, but the political in Hobbes is circumscribed so as to allow for a large measure of freedom of thought, in particular, in religion.87 Given his own interests as a theorist and his emphasis on the mystery of faith in Christianity,88 he has furnished a deﬁnition of religion which allows him both to speak at length on the matter, often in criticism of others’ positions, and to avoid asserting on rational grounds what can only be afﬁrmed as a confession 86

See F.C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes, pp. 38 ff. and 124 ff.; cf. Appendix,

§ 15. 87 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. 88 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.

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of faith.89 The evangelical understanding of faith which grounds the political deﬁnition points to a third parallel between Hobbes and Luther, their description of Christ, the Logos or Word of God, as ‘promise.’ It is generally agreed that the emergence of Reformation theology is organically related to a new biblical hermeneutic, that is, a new appropriation of the Old and New Testaments.90 Luther pioneered in this, beginning, as early as the Lectures on the Psalter of 1513–1515, to invest the biblical text with that intense concentration upon the ﬁgure of Jesus which has long been recognized as a chief aspect of his theology.91 In the preface to these lectures, Luther states that Christ is literally the subject-matter and speaker of the Psalter. The true or proper understanding of the Psalter is thus the sensus Christi, the sense or meaning of Christ, whereby Christ speaks through the text directly to the believer. This emphasis evidences Luther’s break with the medieval approach to the text, according to which David, as author and speaker of the Psalter, was interpreted as a type or ﬁgure of the Christ, so that his relation to Christ was not literal, but ﬁgurative.92 Later in the preface, Luther describes Christ as faith itself, that is, as conformity to God’s will. Indeed, the ultimate signiﬁcance of Scripture for Luther is that it presents Christ precisely as faith. Ebeling states succinctly, ‘Christ is the text.’93 And, in this nexus of text, Christ and faith appears the ‘Urform’ of the Reformation doctrine of justiﬁcation.94 Faith for Luther is not an intellectual 89

On this point, see the discussion of heresy in the second chapter of the Appendix, esp. §§ 15 and 110–112. 90 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). 91 See Werner O. Packull, ‘Luther and Medieval Mysticism in the Context of Recent Historiography,’ Renaissance and Reformation 6 n.s. (1982): 79–93. 92 See Preus, ‘Old Testament Promissio and Luther’s New Hermeneutic.’ 93 ‘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.’ 94 Gerhard Ebeling, ‘Die Anfänge von Luthers Hermeneutik,’ Zeitschrift für Theologie

Introduction

31

analysis and approbation of speciﬁc propositions concerning God,95 nor do its claims and effects yield to such analysis. It is that episode of hearing and believing in the penitent’s life in which the history and fate of Jesus are ‘laid upon him’ by God.96 Luther deepens this sense of the historical situation of the believer in coming to realize that the Old Testament Psalmist’s hope for the Messiah prior to His incarnation is repeated in the longing of the New Testament Christian for the return of Christ following His ascension. Both testaments give witness to a common experience of faith as hope and trust in an active, benevolent God; both evidence the striving of historical ﬁgures to be and remain faithful.97 The Psalmist is thus less a shadowy precursor of Christ, less a bearer of privileged information as to a future event, than a living witness to a promise made by God to those who are faithful to Him. Both Israelite and Christian are united through God’s promise in the household of faith. The Psalmist being under the law and seeking the Messiah is like being in sin and asking forgiveness for the Christian.98 The Psalmist thus no longer speaks ﬁguratively, as a prophet across time, but literally, in his own time and words and out of his own faith and hope for God’s work of salvation. The key understanding here is that the promise of God grants the very blessings it pledges to the faithful. Christ is God’s promise, His saving activity on behalf of sinful humanity.99 The locus classicus of the doctrine of promise 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. 95 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. 96 On the ‘onset of the Gospel’ (evangelischer Ansatz), see Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism, passim, and below, n. 99. 97 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. 98 In his sermons, Calvin reﬂects a similar, high evaluation of the faith of the Jewish patriarchs, though his characteristic emphasis is on the notion of election, rather than Luther’s metaphor of the household of faith. Both men, however, engaged in vicious attacks on Jews of their period. 99 Elert explains how the κ ρυγµα (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

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is Article IV of the Apology to the Augsburg Confession, written by Luther’s friend and co-worker Philip Melanchthon: All Scripture should be divided into these two chief doctrines, the law and the promises. In some places it presents the law. In others it presents the promise of Christ; this it does either when it promises that the Messiah will come and promises forgiveness of sins, justiﬁcation, and eternal life for his sake, or when, in the New Testament, the Christ who came promises forgiveness of sin, justiﬁcation, and eternal life.100

Hobbes too locates the meaning of Christ’s incarnation as the ‘Word’ in the hope and fulﬁllment related to God’s promise, not as an eternal noetic entity existing above the ﬂux of history nor as the Stoic principle of reason in the universe, that is, not as the logos-principle of the ancients,101 but as the saving action of the God of history,102 given witness by writers in both the Old and New Testaments: [19] A. What did the Fathers understand by ‘Word’? [20] B. The natural Son of God, or Him begotten of God, from the beginning, that is, from everlasting.

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. 100 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. 96 ff. 101 For an analysis of the theological use of λγος 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. 102 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, §§ 62 ff. 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.

Introduction

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[21] A. But, in that passage, does not word mean something vocal, that is, a sound uttered by God? [22] B. Absolutely not! The Fathers repeatedly deny that. [23] A. What does it mean then? that it was an internal voice, like the eternal decree of God for the establishment of the world and the redemption of man? [24] B. I do not know what the Fathers felt in this matter. But, I doubt they thought that, lest they approach too near the doctrine of the Stoics, whose εµαρµνη (heimarmene) in Greek and fatum in Latin mean the same as eternal decree. [25] A. Then, as I said, what do the Fathers mean by ‘word’? [26] B. I do not know, except that, in sacred language, word is often to be taken for the very thing which was decreed or promised. For, often in the Old Testament, in place of ‘what God promised was done,’ we read ‘the word of God which He spoke was done.’103 Now, it is not my habit to expound the Holy Scripture to anyone but myself. But, if the passage in St. John’s Gospel is to be understood in this way, then I prefer to ask no further question concerning the mystery of the Incarnation. For, if the word in that place is the very thing which God had ordained to come into the world for our redemption and had promised in paradise, then it is no mere word, but a true thing and one with Christ. But, how He was made man is not mine to inquire after. It is sufﬁcient for me that He has become my Redeemer. And, what then? If I believe that He created the earth and all other things from nothing and man from the dust of the ground, shall I not also believe that He was able to take on human nature, except I know how?104

103

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. 161 ff. 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.’ 104 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; 1 Kings 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.

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It may seem remarkable that Hobbes, that most plebeian and heretical of philosophers,105 should express views on theological matters of such depth and insight. But, alongside the advances in political and natural-scientiﬁc thought with which he is credited, some recognition may also be accorded the originality and overall soundness of understanding which he displayed in approaching the biblical record, especially in relation to his researches into classical thought and experience. And, along with the self-confessed timidity that forms part of our picture of Hobbes the man, we should also mark a characteristic determination, disclosed in his perseverance in defending views in which he had a considerable investment of intellectual energy, carried through generally to his detriment and at times to his peril. Throughout, as we shall see in the essays that follow, Hobbes has sought to describe the relation of religious and political life so as to recognize an inviolable, interior sphere, in which the private individual might approach the divine in the way and on the terms which reason and experience have led him or her to adopt. This was the irreducible freedom that Hobbes claimed and defended, and it is not too much to identify in the philosopher of Malmesbury a dogged defender of inner freedom and the tender conscience. Nor should we hesitate to recognize in his theorizing an important branch in the stream of political thought that ﬂows from the Protestant Reformation through him into Anglo-American political and legal thought. Finally, we may note that Hobbes dealt with themes and concerns that have engaged the attention of the modern theologian, following their concealment in the ideal milieu of Enlightenment and liberal theology. The historical approach to Scripture, the emphasis on justiﬁcation in Christ, the drive to recover the proclamation of the early church and the coincident urge to demythologize its theology and free it from the spell of ancient thought may all be mentioned in this connection.

105

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.

APPENDIX TO LEVIATHAN 1

1

This translation was made possible by the support of the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I derived great beneﬁt from the late François Tricaud’s work, especially from his knowledge of patristic literature. Also, the late Karl Schuhmann was very generous in providing comments on an earlier version of the translation; the scholarly world is much poorer for his loss.

chapter 12 ON THE NICENE CREED3 1 A. I should like you to explain the Nicene Creed to me. I ask not so that I may

grasp the matters in question with my intellect, but that I may understand these words of the faith in a way that is in agreement with the Holy Scriptures.4 [The Nicene Creed as a statement of faith, §§ 1–6] Let us begin with these words, I believe in one God, the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. First of all, what does this expression, I believe in, or, in Greek, πιστε ω ες (pisteuo eis) mean? For, I do not recall having encountered this construction elsewhere among Greek authors. I read I believe someone, πιστε ω τιν (pisteuo tini) and I believe it to be so, πιστε ω οτως εναι (pisteuo houtos einai).5

2 Hobbes’s text lacks both section numbers and the subject headings whose addition here I have signaled with brackets. To aid clarity, I have broken the interlocutors’ speeches into more comprehensible units. His use of italics varies in the text, as does his use of the Greek and Roman alphabets; thus, the word πστασις (hypostasis) is at times written in Greek characters and at times in Roman characters, with and without italics. At times, italics is used for emphasis. Where I have thought it useful, I have retained the emphatic use of italics and have attempted to regularize its use throughout. Capitalization, too, varies, again often used for emphasis; in the translation, I have followed modern conventions. Hobbes gives fragments of biblical passages in the expectation that his audience would recognize them as familiar proof texts; I have expanded the quotations. Hobbes’s discussion of some issues is somewhat disjointed; topics hang ﬁre and are resumed later, often without explicit reference to what went before. I have used cross-references to draw the pieces together. 3 Hobbes reproduces the council’s use of the Latin word symbolum (σ µβολον 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. 4 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

caput i appendix ad leviathan DE SYMBOLO NICENO A. Explica mihi quaeso symbolum Nicenum, non dico, ut res ipsas animo com- 1 prehendam, sed ut verba ﬁdei ita intelligam ut consentanea sunt Scripturis Sacris: et primo haec verba, credo in unum Deum Patrem omnipotentem factorem coeli et terrae, atque visibilium omnium et invisibilium. Et primo, quid est illud, credo in, vel Graecum πιστυω ις. Nam apud authores Graecos non memini me alibi illam phrasin reperisse. Lego, credo alicui, πιστυω τινι, credo ita esse, vel πιστε ω υτως εναι.

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 πστασις, 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. 5 Hobbes’s point is that the use of these verbs with a preposition governing the accusative case, rather than the usual construction of the verb with the dative case, is quite rare and ought to be taken as denoting a meaning different from the usual expression of an attitude of trust or belief. With their strong spatial sense, Hobbes argues, the prepositions here signal the Nicene Fathers’ desire to set out certain boundary formulations of key tenets of the Christian faith, as the consensus which they felt allowed and required. This interpretation goes against current opinion; see n. 7. Hobbes’s discussion consistently reﬂects his awareness of the historical situation which gave rise to the creed and emphasizes its political exigencies and context, especially the role of Constantine as overseer of the church and defender of the peace of the empire. See within, § 146.

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2 B. That way of speaking is proper to those expressing agreement as to the

articles of the creed. For, the preposition ες (eis) means, among other things, to this point. Thus, when one reads πιστε ω ε ς !ε"ν πατρα (pisteuo eis theon patera), I believe in God the Father and so forth, if, in place of !εν, we substituted the word το#το (touto), it would be equal to saying, ‘I believe up to here,’ or, ‘I believe to this point.’ The preposition ες thus signiﬁes the boundary limits of the articles that one must believe; it shows clearly the extent of the agreement with the council reached by those subscribing to the creed.6 It should not surprise you then if you have not read this locution elsewhere than in the confession of faith.7 For, it is the same thing as if you said that you believe that God exists, that He is one and the same, that He is the Father, omnipotent and so forth. You may also read I believe in the Gospel; this means, ‘I believe the Gospel,’ that is, the preachers of the Gospel;8 except, in this case, the Greek has en, not eis. 3 A. ‘God is the Father,’ ‘God is omnipotent,’ etc., are propositions, as the logicians

say.9 They have their subjects and predicates, and some name is clearly attributed

6 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.’ 7 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, πιστε ω (pisteuo) with ε ς (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

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B. Propria est illa vox consentientium in articulos. Nam praepositio ες signiﬁcat 2 inter alia hactenus; ut quando dicitur πιστυω $ις Θε"ν πατρα etc. si pro ες, etc. ponetur το&το, idem esset quod credo huc usque sive hactenus. Signiﬁcat ergo praepositio $ις determinationem articulorum credendorum, nempe, quousque cum consilio consentiunt subscriptores. Mirum igitur videri non debet, si extra confessionem ﬁdei phrasin illam non legisti. Eadem enim est ac si te credere diceres, Deum esse, eundemque unum esse, patrem esse, omnipotentem esse, et sic de caeteris. Legitur etiam credo in evangelio, id est, credo evangelio, id est, praedicatoribus evangelii; sed ibi Graecum non est ε ς, sed $ν. A. Deus est Pater, Deus est omnipotens, etc. sunt, ut loquuntur dialectici, propo- 3 sitiones. Habent enim sua subjecta et praedicata, et aperte in illis Deo nomen

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. 8 Hobbes stresses that the term martyr, or µ'ρτυρ in Greek, properly means witness, one who tells of events he or she has seen. Among Christians, according to Hobbes, faith is belief, or well-founded trust, in the apostolic church, through which stories told by witnesses of Jesus’ life, mission and resurrection have been collected and passed on: Leviathan 3.42.50.555: Amongst the ofﬁcers magisterial, the ﬁrst, and principal were the apostles; whereof there were at ﬁrst but twelve; and these were chosen and constituted by our Saviour himself; and their ofﬁce was not only to preach, teach, and baptize, but also to be martyrs, (witnesses of our Saviour’s resurrection.) This testimony, was the speciﬁcal, and essential mark; whereby the apostleship was distinguished from other magistracy ecclesiastical; as being necessary for an apostle, either to have seen our Saviour after his resurrection, or to have conversed with him before, and seen his works, and other arguments of his divinity; whereby they might be taken for sufﬁcient witnesses. On how the hearing of the gospel becomes operative as faith, see the Introduction and Leviathan 2.29.8.366. 9 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.

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to God in each. But, in this afﬁrmation, ‘God is,’ I do not understand what name is being attributed to God. For, I do not think that one can say, that God is is, and to say, God is God, is to no purpose.10 4 B. When one says, ‘God is,’ the word ‘is’ is a substantive verb, which contains

both the copula and the predicate;11 it is found among the Greeks and Latins alike. Thus the saying, ‘God is,’ means the same thing as that God exists, or, if we resolve the substantive verb into its parts, that He is a being, ( )ν (ho on),12 something real, not merely an appearance,13 like that which we call a specter or like the spirits worshipped by the pagans, those which the Apostle Paul calls ‘nothing.’14

10 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. 11 In using 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

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aliquod attribuitur. Sed in afﬁrmatione hac, Deus est, quod nomen attributum sit, non intelligo. Non enim puto dici posse, quod Deus est est; et frustra dicitur, Deus est Deus. B. Cum dicitur Deus est, vox est est verbum substantiale, includens tum copulam 4 tum praedicatum, tum apud Graecos tum Latinos. Itaque illud Deus est, signiﬁcat idem quod Deus existit, id est, resoluto verbo substantivo, Deus est ens, sive ( *ν, id est, reale aliquid, non merum phantasma, quale est quod vocatur spectrum, vel quales colebantur a gentibus daemones, et ab apostolo S. Paulo nihil.

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), H214 ff. 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. 141 ff. 12 In the Timaeus, Plato uses the phrase ( )ν to mean being, which is more commonly expressed in Greek as τ" ε+ναι or, referring to an entity, τ" -ν. Thus, it is possible that Hobbes intends both this usage, which is not unexampled in the period, and the possible reference to Plato. But, in his Answer to Bishop Bramhall, Hobbes makes a similar point: Lastly, [the bishop] calls God an essence. If he mean by essence the same with ens, {to on}, I approve it. Otherwise, what is essence? There is no such word in the Old Testament. The Hebrew language, which has no word answerable to the copulative est, will not bear it. The New Testament hath {ousia}, but never for essence, nor for substance, but only for riches. I can ﬁnd no other instance of ( )ν in Hobbes’s works, so I am inclined to take the reading as it stands in Molesworth as an error for το /ν. 13 Hobbes uses the Greek word φ'ντασµα (phantasma), often as a Latin word, in referring to name, to appearance, actual and fantastic, and to the ideas or images of thought. Hobbes denies reality to all of these because they depend on some other entity for their existence. The reader may consult the Latin text for the wide variety of items to which he applies the word. 14 The reference is to a passage in Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth, 1 Corinthians 8:4 ff., 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.’

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5 A. Yes, I remember that the apostle calls the graven images nothing but not that

he says the same thing of the spirits.15 6 B. Do you think it is those images graven in gold and ivory and wood that are

called ‘nothing’ and not rather those spirits that were worshipped under these images? Besides, an idol properly so called is not the material thing itself, but the apparition, that is, the idea or conception of the thing. The Greeks would fashion the images to reﬂect their ideas of the gods; they rarely took their ideas or imaginings of their gods from the images.16 God moreover is distinguished from names by that word, ‘a being.’ For, the thing, man, is one thing; the name, man, another. Further, you should know that the word ‘is,’ commonly employed by the Greeks and Latins as a copula in propositions, was completely unknown to the Hebrews, who accordingly always used a substantive verb,17 and, in place of the copula in every afﬁrmation, they merely added one name to another to signal what the logicians call predication. For the Greeks and Latins, however, ‘is’ is not a verb, but a conjunction.18 For, just as ‘and’ signiﬁes that the names between which it is placed are names of different things, so the conjunction ‘is’ signiﬁes that the names between which it is placed are names of the same thing. Thus, the Hebrews could have neither those names that are derived from the copula ‘is,’ like essence, entity, being, etc.,

15 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 25:31 ff.) 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

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A. Memini quidem ab apostolo idola vocari nihil, non autem daemonia sic 5 vocari. B. Putasne ea simulacra aurea, eburnea, lignea, an non potius daemonia, quae 6 sub illis colebantur, vocata esse nihil? Praeterea, idolum proprie est phantasma, nimirum idea, imago rei, non res ipsa; ad quas ideas simulacra sua faciebant Graeci. Nam Deorum suorum ideas sive imagines raro sumpserunt a simulacris. Distinguitur etiam Deus per vocem illam ens, a nominibus. Aliud enim est res homo, aliud nomen homo. Praeterea sciendum est, quod vox est, ut usurpatur a Latinis et Graecis ad copulam in propositionibus, Hebraeis omnino ignota erat. Itaque utebantur semper verbo substantivo, et vice copulae in omni afﬁrmatione ad signiﬁcandam quam dialectici vocant praedicationem, nomen nomini solummodo adjungebant. Latinis autem et Graecis copula est non est verbum, sed conjunctio; et ut et signiﬁcat nomina, inter quae interponitur, esse nomina diversarum rerum, ita conjunctio est signiﬁcat nomina, inter quae interponitur, esse nomina rei ejusdem. Itaque ea nomina, quae a copula est derivantur, ut essentia,

from Philo and the Stoics were ‘seminal reasons’ (λγοι σπερµατικο ; 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. 31 ff. 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. 16 That is, it was the ideas that the Greeks had about their gods that led them in fashioning images of them, not generally the reverse. Thus, Greek statues represent an attempt to give plastic form to the conceptions they had, as, by giving statues of Hermes winged feet, they sought a plastic means of illustrating their conception of the speed of the gods’ messenger. 17 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. 18 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. 141 ff., 151, 186–187 and 228.

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nor their equivalents. In Latin, one says, ‘The land was empty’; in Hebrew, ‘the existing land empty.’19 The speaker of Latin does not hear a ‘was’ in the Hebrew sentence but only ‘something existing.’20 [God the Father, §§ 7–8] 7 A. What must one believe as to this word ‘creator’? Is it that this world was

made from nothing? 8 B. Clearly so, from nothing; not as in Aristotle,21 from pre-existing matter.22

For, it is expressly said in the Holy Scriptures that all things were made from nothing. Even Aristotle, who says the world is eternal,23 contradicts himself, for one speaks of material only as that out of which something is made.24 Thus, the creed says this, that God is the maker of all things out of nothing, and that, in consequence, He has it by His own power to exist and not from any other entity; hence, also that He exists from eternity and, inasmuch as there was no one who bestowed His existence upon Him, so shall there be nothing which will cause Him not to exist. God is thus from everlasting to everlasting.25 But, whatsoever things are created are not from everlasting, precisely because they are created. They shall be to everlasting, however, in such form and kind as God wills. For, the heaven and the earth shall be made anew, and, though the world will burn,26 still it will not be brought to naught: those things that are real will endure. But, God, who was made neither by anyone nor by Himself, cannot be changed or suffer alteration, neither from Himself nor from any other. To the contrary, He is changeless and utterly self-consistent, devoid of Aristotelian

19 Hobbes may be referring to Genesis 1:2, where the world is described as without form and void. 20 The point is that the speaker of Latin recognizes the convention of using a word, a copula, to indicate predication; he or she fails to recognize predication in the formula used by the speaker of Hebrew, who signals such intentions in a different way. Hobbes draws attention to this linguistic fact to support the view that predication need not be shown through a copula. 21 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

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entitas, esse, Hebraei habere non potuerunt, nec illis aequivalentia. Latine dicitur, terra erat vacua; Hebraice, terra existens vacua, ubi ab homine Latino non audiebatur erat, sed (erat) aliquid existens. A. Quid credendum est per vocem hanc, creator? Anne mundum hunc a nihilo 7 factum esse? B. Certe ex nihilo; non ut Aristoteles, ex materia praeexistente. Expresse enim 8 dictum est in Scripturis Sacris, omnia facta esse ex nihilo. Etiam Aristoteles, qui mundum dicit esse aeternum, sibimet ipsi contradict. Materia enim non dicitur, nisi de qua aliquid factum est. Symbolum ergo hoc dicit, Deum factorem esse omnium rerum ex nihilo; et, quod sequitur, sua vi habet ut existat, non ab alio; et proinde etiam existit ab aeterno; et quia non fuit qui Deo dedit ut existeret, nihil etiam erit quod ipsum faciet non existere. Est ergo Deus ab aeterno et in aeternum. Quae vero creata sunt, non sunt ab aeterno, quia creata; in aeternum autem erunt, qua forma et specie vult Deus; nam coelum et terra renovabuntur, et quanquam mundus conﬂagrabit, non tamen annihilabitur, sed permanebunt entia realia. Deus autem qui neque ab alio neque a se factus est, non potest mutari neque metamorphosin pati, neque a se neque ab alio; sed

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. 22 Hobbes’s word, materia, is that out of which something is made. 23 Aristotle argues against the creation of the world, as in De Caelo 279b12 ff., 301b31; for him, matter is ungenerated, eternal. 24 Hobbes may be referring to Aristotle’s discussion of prima materia, matter utterly without form, as in the Metaphysics. In De Corpore, Hobbes explains that, while such a conception is possible as a designation of matter in general, apart from its accidents, nothing of the sort exists or is in any way real. 25 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. 26 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.

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composition.27 All these attributes, simple, immutable, and eternal, as they are deduced from the words of the creed, so are they also explicitly predicated of God in the Holy Scriptures. [God the Son, §§ 9–35] 9 A. And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, only-begotten Son of God.

Why was it necessary to say ‘only-begotten’? 10 B. Because there were heretics in that time who taught that Christ was not

the begotten Son of God, but His adoptive son. And, there were others who taught that Christ was called the Son of God in the Sacred Scriptures in a sense different from that applied to all the faithful,28 even though He is said expressly throughout the Sacred Scriptures to be both begotten and God, born of His Father before all ages. Wherefore, one must also believe that Christ is God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made. 11 A. What is the difference between ‘begotten’ and ‘made’? 12 B. In saying ‘made,’ we understand something made by God out of nothing, that

is, a creature. For, although living creatures may be said to be both created and begotten, when we say they are created, this is understood in relation to God the Creator, who created the ﬁrst male and female in every species out of the earth which He had created. But, when we say a living creature is begotten in the natural way, this should be understood in relation to the ﬁrst things that were created, as to its material. But, when Christ is said to be begotten, this means begotten of God the Father Himself out of the matter of the Virgin.29 13 A. What is ‘Light of Light’? For, it seems to me that light is an appearance,

not something that exists. For example, interpose a glass between your eye and a candle. If the surface of the glass is composed of many planes arranged in a certain way, many candles will appear to you.30 Still, we know that there is only one true candle there and thus that all the others are merely empty apparitions, idols, that is, as St. Paul says, nothing. And, it is not that any one of those candles

27 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 σ ντερος (synteros), which designates material objects composed of λη (hyle; matter) and εδος (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

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est immutabilis, (sine mixtione illa Aristotelica) simplicissimus. Quae omnia attributa, simplex, immutabilis, aeternus, sicut ex verbis symboli deduncuntur, ita de Deo in Scripturis Sacris expressis verbis praedicantur. A. ‘Et in unum Dominum Jesum Christum, Filium Dei unigenitum.’ Cur necesse 9 erat dicere unigenitum. B. Quia erant eo tempore haeretici, qui docebant Christum non esse Filium Dei 10 genitum, sed adoptivum; alii etiam erant, qui docebant Christum alio sensu in Scripturis Sacris vocari Filium Dei, quam quo ﬁdeles omnes ita appellantur: cum tamen in Scripturis Sacris expresse et passim dicitur tum genitus, tum Deus a Patre natus ante omnia secula; et propterea credi debet Christum esse Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine, verum Deum de vero Deo, genitum non factum. A. Quaenam est differentia inter genitum et factum?

11

B. Per factum intelligimus factum a Deo ex nihilo, id est, creaturam. Quanquam 12 enim animalia dicantur et creata et genita; quando dicuntur creata, intelligitur illud cum relatione ad Deum creatorem, qui in omni genere primum marem et foeminam creavit ex creata terra. Sed quando dicitur animal esse genitum naturali modo, intelligi debet cum relatione ad prima creata, ut materiam; at quando dicitur Christum esse genitum, intelligitur genitum ab ipso Deo Patre de materia virginis. A. Quid est ‘Lumen de Lumine?’ Lumen enim, ut mihi videtur, phantasma est, 13 non res existens. Exempli causa; si inter oculum et candelam vitrum statuas, cujus superﬁcies ex multis planis constat certo modo dispositis, multae tibi videbuntur candelae. Scimus tamen unicam ibi esse veram candelam, et proinde caeteras omnes mera esse phantasmata, idola, hoc est, ut dicit S. Paulus, nihil. Neque

he draws between God discovered by reason as ﬁrst cause and God revealed to faith as person, see within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’ 28 Hobbes refers here ﬁrst to the adoptionists, who denied that Christ was God from all eternity and believed instead that, due to an exemplary life, Christ had been adopted by God as His son. Hobbes propounds the orthodox view that Christ existed pre-temporally as God before He appeared on earth and was already the Son of God prior to His birth. In the Historical Narration Concerning Heresy, Hobbes talks of those who taught that Christ was a mere phantasm; that may be his point in this second reference. 29 This discussion preﬁgures Hobbes’s analysis of πστασις (hypostasis) later, §§ 64 ff., in that the position of the Son in relation to the Father was a key aspect of the Arian heresy. 30 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.

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is truer than the rest as regards their appearance; the true candle, the one placed there in the beginning, is simply none of the candles that appear. It is the thing itself, the cause of all those other images (imagines). For this reason, Aristotle distinguished it from the apparition by means of the word hypostasis, as though the thing itself ‘stood under’ the image, lurking. The Latins translated this Greek word literally as ‘substance.’ Thus, both Greeks and Latins distinguish the true thing, standing on its own, from the phantasm, which seems to stand on its own but does not and is not a thing. Is this not the true distinction between the thing itself and its appearance?31 14 B. Yes, it is. But, the Fathers of the Church in those times, both before and after

the Council of Nicaea, seem in their writings to take the word hypostasis in another manner, in their desire to make the mystery of the Trinity intelligible to all Christians. And, they thought this could best be done by means of a comparison to ﬁre, light and heat. Believing these three things to be the same thing, they referred the ﬁre to the Father, the light to the Son and the heat to the Holy Spirit.32 This comparison would perhaps be to the point except for the fact that neither ﬁre nor the brightness of light nor heat are substances; nor did they seem so to the Fathers themselves, especially to the Aristotelians among them, unless ﬁre is perhaps taken to mean the thing being burned. For, man extinguishes ﬁre and light and heat as often as he pleases. But, as weak an agent as man is, we are not required, nor is it credible, to believe that he could extinguish a true, substantial creature, created by God Omnipotent, and reduce it to nothing. Thus, as often as the Fathers themselves drew that comparison in their writings, they immediately added that it should not be accepted as though it were an ideal exposition of that great mystery, but that they could ﬁnd none better than it.33 For, they all agreed on this point, namely, that the nature of God, of the Trinity and of the angels and, as Athanasius added, of the rational soul,34 were incomprehensible.35

31 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. 32 See, for example, Quaestiones aliae, in Migne, Graeca Patrologia, vol. 28, question IV, col. 780, now held a doubtful work of Athanasius. 33 Hobbes stresses the inadequacy of attempts to explain the Trinity on the basis of the sola scriptura principle. His own approach differs from that of those whom he criticizes evidently on the basis of its focus on the speciﬁc terms used in the theological tradition, persona and

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tamen earum una verior est candela, quam reliquiae, quatenus apparent; sed vera candela, quae principio posita erat, candelarum apparentium tantum nulla est, sed res ipsa, eademque causa illarum omnium imaginum, et propterea ab Aristotele distinguitur a phantasmate per vocem hypostasis, quasi sub imagine staret res ipsa latitans; quam Graecam vocem Latini ad syllabam verterunt substantiam. Et sic distinguunt tum Graeci tum Latini rem veram in se subsistentem, a phantasmate, quae videtur subsistere, nec substitit, neque est ens. Nonne haec est vera distinctio inter rem ipsam et suam apparentiam? B. Ita est. Sed Patres ecclesiae illis temporibus, tum ante tum post Concilium 14 Nicenum, in scriptis suis vocem hypostasis videntur alio modo interpretari, mysterium Trinitatis Christianis omnibus intelligible reddere cupientes; et illud optime ﬁeri posse existimabant per similitudinem ignis, luminis, et caloris, quae tria unum esse putaverunt, et ignem quidem ad Patrem, lumen ad Filium, et calorem at Spiritum Sanctum retulerunt. In qua similitudine congruitas esset fortasse accurata, nisi quod ignis splendor et calor substantiae nec sint, nec ipsis Patribus esse visae sint, praesertim Aristotelicis, nisi forte ipse ignis ponatur pro ignito. Homo enim et ignem, et lumen, et calorem extinguit quoties libet; sed ut agens tam inﬁrmus quam est homo, creaturam veram substantialem a Deo omnipotente creatam extinguere possit, et in nihilum redigere, nec jubemur credere, nec credibile est. Itaque quoties comparationem illam adducebant in scriptis propriis, Patres ipsi adjecerunt continuo, non eam ita accipiendam, quasi esset mysterii tanti idonea explicatio; sed ut qua nullam potuere invenire meliorem; omnes enim in eo consenserunt, incomprehensibilem esse naturam Dei, et Trinitatis, et angelorum, et (ut addit Athanasius) animae rationalis.

πρσωπον, as evidence of the writers’ intentions; that is, his interest is philological, not philosophical. Because he ﬁnds the doctrine in the scriptures, he regards the doctrine of the Trinity itself as a revealed truth, worthy of reverence and careful explication. In this way, he can claim that his investigation into the Trinity is not a work of empty speculation. See, for example, § 90. And, in offering and defending a scripturally-based explication of the doctrine, he seeks to avoid depriving the Trinitarian symbol of intelligibility. On this point, see within, ‘Hobbes and the Economic Trinity,’ and below, §§ 178 ff. and nn. 34 On this point, Curley refers to Athanasius’ Quaestiones aliae, Migne, Patrologia Graeca vol. 28, coll. 597–600. 35 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.

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15 A. Indeed, to me it was wrong for them to have sought to explain that mystery at

all. For what is it to explain a mystery if not to destroy it or make a non-mystery of it? For faith, changed into knowledge, dies, leaving only hope and charity.36 16 B. This phrase ‘Light of Light’ is therefore placed in the creed only as an aid to

the faith which must be accorded its other articles.37 17 A. There follows then that great article, which brought so many disorders into

the ancient church, so many banishments and killings: of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made. 18 B. And, utterly true it is, made manifest in St. John’s clear words: ‘In the

beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,’38 and ‘All things were made through it.’39 19 A. What did the Fathers understand by ‘Word?’ 20 B. The natural Son of God, or Him begotten of God, from the beginning, that

is, from everlasting.40 21 A. But, in that passage, does not word mean something vocal, that is, a sound

uttered by God? 22 B. Absolutely not! The Fathers repeatedly deny that. 23 A. What does it mean then? that it was an internal voice, like the eternal decree

of God for the establishment of the world and the redemption of man?41

36 The reference here is to St. Paul’s discussion of faith, hope and love in 1 Corinthians 13:13. Hobbes made the same point in De Homine, chap. 14, where he stated that ‘questions about the nature of God are all too curious and are not to be counted among the works of piety.’ He adds that faith would be done away with by untimely knowledge, possibly a reference to knowledge of things lying outside of time or knowledge sought prematurely, prior to one’s death and resurrection. 37 Hobbes’s insistence that this expression is metaphoric and heuristic would seem to be prompted by his aversion to the metaphysics of light. Among Christians, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria prepared the way for Augustine’s elaborate and profound combination of Platonic and Plotinian elements in describing Christ as divine light. Hobbes’s science and his own study of light effects evidently led him to view such theological discussion as based not on scripture but on mere appearance and thus neither natural religion nor revealed doctrine.

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A. Mihi quidem non recte videntur voluisse mysterium illud explicare. Quid enim 15 aliud est mysterium quam destruere, sive ex mysterio facere non mysterium? Fides enim, conversa in scientiam, interit, manentibus sola spe et charitate. B. Lumen ergo de lumine in symbolo ponitur tantum pro adjutorio ﬁdei caeteris 16 articulis adhibendae. A. Sequitur deinceps articulus ille magnus, qui in ecclesiam antiquam tot turbas 17 intulit, exilia et homicidia, consubstantialem Patri, per quem omnia facta sunt. B. Et quidem verissimus est, verbis apertis declaratus a S. Johanne I:1: In 18 principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Verbum erat Deus. Et (vers. 3): Omnia per ipsum facta sunt. A. Quid intellexerunt Patres per Verbum?

19

B. Filium Dei naturalem, sive genitum a Deo, a principio, id est, ab aeterno.

20

A. Numquid eo loco Verbum signiﬁcat vocem aliquam, ut sonum a Deo prola- 21 tum? B. Absit. Patres id passim negant.

22

A. Quid ergo? Vocem internam, quale est Dei decretum aeternum de condendo 23 mundo et redimento hominem?

38

John 1:1. John 1:3. 40 A reference to the anti-Arian notion of the eternal generation of the Son. 41 The notion that the word was a sound uttered by God, either to Himself or out loud, would involve an anthropomorphism and entail a derogation from the nature of God, in whom to think and to accomplish are the same thing; no sound, prompted by some mental operation, is necessary to effectuate the divine will. 39

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24 B. I do not know what the Fathers felt in this matter. But, I doubt they thought

that, lest they approach too near the doctrine of the Stoics, whose εµαρµνη (heimarmene)42 in Greek and fatum43 in Latin mean the same as eternal decree.44 25 A. Then, as I said, what do the Fathers mean by ‘word?’ 26 B. I do not know, except that, in sacred language, word is often to be taken for

the very thing which was decreed or promised. For, often in the Old Testament, in place of ‘what God promised was done,’ we read ‘the word of God which He spoke was done.’45 Now, it is not my habit to expound the Holy Scripture to anyone but myself. But, if the passage in St. John’s Gospel is to be understood in this way, then I prefer to ask no further question concerning the mystery of the Incarnation. For, if the word in that place is the very thing which God had ordained to come into the world for our redemption and had promised in paradise, then it is no mere word, but a true thing and one with Christ. But, how He was made man is not mine to inquire after. It is sufﬁcient for me that He has become my Redeemer. And, what then? If I believe that He created the earth and all other things from nothing and man from the dust of the ground, shall I not also believe that He was able to take on human nature, except I know how?46 27 A. Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; was cruciﬁed also for us under Pontius Pilate; died and was buried.

There are two difﬁculties here: the ﬁrst is that we are told from what place He descended, namely, from heaven; but it does not say to what place He descended. I know the Apostles’ Creed states that He descended ‘to those below.’ But, those words do not designate a place; in respect to those living in heaven, we men ourselves are properly said to be ‘those below.’47 42 Εµαρµνη (heimarmene) is the nominalized form of the perfect passive participle of µε ροµαι (meiromai), meaning, to receive as one’s due or portion, like the German Teil. The form to which Hobbes refers means ‘that which has been allotted,’ namely, one’s fate, with that term’s starkly necessitarian implications. 43 Fatum from [for [ ], fari, fatus, to say. 44 A theological 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

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B. Nescio de hac re quid senserint Patres; sed puto illos aliter sensisse, ne nimium 24 accederunt ad doctrinam Stoicorum, quorum, apud Graecos, εµαρµνη, et, apud Latinos, fatum, idem signiﬁcat quod decretum aeternum. A. Quid ergo inquam intelligitur per Verbum apud Patres?

25

B. Nescio, nisi quod in lingua sacra Verbum saepe accipiatur pro ipsa re quae 26 decreta est, vel promissa. Legitur enim saepe in Veteri Testamento pro factum est quod Deus promisit, factum est verbum Dei quod locutus est. Ego vero nemini Scripturam Sacram praeterquam mihi interpretari soleo. Veruntamen si locus S. Johannis ita intelligendus sit, nihil circa mysterium incarnationis quaerere amplius vellem. Nam si Verbum hoc loco sit illud ipsum, quod decreverat Deus venturum in mundum ad nostram redemptionem, et quod promiserat Deus in paradiso, Verbum illud non est mera vox, sed vera res, eadem cum Christo. Quomodo autem factus homo est, inquirere non est meum. Sufﬁcit mihi quod Redemptor meus factus est. Quid enim? Si credam creasse terram et caetera omnia ex nihilo, et hominem ex terra, non credam potuisse naturam assumere humanam, nisi sciam quo modo? A. ‘Qui propter nos homines et nostram salutem descendit de coelo; et incarnatus 27 est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virginis; et homo factus est; cruciﬁxus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato; passus et sepultus est.’ Duae hic sunt difﬁcultates, quarum prima est, quod dictum sit unde descendit, nempe de coelo; non autem dictum est quousque descendit. Scio in symbolo apostolorum esse descendit ad inferos. Sed verba illa locum non deﬁniunt; quia homines etiam respectu

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, §§ 204 ff. See also Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 175 ff. 45 See, for example, Isaiah 55:10–13, and Psalms 33:4–9. See also the Introduction. 46 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. 47 Hobbes’s point is that the Latin expression ad inferos could with equal justice mean that Christ descended to men living on earth as to the shades in hell.

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Also, the Scriptures give various names to the place where the enemies of the church are said to be going: sometimes, to Gehenna; at others, to the darkness outside, that is, to somewhere outside the church of God, given that the light of the church was in Goshen because one of the plagues sent upon the Egyptians was darkness. Scripture also speaks both of a lake of ﬁre, I think with reference to the punishment of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, and also of a lake of pitch.48 But, to my knowledge, the church has not yet decided as to these matters. Some doctors, with Bellarmine, have set the place of the damned near the center of the earth, so that it might be at a great distance from the heaven of the blessed.49 In this they may be hearkening to the term from the Greek language, employed by St. Peter, namely, ταρταρ ζοµενος (tartarizomenos), one to be cast into Tartarus.50 And, of course, heaven is farther from the center of the earth than it is from the surface of the earth, taken at any one point. But, I do not think the apostles believed the gentile poets as to the location of Tartarus. For, Hesiod reckoned it as far from the earth as the earth is from heaven; he says that, after descending from heaven for nine straight days and as many nights, an anvil will reach the earth on the tenth day; then, falling from the earth for nine straight days and as many nights, it will reach Tartarus on the tenth day.51 Virgil, on the other hand, puts the distance from earth to Tartarus as twice that from heaven to earth.52 My own view is that the word was employed by the Apostle Peter in a ﬁgurative sense, a common practice with many expressions in Sacred Scripture. 28 B. However that may be, the church in assembly has determined nothing in

regard to the place of the damned. At least, our church has not.

48 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. 49 Bellarmine says as much in his Disputationes, De Christo, bk 4, chap. 10, and in De Gemitu Columbae, bk 2, chap. 2. 50 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

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coelicolarum proprie dicuntur inferi. Etiam in Scripturis, locus ubi hostes ecclesiae dicuntur futuri, varie vocatur; quandoque Gehenna, aliquando tenebrae externae, id est, extra ecclesiam Dei, propter lucem ecclesiae in Goshen, quia una de plagis Aegyptiorum erat tenebrae; aliquando lacus ignis, cum respectu, puto, ad poenam Sodomitarum et Gomorrhaeorum, et lacum bituminis. Sed de his nondum, quod sciam, quicquam ecclesia deﬁnivit. Doctores aliqui locum damnatorum statuerunt cum Bellarmino esse circa centrum terrae, ut, scilicet, longissime distaret a coelo beatorum; respicientes forte ad vocem S. Petri (2 Epist. ii.4) Graecam, ταρταρ ζοµενος. Et quidem coelum distat a centro terrae longius quam a superﬁcie terrae, quantum est totum punctum. Sed non credo credidisse apostolos poetis ethnicis de loco Tartari; quem Hesiodus tantundem a terra distare facit, quantum terra a coelo. Incus, inquit (Theog. 722–725) novem dies et totidem noctes perpetuo de coelo cadens decimo die attinget terram; totidem autem noctes et dies perpetuos e terra cadens perveniet ad Tartarum die decimo. Virgilius autem (Aen. vi. 577–579) distantiam a terra ad Tartarum bis tantam facit, quanta est a coelo ad terram. Caeterum vocem illam ab apostolo Petro positam esse puto ﬁgurate, quod solet ﬁeri de multis dictionibus Scripturae Sacrae. B. Utcunque id sit, de loco damnatorum nihil ab ecclesia congregata, saltem a 28 nostra, hactenus deﬁnitum est.

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. 51 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. 52 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.

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29 A. The second difﬁculty concerns the saying, ‘He was incarnate by the Holy

Spirit.’ For the angel sent to Joseph in Matthew, 1:20, says, ‘What is born in her is of the Holy Spirit.’ This sounds as though the Holy Spirit were the progenitor of the Son, that is, His Father.53 30 B. What? Is not the Spirit of God also God and the same God with the Son and

the Father? 31 A. How then are the hypostases to be distinguished? 32 B. Neither the Creed nor the Sacred Scripture distinguishes or names three

hypostases. 33 A. But, the three hypostases are found in the Athanasian Creed, which is part

of the Anglican liturgy.54 34 B. In Greek, the word is hypostasis, but in Latin it is persona and in English,

person. 35 A. Allow me to question you as to these words hypostasis, person, substance55

and numerous others in addition, but only after you have explained the rest of the creed.56 And He rose again on the third day, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God; and He shall come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.

I acknowledge that all of these things are in the Scriptures and in the same sense as in the creed. I do not understand the phrase And is seated at the right hand of God as indicating a comparison of honor but as rendering the highest honor.57

53 The difﬁculty here is that the Holy Spirit seems to be given a role putatively reserved to God the Father, namely, that of paternity. Hobbes will show that Interlocutor A would be misled in thinking that division of roles equates with division of being within the Trinity; see § 82. He engages in linguistic analysis in the sections that follow to show that A’s error stems from a confusion over the use of the Greek word πστασις (hypostasis) as contrasted with that of the Latin word persona. See below, §§ 64 ff. and within, ‘Hobbes and the Economic Trinity.’ 54 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

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A. Secunda difﬁcultas est, de eo quod dicitur ‘Incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto.’ 29 Nam dicit angelus ad Josephum, (Matth. i.20): Quod in illa genitum est, a Spiritu Sancto est. Quod ita sonat, ac si Spiritus Sanctus esset Filii genitor, id est, Pater. B. Quid? Nonne Spiritus Dei est Deus, et idem Deus cum Filio et Patre?

30

A. Quomodo ergo distinguuntur hypostases?

31

B. Neque in symbolo, neque in Scriptura Sacra distinguuntur aut nominantur 32 tres hypostases. A. Sed inveniuntur tres hypostases in symbolo Athanasii, quae pars est Liturgiae 33 Anglicanae. B. In Graeco quidem hypostasis, in Latino autem et Anglicano persona est.

34

A. De vocibus hypostasis, persona, subsistentia, aliisque multis vocibus, tunc 35 interrogabo te cum symbolum totum explicaveris. ‘Et resurrexit tertia die, secundum Scripturas, et ascendit in coelum, ubi sedet ad dextram Dei. Et iterum venturus est cum gloria judicare vivos et mortuos, cujus regni non est ﬁnis.’ Haec omnia, fateor, in Scripturis sunt, et quidem eodem sensu quo sunt in symbolo. ‘Ubi sedet ad dextram Dei,’ non intelligo ut de comparatione honoris, sed ut

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. 55 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). 56 This discussion resumes below, §§ 64–104. 57 Hobbes may be thinking here of John 14:28, ‘My Father is greater than I,’ a text presenting some difﬁculty for those who would treat the persons of the Trinity as co-equal. The point is that only the substantial equality of Christ and the Spirit with the Father is compatible with monotheism. This may explain why, in chapter 42 of Leviathan, he found an historical instantiation, namely, Moses, to represent the Father, just as Christ and the church represent the Son and the Spirit respectively. See within ‘Hobbes and the Economic Trinity.’

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Appendix to Leviathan [God the Spirit, §§ 35–39]

As for the phrase And in the Holy Spirit, Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son: show me from the Holy Scriptures that the Holy Spirit is the Lord and Giver of life, that is, that He is God, and that He proceeds also from the Son.58 36 B. First, the Son of God Himself is said to be born of the Spirit of God (Matthew

1:20). Second, Job says (Job 33:4): ‘The Spirit of God made me;’ and at 26:13: ‘The Spirit of God created the heavens.’ Now, as to whether the Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as from the Father, this is manifest in what Christ says: ‘I will send you the Paraclete;’59 and in what He said when He breathed upon the apostles: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’60 Note that this expression ‘from the Son,’ although present in the Athanasian Creed, is not in the Nicene Creed, having been added, as Bellarmine thinks, at the second general Council of Constantinople.61 37 A. Who, together with the Father and the Son, is worshipped and gloriﬁed, who

spoke by the prophets. Why is this ‘… together… gloriﬁed…’ placed here? 38 B. I do not know, but, because it is there, I am inclined to believe that the formula

for glorifying the Trinity,62 in which we say or sing praise to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, had been received in the churches of God either in the time of the creed or before it.63 [the church, the resurrection, the soul, §§ 39–56] 39 A. Perhaps.

And in one holy, catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. I look to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Why does the Apostles’ Creed lack the phrase ‘one baptism’? 40 B. Some seventy years prior to the Nicene Council, Saint Cyprian had held a

provincial council in North Africa, where it was decreed that heretics should not be received back by the church unless they be baptized again. I think this decretal was being condemned when the words ‘I acknowledge one baptism’ were inserted.64

58 59

This refers to the famous ‘‘ﬁlioque’ debate. John 15:26.

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de honore maximo. ‘Et in Spiritum Sanctum Dominum et viviﬁcatorem, qui ex Patre Filioque procedit.’ Ostende ex Scripturis Sacris, Spiritum Sanctum esse Dominum et viviﬁcatorem, id est, Deum, et quod procedat etiam a Filio. B. Primo, idem Filius Dei dicitur genitus a Spiritu Dei (Matth. i.20). Deinde 36 dicit Job (xxxiii.4): Spiritus Dei fecit me; et (xxvi.13): Spiritus Dei creavit coelos. Quod autem procedat a Filio, quam a Patre, manifestum est ex eo, quod Christus dicit (Joh. xv.26) ego vobis mittam Paracletum, et ex eo quod, cum spiraret in apostolos, dixit (Joh. xx. 22,25) accipite Spiritum Sanctum. Nota illud, ex Filio, non esse in symbolo Niceno, quanquam sunt in symbolo Athanasii, sed addita esse, ut putat Bellarminus, in Concilio Constantinopolitano generali secundo. A. ‘Qui cum Patre et Filio simul adoratur et congloriﬁcatur, qui locutus est per 37 prophetas.’ Quare positum est illud congloriﬁcatur? B. Nescio, sed propter hoc verbum, congloriﬁcatur, adducor ad credendum 38 formulam gloriﬁcandi Trinitatem, ubi dicitur vel cantatur Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto, in ecclesiis Dei receptam fuisse aut in tempore illo aut ante. A. Fortasse. ‘Et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam. Conﬁteor 39 unum baptisma in remissionem peccatorum. Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi seculi.’ Cur in symbolo apostolico deest illud unum baptisma? B. Sanctus Cyprianus, circiter septuaginta annis ante Concilium Nicenum, Conci- 40 lium tenuerat provinciale in Africa Carthaginense, ubi decretum est haereticos non debere recipi ab ecclesia, nisi iterum baptizarentur; quod decretum puto tunc condemnatum esse, cum inserta essent illa verba conﬁteor unum baptisma.

60

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. 62 The Gloria Patri. 63 Hobbes’s point is that the creed reﬂected the liturgical usages of churches at or before the time of its adoption; that is, they did not derive the practices from a reading of the creed. Perhaps, this was because they thought the creed expressed the faith; it did not establish it. 64 Hobbes’s phrasing may obscure the point that the problem was whether the baptism conferred upon the converted heretics by heretics had been valid, not whether they were in need of a second baptism. 61

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41 A. In the Apostles’ Creed, it reads ‘the resurrection of the ﬂesh,’ not the

‘resurrection of the dead.’ What is the difference? When they rise, will the dead have ﬂesh, bones, blood, hands, feet and the other parts of the human body? 42 B. Let St. Paul answer you, 1 Corinthians 15:23: ‘They shall rise and each one in

his own body.’65 Then, at verse 44: ‘A ﬂeshly body is sown,’ that is, in my opinion, the human body when it is dead; ‘there shall arise a spiritual body.’ And so it is changed, as we read at verse 51: Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.66 43 A. But, two difﬁculties are apparent to me here: ﬁrst, since to rise is to live again,

how shall a man in the grave live again unless his soul is added to his body? Will the soul descend from heaven or from some limbo in heaven; will it ascend from hell or purgatory?67 44 B. What? Will God, who made man into a living being from the dust of the

ground, be unable to bring the same back to life when he has returned to dust? 45 A. Then, it seems to follow that man will have two rational souls after the

resurrection: one, by which he rises, and another, separated at death from the body, which has migrated to heaven or to limbo or to purgatory or to hell. For, all men say that the human soul never dies when once created; that is, that, as a self-subsistent entity, it does not cease to exist, not even for the least instant. 46 B. I shall tell you nothing at all on this point apart from that which I ﬁnd

expressly stated, without the least ambiguity, in the Scriptures, and that is not openly contradicted by some other text.68

65 The passage in the Authorized Version reads, ‘But, every man in his own order,’ as the rendering of the Greek $ν τ" δι4ω τ'γµατι (en to idio tagmati) (Vulgate: in suo ordine). 66 Hobbes’s Latin is not that of the Vulgate, which is taken today as incorrect at this point in any case. I have followed the Authorized (‘King James’) Version here. 67 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).

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A. In symbolo apostolico non dicitur resurrectionem mortuorum; sed resurrec- 41 tio carnis? Quaenam est differentia? Habebuntne mortui, quando resurgent, carnem, ossa, sanguinem, manus, pedes, et caetera humani corporis membra? B. Respondeat tibi S. Paulus (1 Cor. xv.23): Resurgent unusquisque in proprio 42 corpore. Deinde (vers. 44), Seminatur corpus animale, id est, ut ego opinor, quale est corpus humanum quando est mortuum; resurget corpus spirituale. Itaque mutatur; ut vers. 51, 52, mysterium vobis dico. Non omnes quidem moriemur, omnes autem mutabimur in momento et ictu oculi, in tuba ultima. Sonabit enim tuba, et resurgent mortui incorruptibiles, et nos mutabimur. A. Sed mihi videntur hic duae difﬁcultates; altera, quia resurgere est reviviscere, 43 quomodo homo reviviscet in sepulchro, nisi anima ejus accedat ad corpus; nimirum, de coelo vel aliquo coeli limbo descendens, vel ab inferno vel purgatorio ascendens? B. Quid? Deusne, qui fecit hominem ex terra in animal, vivens non poterit 44 eundem, resolutum in terram, ad vitam resuscitare? A. Videtur ergo homo post resurrectionem habiturus duas animas rationales, 45 nimirum, illam qua resurgit, alteram quae in morte a corpore separata, migravit in coelum, vel limbum, vel purgatorium, vel infernum. Dicunt enim omnes animam humanam nunquam interire postquam semel creata est, ne minimo quidem momento, ut rem in se subsistentem, desinere esse. B. Ego vero nihil super hac re tibi dicam, nisi quod reperio dictum diserte, et 46 sine omni ambiguitate in Scripturis, nulloque alio textu aperte contradicente.

68 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. 68 ff. 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.

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That the human soul cannot die is a belief which you and almost all other men take from the philosophers.69 I, for my part, have no desire to have them as my masters after the Holy Scriptures.70 Nonetheless, if you brought me some passage from the Scriptures in which some type of immortality is ascribed to the human soul other than that which is given men under the name of eternal life, then I too shall hold with the philosophers. But, if the passages you brought me were those in which God threatens sinful men with eternal torments, you would be unable to infer from these that their souls exist in the interim between their deaths and the day of judgment, but only after the day of judgment. Further, you derive the eternity of the torments themselves from the justice of God, who has threatened sinners with eternal torments. For even if he is unjust who does not render those goods which he ought, still he who does not render the evils or injuries which he might rightly render is, on the contrary, not unjust but merciful. Will God, who is inﬁnitely merciful, be less able to mitigate both the length and severity of the punishments which men merit without violating His own justice? Then also, the Scripture, in Revelation 20, says: ‘Hell itself will be thrown into the lake of ﬁre, which is the second death.’ The damned will thus rise it appears to a second death.71

69 Only Plato among Greek philosophers unquestionably taught the soul’s immortality. It is doubtful or at least uncertain on Aristotelian principles. Stoics before Posidonius admitted a limited survival, at least to the souls of the wise, but only until the succeeding cosmic conﬂagration ($κπ ρωσις; ekpyrosis). And, Epicurus and Lucretius explicitly denied it. Cf. Hebrews 1:1–3, and 2 Corinthians 4:4. 70 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. 71 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:

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Tu quidem una cum caeteris fere omnibus, quod anima humana interire non potest, habes a philosophis, quos ego post Scripturas Sacras magistros mihi non desidero. Veruntamen, si locum aliquem mihi attuleris ex Scripturis Sacris, ubi, alia attribuitur animae humanae immortalitatis praeter illam quae hominibus sub nomine aeternae vitae data est, ego etiam sentiam cum philosophis. Verum si attuleris loca illa, quibus comminatur Deus reprobis aeternos cruciatus, non inde poteris colligere animas eorum inter diem mortis et diem judicii, sed tantum post diem judicii extitisse. Praterea a justitia Dei, qui cruciatus aeternos peccatoribus comminatus est, arguere aeternitatem ipsorum cruciatuum non potes. Etsi enim qui bona quae debentur non praestat, injustus est, is tamen, qui mala vel damna debita non praestat, injustus non est, sed misericors. Quanto minus Deus, qui est inﬁnite misericors, non poterit sine justitiae suae violatione mitigare tum diuturnitatem tum acerbitatem meritarum poenarum? Deinde Scriptura dicit, (Apocal. xx.14): Ipsum infernum conjectum iri in lacum ignis, quae est secunda

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.

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Finally, if the soul is not the same thing as life but a substance existing of itself, distinct from the body, and the same as the essence or nature of man, it seems to follow that, if we add His divine nature, there are three natures in Christ, which is contrary to the faith. 47 A. Even if it could not be demonstrated from Scripture that the human soul is a

substance separate from the body, still it does not seem that the contrary can be so proven either.72 48 B. Let us see then what the coherent doctrine is in Scripture, both Old and New

Testaments, as to the nature of the human soul. For, as the preceding articles may be uppermost in the minds of the theologians, still this article concerning the resurrection to eternal life is uppermost among all Christians. For, in it do they repose all their hope, a foretaste of the joy to follow the miseries of the present life. God spoke to Adam in paradise, where there stood two trees, excelling all others, namely, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: ‘On that day when you shall eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in your death, you shall surely die.’73 But, the devil said to Eve: ‘You are prohibited from eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil lest you become as gods.’74 Then, both Adam and Eve, led by ambition, believed the serpent, disbelieved God and ate of the forbidden fruit. And so, God expelled both from paradise, lest they put their hand to the tree of life and live forever. 49 A. From this I understand that Adam could have lived forever by eating of the

fruit of the tree of life and that he was created for immortality, not of his own nature but solely by virtue of the tree of life. Further, I learn that the punishment inﬂicted upon Adam for violation of the divine command was mortality; this necessarily follows from the fact that, having lost the chance of immortality, he could not live forever. I see these things as clearly contained in the sacred text. But, I do not see why Adam did not die as soon as he had eaten, in accordance with the words of God’s warning, but instead went on to live nine hundred years longer. 50 B. God did not simply say, ‘You shall die,’ but, ‘In your death, you shall die;’ that

is, when you die, you will be dead: you will not rise again, but you will be dead forever. This is how Athanasius explains the passage and correctly so, for it is

72 Hobbes’s inclination is clearly to collapse the distinction of soul and life, so that death marks the total cessation of the given human personality in its entirety until the resurrection. But, if the distinction is to be maintained, he shows how his explanation of the general

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mors. Resurgent ergo reprobi, ut videtur, ad secundam mortem. Denique si anima non sit idem quod vita, sed substantia in se existens distincta a corpore, eademque hominis essentia sive natura, sequi videtur, addita natura divina, tres esse in Christo naturas, quod est contra ﬁdem. A. Etsi ex Scriptura demonstrari non possit animam humanam substantiam 47 esse separatam a corpore, non videtur tamen ex Scriptura demonstrari posse contrarium. B. Videamus ergo quid Scriptura dicit, tum in Veteri tum in Novo Testamento, 48 de natura animae humanae, harmonice. Ut enim articuli praecendentes praecipui sint apud theologos, articulus tamen hic de resurrectione ad vitam aeternam praecipuus est apud Christianos universos; quia in illo omnis eorum post praesentis vitae afﬂictiones collocatur spes, et praesumptum gaudium. Dixit Deus (Gen. ii.17) ad Adamum in Paradiso, ubi erant duae prae ceteris arbores excellentes, nempe arbor vitae, et arbor cognitionis boni et mali, quo die comederis de fructu arboris cognitionis boni et mali, moriendo morieris. Diabolus autem ad Evam dixit, (Gen. iii.5): ‘Prohibetur vobis ne comedatis de fructu arboris cognitionis boni et mali, ne ﬁatis sicut dii.’ Ambo autem Adamus et Eva ambitioni ducti, serpenti crediderunt, Deo non crediderunt, et de fructu vetito comederunt: itaque Deus utrumque a Paradiso expulit, ne manum ad arborem vitae extenderent, et viverent in aeternum. A. Intelligo hinc Adamum ex esu fructus arboris vitae vivere potuisse in aeter- 49 num, ac fuisse creatum, non sua natura, sed tantummodo virtute arboris vitae, immortalem: praeterea, poenam violati praecepti divini Adamo inﬂictam fuisse mortalitatem, quae necessario consequebatur ab eo quod illud perdiderit, sine quo vivere in aeternum non potuit. Haec manifesta inesse in sacro textu video. Sed non video, quare Adamus, secundum verba comminationis divinae, non statim ac comedisset mortuus sit, sed vixit plusquam nongentos annos. B. Deus non dixit simpliciter morieris, sed moriendo morieris, id est, cum morieris 50 morieris, id est, non revivisces, sed mortuus perpetuo eris. Sic explicat locum Athanasius, et recte; nam idioma est Hebraeorum. Ex quo intelligitur commina-

resurrection is nonetheless the most elegant and rational. Again, Hobbes is led by his reading of Scripture to replace the Greek philosophic categories, immortal spirit and corrupted matter, with more clearly Jewish or Judaeo-Christian ideas, viz., the unity of the human personality, human mortality and an emphasis upon human need for God’s work of salvation. 73 Genesis 2:17. 74 Genesis 3:5.

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an idiom of the Hebrews.75 From this we understand that God’s warning also extended to all the posterity of Adam, that is, to the human race. And, this is why St. Paul says, ‘Through the sin of one man, death entered the world.’76 From this, it follows that not only other men but Adam himself had need of beneﬁting from the gift of Jesus Christ’s death to gain the eternal life which he had lost through his own sin.77 51 A. Why is this so? 52 B. Because of what St. Paul says, in summary of the Old and New Testaments,

1 Corinthians 15:22–24: For, as in Adam, all died, so in Christ shall all be made alive, each one in his own body; ﬁrst, Christ, then all who are of Christ, in the coming of Christ. Then the end, etc…78 53 A. The coming of Christ will be on the same day as the Day of Judgment. No

one therefore will come back to life before the Day of Judgment but only on that very day. Thus, I think that Adam is surely to be saved; nonetheless, he will not receive his life before the last day.79 In the meantime, how shall one say that he is alive? If Adam, prior to receiving his soul, is alive in heaven in virtue of his soul, then his soul, at least if it is a living substance, will be alive without ensouling his body. This is a very hard saying. On the other hand, the souls of men living on

75 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. 76 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. 67 ff. Hobbes did however develop the Augustinian doctrine in the direction of the Reformation in stating, in chapter 31 of Leviathan, pp. 397 ff.,

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tionem illam pertinere etiam ad Adami posteritatem, id est, ad genus humanum. Atque hinc est quod dicit apostolus Paulus (Rom. v. 12), per peccatum unius hominis mors intravit in mundum; unde sequitur non modo caeteros homines, verum etiam Adamum ipsum necessitatem habuisse utendi beneﬁcio mortis Jesu Christi ad vitam aeternam, quam perdiderat sua culpa. A. Quid ita?

51

B. Quia dicit S. Paulus, (1 Cor. xv. 22–24), quae est harmonice Veteris et Novi 52 Testamenti; Sicut in Adamo omnes mortui sunt, ita in Christo omnes viviﬁcamur: unusquisque in proprio corpore: primitiae Christus: deinde illi qui sunt Christi, in adventu Christi. Deinde ﬁnis, etc. A. Adventus Christi erit idem cum die judicii. Nemo ergo reviviscet ante diem 53 judicii, sed in illo ipso die. Adamum ergo certe salvandum esse puto, nec tamen vitam recipiet ante diem ultimum. Interea quomodo dicetur vivere? Se per animam in coelo vivet Adamus antequam est animatus, anima ejus, si modo sit substantia vivens, vivet in non animato corpore, quod valde durum est dicere.

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. 52 ff. 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. 77 Adam ﬁgured in both the ‘harrowing of hell’ legends of the Middle Ages and in the so-called story of the cross. According to the latter, the tree that supplied the wood used at the cruciﬁxion grew from a shoot placed by Seth in Adam’s mouth at the time of his burial. Adam’s death and burial are portrayed in the cycle of frescoes of the Story of the Holy Cross painted in the Church of St. Francis at Arezzo by the early Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca. 78 On this text, see above, § 42. 79 This assertion runs counter to the belief that Christ led Adam and the other patriarchs out of hell in the harrowing of hell that followed his death, prior to the resurrection. The story is recounted in the apocryphal Acts of Pilate and the Gospel of Nicodemos, and Dürer included a woodcut of the scene in his 1512 series on the passion.

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the earth in the Day of Judgment will be raised to the clouds and thence up to heaven; these same souls will have spiritual bodies, themselves brought to life through spiritual souls, provided of course that souls are indeed substances, existing on their own. So what difference will there be then between these two spiritual entities, the body and the soul? 54 A. To me at least, the difference between them remains inexplicable unless one

concedes that eternal life does not begin for men earlier than the resurrection. And, we must also concede that life and soul are the same thing, for they are never explicitly contrasted in the Sacred Scriptures. And, consider those words of Christ on the cross to the robber: ‘Today you shall be with me in paradise’;80 and the other words to the disciples: ‘I am the tree of life’;81 what purpose do these words serve except that the faithful may know that the great ﬂaming sword has been removed from the gate of paradise and the way made plain, through the sacriﬁce of Christ, to the tree of life, that is, to life eternal? What need is there then for the faithful man to attribute his immortality to creation, that is to nature, rather than to redemption?82 55 B. But, I am greatly affected by the general opinion of all those, past and present,

even if ignorant of sacred doctrine, who believe that the rational soul is immortal of its own nature, once it has been created. 56 A. Least of all do I censure those who feel this way. For, surely he who has

such lofty thoughts about his own soul is most careful not to deﬁle it through baseness of life. Nonetheless, I do not concede that he is less careful in avoiding that result who steadfastly believes that his soul has been redeemed through the blood of Christ and made eternal. Nor must I concede to you that that belief is and has been generally entertained by all men. For those who have said in their hearts, ‘Let us eat and drink; tomorrow we die,’ surely have not held it, and they nonetheless are not few.83 Further, the beliefs of all those who follow the dictates of their masters without reasoning about them themselves are not properly their own. Farmers, craftsmen and others who are occupied with the concerns of everyday life are almost never in the habit of thinking about the nature of their soul but only about striving for riches and honors or about their bodily needs; these men should not be said to hold that view. And so, that general agreement of all men is reduced to an agreement among the philosophers only.

80

Luke 23:43. Hobbes has conﬂated a number of scriptural passages to arrive at this sentence. 82 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 81

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Animae autem hominum eorum, qui in die judicii in terra viventes, elevabuntur ad nubes et inde ad coelum, eaedem animae, corpora habebunt spiritualia, eademque animata animis, si quidem animae sint substantiae in se existentes, spiritualibus. Quaenam ergo erit differentia illa inter duo illa entia spiritualia, corpus et animam. B. Mihi quidem differentia illa inexplicabilis est, nisi concedatur vitam aeternam 54 hominibus non incipere nisi a resurrectione, et vitam et animam eandem esse rem, cum in Scripturis Sacris nusquam aperte distinguantur. Verba autem illa Christi in cruce ad latronem, (Luc. xxiii.43): Hodie mecum eris in paradiso; et illa ad discipulos; Ego sum arbor vitae; quorsum spectant, nisi ut sciant ﬁdeles amotum esse a porta paradisi gladium illum ﬂammantem, et per sacriﬁcium Christi patefactam viam esse ad arborem vitae, id est, ad vitam aeternam? Quid ergo opus est pio homini immortalitatem suam creationi, id est, naturae, potius quam redemptioni, attribuere? A. Sed commoveor consensu omnium, qui fuere et sunt, credentium, animam 55 rationalem immortalem esse sua natura, simul atque est creata, quamvis ignari doctrinae sacrae. B. Equidem illos, qui sic sentiunt, non vitupero. Nam qui praeclare sentit de 56 anima propria, cavet plerumque ne illam per vitae turpitudinem dedecoret. Caeterum non concedo, illum minus cavere idem, qui constanter credit animam suam redemptam esse per sanguinem Christi, et factam aeternam. Neque id concedendum tibi est, sententiam illam fuisse et esse omnium in universum hominum. Illi enim qui dixerunt in cordibus suis, ‘edamus, bibamus, cras moriemur,’ non ita sentiebant, qui tamen pauci non sunt. Praeterea sententiae eorum omnium, qui sine propria ratiocinatione sequuntur dictamina magistrorum, non sunt proprie suae. Non ergo ita sentire dici debent agricolae, artiﬁces, aliique homines qui circa vitam communem occupati, numquam fere de natura animae suae, sed de divitiis et honoribus comparandis, vel de necessitatibus suorum corporum cogitare solent. Itaque consensus ille omnium hominum reductus est ad consensum solorum philosophorum. Deinde, fuere inter philosophos Sadducaei, qui nullos omnino

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. 83 Cf. 1 Corinthians 15:32.

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Then too, among the philosophers, there were the Sadducees, who in no way believed that created spirits existed; accordingly, they did not recognize the existence of the soul, except as a name for life. Also, the followers of Aristotle and Plato believed in it solely upon the authority of their masters and not from lines of argument that were clear to them; these should not be counted as the authors of an opinion they profess. Thus, that number which you said included all men is reduced to Plato, Aristotle and the few other princes of philosophy. Finally, let us consider the words of Ecclesiastes, the third chapter, toward the end, in the polyglot, interlinear version:84 I said in my heart concerning the word of the sons of Adam, that God should test them and that they may see they are as the animal, that the end of the sons of Adam and of the animal is the same thing. As it dies, so he dies. There is also one spirit in all. And, the excellence of man before the animal is nothing, for all is vanity, with each one going to the same place. Each comes from dust, and each returns to dust. And, who is there that knows if the spirit of the sons of man ascends and that of the beast descends under the ground?85

Where this version has ‘… should test them…,’ the Septuagint has διακρ νει (diakrinei) and for ‘… concerning the word…,’ it has περ λαλε ας (peri laleias).86 Thus, the sense of the words is this: ‘Regarding that which men claim, namely, that God will make an essential difference between the life of man and the life of the brute, I have spoken; since the end of man and that of the brute are the same and since man does not excel the brute by his essence, how shall it be shown that the soul of man will ascend or that the soul of the brute will descend?’87 Yet, the same Preacher often attests to the judgment of the last day in that same book.88 This is a weighty argument against that consensus which you say all men have. Furthermore, lest I seem to you to be stubborn, advance an argument from Aristotle or Plato or any other philosopher whatever by which he reasons to the natural immortality of the soul from natural principles89 as clearly as I have 84 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. 41 ff. Hobbes’s Latin text lacks the sentence, ‘All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.’ 85 Ecclesiastes 18–22. Hobbes’s text is asyntactical, presumably because he relied on his contemporaries’ knowledge of these passages; I have ﬁlled in the gaps in the interest of clarity. This is the King James version:

18 I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. 19 For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. 20 All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. 21

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cred ebant esse spiritus creatos, et proinde animae existentiam, aliter quam ut appellatur vita, non agnoscebant. Etiam sectatores Aristotelis et Platonis, non perspectis rationibus, sed sola authoritate magistrorum id crediderunt; non sunt ergo numerandi tanquam authores opinionis quam proﬁtentur. Adeo ut quod dicis omnes homines, reducuntur ad Platonem, Aristotelem aliosque paucos philosophiae principes. Denique, consideremus verba Ecclesiastis, quae sunt in capite tertio, versus ﬁnem. In Bibliis Polyglossis versio interlinearis est, Dixi ego in corde meo super verbum ﬁliorum Adam (ad purgandos eos Deus, et ad videndum quod ipsi animal ipsi sibi) quia eventus ﬁliorum Adam, et eventus animalis, et eventus unus eis. Sicut mori istud, sic mori illum. Et spiritus unus omnibus. Et praestantia hominis prae animalia nulla, quia omnia vanitas. Omne vadens ad locum unum. Omne fuit ex pulvere et omne revertens ad pulverem. Quis sciens spiritus ﬁliorum hominum ascendens ipse sursum, et spiritus jumenti descendens ipse subtus terram? Ubi pro, ad purgandos eos, versio septuaginta virorum habet διακρινει (diakrinei), et pro super verbum, περι λαλ ας (peri lalias). Sensus ergo verborum est, ‘dixi ego de eo quod homines dicant, Deum facturum differentiam essentialem inter vitam hominis et bruti vitam, cum eventus hominis et bruti idem sit, neque homo per essentiam suam bruto praestat, quomodo probabitur animam hominis ascensuram, aut animam bruti descensuram esse.’ Sed idem Ecclesiastes judicium diei ultimi in eodem libro saepe asserit. Magnum hoc argumentum est contra consensum illum, quem dicis omnium hominum. Praeterea, ne obstinatus tibi videar, demonstrationem ex Aristotele, Platone profer, vel ex alio quocunque philosopho, qua naturalem animae immor-

Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth? 22 Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him? The 1668 text bears the unattested form λαλε ας (laleias), rather than the correct form, reported by Molesworth, λαλ ας (lalias), without notice of his apparent emendation; Tricaud notes that laleias is found in Walton’s edition of the Bible. It means ‘empty talk’ or ‘chatter.’ 87 Hobbes enters into this comparison to show that, whether or not the Latin manifests the author’s rejection of human claims for superiority over the animal, the Greek clearly does show such rejection. 88 That is, the author of Ecclesiastes says that the fate shared by man and animal is an effective cessation of life at death, one of the teachings of mortalism, together with man’s subsequent return to life through God’s power in the ﬁnal judgment. 89 The implied targets throughout this section of the Appendix seem to be arguments like those made by Plato in such texts as the Phaedo, the Meno, the Phraedrus and the Laws, that knowledge of the immortal forms, by which we know the world as beautiful, good, just and holy, is evidence of the immortality of the soul. As Plato says in the Phaedo (76B), ‘There can be no doubt that, if these absolute ideas existed before we were born, then our souls must have existed before we were born, and, if not the ideas, then not the souls.’ 86

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shown from the Sacred Scriptures that the future eternity of life for the elect has been acquired through Christ;90 then I will acquiesce. The soul, they say, thinks, remembers, reasons. What if, denying this, I were to say that it is the living being itself which thinks and remembers? How shall they refute this? And, what is it to reason but to place names upon things, to connect the names into assertions and to join these assertions into syllogisms?91 These are the source of logic. In paradise, before he had imposed names on things, how was Adam more rational than the other animals, except by potential only?92 It does not seem to me then that men are substantially distinguished from the brutes by the fact that they discuss matters in words and brutes do not.93 Let others look forward to what immortality they prefer. I look to that which Christ has acquired for us by His victory over death through His blood.

90 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. 134 ff. 91 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

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talitatem tam aperte concludit ex principiis naturalibus, quam aperte ego ex Scripturis Sacris demonstravi futuram electis aeternitatem vitae per Christum acquisitam, acquiescam. Anima, inquiunt, cogitat, meminit, rationcinatur. Quid, si hoc negans, dixero esse ipsum animal quod cogitat, et meminit? Quomodo refutabunt? Ratiocinari quid est, nisi rebus imponere nomina, nomina connectere in dicta, dicta conjugere in syllogismos? Ab his ﬁt dialectica. Quomodo erat in Paradiso Adam, ante nomina ab ipso imposita, rationalis magis quam caetera animalia, nisi potentia tantum. Non videntur ergo mihi homines distingui substantialiter a brutis, eo quod illi disputant, bruta non disputant. Expectent alii immortalitatem qualem velint; ego illam expecto, quam, victa morte, nobis suo sanguine acquisivit Christus.

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. 68 ff. 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. 92 On the Adamic language and its loss, see Leviathan, 1.3.12.100. 93 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.’

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Appendix to Leviathan [Mary, the Mother of God, §§ 57–63]

57 A. What is your feeling concerning the term ‘Mother of God,’ which many

attribute to the Holy Virgin?94 58 B. It seems to me that a woman can rightly be said to bring forth ((parere) that

which she bears in childbirth (in partu). Now, Mary bore Christ, God and man, in that the assumption of human nature was accomplished in her womb. She thus brought forth God and man. She however conceived only a man, without man’s seed, the power of which God supplied. 59 A. But, then a new difﬁculty arises, namely, how the son of Mary, that is, the

ﬂesh of Christ, is not of divine substance. 60 B. Not even in the case of a man born of man is his ﬂesh of the substance of his

father, unless you believe that what is born develops from the seed as from its matter. It is the blood of the mother alone that is the material of the fetus as it grows by daily nourishment till term and delivery. The seed in the uterus is the efﬁcient cause of the woman’s being pregnant; the seed is not the material of the fetus.95 Thus, if you believe that a woman could become pregnant from the power of human seed, why do you doubt whether the same thing could occur by the power of God Almighty? 61 A. But, by your reasoning, since the substance of God exists equally in all ﬂesh,

will it not also be shown that all other men are like Christ in having both a human and divine nature? 62 B. Not at all. For, even if God is everywhere omnipotent, doing everywhere

whatsoever He wishes in every creature, still He does not do everywhere whatever He can. In the generation of man from man, God desired from everlasting that only men who cannot do all they wish be produced; but, in the generation of man in a supernatural way, through the Holy Spirit, He desired from all eternity

94 Deipara, Dei Genetrix and !εοτκος (theotokos), are names attributed to Mary as the mother of Christ by the third Council of Ephesus (431), presided over by Saint Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria. The council condemned Nestorius, the bishop of Constantinople, whose teaching that Mary did not bring forth the Word of God bore on the nature(s) of her child. This is how Pope Pius XI described the Nestorian heresy in his Lux Veritatis, celebrating the 1500th anniversary of the council on December 25, 1931:

[Nestorius], thinking that two whole hypostases, namely, that of Jesus which was human and that of the Word which was divine, came together in one ‘prosopon,’ as he called it, denied that wondrous and substantial union of the two natures which we call hypostatic; and for this reason he asserted that the Only begotten Word of God was not made man

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A. Quid sentis de voce Deipara, quam Sanctae Virgini attribuunt plurimi?

57

B. Id mulier, ut mihi videtur, recte dici potest parere, quod in partu producit. 58 Sed produxit illa Christum Deum et hominem, quia assumptio naturae humanae peracta fuit in utero. Peperit ergo Deum et hominem. Genuit autem hominem tantum, sine semine viri, cujus seminis vim supplevit Deus. A. Sed nova hic oritur difﬁcultas, nempe, quomodo ﬁlius Mariae, id est, caro 59 Christi, non sit de substantia divina. B. Ne hominis quidem ex homine geniti caro est de substantia genitoris sui, nisi 60 credas id, quod nascitur, ﬁeri ex semine ut ex materia. Foeminae sanguis sola est materia foetus, per alimentum quotidianum crescens usque ad parturitionis maturitatem. Semen in utero causa efﬁciens est foecunditatis, non materia foetus. Si credas ergo foeminam gravidam ﬁeri posse virtute seminis humani, cur dubitas an idem ﬁeri possit virtute Dei omnipotentis? A. Nonne tua hac ratione, cum Dei substantia in omni carne aequaliter existat, 61 probabitur etiam omnes alios homines habere utramque naturam humanam et divinam, sicut Christus? B. Minime. Etsi enim Deus sit ubique omnipotens, faciens ubique omnia quae 62 vult in omni creatura, non tamen ubique facit quidquid potest. In generatione hominis ab homine, voluit ab aeterno produci tantum hominem, qui omnia facere quae vult non potest; at in generatione hominis supernaturali modo, per Spiritum Sanctum, voluit ab aeterno producere hominem qui facere posset

but was in human ﬂesh, by indwelling, by good pleasure and by the power of operation. Wherefore he was to be called ‘Theophoros,’ or God-bearer, in much the same way as prophets and other holy men can be called God-bearers by reason of the divine grace imparted to them. See below, n. 161. 95 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 Ζ, 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.

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to bring forth a man who could do whatsoever He desired, that is, man and God.96 Nor is there any place in this for asking how. For not only Christians but all peoples who believe that God exists believe Him to be all-powerful; nor do they ask how He gives birth to him whom they say He bore. 63 A. Thus far, you have explained the teaching of the Nicene Creed in such a way

that you seem to me to have conﬁrmed the Christian faith rather than to have shaken it in any way, though you have done so after your own fashion. [hypostasis, essentia, a substantia, a persona, a body and spirit, §§ 64–103] 64 A. Now show me what the Greeks call hypostasis. 65 B. When you look at something that you call white, you are imposing that name

upon a substance or underlying body, say marble, for example, even though the sight of your eyes cannot penetrate into the substance of the marble or into that of any other entity. Thus, ‘white’ is the name of the self-subsistent body, not the name of its color, and it is imposed because of a certain well-determined appearance, or, as the Greeks call it, µφασις (emphasis) or φ'ντασµα (phantasma), something that certainly seems to exist but in fact is nothing.97 We know quite well that this appearance cannot lack some cause or basis; that is, the white cannot exist unless some substance in fact underlies the appearance as its cause and, as the logicians say, its subject. Thus, Greeks call this subject τ" /ν (to on), φιστ'µενον (hyphistamenon), ποστ'ς (hypostas) or πστασις (hypostasis; foundation).98 The Latins call it ens, subjectum, suppositum, substantia, basis and fundamentum. And, what I have said about cognition through sight should be understood to hold also for the other senses. Thus, hypostasis is opposed to appearance (phantasma ( ) as cause is contrasted to effect, that is, in terms of a relation. In a similar way, if three things are related, like father, son and grandson, by reason of his different relatedness, the son has two names, even though he is only one real entity: that of ‘father,’ because he has offspring; and that of ‘son,’ because he is an offspring. Thus, the son, by standing in between his father and son, though only one entity, has two names, which are said to be

96 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:

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omnia quae vellet, id est, hominem et Deum. Neque locus hic ullus est quaerendi quomodo; quia non modo Christiani, sed etiam gentes omnes quae credunt esse Deum, eundem credunt esse omnipotentem; nec requirunt quomodo gignat, quem genuisse dicunt. A. Hactenus doctrinam symboli Niceni ita explicasti, ut ﬁdem Christianam nullo 63 modo labefactasse, sed potius conﬁrmasse, mihi videare, sed tuo modo. A. Ostende nunc quid sit quod Graeci appellant hypostasin.

64

B. Quando aliquid intueris quod vocas album, nomen illud imponis substantiae 65 sive subjecto corpori, puta marmori, etsi oculorum tuorum acies non potest penetrare in substantiam marmoris, aut cujuscunque alius entis. Album igitur corporis per se subsistentis, non coloris nomen est, et impositum propter quandam certam apparentiam, sive, ut loquuntur Graeci, µφασις vel φαντ'σµα, quod videtur quidem esse aliquid, revera autem nihil est; quam apparitionem sine aliqua causa et fundamento esse non posse satis intelligimus, nimirum album, esse non posse, nisi revera subsistat ipsi apparitioni substantia aliqua, quae ejus causa sit, et, ut dicunt logici, subjectum. Subjectum hoc Graeci appellant τ" /ν, φιστ'µενον, vel ποστ'ς et πστασις; Latini ens, subjectum, suppositum, substantiam, basim, et fundamentum. Quod autem de cognitione per visum dixi, de caeteris etiam sensibus intelligendum est. Opponitur ergo hypostasis phantasmati, ut causa effectui, nempe relative. Similiter, si sint tria relativa, ut pater, ﬁlius, et nepos, ubi ﬁlius per diversam relationem, etsi unum ens reale, habet duo nomina, alterum Patris, quia genuit; alterum Filii, quia genitus est. Filius ergo ut medius, quanquam unum tantum sit ens, habet duo nomina quae ipsi

Basic Books, 1964), 213–238, esp. 231 ff. 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. 276 ff. 97 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. 98 φιστ'µενον (hyphistamenon) and ποστ'ς (hypostas) are participial forms of the verb φ στηµι (hyphistemi), the present middle and aorist active forms, respectively.

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‘imposed’ (im-posita) upon him. The entity itself is the basis (sub-positum) of the two names, their φιστ'µενον, the hypostasis or foundation of the relation. And so, hypostasis can be used in reference not only to appearances but also to names.99 66 A. What then is the difference between φιστ'µενον, ποστ'ς and πστασις? 67 B. Between the ﬁrst two, there is no other difference than that the ﬁrst one

means ‘existent,’ the second ‘existent now.’100 The Greeks generally use the word hypostasis in place of these words, and the Latins use the word substantia or essentia, though the Latin Fathers do not distinguish between the two, as is clear from Peter Lombard.101 68 A. How is the word hypostasis understood in the New Testament? 69 B. In the same way as writers in other works understand it; for example, in

Hebrews 1:3, Christ is called the ‘stamp of the substance of God.’102 Hypostasis there is contrasted to stamp; that is, substance is opposed to an image of the same substance. In the same passage, Christ is also called the splendor of the divine glory, or, what is the same, the light of a luminous body, for the bright object is the substance or subject of the light. Further, in Hebrews 11:1, faith is called the substance of things hoped for, that is (for the saying is metaphorical), faith is the basis of hope. Third, in 2 Corinthians 9:4, Paul the Apostle, after having boasted among the Macedonians of the kindness promised him by the Corinthians, calls that promise the ‘substance of his boast’; that is, it is its basis. 70 A. What does essentia mean? 71 B. As I have said, the Fathers do not distinguish essentia from substantia. 72 A. What is substantia then? 73 B. The same thing as entity, that is, whatever is truly existent, distinguished from

appearance (phantasma ( ) and name.

99

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:

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dicuntur imposita, ipsum autem ens est duorum nominum suppositum, sive πιστ'µενον, hypostasis, fundamentum relationis. Itaque hypostasis non modo ad phantasmata referri potest, sed etiam ad nomina. A. Quaenam est differentia inter πιστ'µενον et ποστ'ν et πστασιν?

66

B. Inter duo priora differentia alia nulla est, nisi quod hoc subsistens, illud 67 nunc subsistens signiﬁcet. Pro iisdem autem utuntur Graeci plerumque voce hypostasis, et Latini voce substantia vel essentia, inter quas Patres Latini non distinguunt, ut constat ex Petro Lombardo. A. Quomodo accipitur vox hypostasis in Testamento Novo?

68

B. Eodem modo, quo accipitur a scriptoribus caeteris. Ut (Heb. i.3) ubi Christus 69 dicitur character hypostaseos Dei. Nam hypostasis ibi opponitur characteri, id est, substantia imagini ejusdem substantiae. Dicitur etiam eodem loco splendor gloriae divinae, sive, quod idem est, lumen de lucido; nam lucidum est substantia sive subjectum luminis. Deinde (Heb. xi.1) ﬁdes vocatur hypostasis earum rerum quas speramus, id est, (nam dictio metaphorica est), ﬁdes est fundamentum spei. Tertio (2 Cor. ix.4), ubi Paulus apostolus, qui benevolentiam Corinthiorum promissam apud Macedonas jactaverat, promissionem illam appellat jactationis suae hypostasin, id est, fundamentum. A. Quid signiﬁcat essentia?

70

B. Patres, ut dixi, non distinguunt essentiam a substantia.

71

A. Quid ergo est substantia?

72

B. Idem quod ens, id est, quicquid est vere existens, distinctum a phantasmate et 73 nomine.

Princeton University Press, 1985) and Cees Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes’ Natural Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 100 Hobbes is correct in distinguishing between the ﬁrst, whose temporal reference depends on context, and the second, whose temporal reference is understood as contemporaneous with the temporal location of the speaker. 101 See below, § 88 and nn. 102 ‘Character hypostaseos Dei.’ χαραχτ ρ (character), from χαρ'σσειν (charassein), ‘to engrave or inscribe,’ may be translated as that which bears the imprint of a seal or stamp, as a coin or waxen tablet with writing on it. Translations of the phrase vary: the King James Version has, ‘the express image of his person’; the Douay Denvir edition has, ‘the ﬁgure of his substance’; the Standard Edition of 1901 has, ‘the very image of his substance’; the Complete Bible of 1927 has, ‘the representation of his being.’

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74 A. What need was there for the Greeks and Latins to twist well known and

understood names into uncertain ones, whose equivalents are not found in Hebrew, and which no language needs? 75 B. When names are twisted, as when ο8σ α (ousia) is made from /ν (on) or

πστασις from φιστ'µενον (hyphistamenon) or essentia from ens or substantia from substans or whiteness from white; this twisting is what the philosophers call abstraction. Further, the name /ν is called concrete, while ο8σ α is called abstract; ens is called concrete, essentia is called abstract; white, concrete, and whiteness, abstract. Sometimes however, in place of the abstract word, one uses an inﬁnitive, as when, in place of ο8σ α, the Greeks say τ" εναι (to einai; to be); or in place of essentia, the Latins say esse; in place of λευκτης (leukotes; whiteness), the Greeks say τ" εναι λευκν (to einai leukon; to be white) or even τ" λευκν (to leukon; that which is white), referring the article τ (to; the) not to λευκν (leukon; white) but to /νοµα (onoma; name), which is silently implied. Likewise, from the concrete vivens (living thing), the Latins make not only the abstract vita (life), but also vivere (to live).103 These words may indeed be called abstract and with good reason. For when people impose diverse names upon something that truly exists because of the diverse appearances it has, calling the same thing great and colored and hard and weighty, they are considering in that thing at one point that it is of such and such a size, which is the concern of geometers; at another point, that it is colored or hard or weighty, which is the concern of the scientists. Further, in order to distinguish one appearance, whose cause they know resides in the concrete entity, from all the other appearances of the same thing, they indicate it by means of a certain twisting of names. The result is that they no longer speak of great and colored and hard and weighty, but of greatness, of color, of hardness and of weight. This abstraction of words, although it is nothing but the consideration of an appearance or name, separated from all other considerations and names of the same concrete object, is virtually inevitable in order to teach about causes.104 If you understand these things correctly, you understand also that it is impossible for the essence of any entity to exist separated from the entity itself, as if there might be a white object where there is no whiteness, or whiteness where there is no white object, or a human where there is no human nature [or human nature where there is no human]. You also know that Aristotle is wrong in asserting, ‘some essences exist separated from the entities whose essences they are.’105

103 Hobbes refers here to the practice in Latin and Greek of using an inﬁnitive where English prefers a gerund; thus, vivere (to live) for ‘living,’ esse (to be) for ‘being.’ 104 It is necessary in the sense of furnishing linguistic tools by which to name and discuss

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A. Quid ergo opus erat Graecis et Latinis detorquere nomina satis cognita 74 et intellecta in nomina incerta, quorum aequivalentia in lingua Hebraea non inveniuntur, neque in ulla lingua sunt necessaria? B. Quando nomina detorquentur, ut cum ﬁt a voce /ν, ο8σ α; ab πιστ'µενον, 75 πστασις; ab ente, essentia; a substans, substantia; ab album, albedo; detorsio illa a philosophis dicitur abstractio. Propterea nomen /ν concretum, ο8σ α abstractum; ens concretum, essentia abstractum; album concretum, albedo abstractum appellatur. Aliquando autem pro voce abstracta utuntur verbo inﬁnitivo; ut cum pro ο8σ α, Graeci dicuntur τ" εναι; Latini pro essentia, esse; Graeci pro λευκτης, τ εναι λευκ"ν, vel etiam τ λευκ"ν, articulum τ referentes non ad λευκ"ν, sed ad subauditum /νοµα. Item Latini a concreto vivens, abstractum faciunt non modo vita, sed etiam vivere. Quae voces abstractae dici possent; nec absurde. Cum enim rei vere existenti nomina, propter apparitiones diversas, diversa imposuerint, vocantes eandem rem magnam, coloratam, duram, gravem; considerant in illa re aliquando quod tanta est, quae est consideratio geometrarum; aliquando quod colorata, vel dura, vel gravis est, quae consideratio est physicorum. Et propterea, ad distinctionem phantasmatis, cujus causam in concreto esse intelligunt, ab omnibus aliis phantasmatibus ejusdem rei, detorsione aliqua nominum ita rem signant, ut non jam magnam, coloratam, duram, gravem dicant sed magnitudinem, colorem, duritiem, gravitatem dicant. Quae vocum abstractio, cum nihil aliud sit quam phantasmatis vel nominis, ab aliis omnibus ejusdem concreti considerationibus et nominibus separata, consideratio, ad doctrinam causarum fere necessaria est. Haec si recte intelligas, intelligis etiam impossibile esse, ut essentia ullius entis separata existat ab ipso ente, nempe, ut ibi sit album ubi non est albedo, aut albedo ubi non est album, aut homo ubi non est humanitas; falsumque esse quod asserit Aristoteles, essentias aliquas existere ab illis rebus separatas, quarum illae sunt essentiae; et proinde

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. 100 ff. 105 For example, in Metaphysics, book Ζ, at 1032a, Aristotle is talking about the production of things which are made, that is, artifacts, such as health, and he clariﬁes: λγω δ9 ο8σ αν :νευ #λης τ" τ ;ν εναι (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’ (χοριστς), see Donald Morrison, ‘CHORISTOS in Aristotle.’ Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 89 (1985): 89–105.

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And, you realize that the soul is thus either not the essence of a living being, as he asserts, or does not exist when that being has died. As a consequence, you see that Aristotle erred in that he did not distinguish between separate things and separate considerations of the same thing. 76 A. I understand that abstract words are almost unavoidable in delving into the

causes of things that appear but exist only in our imaginations. But, unlike the names magnitude, color and the others, which take their origin from the ﬁve organs of our senses, the name essence as such was not imposed because of some appearance of ours. For, as you said above,106 it is not substance itself nor the entity itself that appears, but only its effects, which one calls its appearances. But, the essence of an entity as such is not an appearance. What then is essence or being, whenever it is used as a name? Of what thing is it the name? 77 B. The essence of an entity concretely – take some white entity – is the name of

that very white thing itself, but considered only insofar as it is a white thing. By the same reasoning, the essence of an entity as such is the name of the entity, but considered only insofar as it is an entity.107 Generally, abstract names are names of concrete objects when they are thought of separately from other names of the same concrete object. A white thing, for example, is an entity that is white. If we now were to consider the white in a white object separately from the object, in place of white, in order to teach, we say, whiteness, or we say, being white. 78 A. Thus, when we simply say essence in place of entity, essence and entity will

be synonymous, so that the word essence is superﬂuous.

106

Presumably, the reference is to §§ 30ff. 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: 107

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 somehow 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

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animam vel non esse, ut ille dicit, essentiam animalis, aut mortuo animali non existere; et per consequens errasse Aristotelem, eo quod non distinxerit inter separatas res, et separatas ejusdem rei considerationes. A. Intelligo voces abstractas ad causas rerum apparentium, nec nisi in imagina- 76 tione nostra existentium, indagandas necessarias fere esse; sed nomen essentia simpliciter, non impositum erat propter phantasma nostrum, sicut magnitudo, color, etc. quae causam habent in quinque organis sensuum. Nam, ut dixisti supra, non ipsa substantia sive ipsum ens, sed tantummodo effectus ejus apparent et appellantur phantasmata: essentia autem entis simpliciter, phantasma non est. Quid ergo est essentia vel esse, quoties usurpatur ut nomen? Cujus rei nomen est? B. Essentia entis in concreto, puta entis albi, est nomen ipsius albi, sed consi- 77 derati quatenus albi. Eadem ratione essentia entis simpliciter est nomen entis, sed considerati simpliciter quatenus ens; et in universum, abstracta sunt nomina concretorum, quando considerantur seorsim a caeteris nominibus ejusdem concreti. Album, verbi gratia, est ens album. Si jam in ente albo consideremus album seorsim ab ente, dicimus pro albo, doctrinae causa, albedinem, vel esse album. A. Quando ergo pro ente simpliciter dicimus essentiam, erunt essentia et ens 78 synonima, et per consequens vox essentia superﬂua est.

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.

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79 B. More to the point, it is inconsistent with the truth of faith.108 Witness John

Damascene,109 in the eleventh chapter of his Exact Explication of the Orthodox Faith:110 after he had said that the Word had been made man, he added, ‘we nevertheless in no way took it that divinity had been incarnate or made human’.111 It is therefore clear that, in any entity considered as such, entity and essence differ and much more in concrete things.112 80 A. What caused the doctors to afﬁrm that, unless existence and essence were

the same in God, the divine substance would be composite?113 81 B. Because a deﬁnition, which is the explanation of the essence of the thing

deﬁned, is itself commonly called an essence by philosophers. Thus, if the deﬁnition of man is ‘rational animal,’ they call ‘rational animal’ an essence and say that it is composed of animal and rational, as from its parts. They thus fail to distinguish between the deﬁnition of man, which is a form of speech that has as its parts the names ‘animal’ and ‘rational,’ and man himself, whose parts are a head, chest, limbs and other members. But, because it is a hard thing to call a concrete rational animal an essence, some, desiring to soften that way of speaking, say that the essence of man is not rational animal but rational soul and that the rational soul exists as a substance separately from the human body. Thus, they make the essence out to be the constitutive part of a man himself and at the same time his essence. 82 A. O, the amazing sleights of a vain philosophy!

Tell me now what the word persona truly and properly means. 83 B. It is a Latin word, meaning any individual thing, no matter whether acting

in accordance with its own will or that of another. Thus, Cicero says, ‘Though one single man, I bear three persons, my own, that of the judge and that of the opponent.’114 What does this mean but that Cicero himself took three parts, his own, that of the judge and of his opponent?

108 The linguistic point that Hobbes has been making so far, §§ 64 ff., leads to the conclusion that a faulty theory of predication resulted in theological confusions. See within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’ 109 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 γνσεος), 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.

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B. Imo vero, inconsistens cum veritate ﬁdei; teste Johanne Damasceno, capite 79 undecimo de Expositione Fidei. Qui cum dixisset, Verbum factum esse hominem, adjecit, quod tamen Deitas aut incarnata aut humanata esset, nullo pacto audivimus. Manifestum ergo est, in ente simpliciter differre inter se ens et essentiam, et multo magis in concretis. A. Quae causa erat doctoribus afﬁrmandi, quod nisi ens et essentia in Deo idem 80 essent, substantia divina esset composita? B. Quia deﬁnitio, quae est explicatio essentiae deﬁnitae, vocatur vulgo a philoso- 81 phis ipsa essentia. Ut, si deﬁnitio hominis sit animal rationale, essentiam vocant animal rationale, et compositam esse dicunt ab animali et rationali, ut a suis partibus; non distinguentes inter deﬁnitionem hominis, quae est oratio habens pro partibus nomina animal et rationale, et hominem ipsum, cujus partes sunt caput, bustum, crura, et reliqua membra. Sed quoniam durum est animal rationale in concreto appellare essentiam, nonnulli formulam illam loquendi mollire cupientes, non animal rationale, sed animam rationalem, essentiam hominem esse dicunt; eandemque substantiam esse seorsim a humano corpore existentem. Atque ita essentiam faciunt partem ipsius hominis intergrantem simulque essentiam. A. O mirabiles inanis philosophiae praestigias! Dic quid jam vere et proprie 82 signiﬁcat persona? B. Vox Latina est, signiﬁcans rem quamcunque singularem agentem utcunque 83 sua vel alterius voluntate. Sic Cicero (De Oratore, ii.102): Unus sustineo tres personas, mei, judicis, et adversarii. Quid hoc est, nisi quod ipse Cicero partes ageret et suas, et judicis, et adversarii? Quid etiam est, id quod invenitur in catechismo

110 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. 111 This discussion takes place in the eleventh chapter of the third book. John’s point is that divinity is a term to be applied only to all three of the persons of the Trinity, so that its attribution to Christ alone, as the incarnated Word, is inappropriate. 112 This passage is difﬁcult but may mean that Hobbes believes that, for John Damascene, entity and essence are distinguishable and that they differ much more in material entities than they do in the utterly simple entity, God. 113 Hobbes is referring to the scholastic distinction between existence and essence. Neither Franciscans nor Dominicans allowed for a contrast between what they called essential and existential being in God. 114 De Oratore 2:102.

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Similarly, what does it mean in the Anglican Catechism when the minister asks, ‘What do you chieﬂy learn from the articles of your faith?’, and the catechumen responds, ‘I learn ﬁrst to believe in God the Father, who created me and the whole world; second, in Jesus Christ, His Son, who has redeemed me and all mankind; third, in the Holy Spirit, who has sanctiﬁed me and all the chosen people of God.’ What does this mean if not that God, in His own person, created all things; in the person of His Son, redeemed mankind; and in the person of the Holy Spirit, sanctiﬁed the church? What can be said more clearly than this concerning the divine persons or more in accord with the faith? But, if, with the Greek Fathers, we use the word hypostasis in place of person, since hypostasis and substance mean the same thing, in place of the three persons, we make three divine substances, that is, three Gods. Bellarmine and almost all the other doctors deﬁne person as the ﬁrst rational substance, that is, an individual substance that is single but intelligent, like God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, Gabriel, Peter.115 But, what are these ﬁrst three substances, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, if not three divine substances? But, this is contrary to the faith. Bellarmine did not understand the force of persona, for, if it meant ﬁrst substance, would not the Greek word πρσωπον116 (prosopon) then mean the same thing? And, it surely does not, for it means properly the face of a man, whether natural; artiﬁcial, as with a mask, and also representative of a face, not only in the theater, but also in legal action and at church. Again, what else is a representation of a face but an image or stamp of the thing represented? And, it is in this sense that our Savior is called the stamp of the substance of God by St. Paul (Hebrews 1:3). 84 A. But, what does πρσωπον mean in Sacred Scriptures? 85 B. Nothing properly but the face or visage. By synecdoche, it is however some-

times used in place of man himself, as in the word προσωπολεψ α (prosopolepsia; respect for persons).117 But, in the creed of our faith, no mention is made either of person or of hypostasis or of Trinity. Even though hypostasis is put in the Greek creed of Athanasius, the church accepts that creed only as a paraphrase of the Nicene Creed without the word hypostasis. For, neither the creed nor any single article of the faith could have been established by the authority of individual doctors nor even by the whole church, except by way of interpretation of the Holy Scriptures.

115

The reference is to De Christo, bk 2, chap. 5. Hobbes’s point is that the Greek word for face or mask, πρσωπον (prosopon), cannot bear the meaning ‘substance.’ 116

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Anglicano, ubi minister rogat: Quid ex ﬁdei tuae articulis praecipue discis? Catechumenus respondit: Disco primo, credere in Deum Patrem, qui creavit me et universum mundum; secundo, in Filium ejus Jesum Christum, qui redemit me et universum genus humanum; tertio, in Spiritum Sanctum, qui sanctiﬁcavit me omnemque electum populum Dei, nisi quod Deus in persona propria creavit omnia; in persona Filii sui redemit genus humanum; in persona Spiritus Sancti ecclesiam sanctiﬁcavit. Quid hoc de personis divinis clarius, aut ﬁdei congruentius dici potest? Quod si pro persona utamur voce hypostasi cum Patribus Graecis, cum hypostasis et substantia idem signiﬁcent, facimus pro tribus personis tres substantias divinas, id est, tres Deos. Bellarminus et doctores caeteri fere omnes personam deﬁniunt esse substantiam primam intelligentam, id est, substantiam individuam, id est, singularem, sed intelligentem, ut Deum, Christum, Spiritum Sanctum, Gabrielem, Petrum. Quid autem sunt tres illae substantiae primae, Pater, Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus, nisi tres substantiae divinae? Quod tamen est contra ﬁdem. Non intellexit Bellarminus vim Latinae vocis personae. Quae vox si signiﬁcet primam substantiam, nonne πρσωπον signiﬁcaret idem Graece? Quod non est verum; nam signiﬁcat proprie faciem hominis, tum naturalem, tum artiﬁcialem sive larvam, tum etiam faciem representativam, idque non modo in theatro, sed etiam in foro et ecclesia. Facies autem representativa, quid aliud est quam imago vel character representati? Atque eo sensu a Sancto Paulo Servator noster (Heb. i.3) appellatur character substantiae Dei. A. Quid autem in Scriptura Sacra signiﬁcat πρσωπον?

84

B. Nihil proprie, praeter faciem seu vultum. Synecdochice autem aliquando 85 ponitur pro ipso homine, ut in voce πρσωποληψ α. Sed in symbolo ﬁdei, mentio nulla est neque personae, neque hypostaseos neque trinitatis; etsi hypostasis ponatur in symbolo Athanasii Graeco, quod symbolum Athanasii, sed sine voce hypostasi, recipit ecclesia non aliter quam pro ﬁdei Nicenae paraphrasi. Nam neque symbolum, neque ﬁdei articulus unus quicunque, authoritate doctorum singularium, neque, nisi per modum interpretandi Scripturas Sacras, ab ecclesia universa, constitui potuit.

Προσωπολεψ α (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.’ 117

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86 B. Then, why did the ancient Fathers and many other more recent men of

learning employ these words? 87 A. Because they could not otherwise explain the words of the Scriptures: for

example, ‘Go and baptize all nations in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit;’118 also, the words of St. John: ‘There are three who give testimony in heaven, Father, Son and Holy Spirit’;119 and other similar passages concerning the divinity of Christ. 88 A. But, why was it necessary to explain such things at all, which they knew to be

incomprehensible, that is, inexplicable? 89 B. The Fathers of the Church, both before and after the Council of Nicaea, freely

owned that the Incarnation of the Son of God could not be understood, but they pleaded in excuse that they were forced to debate the matter by heretics. Thus, Epiphanius, in his On the Trinity, at the beginning of the seventh book:120 The word of God was sufﬁcient for all believers when He said, ‘Go now and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, etc.’ But, we are forced by the faults of the heretics and blasphemers to do that which is not permitted and to speak of that which is ineffable and to fall into that error which is the contrary of theirs.

Likewise, Bellarmine, in the ﬁrst book of his On Christ: ‘Our doctors do not debate after the manner of philosophers in order to demonstrate the Trinity, but so that they might correct the fallacies of the philosophers.’121 And, Peter Lombard, in the ﬁrst book of his Sentences 23, [chapter 14], commenting on the seventh book of St Augustine’s De Trinitate:122 For, the Greeks understand substance differently from the Latins. The Latins say, ‘one essence or substance, three persons.’ This is because, in our language, essence is properly understood no differently from substance. And, in order that this might be understood at least ‘as in a mystery’ whenever someone would ask what the three were, it has been helpful to have something to say… Thus, when asked who or what the three are, we set about the task of ﬁnding some name by which to embrace the three. But, nothing occurs to us, because the supereminence of divinity exceeds the power of ordinary speech. 90 A. Epiphanius wrongly excuses himself, for, without threats or outright force, no

one can be compelled by another’s fault to do that which is not allowed. Nor is Bellarmine’s denial a true one, viz., that his doctors do not debate philosophically

118

Matthew 28:19.

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A. Cur ergo Patres veteres, et multi alii doctores recentiores, vocibus illis usi 86 sunt? B. Quia verba Scripturae Sacrae, nempe Matth. xxviii.19: Euntes baptizate omnes 87 gentes in nomine Patris, Filii, et Spritus Sancti, item verba S. Johannis (1 Epist. v. 7): Tres sunt qui testimonium perhibent in coelis, Pater, Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus, et loca similia de divinitate Christi, aliter explicare non potuerunt. A. At cur omnino necesse erat ea explicare, quae sciebant ipsi incomprehensi- 88 bilia, id est, inexplicabilia esse? B. Proﬁtentur quidem Patres ecclesiae, tum ante tum post Concilium Nicenum, 89 incarnationem Filii Dei incomprehensibilem esse; sed excusant se eo quod de illa disputare ab haereticis compellerentur. Sic Epiphanius De Trinitate, initio libri septimi: ‘Sufﬁciebat quidem credentibus Dei sermo, dicentis, Euntes nunc docete omnes gentes, baptizantes eos in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, etc. Sed compellimur haereticorum et blasphemantium vitiis illicitum agere, et ineffabilia eloqui, et in vitium incidere vitio contrarium alieno.’ Etiam Bellarminus libro primo, De Christo: ‘Nostri doctores non disputant philosophice ut ostendant Trinitatem, sed ut solvant sophismata philosophorum.’ Et Petrus Lombardus, Lib. I. Distinct. 23. D. ex Augustino Lib. VII. De Trinitate: ‘Aliter enim Graeci accipiunt substantiam, quam Latini. A Latinis autem dictum est, una essentia vel substantia, tres personae: quia non aliter in sermone nostro, id est Latino, essentia quam substantia solet intelligi. Et ut intelligatur saltem in aenigmate, placuit ita dici, ut cum quaereretur quid tria sint, aliquid diceretur. – Cum ergo quaeritur quid tria, vel quid tres, conferimus nos ad inveniendum aliquod nomen quo complectamur haec tria. Neque occurrit animo; quia supereminentia divinitatis usitati eloquii facultatem excedit.’ A. Non recte se excusat Epiphanius. Alieno enim vitio compelli ad faciendum 90 id quod est illicitum, sine vi aut minis nemo potest. Et quod Bellarminus doctores suos philosophice disputare negat, ut ostendant Trinitatem, sed ut sol-

119

1 John 5:7. I know of no work of Epiphanius that goes under this name. 121 See his Second General Controversy, Opera Omnia I.303. 122 The text is that of St. Augustine, De Trinitate, bk 7, chap. 4, with some minor changes. 120

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in order to explain the Trinity but to correct the fallacies of philosophers. For, of those very theologians who published explanations of the Nicene Creed, almost all used deﬁnitions drawn from the Logic and Metaphysics of Aristotle, although they ought to have explained the Holy Trinity from Sacred Scripture alone.123 In fact, I am amazed that the Nicene Fathers, since so many of them were philosophers, did not import the technical philosophic words, which they used in their explanations, into the creed itself. 91 B. That is not so amazing to me when I consider that few of those present

at the great councils could speak forcefully and debate. The rest then, who approved only those propositions taken from the Sacred Scripture, since they outnumbered the ones who argued, found it an easy matter to win with their votes, with the result that nothing was taken into the creed except those things which were clearly inferred from the Scriptures. 92 A. What is body? What is incorporeal? What is spirit? 93 B. Those names have seemed so well known and understood to all learned men

that I do not know whether any theologian or philosopher has thought it worthy to explain them by deﬁnitions. Tell me: the idea of what thing do you have in mind when you or someone in your hearing says the word body? 94 A. I now take body to mean something about which it can truly be said that it

really exists, of itself, and also that it has a certain magnitude. I say that it has magnitude, not that it is magnitude itself. I do recall, however, that at one time I considered that body was that which met my touch or sight. And so, I also thought that body was the image of a body that appears in a mirror or in a dream or in the dark; I was bewildered. But, as I thought afterward, I realized that those images disappeared, so that their existence did not depend on themselves but on some animated entity, and they no longer seemed real to me but only appearances and the effects of things working upon the organs of the senses. So, I knew that they were incorporeal.124 As to spirits, however, I based my judgment on air, which is spirit, and on wind, which I felt with my sense of touch. On this basis, I thought that spirit was indeed body, but thin body; also, that some spirits could be more attenuated than others and more pure; and that some could differ from others in strength no less than liquids, which, though they may be equally transparent, nonetheless differ greatly among themselves in their powers.125 But, I was unable to conceive of a nature midway between body and spirit or between spirit and appearance, that is, between spirit and nothing. 123 124

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

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vant sophismata philosophorum, non est verum. Utuntur enim theologi illi, qui expositiones symboli Niceni ediderunt, omnes fere deﬁnitionibus desumptis ex logica et metaphysica Aristotelis; cum sanctam Trinitatem ex sola Scriptura Sacra ostendere debuerint. Miror enim Nicenos Patres, cum tot essent inter illos philosophi, verba illa artis, quibus in explicationibus usi sunt, in ipsum symbolum non intulisse. B. Mihi vero illud mirum non est, consideranti, quod in synodis magnis, qui 91 audacter perorare et disputare possunt, pauci sint. Reliqui ergo, qui sola illa argumenta approbarunt quae ex Sacra Scriptura allata erant, cum numero disputatores superarent, facile suffragiis suis evicerunt ut nihil in symbolum admitteretur praeter ea quae ex Scripturis aperte inferebantur. A. Quid est corpus, quid incorporeum, quid spiritus?

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B. Nomina illa ita eruditis omnibus cognita et intellecta visa sunt, ut nesciam 93 an ullus aut theologus aut philosophus deﬁnitionibus ea explicare dignatus sit. Tu ergo cujus rei ideam in animo habes, quando profers vel prolatum audis vocabulum illud corpus? A. Ego per corpus intelligo nunc id quod de quo vere dici potest, quod exi- 94 stit realiter in seipso, habetque etiam aliquam magnitudinem; habet, inquam, magnitudinem, non quod sit magnitudo ipsa. Memini tamen quod corpus putarem aliquando id solum esse, quod tactui meo vel visui obstaret. Itaque speciem quoque corporis in speculo, aut somno, aut tenebris apparentem, quanquam miratus, corpus tamen esse arbitrabar. Sed consideranti postea species illas evanescere, ut quarum existentia dependeret non a seipsis, sed a natura animata, non amplius mihi visae sunt reales, sed phantasmata et effectus rerum in organa sensuum agentium; et proinde esse incorporeas. De spiritibus autem judicabam ex aere, qui spiritus est, et vento, quem tactu sentiebam; et propterea spiritum existimavi corpus quidem, sed tenue, esse, et spiritus alios aliis esse posse tenuiores, puriores, et alios ab aliis differre posse etiam virtute, non minus quam liquores, qui quanquam sint transparentes aeque, virtutibus tamen inter se immane discrepant. Naturam autem mediam inter corpus et spiritum, aut spiritum et phantasma, id est, inter spiritum et nihil, concipere non

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. 125 Hobbes may be thinking of acids here; aqua fortis, for example, was a name for nitric acid, used commonly in engraving.

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It must therefore be asked whether the phrases ‘incorporeal substance’ or ‘immaterial substance’ or ‘separated essences’ is found in the Holy Scripture.126 95 B. They are not. But, the ﬁrst of the Thirty-nine Articles of the faith, published

by the Church of England in the year 1562, expressly states, ‘God is without body and without parts.’127 And, this must not be denied. Also, the penalty for those who do deny it is established as excommunication. 96 A. And, it will not be denied.128 Nonetheless, in the twentieth article, it is stated

that nothing ought to be enjoined as a belief by the church that could not be derived from the Holy Scriptures.129 How I wish this ﬁrst article had been derived in that way!130 For, I still do not know in what sense something can be called greatest or great that is not body.

126 Again, the discussion of these sections, §§ 79 ff., is brought back to the theological context that animates Hobbes’s argument. 127 Article 1 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. 20 ff. 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. 128 But, cf. Appendix § 180. 129 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. 130 Article 20 concerns the church’s authority in doctrine:

The Church hath power to decree Rites and Ceremonies, and Authority in controversies

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potui. Quaerendum ergo est, an in Scriptura Sacra reperiatur vox substantia incorporea, vel substantia immaterialis, vel essentiae separatae. B. Voces illae in Scriptura Sacra non sunt. Caeterum in primo ex triginta novem 95 articulis religionis, editis ab ecclesia Anglicana A.D. MDLXII expresse dicitur, Deum esse sine corpore et sine partibus. Itaque negandum non est. Poena etiam in negantes constituitur excommunicatio. A. Non negabitur. In articulo tamen vicesimo dicitur, quod nihil ab ecclesia 96 credendum injungi debet, quod non e Scripturis Sacris deduci possit. Sed utinam

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 in questions of doctrine and public worship. On this, see within, for example, §§ 207 ff. 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.

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Appendix to Leviathan But, tell me, what is the difference between ‘beget’ and ‘proceed’?

97 B. Look at Matthew 1:20, where the angel says to Joseph, ‘Fear not to take Mary

as your wife, for what is begotten in her is of the Holy Spirit.’ 98 A. But, I do not know whether this ‘is of the Holy Spirit’ means ‘begotten of the

Holy Spirit’ or ‘proceeds from the Holy Spirit.’ 99 B. This passage from Matthew is part of the gospel read at the feast of the

circumcision, where one reads in the liturgy published in Latin by Edward VI, ‘What is begotten in her has proceeded from the Holy Spirit,’ and it is translated by our church as though it read, ‘It comes from the Holy Spirit.’ There, you see how the Church of England has interpreted the passage, and I think rightly so.131 100 A. With what result? Since the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, as it is in the

creed, and the Son proceeds from the Holy Spirit, as it is in this text, and both are said to be ‘begotten,’ there seems to be no difference at all between being begotten and proceeding. To what purpose has the Roman Church distinguished between these words? 101 B. I do not know.132 But, you know that at one time the sphinx spread terror

among the people by means of a riddle. 102 A. What distinction do the Fathers draw between those words? 103 B. None that I have seen. Cyril says that the Son relates to the Holy Spirit as the

Father relates to the Son.133 104 A. Then, to Cyril, it seemed that the Son begot the Holy Spirit, so we are back

once again to equating ‘to be begotten’ and ‘to proceed.’ To me, it is clear enough that God’s Son was born of God, who comprehends the entire Trinity. But, it does not seem true to me that the salvation of men turns upon the outcome of such triﬂing quibbles over words. I have no doubt but that he who believes in Jesus Christ and repents of his sins will be saved, even if he is not a theologian.134 Nor am I deviating from the teaching of the Nicene Creed, which I see was most clearly derived from the Holy Scripture, that the Three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, are one God in three persons, with ‘person’ taken in the word’s true and proper meaning, as one who plays his own parts or those of another.

131 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.

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deductum fuisset. Nondum enim scio quo sensu aliquid maximum vel magnum dici possit, quod non sit corpus. Sed dic mihi, quaenam est differentia inter gigni et procedere? B. Vide Matthaeum (i.20), ubi angelus Josephum alloquitur, dicens: Ne metuas 97 accipere Mariam uxorem tuam: quod in illa GENITUM est, ex Spiritu Sancto est. A. At illud, ex Spiritu Sancto est, nescio an signiﬁcat ex Spiritu Sancto genitum 98 est, an ex Spiritu Sancto procedit. B. Locus hic Matthei pars est Evangelii ad festum circumcisionis, ubi legitur 99 in liturgia, sub Eduardo Sexto latine edita, Quod in illa genitum est, a Spiritu Sancto profectum est; et ab ecclesia nostra ita vertitur ac si scriptum esset, a Spiritu Sancto venit. Vides ergo quomodo locum illum interpretata est ecclesia Anglicana, et opinor, recte. A. Quid igitur? Cum Spiritus Sanctus a Filio procedat, ut est in symbolo, et 100 Filius, ut in hoc textu, procedat a Spiritu Sancto, et uterque genitus dicatur, gigni et procedere omnino differre non videntur. Quorsum verba illa distinxit ecclesia Romana? B. Nescio. Scis autem Sphingem aenigmate quondam fuisse populo formidabi- 101 lem. A. Quam distinctionem harum vocum faciunt Patres?

102

B. Nullam quam ego vidi. Cyrillus dicit, ita se habere Filium ad Spiritum Sanctum, 103 ut Pater ad Filium. A. Videtur ergo Cyrillo Filium genuisse Spiritum Sanctum, et sic rursus idem 104 esse gigni et procedere. Mihi vero satis perspicuum est Filium Dei genitum esse a Deo, qui totam comprehendit Trinitatem. Verum non mihi videtur in tantillis verborum argutiis versari salus hominum. Qui credit in Jesum Christum, quemque suorum peccatorem poenitet, quin is, etsi theologus non sit, salvandus tamen sit, nullus dubitat. Neque vero a doctrina discedo symboli Niceni, quam video e Sacra Scriptura manifestissime derivatam esse; et tres, Patrem, Filium, et Spiritum Sanctum, unum esse Deum, idque in tribus personis, sumpta scilicet persona in sua signiﬁcatione vera et propria, pro eo qui partes suas vel alterius

132

This is a position Hobbes either came to or espoused late in life; see within, ‘Hobbes and the Economic Trinity.’ 133 Cyril’s Thesaurus 23 has a passage like this. 134 Reading with Schuhmann nullus dubito for Molesworth’s nullus dubitat, especially in the view of the verb that follows, discedo.

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Further, if the word persona is taken as Bellarmine does, simply as a singular, intelligent substance, like Peter, Paul and John, or, what is the same thing, in place of hypostasis, then I do not understand how the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not three individual substances, that is, three Gods in number. Nor do I see how that view can be proven from the Scriptures, in which neither hypostases nor persons are distinguished in God. They are said to be three only who give testimony in heaven, namely, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,135 and these three are one. Those things which the Fathers say beyond the Holy Scripture in their particular explanations of the faith do not bind Christians, each one of whom should seek out his salvation in the Holy Scriptures, and not because of anyone else’s peril, but because of his own most profound peril.136 Now I will go on to other matters.

135 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 the words in a marginal note. The formula made 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. 136 The peril Hobbes intends must be damnation, as he understands it. There is also the clear suggestion that one’s salvation is a private concern, not properly subject to other persons’ intrusive scrutiny or preferences. See below, n. 183.

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agit. Caeterum si vox persona sumatur simpliciter pro substantia intelligente singulari, quemadmodum sumitur a Bellarmino, ut Petrus, Paulus, Johannes, vel, quod idem est, pro hypostasi; quomodo Pater, Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus non sint tres substantiae individuae, id est, tres numero Dei, non intelligo; neque quomodo e Scripturis probari possit, video, ubi neque hypostases, neque personae in Deo distinguuntur. Solummodo dicuntur esse tres qui testimo nium perhibent in coelo, nempe Pater, Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus, et tres illi esse unum. Illa, quae Patres dicunt extra Scripturam Sacram in suis ﬁdei explicationibus particularibus, Christianos non obligant, quorum unusquisque non alieno periculo, sed suo et summo, salutem suam in Scripturis Sacris scrutari debet. Transeo nunc ad alia.

chapter 2 ON HERESY 105 A. What is ‘heresy’? 106 B. It is a Greek word, meaning the teaching of any sect. 107 A. What is a sect? 108 B. A sect is a group of men who follow one and the same master in the sciences,

whom they have chosen for themselves of their own accord. As ‘sect’ comes from sequi, so ‘heresy’ comes from α>ρεσις (hairesis), the Greek word for ‘choosing.’137 Lucian, an impious man, though a good master of the Greek language, wrote a book on choosing a master, Περι αρσεως. 109 A. What sects have there been and which men did they follow? 110 B. They were followers of philosophers, that is, of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epi-

curus and others. And, they were called Academics, Peripatetics, Stoics and Epicureans. These were the Greek philosophers’ principal sects or, at any rate, of those who required that they be esteemed as philosophers. For, it is true, I think, that Plato and Aristotle, Zeno and Epicurus, the sects’ originators, were truly philosophers, according to the understanding of the pagans; that is, they were men devoted to truth and virtue. And, it is for this that their names have justly shone in the glory of their wisdom throughout nearly all the world. But, I do not think that we should call their sect-followers philosophers, for, apart from the opinions they knew their masters held, such men themselves understood nothing. They lacked knowledge of the principles and lines of reasoning upon which their masters’ teachings rested. Nor did they lead lives after the manner of philosophy, except that they went about looking sad; they let their beards grow and they wore a threadbare pallium.138 Otherwise, they were greedy, haughty and irascible, complete strangers to civic affection.139

137 A noun from the verb αροµαι (haireomai), meaning to choose for oneself, to prefer. Hobbes’s point here is that a sect is a voluntary association of persons, constituted by their ‘heresy,’ that is, the free act of choosing their own master.

caput ii appendix ad leviathan DE HAERESI A. Quid est haeresis?

105

B. Vox Graeca est, signiﬁcans cujuscunque sectae dogma.

106

A. Quid est secta?

107

B. Secta est numerus hominum sequentium unum eundemque in scientiis magi- 108 strum, quem pro suo arbitrio sibi eligerunt. Ut autem secta a sequendo, ita haeresis ab eligendo dicitur. Lucianus librum suum de magistro eligendo, homo quidem blasphemus, sed bonus author linguae Graecae, scripsit Περι αρσεως. A. Sectae quaenam erant, et quorum hominum?

109

B. Philosophorum; nimirum Platonis, Aristotelis, Zenonis, Epicuri, et aliorum. 110 Nominabantur autem Academici, Peripatetici, Stoici, Epicurei; quae sectae erant principales philosophorum Graecorum, vel eorum qui philosophos videri postulabant. Etsi enim haeresiarchas ipsos, Platonem, Aristotelem, Zenonem, Epicurum, pro captu ethnicorum vere philosophos fuisse puto, id est, veritatis et virtutis studiosos, et propter eam rem nomina eorum fere per totum orbem sapientiae gloria merito ﬂoruisse; sectatores tamen eorum philosophos dicendos esse non puto; qui praeterquam quod scirent quaenam fuerint magistrorum suorum sententiae, nihil intelligebant. Principia enim et ratiocinationes, quibus eorum dogmata innitebantur, nesciebant; neque quicquam ad philosophiae speciem in vita habuerunt, praeterquam quod tristes incederunt, barbam promitterent, et pallium tritum amicirentur; homines alioqui avari, fastuosi, iracundi, et amore civili alieni.

138 The pallium was a rectangular piece of material worn draped, mainly by men, as an outer garment; it was considered a characteristically Greek form of dress. 139 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.

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111 A. But, so far you have omitted to speak of the words truth or error. Do they not

pertain to the deﬁnition of a heresy in that one or the other inheres necessarily in every teaching? 112 B. No, not in the slightest. Heresy denotes only some declared opinion, no matter

whether true or false, in accordance with or contrary to the law. 113 A. If these men called one another heretics, then it seems that it was not a term

of abuse. 114 B. Oh, those sects of the Greek philosophers did not call one another heretics,

but wretches, deﬁlers of the sacred, thieves, parricides, unclean, accursed and other names such as men of the lowest sort use when they grow angry and come to blows. But, after heresies began to arise within the church, the greatest reproach of all was to be called a heretic. 115 A. Were there no other heresies apart from those of the Greek philosophers? 116 B. In Judaea, the sects of the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Essenes were also

called heresies, as the New Testament makes clear. Hellenism but also Judaism and Christianity counted in those days as so many heresies.140 Galatians includes heresy in a list of crimes,141 and, in Galatians 1:8, it means any teaching contrary to that of St. Paul, that is, contrary to the Gospel of Christ: ‘But, though we or some angel from heaven preach any Gospel to you except that one which we have preached to you, let him be anathema’ (?ν'!εµα στω; anathema esto). 117 A. What does ?ν'!εµα (anathema) mean? 118 B. With an eta, ?ν'!ηµα means anything whatsoever that is dedicated, conse-

crated or separated from ordinary use. But, with an epsilon, ?ν'!εµα sometimes means a person given over to the shades of the world below.142 119 A. How can an angel be given over to the shades of the underworld?

140

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).

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A. Nihilne ad deﬁnitionem haereseos pertinent voces, quas omisisti, veritas et 111 error; quorum alter omni dogmati adhaeret necessario? B. Nihil omnino; haeresis enim solam denotat sententiam declaratam, sive vera 112 ea sit, sive falsa; sive juxta, sive contra legem. A. Videtur ergo, si homines mutuo se haereticos appellent, convicium non esse. 113 B. Sectae illae philosophorum Graecorum non appellabant alter alterum haere- 114 ticum; sed scelestum, sacrilegum, furem, parricidam, µι'ρον, καταρατν aliisque nominibus quibus utuntur inﬁmi ordinis homines, quando fere ad pugnam excandescunt. Postquam autem in ecclesia haereses ortae essent, maximum omnium convicium erat haereticus. A. Nullaene erant haereses praeterquam philosophorum Graecorum?

115

B. Etiam in Judaea, Pharisaeorum, Sadducaeorum, Essenorum sectae dicebantur 116 haereses, ut ex Novo Testamento manifestum est. Graecismus item, Judaismus, Christianismus, habebantur eo tempore pro totidem haeresibus. Haeresis item (Gal. v. 20) inter crimina ponitur: et (Gal. i.8), doctrinam signiﬁcat doctrinae ipsius S. Pauli contrariam, id est, contrariam Evangelio Christi: Si nos aut angelus de coelo Evangelium aliud praedicaverit praeter illud quod vobis praedicavimus, ?ν'!εµα στο. A. Quid est ?ν'!εµα?

117

B. ?ν'!ηµα (per -η-) signiﬁcat quamlibet rem dedicatam, consecratam, vel ab 118 usu communi separatam. Sed ?ν'!εµα (per -ε-) signiﬁcat aliquando personam Diis manibus devotam. A. Quomodo Diis manibus devoveri potest angelus?

141 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.’ 142 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.

119

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120 B. An angel certainly cannot be burned or killed. But, one could be considered

not to be an angel but only a specter and denounced as an accursed deceiver, that is, as the Holy Scripture says, handed over to Satan.143 121 A. In the primitive church, since it had the written Gospel as its rule of the

correct faith, what was the cause of heresies? 122 B. It was the pride of the philosophers of whom I have just spoken, ignorant

men living at the time of the apostles, who had learned to dispute more subtly and orate more powerfully than other men. These men, in entering upon the way of Christ, were almost of necessity chosen as bishops and elders to defend and propagate the faith, and, as much as in them lay, even as Christian converts, they held fast to the teachings of their pagan masters. Accordingly, they sought to interpret the Holy Scriptures so as to preserve at once their own philosophy and the Christian faith, as though they were the same thing.144 123 A. You have explained clearly enough what a heresy was in philosophy, but I

still do not know what was called a heresy in the church. 124 B. In the primitive church, up to the time of the Council of Nicaea, most of the

teachings about which the Christians then disagreed concerned the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. For, although everyone held that this mystery was incomprehensible, nonetheless, trusting the philosophy of his masters, each man dared to explain it after his own manner. From this, there arose at ﬁrst arguments, then disorders; thereafter, to avoid scandal and establish peace in the church, synods were organized, convoked without the order of those in power but through the voluntary drawing together of bishops and pastors, as they were able with the lessening of persecution. In these councils, the participants deﬁned what one was to believe concerning the faith in any area of dispute. That which was deﬁned was called the catholic faith; what was condemned, heresy. For, with respect to the individual bishop or pastor, the council was the catholic church, that is, the whole or universal church. So also was their opinion the catholic opinion, while a speciﬁc teaching held by

143

Hobbes may have in mind those angels who have fallen from heaven to be handed over to Tartarus (Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4) and await the last judgment. This may refer to the fact that Satan was described as the king of liars. (In chapter 47 of the Latin Leviathan, Hobbes deﬁnes the word ‘fairy’ [lemur] by reference to the word ‘specter,’ so the passage may be translated, ‘as no more than a fairy.’) Or, the reference may be to I Corinthians 5:5, which the Vulgate

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B. Comburi quidem non potest, neque occidi; sed haberi pro non angelo sed 120 pro spectro tantum potuit, et ut deceptor execrabilis declarari, id est, in verbis Scripturis Sacris, tradi Satanae. A. Quaenam erat in ecclesia primitiva, cum rectae ﬁdei regulam haberet Evan- 121 gelium scriptum, haeresium causa? B. Philosophorum, quos dixi supra, hominum imperitorum apostolorum tem- 122 pore vigentium, arrogantia; qui caeteris hominibus argutius disputare et potentius perorare didicerant. Hi ad disciplinam Christi accedentes in presbyteros et episcopos, ad defendendam et propagandam ﬁdem, pene necessario eligebantur; et magistrorum suorum ethnicorum, quantum poterant, etiam facti Christiani dogmata retinuerunt, et propterea Scripturas Sacras ad philosophiam suam et ﬁdem Christianam, tanquam eandem rem, simul conservandam interpretari conabantur. A. Quid erat haeresis in philosophia, satis explicasti. Quid vero in ecclesia 123 dicebatur haeresis, nondum intelligo. B. In ecclesia primitiva usque ad tempus Concilii Niceni, dogmata quibus inter 124 se discrepabant Christiani eo tempore, erant pleraque circa doctrinam Trinitatis; cujus mysterium, quanquam ab omnibus tenerentur incomprehensible, freti tamen suorum magistrorum philosophia, explicare alius alio modo ausus est. Unde primo ortae sunt disputationes, deinde jurgia, et deinde, ad scandalum evitandum et pacem in ecclesia constituendam, synodi adhibitae sunt, convocatae nulla jussione imperantium, sed coitione episcoporum et pastorum voluntaria, quando cessante persecutione potuerunt. In quibus Conciliis quid de ﬁde in re controversa tenendum esset deﬁnierunt. Quod autem deﬁnitum erat, ﬁdes catholica; quod damnatum, haeresis dicebatur. Erat enim Concilium, respectu episcopi vel pastoris singularis, ecclesia catholica, sive tota, sive universalis; sicut

reports as: tradere huiusmodi Satanae in interitum carnis ut spiritus salvus sit in die Domini Iesu; ‘to deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the ﬂesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.’ 144 This is a key objective throughout the Appendix, namely, distinguishing what is Greek in Christianity from Christianity itself.

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an individual pastor was heresy. And, it is from this, as much as I have been able to explore in the historical sources, that the name ‘Catholic Church’ derives. And, in every church, the words ‘catholic’ and ‘heretic’ are relative terms.145 125 A. If ‘Catholic Church’ means nothing other than this, then there are indeed

many catholic churches in the Christian world. 126 B. There are as many catholic churches as there are heads of churches.146 And,

there are as many heads of churches as there are Christian kingdoms and commonwealths.147 For, in every land of Christians, the prince is the head of his subjects in that land,148 independent of any other head on earth.149 Thus, there

145 ‘Catholic’ here indicates the will of the majority that binds the whole; in the church conceived of as a voluntary association, confessing and worshipping ‘according to the whole’ means acting in accordance with the majority will. Heresy is in Hobbes’s sense a minority’s opinion, without regard to whether it is right or wrong. The legality of such an opinion can be determined only following the erection of a sovereign competent to legislate and sanction illicit behavior. Its truth cannot be determined. Thus, the faithful may be misled as to particulars of the faith, though not as to the essential doctrine that Jesus is the Christ, a belief which neither requires nor warrants disobedience on the part of the subject:

Leviathan 3.43.22.624: Having thus shown what is necessary to salvation; it is not hard to reconcile our obedience to God, with our obedience to the civil sovereign; who is either Christian, or inﬁdel. If he be a Christian, he alloweth the belief of this article, that Jesus is the Christ; and of all the articles that are contained in, or are by evident consequence deduced from it: which is all the faith necessary to salvation. And because he is a sovereign, he requireth obedience to all his own, that is, to all the civil laws; in which also are contained all the laws of nature, that is, all the laws of God: for besides the laws of nature, and the laws of the Church, which are part of the civil law, (for the Church that can make laws is the commonwealth), there be no other laws divine. Whosoever therefore obeyeth his Christian sovereign, is not thereby hindered, neither from believing, nor from obeying God… There can therefore be no contradiction between the laws of God, and the laws of a Christian commonwealth. 146

That is, there are as many churches, properly deﬁned, as there are persons with sovereign power within them; nothing within the body of believers itself encompasses coercive force. As Hobbes indicated above, § 123, the Nicene Fathers required the sovereign power of Constantine to enforce their decisions. Christians as such lack coercive force and are restricted in remedies for unsanctioned beliefs and practices; see below, §§ 145 ff. 147 In this section of the Appendix, Hobbes develops his principle of the national church. 148 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. 158 ff. 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. 219 ff. Corbett identiﬁes the page’s engraver as the Frenchman

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et eorum opinio, catholica; singulare autem cujuscunque pastoris dogma, haeresis. Atque hinc, quatenus in historiis explorare potui, origo nominis ecclesiae catholicae; et in omni ecclesia catholicus et haereticus voces sunt relativae. A. Si nihil aliud signiﬁcet ecclesia catholica, multae sane sunt in orbe Christiano 125 ecclesiae catholicae. B. Tot sunt ecclesiae catholicae, quot sunt ecclesiarum capita. Sunt autem tot 126 capita, quot sunt regna et respublicae Christianae. In omni enim regione Christianorum, in ea regione princeps sudbitorum suorum caput est, nec ab alio in

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. 149 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: [P]erhaps in the later years of Edward I and at least certainly by the beginning of the reign of Edward II, the Crown had apparently begun to expand its jurisdiction… and to assert the competence of its own courts over those of the church whether within the realm or at Rome. No longer is it simply a matter of prohibition because justice is available within the realm, but now because cognition of the matter in question pertains to the royal courts. The privilege of England, however, did not support this assertion as well as arguments could that were based upon the royal prerogative and ancient custom, and a more vigorous policy seems to have been gradually formulated. At a time that can not yet be precisely dated, then, the basis of royal prohibition to Rome was changed. Appeals to Rome were no longer said, as in 1233, to be merely ‘contra formam privilegi nostri’ [against the form of our privilege], but now rather, as in 1307, to be ‘in enervationem juris nostri regii et exheredationem nostram et enormem laesionem dignitatis et coronae nostrae’ [to the destruction of our royal right and our inheritance and a great injury to our dignity and crown]. I owe this reference to the kindness of the late Stephan Kuttner.

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are as many visible churches as there are heads of churches.150 But, because the number of God’s elect, scattered throughout the whole world and having Jesus Christ Himself in heaven as head, is called and is the true, most catholic and only church, this is also the church in which we profess to believe in the creed of our faith.151 For, there is not nor can there be another catholic church, at least, if, by catholic, we mean all Christians together.152 For in

150

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 realm of 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 the only 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

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terris capite dependent. Itaque quot sunt ecclesiae visibiles, tot sunt ecclesiarum capita. Quoniam autem electorum a Deo numerus, per totum orbem terrarum disseminatus, caput habens in coelis ipsum Jesum Christum, dicitur et est vera ecclesia catholicissima et unica; illa quoque est, in quam credere proﬁtemur in ﬁdei symbolo. Nulla enim alia est aut esse potest ecclesia catholica, si modo catholica sumatur pro omnibus simul Christianis. In Christianis enim civitatibus,

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. 151 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 distinguish between 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, §§ 207 ff.; 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. 152 Note that Hobbes’s deﬁnition of the universal church does not rest on any empirical unity of belief among Christians, continuity in time or contiguity in space. He may be contrasted with Hooker on these points.

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Christian polities, the kingdom and the church are the same people.153 Thus, if it were granted to anyone on earth to be the head of the whole Christian Church, to him also would it at the same time be granted to be king of all kingdoms and commonwealths.154 127 A. Which teachings were called heresies by the primitive churches? 128 B. There were many, but the principal ones pertained to the doctrine of the

Trinity, which is contained in the Nicene confession of faith. This statement of the faith had its origins at the ecumenical Council of Nicaea, but it was completed by the following three ecumenical councils, namely, those held at Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon. Further, it was ratiﬁed by the Roman emperors of those times who had called the councils. The reason for calling the Council of Nicaea was Arius, elder of Alexandria.155 When the bishop of that city, Alexander, had said to him that the Son of God was (µο σιος (homousios),156 that is, of the same substance, with the Father, Arius contradicted him.157 And then, with a large number of elders present, in the rising heat of their argument, he also denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. As a result, shortly thereafter civil strife and bloodshed were born in Alexander’s city.158 Then, in order to preserve the peace, Emperor Constantine the Great convoked the famous Council of Nicaea, during which the Fathers settled the 153

See Leviathan 3.39.5.498:

[T]here is on earth, no such universal Church, as all Christians are bound to obey; because there is no power on earth, to which all other commonwealths are subject: There are Christians, in the dominions of several princes and states; but every one of them is subject to that commonwealth, whereof he is himself a member; and consequently, cannot be subject to the commands of any other person. And therefore a Church, such a one as is capable to command, to judge, absolve, condemn, or do any other act, is the same thing with a civil commonwealth, consisting of Christian men; and is called a civil state, for that the subjects of it are men; and a Church, for that the subjects thereof are Christians. Temporal and spiritual government, are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and mistake their lawful sovereign. It is true, that the bodies of the faithful, after the resurrection, shall be not only spiritual, but eternal: but in this life they are gross, and corruptible. There is therefore no other government in this life neither of state, nor religion, but temporal; nor teaching of any doctrine, lawful to any subject, which the governor both of the state, and of the religion, forbiddeth to be taught: And that governor must be one; or else there must needs follow faction, and civil war in the commonwealth, between the Church and State; between spiritualists, and temporalists; between the sword of justice, and the shield of faith; and (which is more) in every Christian man’s own breast, between the Christian, and the man. The doctors of the Church, are called pastors; so also are civil sovereigns: But if pastors be not subordinate one to another, so as that there may be one chief pastor, men will be taught contrary doctrines, whereof both may be, and one must be false. The union of church and state under the sovereignty of the royal person was the goal of Henry VIII, carried out by his son Edward and daughter Elizabeth and then the early Stuarts, James

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regnum et ecclesia populus idem est. Itaque si alicui in terris concederetur, ut esset totius ecclesiae Christianae caput, eidem simul concederetur ut esset regnorum et rerumpublicarum omnium rex. A. Quaenam erant illa dogmata ab ecclesiis primitivis appellatae haereses?

127

B. Inter multas alias praecipue fuerunt, quae pertinebant ad doctrinam Trinita- 128 tis, quae continetur in ﬁdei symbolo Niceno. Quod quidem symbolum constitui coepit in Concilio Oecumenico Niceno; absolutum autem est a tribus Conciliis Oecumenicis sequentibus, nempe Constantinopolitano, Ephesino, Chalcedonensi, et ab imperatoribus Romanis illorum temporum, qui illa Concilia indixerunt, conﬁrmatum. Causa Concilii Niceni convocandi fuit Arius, presbyter Alexandriae, cui cum Alexander, ejusdem urbis episcopus, dixisset Filium Dei esse Patri (µο σιον, id est, ejusdem substantiae cum Patre, Arius contradixit; cumque, multis presentibus presbyteris, fervesceret disputatio, negavit quoque Jesu Christi divinitatem: unde nata est paulo post in urbe Alexandrina seditio et caedes. Conservandae autem pacis causa, imperator Constantinus Magnus Concilium illud Nicenum convocavit, in quo symbolum usque ad haec verba, credo

and Charles. Cf. Henry Parker’s argument in The Question concerning the Divine Right of Episcopacie Truly Stated Printed for Robert Bostock (1641), esp. pp. 3–4. 154 The upshot of this analysis is to deny the primacy of the pope, for example, over the English sovereign’s Christian subjects. 155 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). 156 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, A Glossary of Later Latin to 600 A.D. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), p. 176. 157 Since the Arian position was that Christ was a second, or inferior God, standing midway between the First Cause and creatures: made, yet making all things; existing before all worlds and possessed of all divine perfections, except that God alone was without beginning, unoriginate; they were able to subscribe to the orthodox statements, as they interpreted them. Only the term homoousios, with its meaning ‘of the same substance with the Father,’ pressed the distinction which revealed the Arians’ deviation from orthodoxy. 158 One may hear a double entendre here, with a reference to both the Macedonian general and the bishop.

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wording of the creed up to the phrase ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit…’159 And, they condemned the belief of the Arians, excommunicated him and his followers, certain of the bishops and elders, and expelled them from their churches. But, because so many of the later emperors were Arians, that heresy could not be extinguished. Fifty years passed, and another general council took place at Constantinople, at which Macedonius’ denial of the divinity of the Holy Spirit was condemned as heresy.160 Then, after ﬁfty more years, at the general council held at Ephesus, there issued a condemnation of the doctrine of Nestorius, who, like Arius, denied the divinity of Christ.161 Finally, the General Council of Chalcedon condemned the heresy of Eutyches and Dioscorus, who denied the union of the two natures of Christ, the human and the divine.162 In this way then, the creed which is named for Nicaea was ﬁnally completed, and the heresies I have mentioned, as well as others similar to them, were condemned. 129 A. After these heresies were condemned, did no new ones then spring to life? 130 B. Oh yes, many more; I do not know how many. For after that, the Roman

Church by its decrees arrogated to itself the inability to err as to the articles of the faith. And then, Emperor Phocas granted supremacy over all bishops to the pope.163 And, as the power of the empire in Italy began to wane and with

159 That the Fathers at Nicaea went no farther in writing the third article of creed is attested in Eusebius’ ‘circular letter’; see § 179. 160 The heresy of the Pneutomachi (‘Adversaries of the Holy Spirit’) is commonly associated with the name of Macedonius, the Bishop of Constantinople appointed by Arians prior to 360, when he was deposed by that group for doctrinal differences. With the Nicene Fathers’ condemnation of the Arian position on the Son, the second part of the program, namely, dealing with the Holy Spirit, was left to fall with the ﬁrst. It did not and had to be dealt with by a number of succeeding councils, most fully by the council of Constantinople, which completed the work on the Trinity begun at Nicaea. 161 The heresy of Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, was a reaction to the confusion of the two natures in Christ by the Apollinarians. Nestorius insisted so strongly on Christ’s human nature as to tend to a separation of the two natures in derogation of the orthodox doctrine of the ‘hypostatic union,’ the view that Christ was one divine person in whom two natures were most closely and intimately united, but without being mixed or confounded. The council meeting at Ephesus condemned the heresy, and Nestorius suffered banishment to Egypt. The status of Mary ﬁgured in the debate on the heresy in that Nestorius denied that she was !εοτκος (theotokos), that is, mother of God, but merely Χριστφορος (Christophoros), that is, mother of Christ, thereby preferring to describe the union of the divine and human natures in Christ as moral only. Hobbes’s discussion of the Latin term Deipara, §§ 57–58, would show a familiarity with this aspect of the problem of Christ’s divinity. 162 Eutyches and his followers were the early Monophysites, teaching that there resulted only one nature from the unity of the two natures in Christ. The error was that the human

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in Spiritum Sanctum, Patres constabiliverunt, et damnata sententia Arianorum, ipsum cum sociis ejus quibusdam episcopis et presbyteris excommunicaverunt, et ab ecclesiis deposuerunt; quanquam, propter sequentes imperatores aliquot Arianos, haeresis illa extingui non potuit. Concilium alium generale post annos quinquaginta habitum est Constantinopoli, ubi damnata est haeresis Macedonii, negantis divinitatem Spiritus Sancti. Deinde, post annos alios quinquaginta in Concilio generali Ephesino damnata est doctrina Nestorii negantis, sicut Arius, divinitatem Christi. Postremo, in Concilio generali Chalcedonensi damnata est haeresis Eutychetis et Dioscuri, negaverunt duarum naturarum in Christo, divinae et humanae, unionem. Et ita symbolum, quod vocatur Nicenum, tandem perfectum fuit, et cum dictis haeresibus etiam aliae his afﬁnes condemnatae sunt. A. Post haereses illas damnatas, nullaene postea subortae sunt novae?

129

B. Etiam multae, nescio quot. Postquam enim ecclesia Romana decretis suis 130 arrogasset sibi, circa articulos ﬁdei errare se non posse; et primatum super omnes episcopos concessisset Papae imperator Phocas; et imperii in Italia vis

nature seemed to be absorbed in the divine. Eutyches’ opinion was condemned at a synod at Constantinople, but he appealed to Emperor Theodosius, who called a general council at Ephesus upon the advocacy of Dioscorus of Alexandria in Eutyches’ behalf. The council’s procedures were evidently unfair, and its result was unsatisfactory, so that, after further machinations, Marcian summoned another council to meet at Chalcedon. Eutyches, who had been banished by the emperor, was condemned; Dioscorus was condemned, deposed and banished. 163 The title ‘universal bishop’ had been claimed by the patriarch of Constantinople known as John the Faster. (John won his title after having eaten nothing but lettuce, a little watermelon, grapes or ﬁgs for more than thirteen years.) Pope Boniface IV sought and received from Phocas (602–610) a decree acknowledging that ‘the See of Blessed Peter the Apostle should be the head of all the Churches’ and that the title of ‘universal bishop’ should be reserved exclusively for the bishop of Rome. In fact, the decree restated the earlier view of Justinian, who had already given legal recognition to the primacy of the Roman pontiff. Phocas’ action is mentioned by Cluverius (Johann Clüver 1593–1633), in his Historiarum totius mundi epitome, which Aubrey mentions Hobbes read between his return to London in 1651 and the Restoration of 1660. The work appeared in 1631 and sold out quickly; there were at least twelve more editions by 1678, published in Leiden, Amsterdam, Hildesheim and Breslau. If the account comes from Cluverius, Hobbes read the comment, Phocas Tyrannus verius quam Imperator, ut acquisivit potestatem, ita gessit, crudelitate, temulentia, fraudibus, nequitia nobilitatus apud posteros; ‘Phocas, more truly a tyrant than an emperor, as he acquired power, so he employed it, achieving notoriety amongst those who followed through his cruelty, drunkenness, deceits, wickedness.’ Phocas also presented the pope with the Pantheon, then a pagan temple, authorizing its conversion into a Christian church, known as Santa Maria Rotunda. The pope rededicated the temple in 609, following rules established for such conversion by his predecessor Gregory I.

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the Christian princes seized by fear of the Saracens, the pope, already mightily increased in riches and power, called general councils upon his own authority, without regard for the authority of the emperors and kinglings of Italy. He even dared to excommunicate some kings and emperors as heretics. As time passed, they condemned as heresies all those doctrines which seemed either to impede the growth of ecclesiastical power or to detract from that already gained. And, from this arose those numerous heresies, on account of which, following the publication of Luther’s writings, so many Christians in this realm of England and in other places met a ﬁery death; until, at length, the princes of those places woke up and their subjects were freed from this, so grievous Roman persecution and servitude.164 131 A. Those whom the Roman Church ordered to be burned, the Lutherans, the

Anabaptists and the others, did it consider them Christians or pagans? 132 B. Without a doubt, Christians, and not only them, but surely also the Arians

and all the others whom the Nicene Synod condemned; nor did it call them anything other than heretics. For, even though, by using philosophic reasonings concerning the nature of the Savior, they felt differently than they should have about the Holy Trinity, against the Holy Scriptures, nonetheless they looked upon Christ as the true Messiah and Jesus Christ as the Son of God and called upon His name. 133 A. If this is so, it seems to me that the Roman Church is wrong to complain

of the ancient persecutions of the pagan emperors. For, the Christians of those times were so many sects, having the same relation to the religion established in the Roman Empire as a heresy today has to the catholic church. But, it is surely a more grievous thing if Christians are cruciﬁed by Christians rather than by the faithless. 134 B. So it seems to me also. Then again, it is altogether necessary that precaution

be taken in kingdoms and commonwealths lest sedition and civil wars arise. And, since these very frequently arise out of doctrinal differences and battles of intellect,165 those must certainly be coerced by some punishment who, in public meetings or in books, teach things contrary to what the laws of princes and commonwealths have ordained.166 For this reason, when Queen Elizabeth of England, upon succeeding her sister Mary, who had burned many heretics and had menaced even Elizabeth’s life, accepted the kingdom, with the consent of the Lords and people, she immediately removed the supreme right of ruling the Church of England from 164

Hobbes has leapt from early medieval times in the Mediterranean to the reigns of Henry and Mary Tudor in England by way of the Reformation in Germany.

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languesceret, et metus Saracenorum princeps Christianos occupasset; Papa, jam ante divitiis et potentia multum auctus, Concilia generalia propria authoritate convocabat, neglecta imperatorum et Italiae regulorum authoritate, quorum etiam aliquos reges et imperatores, ut haereticos, excommunicare ausus est. Itaque progressu temporis omnes doctrinas, quae potentiam ecclesiasticam aut surgentem impedire, aut consummatae detrahere videbantur, pro haeresibus condemnabant. Atque inde ortae sunt haereses illae numerosae, propter quas, post edita Lutheri scripta, tot Christiani in hoc regno Angliae aliisque in locis combusti sunt; donec, evigilantibus tandem illorum locorum principibus, a tam gravi percutione et servitudine Romana liberati fuerunt. A. Ecclesia Romana quos comburi jussit, Lutheranos, Anabaptistas, aliosque, 131 habuitne pro Christianos, an pro ethnicis? B. Pro Christianis sine dubio; nec hos tantum, verum etiam Arianos, et eos omnes 132 quos damnavit synodus Nicena. Neque eos aliter vocavit quam haereticos. Nam etsi philosophicis rationibus usi, de naturis Salvatoris et sancta Trinitate aliter senserunt quam oportuit, contra Scripturas Sacras; Christum tamen pro vero Messiah habuerunt, et Filium Dei Jesum Christum, et nomen ejus invocarunt. A. Si ita est, ecclesia Romana de imperatorum ethnicorum antiquis persecutio- 133 nibus, ut mihi quidem videtur, inique conqueruntur. Christiani enim temporum illorum sectae quaedam erant, eandem habentes rationem ad religionem in Romano imperio stabilitam, quam haeresis hodie ad ecclesiam catholicam. Gravius autem aliquanto est Christianos a Christianis, quam ab inﬁdelibus cruciari. B. Idem videtur et mihi. Sed tamen in regnis et rebuspublicis, ut cautio adhibea- 134 tur ne seditiones et bella civilia oriantur, omnimodo necessarium est. Quae cum saepissime nascantur a diversitate doctrinarum et concertationibus de ingenio, poena certe aliqua illi coercendi sunt, qui in concionibus vel libris ea docent, quae doceri principum et rerumpublicarum legibus prohibentur. Itaque Angliae regina Elizabetha, sorori Mariae succedens, sub qua multi haeretici combusti sunt, (nec ipsa Elizabetha sine periculo erat), accepto regno, jus regendae ecclesiae Anglicanae, jure naturali omnibus regibus in suis dominiis debitum, ante omnia, consensu procerum et populi, omnibus potestatibus extraneis ecclesiae Anglicanae suprematum abstulit; et adminstrationem ejusdem sub seipsa

165

That is, arguments among learned disputants which may lead to controversy and vio-

lence. 166

Reading jubentur with Schuhmann in place of Molesworth’s prohibentur.

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all external powers.167 For, such supremacy is owed by natural right to all kings in their territories.168 And, she entrusted administration of the church to her bishops under her, together with a few from the Privy Council, by an act under the Great Seal of England, conﬁrming them in it. In her act, she made provision lest the bishops pronounce any doctrine heretical not so declared in any of the ﬁrst four general councils which I have mentioned.169 Thus, the position of the Church of England as regards heresy was then similar to that of the Roman Church under Constantine the Great. And, so it remained until the seventeenth year of Charles I’s reign.170 In that year, almost forced to it by the entreaties of his subjects, who would no longer bear the great power of the bishops, Charles rescinded Elizabeth’s act.171 He left the bishops only their ordinary power, namely, that of making canons, which, should they receive the royal assent, would become the laws of the church.172

167

Hobbes refers to the Elizabethan religious settlement because of the success of its guiding policies, namely, outward conformity to the religion established by law and sustained by the authority of the Queen. Rather than open windows into men’s souls, Elizabeth promoted agreement as to externals as a basis of unity, so that religion might further, or at least not impede, the course of her government. The wisdom and expediency of this approach recommended themselves to Hobbes, particularly in view of the failure of the early Stuarts’ programs of church discipline and reform. 168 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. 169 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.

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episcopis suis, una cum paucis ex consilio suo privato, diplomate sub sigillo magno Angliae commisit et conﬁrmavit. In quo diplomate provisum erat ne quam doctrinam haereticam esse pronuntiarent, quae haeretica declarata non fuisset in aliquo eorum, quae dixi, Conciliorum quatuor primorum generalium. Itaque quod attinet ad haereses, status ecclesiae Anglicanae similis erat ejus qui erat ecclesiae Romanae sub Constantino Magno; et sic remansit usque ad annum decimum septimum regis Caroli I, qui subditorum suorum, tantam potestatem episcoporum non ferentium, precibus fere coactus, diploma illud Elizabethae revocavit, relicta episcopis potestate tantum ordinaria, nimirum faciendi canones, qui consentiente rege leges ﬁerent ecclesiasticae.

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. 142 ff. 170 That is, in 1641, in the context of Charles’ struggles with the Scots and the Long Parliament. 171 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. 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.

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135 A. Thus, the condition of the Church of England, as it appears today, is equal to

that of the church at the time of Constantine with respect to purity of doctrine but superior to it with respect to the fairness of ecclesiastical laws. For, it is surely unfair that a man who chooses173 his faith at the peril of his own salvation should receive punishment upon the accusation that it is in error, especially if the accusation is made by those not brought to damnation by his error. 136 B. To err, to be deceived, to hold a false opinion, these are by their nature no

crime, nor can error, so long as it held within one’s breast, become a crime. For, what informer will accuse him? What witnesses will convict him? And, then how will judgment be rendered? But, words can be made a criminal matter, and legislators may rightly seek to punish them through penalties, including forfeiture of one’s life. If blasphemy against the king can be punished with death, so much more blasphemy against God.174 But, fairness requires that such a law specify openly both what crime the law condemns and what penalty will be exacted, to the end that, if the wrong-doer knows in advance the penalty he will pay, he may be frightened from his wrongdoing. For, the end of legitimate punishment is not satiation of anger against a man but the prevention of injuries, as much as can be done to the beneﬁt of mankind. Any law is unjust which does not ﬁrst threaten before it wounds, and, however discretionary the right of supreme powers may be in setting down the laws, still it is not within their discretion to exact penalties which have not previously been deﬁned in the laws.175 Moreover, unless a law is declared and promulgated, so that any credible excuse of ignorance is removed, not even that which is done against the law can be rightly punished or called a crime.176 137 A. But, is that which transgresses the natural law not a crime and liable to

punishment, even if no penalty is provided in a law?177

173

This whole chapter deals with the effects of choosing in religious matters, so ‘choose’ for sumitur seems a good translation. Hobbes presses the signiﬁcance of these choices and in so doing strengthens his insistence that the scriptures supersede one’s own philosophic predilections in favor of the apostolic proclamation of the Gospel. Of course, whether this word or any word is effective rests not with the preacher or even the hearer but with the free gift of grace; see the Introduction. 174 Hobbes may have the rationale of Justinian’s Novella 77 in mind here; see §§ 171 ff. 175 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

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A. Ecclesiae ergo Anglicanae conditio qualis hodie cernitur, tum puritate doc- 135 trinae conditioni ecclesiae, quae erat tempore Constantini, aequalis est; tum aequitate legum ecclesiasticarum, superior. Iniquum enim videtur, ut homo, cujus ﬁdes suo solius periculo sumitur, eo nomine puniatur quod sit erronea, praesertim ab illis quibus alienus error damnosus non est. B. Errare, decipi, male sentire, natura sua crimen non est; nec, dum intra pec- 136 tus continetur, error ﬁeri crimen potest. Nam quo indice accusabitur, quo teste convincetur? Quomodo ergo judicabitur? At verba crimen esse possunt, et quibus legislatores volunt poenis puniri sine injuria; et quidem supplicio ultimo. Si blasphemia in regem morte puniri potest, multo magis blasphemia in Deum. Veruntamen aequitatis est, ut in tali lege aperte deﬁnitum sit, tum quid sit crimen quod condemnatur, tum quis sit modus puniendi; eo ﬁne ut expectatione poenae malus a maleﬁciendo absterreatur. Legitimae enim poenae ﬁnis non est irae contra hominem satiatio, sed, ad commodum humani generis, injuriarum quantum ﬁeri potest preventio; et iniqua est lex omnis, quae non ante comminatur, quam ferit; et quantumvis summarum potestatum in legibus condendis jus arbitrarium sit, arbitrarium tamen non est in sumendis poenis quae non sint an legibus deﬁnitae. Praeterea, lex nisi declarata sit et promulgata, ita ut ignorantionis excusatio omnis probabilis auferatur, ne id quidem, quod contra legem factum est, recte puniri aut crimen appellari potest. A. Quod factum est contra legem naturalem, nonne crimen est, et puniri potest, 137 etiamsi nullus legi adscriptus sit puniendi modus?

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. 176 That is, the law must not only be properly legislated but also promulgated and publicized. 177 That is, does the natural law not provide a basis for punishment without legislation or promulgation, given the fact that its requirements are by hypothesis known to all?

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138 B. The natural law is eternal and divine and inscribed only in the hearts of men.

But, few are they who know how to peer into their own hearts and read the things written there. And so, men learn what to do and what to avoid from laws that have been written down. And, having seen the penalties, they then do and avoid only so much as each one deems useful or harmful to him.178 Besides, if something is done against natural law, it is not usual to call it a crime but a sin, and men think they should be forgiven their sins immediately if they are repentant, unless what they have done involves some harm to the commonwealth or to their neighbor. And, in that case, they think themselves liable to no more punishment than is required to make satisfaction for the damage they have caused. But, they consider the evil itself to be punishable by God alone. For, if a sinner punishes a sinner, accusing him of nothing but the sin, after the law has been satisﬁed, it is not so different from a state of civil war.179 139 A. But, what if someone is an atheist, and no written law deﬁnes the penalty;

shall he not be punished? 140 B. He shall undoubtedly be punished and most severely, but ﬁrst he must

be accused, heard and condemned. And, he can be accused only because of something he has said and done. But, by what deeds will atheism be proven? For what deed have you heard of so wicked and impious the like to which has not at some time been committed, not only by those not considered atheists but even by those who make profession of Christianity? No, it is not from a man’s deeds that he will be adjudged an atheist. Thus, only because of something he has said, either orally or in writing, can a man be accused of atheism; that is, if he has directly denied that God exists. 141 A. But, do we not also call anyone an atheist who has said or written something,

the necessary consequence of which is the non-existence of God? 142 B. Oh yes, provided that, when he uttered or wrote it, he saw the necessity with

which that consequence followed. For, if it is certain words or deeds that the law prohibits and makes liable to punishment, then they must be deﬁned such that everyone whom that law is meant to oblige may know that it is this or that deed that is liable to punishment or these or those words, written out in the law itself, that are to be punished, together with a description in the law itself of the relevant circumstances.

178

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,

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B. Lex naturalis aeterna, divina, et cordibus solummodo inscripta est. Pauci 138 autem sunt, qui in sua ipsorum corda inspicere, et quae illic scripta sunt sciunt legere. Itaque quae facienda, quae fugienda sint, a legis scriptis discunt; faciuntque et fugiunt, prout praevisis poenis videbitur sibimet ipsis utile vel damnosus. Praeterea si quid factum sit contra legem naturalem, non id crimen vocari solet, sed peccatum, idque sibi poenitentibus statim condonandum existimant, nisi cum aliquo damno civitatis vel proximi conjunctum sit: neque tunc ulterius puniri se posse putant, quam ut pro damno illato satisfaciant; malitiam autem soli Deo puniendam relinqui. Nam si peccator peccatorem puniat peccati solius nomine, postquam legi satisfactum sit, simile est belli civilis. A. Quid, si quis atheus sit, nec sit lex scripta quae modum poenae deﬁniat, nonne 139 punietur? B. Punietur profecto, et gravissime. Sed prius accusandus, audiendus, et damnan- 140 dus est. Accusari autem praeter dictum et factum, nihil potest. Quibus autem factis arguetur atheismus? Quodnam enim factum audivisti unquam tam sceleratum aut impium, cujus simile non commissum sit aliquando ab illis, qui non modo non putantur athei, sed etiam professione tenus sunt Christiani? Non ergo ex factis judicatur atheus. Dicto igitur aliquo, sive prolato sive scripto, reus ﬁeri, neque ullo alio modo, potest; nempe, si directe negaverit Deum esse. A. Nonne atheus dicetur etiam is, qui dixerit scripseritve id, ex quo Deum non 141 esse necessario sequitur? B. Ita sane, si ipse, quando id dixit vel scripsit, consequentiae talis necessitatem 142 vidit. Nam si dictum vel factum sit id quod lege prohibetur, et proinde puniri possit, illud deﬁniri ita debet, ut illi omnes, qui lege illa obligandi sunt, cognoscant hoc et illud factum, prout lege cum circumstantiis deﬁnitum est, vel haec vel illa verba, quae in lege ipsa scribuntur, punienda esse. Nam verborum consequentiae

1969), pp. 35–40, 178 ff., and Pierre-François Moreau, ‘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.’ 179 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).

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For, the consequences of words are very difﬁcult to judge. Thus, if an accused man has spoken contrary to the letter of the law in ignorance of good reasoning, this very ignorance will excuse him, provided no damage has been done to anyone. If a judge, however, through ignorance of some consequence, binds an innocent man over for punishment, he cannot be excused.180 But, if the accused knows that those words are contrary to the law, he can be punished.181 Therefore, he who denies that God exists or openly professes his own doubt whether He exists or not can be punished, even if the precise penalty has not been inserted in the law, but with exile only, by natural fairness. For, religion and acknowledgement of divine power is commanded by law in every commonwealth; and every commonwealth must ensure that faith in covenants be preserved and especially if it is conﬁrmed by swearing an oath.182 Thus, because an atheist cannot be bound by an oath, he must be removed from the republic, not because he is contumacious but as a public nuisance.183 Then, once the public harm has abated, I do not see why he must be killed, since he may perhaps later be converted from his impiety. For, what may a man not hope for from divine patience before he dies? The same should be said concerning blasphemy, which is reproachful speech against God and, if the mind gives assent to the speech, atheism. 143 A. But, why are blasphemers to be killed according to the Mosaic law, rather

than suffer exile?

180 The point seems to be that judges left without explicit instructions as to heretical words can err in reasoning and thus wrong an innocent person, whereas, if they had explicit instructions, there would be no or less possibility of error. 181 That is, he knowingly broke the law by some word or deed and is liable to punishment for a religious offense. The question is one of criminal intent, linked to a speciﬁc act. 182 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. On oath, cf. Leviathan 1.15.33.201.

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difﬁcillimae judicatu sunt. Itaque si reus, ignorantione bene ratiocinandi, contra literam legis loquutus sit, nullo cuiquam damno facto, excusabit illum ignorantia. Sin judex per ignorantiam alicujus consequentiae hominem innocentem poenae tradiderit, excusari non potest. Quod si verba ipsa sciat contra legem esse, puniri potest. Quare qui Deum esse negat, vel aperte proﬁtetur dubitare se an sit vel non sit, etsi modus puniendi adscriptus legi non sit, puniri potest, sed exilio, etiam aequitate naturali. Nam religio et agnitio potentiae divinae in omni civitate lege imperatur: et est civitati omni essentiale, ut in pactis servetur ﬁdes, et praecipue si sit jurejurando conﬁrmata. Quia ergo atheus jurejurando obligari non potest, a republica ablegari debet, non ut contumax, sed ut nocumentum publicum. Cur autem, cessante damno publico, occidendus sit non video, cum ab impietate converti possit aliquando. Nam a longanimitate divina quid est quod sperare homo non potest, antequam moriatur? Similiter dicendum est de blasphemia, quae est oratio in Deum contumeliosa, et, consentiente animo cum oratione, atheismus. A. Quare autem non relegati potius erant blasphemi, per legem Mosaicam, 143 quam occisi?

183 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.

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144 B. Once a law has been enacted, an earthly king has the right to expel a

blasphemer from his kingdom. The king of the Israelite people at the time of Moses was God Himself, established so by covenant and also king naturally of the whole world. God therefore had the same right, once the law had been passed, to expel the blasphemer from the earth itself, that is, to kill him. Of course, you must understand this response of mine to your question not as an explanation of the cause of God’s purpose in setting down the law, but only as a defense of its fairness once it had been set down.184 145 A. Now I understand what heresy is, namely, that it was ﬁrst no more than an

opinion of a sect, then an opinion of a Christian sect and thirdly an opinion of a Christian sect condemned by the Catholic Church. I would also like to know by what power and in what way it became customary to punish heresy, from the beginning up to the present. 146 B. Before Constantine the Great, the ﬁrst Christian emperor, neither the pastors

nor even the apostles themselves had the power of inﬂicting any legal sanction upon those whom they had condemned as heretics. They could neither send them into exile nor deprive them of freedom of movement nor in any way molest them. Such power was in the competence of the highest ruler alone, for the preservation of the peace. They could excommunicate; that is, they could avoid heretics and withdraw from their society, intimacy and conversation,

184 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.

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B. Quia quo iure rex terrenus blasphemum, lege late, regno suo potest expellere, 144 eodem jure rex populi Israelitici, qui tempore Mosis erat Deus ipse per pactum constitutus, idemque rex per naturam totius orbis terrae, blasphemum, lege lata, expellere potuit ex universa terra, id est, occidere. Sed ad quaestionem tuam responsum hoc meum ita accipe, non ut consilii divini in lege condenda causam explicans, sed ut conditae aequitatem defendens. A. Intelligo jam quid sit haeresis; nempe, quod, primo, erat opinio tantum sectae; 145 deinde, opinio sectae Christianae; tertio, opinio sectae Christianae ab ecclesia Catholica damnatae. Vellem et hoc scire, a qua potestate, et quo modo, ab origine usque hodie puniri consuevit. B. Ante Constantinum Magnum, imperatorem Christianum primum, neque 146 pastores neque ipsi apostoli potestatem habuerunt haereticis a se condemnatis poenam ullam inﬂigendi, neque illos in exilium mittendi, neque libertate corporis privandi, neque quomodocunque molestandi; quippe quod soli summo imperanti ad conversationem pacis competebat. Excommunicare potuerunt, id est, eorum societatem, convictum, congressum, declinare et fugere, tanquam

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.

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treating them as though they were heathens and publicans.185 But, this is not a punishment, and it often caused more inconvenience to the ‘excommunicator’ than to the ‘excommunicated’. At the Council of Nicaea, after the heretics had been condemned, a punishment was established, but only against the clerics, namely, that they be deprived of their churches. Nothing however was done against their disciples, perhaps because the laity was not held at all responsible for judging the teachings of their pastors. Or, perhaps it was because quite a few of them were soldiers who had served in the army under the emperor himself; these were not to be provoked without some danger. Even the learned teachers of the heresies were called before the council; their reasonings were heard and, after argument, refuted out of the Holy Scriptures. If they refused to the end to subscribe to the judgment of the church, then at length they were deprived of their churches. And, if afterwards they continued to corrupt the people with their heresy, they were sometimes sent into exile.186 But, if these same men put their contumacy aside and later subscribed to the creed, the emperor restored them. Thus, Arius himself was restored after he had given the emperor a written confession of his faith which seemed to the emperor not to depart from the judgment given by the other Fathers. And, Athanasius, who did not want to receive him back, was sent into exile because of this behavior. 147 A. Did so great a man as Athanasius not think it a sin to refuse obedience to the

command of the supreme emperor? 148 B. So it seems. Nonetheless, the passages in the New Testament in which obe-

dience is taught by Christ and the apostles to even pagan powers are far from obscure. But, with that very zeal which he had shortly before employed to ﬁght the Arian heresy at the Nicene Council, Athanasius afterwards set himself against the emperor regarding the restoration of Arius.187 This should not surprise us, for, when doctors of theology so intently fasten upon those passages in the Holy Scriptures which bear on a current debate, they pass over those other passages which are about the rights of princes, either through carelessness or sometimes even through partisanship and the slighting of human laws. 185 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. 186

Very few of the Arians refused to subscribe and were exiled, only Arius, Secundus of Ptolemais, Theonas of Marmarica, who had supported Arius from early on, and some priests.

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ethnicorum vel publicanorum; quae poena non est, et saepenumero excommunicanti magis quam excommunicato incommoda erat. In Concilio Niceno poena, damnatis haereticis, in clericos tantum constituta est, eaque erat ut ecclesiis suis privarentur. Sed contra discipulos illorum statutum est nihil, quia laici forte de pastorum suorum doctrinis judicare minime tenebantur; vel forte, quia plerique eorum milites erant qui sub imperatore ipso meruerant, nec irritandi sine periculo erant. Etiam doctores haeresium ipsi citabantur ad Concilium, eorum rationes audiebantur, disputabantur, et ex Scripturis Sacris refutabantur. Ad extremum si ecclesiae judicio subscribere recusarent, tum demum privabantur ecclesiis. Et siquidem postea populum haeresi sua pergerent inﬁcere, in exilium quandoque mittebantur. Caeterum illi iidem, si posita contumacia postea subscriberent, ab imperatore restituebantur; sicut ipse Arius, postquam ﬁdei suae confessionem imperatori scriptam dedisset, quae a judicio Patrum reliquorum, ut imperatori videbatur, non discrepabat, restitutus fuit; et Athanasius, qui eum recipere noluit, ob eam rem in exilium missus est. A. Athanasius ille magnus summi imperatoris mandato obedientiam negare, 147 peccatum esse non putavit? B. Ita videtur; loca tamen Testamenti Novi illa, quibus obedientia potestatibus 148 etiam ethnicis a Christo et apostolis praecipitur, obscura non sunt. Sed Athanasius quo zelo haeresim Arianam in Concilio Niceno paulo ante oppugnaverat, eodem postea de Ario restituendo ipsi imperatori se opposuit. Neque mirum id videri debet; cum theologiae doctores, dum in loca illa Scripturae Sacrae, quae pertinent ad praesentem controversiam, intentissime inspiciunt, loca alia quae spectant ad jura principum aut negligentia, aut aliquando etiam studio spretis-

187 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 337 A.D.,’ Byzantion 62 (1992): 158–211, p. 182, n. 141.

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But, to return to the punishments set up for heretics, you should know that, among ecclesiastical punishments, the ultimate is what is called anathema or excommunication, so that every other punishment depends on the civil power.188 Now, the reason why Constantine and the other Roman emperors instituted many punishments against the heretics, such as exile, conﬁscation of their goods, the burning of their books, even death, though this measure was taken not against the heretical writers themselves but against those who failed to bring the condemned books to the ﬂames; I say this, the cause was lest Christians, and particularly soldiers, divide into factions and kill one another.189 Nonetheless, I can ﬁnd no imperial law requiring heretics be killed, excepting the Manichaeans only,190 whom I consider less as heretics than as feigned Christians and wicked men.191 I do ﬁnd a law according to which a pagan or Jew is to be burned if he has attempted to turn his relative, once converted, away from the Christian faith.192 But, this in no way pertains to the punishment of heretics. I have also heard that Emperor Frederick Barbarossa brought forward a law for the burning of heretics. But, although I ﬁnd that Justinian’s Code does contain a constitution of Frederick which conﬁrms his predecessors’ constitutions as to punishing heretics, no constitution exists as to burning them.193 And so, as far as I can gather by way of conjecture, that penalty for heretics began to take place shortly after the time of Pope Alexander III, who was the ﬁrst to trample not only that emperor but also the imperial power itself and the

188 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, §§ 207 ff. 189 I have tried to bring out what seems to be anacoluthon. 190 See Constantine’s law of 326, in Justinian’s Code, bk 1, title 5, De haereticis et Manicheis et Samaritis. 191 Hobbes perpetuates the unsupported attack on the behavior of the Manichaeans. Converted to Christianity, Augustine, in arguing vigorously against his former co-religionists, nonetheless does not complain of their behavior. 192 A reference to Constantine’s law of 315, Code, bk 1, title 9, De Judaeis et Caelicolis.

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que legibus humanis, praetereunt. Sed (ut redeamus ad haereticorum poenas) sciendum est, inter ecclesiastica supplicia ultimum esse quod vocatur anathematizatio sive excommunicatio, et propterea aliam omnem poenam dependere a potestate civili. Causa autem quare Constantinus et caeteri imperatores Romani multas poenas in haereticos constituerunt, ut exilium, publicationem bonorum, librorum combustionem (etiam mortem, sed non in scriptores haereticos ipsos, sed in eos qui libros illos damnatos ad ignem non protulerint), erat ne Christiani et praecipue milites secederent in partes, et mutuo se occiderent. Nullam tamen legem imperatoriam invenire possum, qua haeretici necandi sunt, exceptis Manichaeis, quos ego non tam pro haereticis, quam pro ﬁctis Christianis et sceleratis habeo. Legem quidem invenio, qua homo ethnicus vel Judaeus, si gentilem suum factum Christianum tentaverit a ﬁde Christiana revocare, comburendus esset. Sed hoc nihil attinet ad supplicium haereticorum. Audivi quidem imperatorem Fredericum Aenobarbum de comburendo haeretico legem tulisse; sed, etsi in codice Justiniani constitutionem reperio Frederici illius, conﬁrmantem imperatorum praecedentium constitutiones de poenis haereticorum, nulla tamen extat de combustione haereticorum. Itaque, quantum conjectura assequi possum, modus ille puniendi haereticos paulo post tempora Papae Alexandri III coepit, qui primus una cum imperatore illo imperium ipsum et principum

193 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 Pope Alexander 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. 47 ff.

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laws of all princes.194 However that may be, it is certain that, in our England, from almost that time until the times of Queen Elizabeth, heretics have generally been burned in accordance with a certain custom which has passed into law.195 149 A. Thus, a few words must be added to the deﬁnition of heresy from this time

forward, namely, that it is a teaching against the catholic faith, that is to be punished by ﬁre. 150 B. So it is. 151 A. By what judge and by what judicial form were heretics to be condemned? 152 B. Before the popes began to exercise supreme control over the emperors, the

judges were by and large those to whom were sent the emperors’ rescripts concerning punishments meted out to heretics, namely, the praetors of Rome and the provincial prefects. But, I know nothing of their procedure for convicting heretics.

194

Federico Zuccaro depicts Alexander placing his foot on the emperor’s neck, as the king sued for forgiveness following his defeat at Legnano, though the story is disputed. As pope, Rolando Bandinelli, the great Sienese theologian and canonist, vindicated his vision of the relations of church and state against a number of princes, including England’s Henry II in the wake of the Constitutions of Clarendon and the Becket affair. The scene and circumstance resemble another one which Hobbes recalls between Frederick Barbarossa and his countryman Pope Adrian IV (1100?-1159) at Sutri in 1155. At the pope’s approach, the emperor advanced but failed to hold the pope’s stirrup, part of the customary ceremony of homage. The pope said nothing and dismounted, and the emperor led him to a chair and kissed his shoe. Custom required that the pope then give the kiss of peace, which he refused to do, telling Frederick that, until full homage had been paid, he would withhold the kiss and, by implication, coronation. Frederick submitted. Hobbes commented on the episode as a consequence of allowing errors and seditious doctrines into the commonwealth; it may serve as an epitome of Hobbes’s thinking on the relation of politics and religion: Leviathan 4.47.18.709: But the emperors, and other Christian sovereigns, under whose government these errors, and the like encroachments of ecclesiastics upon their ofﬁce, at ﬁrst crept in, to the disturbance of their possessions, and of the tranquillity of their subjects, though they suffered the same for want of foresight of the sequel, and of insight into the designs of their teachers, may nevertheless be esteemed accessories to their own, and the public damage. For without their authority there could at ﬁrst no seditious doctrine have been publicly preached. I say they might have hindered the same in the beginning: but when the people were once possessed by those spiritual men, there was no human remedy to be applied, that any man could invent. And for the remedies that God should provide, who never faileth in his good time to destroy all the machinations of men against the truth, we are to attend his good pleasure, that suffereth many times the prosperity of his enemies, together with their ambition, to grow to such a height, as the violence thereof openeth the eyes, which the wariness of their predecessors had before sealed up, and

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omnium leges conculcavit. Utcunque id sit, certum est in Anglia nostra, ab illo fere tempore usque ad tempora Reginae Elizabethae, consuetudine quadam in legem transeunte haereticos comburi solitos esse. A. Deﬁnitioni ergo haereseos ab hoc tempore voculae aliquot adjiciendae sunt; 149 nimirum, ut haeresis sit doctrina contra ﬁdem Christianam, vindicanda igne. B. Ita est.

150

A. Quo judice, qua judicandi forma, condemnandi erunt haeretici?

151

B. Antequam imperium in imperatores exercerent Papae, judices plerumque 152 erant illi ad quos rescripta imperatorum de poenis haereticorum missa erant, nempe praetores urbis, provinciarum praefecti. Sed de forma haeretici convin-

makes men by too much grasping let go all, as Peter’s net was broken, by the struggling of too great a multitude of ﬁshes; whereas the impatience of those, that strive to resist such encroachment, before their subjects’ eyes were opened, did but increase the power they resisted. I do not therefore blame the emperor Frederick for holding the stirrup to our countryman Pope Adrian; for such was the disposition of his subjects then, as if he had not done it, he was not likely to have succeeded in the empire. But I blame those, that in the beginning, when their power was entire, by suffering such doctrines to be forged in the universities of their own dominions, have holden the stirrup to all the succeeding Popes, whilst they mounted into the thrones of all Christian sovereigns, to ride, and tire, both them, and their people, at their pleasure. But as the inventions of men are woven, so also are they ravelled out; the way is the same, but the order is inverted. The web begins at the ﬁrst elements of power, which are wisdom, humility, sincerity, and other virtues of the Apostles, whom the people converted, obeyed out of reverence, not by obligation. Their consciences were free, and their words and actions subject to none but the civil power. Afterwards the presbyters (as the ﬂocks of Christ increased) assembling to consider what they should teach, and thereby obliging themselves to teach nothing against the decrees of their assemblies, made it to be thought the people were thereby obliged to follow their doctrine, and when they refused, refused to keep them company, (that was then called excommunication,) not as being inﬁdels, but as being disobedient: and this was the ﬁrst knot upon their liberty. And the number of presbyters increasing, the presbyters of the chief city or province, got themselves an authority over the parochial presbyters, and appropriated to themselves the names of bishops: and this was a second knot on Christian liberty. Lastly, the bishop of Rome, in regard of the imperial city, took upon him an authority (partly by the wills of the emperors themselves, and by the title of Pontifex Maximus, and at last when the emperors were grown weak, by the privileges of St. Peter) over all other bishops of the empire: which was the third and last knot, and the whole synthesis and construction of the pontiﬁcal power. On the emperors’ ceding of the title pontifex maximus, see below, n. 280. 195 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.

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Then, after pontiﬁcal power had grown strong, cognizance of the action lay with one or more of the bishops. If the accused, having been questioned publicly, twice if necessary, renounced the doctrine he had taught, after having made penance in the form prescribed by the court, he would be absolved. But, if afterwards he relapsed into the same heresy or fell into some other (for they were without number), he was handed over to the secular power for burning. Nor was there any chance of pardon, given the division between civil and ecclesiastical power, without the consent of the pope. 153 A. How were heretics to be convicted and punished beginning with the ﬁrst year

of Elizabeth’s reign to the seventeenth year of Charles I? 154 B. Throughout that time, there appeared very few heretics at all.196 This was

because those to whom the Queen had entrusted ecclesiastical government under her were prohibited by law from judging any doctrine to be heretical which had not previously been condemned as heresy in one of the ﬁrst four general councils;197 as is clear from those councils themselves, this means any doctrine which did not oppose the faith set out in the Nicene Creed. But, any who were convicted would be burned. 155 A. How is it possible to know what is or is not contrary to the creed unless one

either denies the truth of the creed’s very words, in the form in which they were written down, or asserts their falsity? 156 B. Indeed; no heretic should be punished by the law unless he contradicts the

creed’s very words. For, it is unjust that someone should say that someone has denied the faith by implication and that, therefore, someone should be punished for this reason. Is it fair to seek a man’s life by means of adroitness in using logical arguments? Or to put his life at risk because of his adversaries’, or even his judge’s, skill in logic? Should the law, which requires no more than compliance, exact retribution for a ﬂaw in reasoning? Even the Fathers of the Nicene Council thought otherwise, for, when only some few of them hesitated to subscribe to the creed because of the word homousios and demanded a fuller explanation of that word, the other Fathers, gratifying their wish, declared that that word should be understood to mean that the Son of God was indeed of the substance of the Father but that He was nonetheless not a part of the Father. One of those who sought this explanation from the Fathers was Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, who wrote the so-called ‘circular letter’ to the clergy of all

196

Hobbes may mean in comparison to those appearing during the reign of Elizabeth’s predecessor.

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cendi nihil scio. Caeterum, postquam viguerat authoritas pontiﬁcia, cognitio causae ad episcopum unum vel plures attinebat; et siquidem reus doctrinae quam docuerat, publice bis, si opus esset, requisitus, renuntiaret, poenitentiamque ageret ea forma quam praescriberet curia, absolvebatur. Quod si in eandem haeresin post relaberetur, vel in aliam (nam innumerae erant) potestati seculari comburendus tradebatur: neque omnino veniae locus erat, propter potestatis ecclesiasticae et civilis distinctionem, sine consensu Papae. A. Ab anno primo Elizabethae ad annum decimum septimum Caroli I, quomodo 153 convincendi et puniendi erant? B. Per totum illud tempus apparuerunt quidem valde pauci haeretici, propte- 154 rea quod illis, quibus regina commiserat regimen, sub se ipsa, ecclesiasticum, prohibitum lege erat, ne quam doctrinam haereticam esse judicarent, quae non ante pro haeresi condemnata fuisset in aliquo quatuor Conciliorum generalium primorum, id est, ut ex illis ipsis Conciliis manifestum est, quae non erat contra ﬁdem in symbolo Niceno declaratam. Sed qui convicti erant, comburebantur. A. Quomodo cognosci potest, quid sit symbolo contrarium vel non contrarium, 155 nisi ipsa verba symboli ea formula, qua scripta sunt, negentur esse vera vel dicantur esse falsa? B. Neque lege puniendus est haereticus, nisi ipsis symboli verbis contradicat. 156 Nam ut quis dicat negari ﬁdem per consequentiam, utque ea de causa aliquis puniendus sit, iniquum est. Aequumne est ut hominis vita argutiis petatur consequentiarum; vel in adversariorum, aut etiam judicis peritia in arte logica periclitetur? An lex, quae nihil exigit praeter obedientiam, ulciscetur paralogismus? Patres ipsi in Concilio Niceno aliter censuerunt. Cum enim essent inter illos aliqui, sed pauci, qui propter vocem (µο σιος, subscribere symbolo dubitarent, et explicationem illius vocis pleniorem poscerent; illis morem gerentes Patres caeteri, vocem (µουσιον ita intelligendam esse declararunt, ut Filius Dei ex substantia quidem Patris esset, ut non tamen esset Patris pars. Ex illis qui explicationem hanc a Patribus impetraverunt, erat Eusebius episcopus Caesariensis;

197

1 Elizabeth, c. 20.

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the dioceses.198 In it, he set forth what the council had decided concerning faith in the Holy Trinity, and he explained why he and others who had ﬁrst refused to subscribe, later endorsed the creed. He gave as the reason for his action ‘that a formula was prescribed by the Fathers, by which care was taken that he might remain within the meaning of the orthodox faith, and that it was on this account that he did not reject the word homousios, namely, because peace was the object constantly before our eyes.’199 From this, one may understand, that, whenever words are made a crime, according to the opinion of the Nicene Council, they must be reduced to a formula, so that all can be certain without many syllogisms which words constitute a crime and which do not, and this is the very same manner by which one distinguishes those acts that constitute a crime from those that do not, namely, through a formula in the law. All the popes have felt similarly. For, when they condemn some doctrine as heretical in the general councils, they write down in the conciliar decretal as many express formulas as they foresee possible consequences which can arise from the given doctrine. 157 A. You said a moment ago that, in the ﬁrst year of the reign of Queen Eliza-

beth, the law prohibited those who exercised ecclesiastical government under her from pronouncing anything a heresy which one of the ﬁrst four general councils had not so condemned.200 Now I should like to know therefore whether those ecclesiastical governors whom she then established promulgated notice throughout all the parochial churches as to precisely which doctrines and verbal formulas it was a capital offense to contradict. For, I do not believe that uneducated men,201 to whom nothing but the Holy Bible had been prescribed for their salvation, were obliged to have with them a true transcript of the councils. In fact, I do not know whether a true transcript exists, for there are those who claim that the Arians corrupted the conciliar records, which the Catholics then suppressed for that reason. 198 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, §§ 179 ff. 199 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

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idemque ad clerum per omnes dioeceses epistolam scripsit, quae vocatur epistola circularis, in qua certiores facit, quid decretum erat in synodo de ﬁde circa sanctam Trinitatem, et de causa quare ipse et caeteri, qui prius subscribere recusaverant, nunc subscriberent; ubi pro causa subscriptionis suae posuit hanc, quod formula a Patribus praescripta esset, per quam cautio adhibebatur ne a rectae ﬁdei sententia excideret, et quod ob eam causam vocem (µο σιον non rejiceret, nempe, quia pax nobis tanquam scopus ante oculos versabatur. Ex quo intelligitur, quoties verba ﬁunt crimen, juxta Concilii Niceni sententiam, verba illa in formulam debere redigi; ut unusquisque quae verba crimen habent, quae non habent, sine pluribus syllogismis certus esse possit: eodem plano modo, quo id quod in factis crimen est ab eo quod crimen non est, distinguitur per legis formulam. Idem senserunt et Papae omnes. Nam ubi in Conciliis generalibus doctrinam aliquam damnant ut haereticam, ejusdem doctrinae consequentias quotquot nasci posse praevident, totidem formulas expressas in decreto ipso perscribunt. A. Dixisti modo prohibitum lege fuisse anno primo Reginae Elizabethae, ne 157 qui sub illa regimen ecclesiasticum exercerent, quicquam pronuntiarent esse haeresin, quod non esset ab aliquo primorum quatuor Conciliorum generalium condemnatum. Quaero igitur an rectores illi ecclesiastici, a regina tunc constituti, promulgaverint per omnes ecclesias parochiales, quaenam doctrinae illae erant, et formulae verborum, quibus contradicere capitale esset? Non enim credo homines imperitos, et quibus nihil ad salutem suam legendum praescriptum erat praeter Biblia Sacra, obligatos fuisse habere apud se exemplar Conciliorum, quod nescio an extet, verum. Sunt enim qui extare illa negant, ut ab Arianis corrupta, et ob eam causam suppressa a Catholicis.

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. 29 ff. 200 The respectful attitude Hobbes takes here toward at least the Nicene Creed is not repeated in what must be his later work Historia Ecclesiastica; see Patricia Springborg, ‘Hobbes, Heresy and the Historia Ecclesiastica,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994): 553–571, p. 563. 201 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 the ministry 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. 71 ff. This laxness was also dangerous after the arrival in 1580 of learned priests from English colleges established at Douai, then at Rheims and Rome.

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158 B. There can be no doubt that there exists an unadulterated transcript of the

part of the councils in which the creed was established. As for what pertains to the disputes between the Catholics and the heretics, it is hardly of great interest whether or not that part perished. Now, to respond to your question about whether the verbal formulas by which heresy was contained under Elizabeth were promulgated throughout the churches: no, none were; not even the royal letters themselves were published, until a long time afterward. As a result, a given defendant could not know what was and was not heresy before he was cited. Thus, even if, as a result of the royal letters, heresy could have been declared to be whatever had been so declared by those councils, this could not however be done on the basis of the letters.202 The negligence of Elizabeth’s ecclesiastical governors, their failure to publish those letters more quickly, was criticized by that most illustrious jurist Edward Coke, in the third book of his Institutes.203 159 A. The Anglican liturgy contained the creed. Was its publication not sufﬁcient

promulgation of the law on heresy? 160 B. Yes, if the law had contained a remark to that effect.204 But, no mention is

made there of the Nicene Creed, and neither the uneducated nor perhaps even some of the clergy understood what that creed had in common with the councils or how a decree of Constantine had been made English law. 161 A. You said that the governors of the church charged with adjudication of heresy

lost their authority through a law issued in the seventeenth year of Charles I’s reign.205 How was it possible that the laws on heresy which existed in the time of Queen Mary did not regain their authority at that point?

202 That is, because they lacked promulgation throughout the realm, not because the sovereign lacked power in the church to deﬁne heresy. 203 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

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B. Dubitari non potest de ea parte Conciliorum, qua symbolum stabilitur, quin 158 pura extet. Quod autem ad disputationes inter Catholicos et Haereticos attinet, utrum ea pars periit necne, haud magni interest. Caeterum quod quaeris, utrum promulgatae erant per ecclesias formulae verborum illae, quibus sub Elizabetha continetur haeresis, nullae promulgatae erant, ne ipsae quidem literae regiae publicatae fuerunt, nisi longo post tempore; adeo ut quid esset haeresis, quid non, sciri a reo non poterat antequam citaretur. Etsi enim propter literas illas regias haeresis declarari potuit, quicquid erat ita declaratum a praedictis Conciliis; potuit tamen per easdem non declarari. Negligentiam hanc rectorum ecclesiasticorum sub Elizabetha, quod literas illas regias non citius publicaverint, reprehendit clarissimus ille jurisconsultus Eduardus Cocus in tertio libro Institutorum. A. Nonne ipsum symbolum in liturgia Anglicana publicatum, legis de haeresi 159 sufﬁciens erat promulgatio? B. Ita, si in lege id scriptum fuisset. Sed nulla ibi facta est mentio symboli 160 Niceni; neque indocti, neque aliqui fortasse clerici, quid symbolum illud cum Conciliis commune haberet, aut quomodo decretum Constantini lex Anglicana facta esset, intellexerunt. A. Quum rectorum illorum, penes quos erat de haeresi judicare, authoritas lege 161 sublata erat, anno, ut dicis, Caroli Primi decimo septimo; quomodo ﬁeri potuit, ut authoritas legibus de haeresi, quae extiterunt tempore Reginae Mariae, non rediret?

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 §§ 207 ff. 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. 204 Hobbes’s implication is that the church lacked power legally to punish heresy without the power of the sovereign. The point was disputed at various times but seems a clear result of Henry VIII’s reforms. 205 See above, § 133 and n.

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162 B. Because the law to abolish all ecclesiastical power other than royal power

had been passed before the power of the ecclesiastical governors was set up. So, once the law was removed, they then had no power to punish heretics except their ordinary power to excommunicate; nor do they have any such authority today. 163 A. Today then, a heretic cannot be punished in any way except by excommuni-

cation? 164 B. And, by those penalties which follow upon excommunication in virtue of the

civil laws. For, he will be called into an ecclesiastical court, where, if he does not condemn his error, he will be handed over to the secular power to be thrown into prison. There he will remain until he renounces his heresy and fulﬁlls the penalty established in the laws.206 165 A. Who can know whether he has truly renounced or not? 166 B. No one can in any way know, except God alone. 167 A. Can he not be forced to abjure his heresy? 168 B. He cannot. During the regime of those ecclesiastical governors I have men-

tioned, it was occasionally the practice for heretics to be examined under oath as to their interior beliefs.207 But, the bishops’ power to do this was taken away

206 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. 727 ff. 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). 207 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

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B. Quia lex de omni alia potestate ecclesiastica praeter regiam abolenda, ante 162 lata erat, quam potestas illa rectorum ecclesiasticorum erigeretur; itaque sublata illa lege, rectores illi authoritatem, praeter ordinariam illam excommuncandi, in puniendis haereticis nullum habuere, neque habent hodie. A. Haereticus ergo hodie alia poena praeter excommuncationem puniri non 163 potest? B. Etiam poenis iis, quae excommunicationem, virtute legum civilium, conse- 164 quuntur. Citabitur enim ad curiam ecclesiasticam, ubi, nisi errorem suum ipse damnet, tradetur potestati seculari in carcerem conjiciendus; ibi mansurus, donec haeresi suae renuntiet, penitentiamque egerit legibus constitutam. A. Qui sciri potest an vere renuntiaverit necne?

165

B. Omnino sciri non potest, praeterquam a Deo solo.

166

A. Nonne cogi potest haeresin suam abjurare?

167

B. Non potest. Solebant quidem, stante authoritate dictorum rectorum eccle- 168 siasticorum, examinari aliquando cum juramento de sententia ipsorum interna. Sed ea potestas una cum ipsa authoritate ablata est, ut iniqua; propterea, quod

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.

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with their authority as unjust208 in that exacting retribution for thoughts seems to pertain to God alone, the searcher of thoughts.209 Human laws take notice only of contumacy. 169 A. Does the Gospel not establish any penalty against heretics? 170 B. None, except that they were to be avoided and excluded from the communion

of saints, who at that time ate and lived together on resources that were shared in common.210 I ﬁnd no secular punishment prescribed by law. Nor do I ﬁnd that excommunication followed upon one’s heresy, but rather from one’s life and crimes, that brought the religion into discredit.211 Quite to the contrary, I think that, if the parables of the New Testament are brought to bear upon Christian doctrine, then the punishment of the heretic on the part of a Christian through civil penalties is prohibited, as in Matthew 13:27–30:212 [Another parable he put before them, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his ﬁeld; but while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And, the servants of the householder came and said to him, “Sir, did you not sow good seed in your ﬁeld?] How then has it weeds?” He said to them, “An enemy has done this.” The servants said to him, “Then do you want us to go and gather the weeds?” But, he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow until the time of harvest, [and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds ﬁrst and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”]’

Is it not clear from this that the weeds, that is, the heresies, are to be reserved until the last judgment? How are they then to be uprooted in this world by death or exile? Likewise, I Corinthians 3:11–15:213 [According to the commission of God given to me (Paul), like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and another man (Apollos) is building upon it. Let each man take care how he builds upon it.] For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, each man’s work will become manifest.

208

17 Carolus I, c. 11.

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cogitationum vindicta ad solum videtur pertinere Deum, cognitationum inspectorem. Leges enim humanae in contumaciam tantum animadvertunt. A. Nullane haereticorum poena constituitur in evangelio?

169

B. Nulla, nisi quod fugiendi sunt, et communione sanctorum, qui illo tempore de 170 divitiis communibus alebantur, prohibendi. Nullam poenam sancitam invenio secularem. Neque excommunicationem reperio propter haeresin, sed propter vitam, et scelera quibus religio dedecorabatur. Contra autem, si ad doctrinam Christianam parabolae Novi Testamenti adhibendae sunt, puniri haereticum a Christiano homine poena civili prohibitum puto (Matth. xiii.27–30): Unde haec zizania? Dixit illis Jesus, Inimicus homo hoc fecit. Servi autem dixerunt illi, Vis colligamus ea? Ille autem dixit, Non, ne forte colligentes zizania, eradicetis una granum. Sinite ambo simul crescere usque ad messem. Nonne manifestum hinc est, zizania, id est haereses reservandas esse ad judicium ultimum? Quomodo ergo revellendae sunt in hoc mundo morte vel exilio? Item 1 Cor. iii.11–15: Fundamentum aliud ponere nemo potest, praeterquam quod Jesus est Christus. Sin quis huic fundamento superaediﬁcaverit aurum, argentum, lapides pretiosos, lignum, foenum, culmum: uniuscujusque opus manifestum ﬁet. Si alicujus opus

209 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.’ 210 See Acts 2:41 ff. and 4:32 ff. 211 That the early church’s approach to heresy was more pastoral and social and less legal and forensic than in later eras is generally conceded. 212 The additions to the passages that Hobbes gives are noted with brackets. 213 The additions to the passages that Hobbes gives are noted with brackets.

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This means that anyone who holds to this foundation, that Jesus is the Christ, that is, anyone who is truly a Christian, will be saved, even if he builds up wood or hay or straw, that is, false beliefs. He will lose the work but shall nevertheless be saved, though as through ﬁre, that is, once his errors have been purged from his mind. Also, 2 Timothy 2:25:214 [Have nothing to do with stupid, senseless controversies; you know that they breed quarrels.] And, the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to every one, an apt teacher, forbearing, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant that they will repent and come to know the truth, [after being captured by Him to do His will.]

Is this not against those who cause the heretic who has twice been cited immediately to be burned unless he renounces his doctrine, thereby doing as much as they can to block a Christian’s way to God’s mercy? To these passages from the Holy Scripture, add the belief of all the theologians that no one is received by Christ who is forced to Him through fear of death.215 171 A. How is blasphemy usually punished? 172 B. Blasphemy, if it comes from a disposition of the mind, is atheism. For, who

would dare to blaspheme God if he believed that He exists and works the cure of human affairs? But, that which men commonly call blasphemy is nothing other than an affected abuse of the divinity by means of unnecessary oaths. Justinian deﬁnes the crime in this way in Novella 77: ‘Blasphemies are, for example, “by the hair of God” and “by His head,” and words like them.’ Then, the penalty established is capital punishment. 173 A. Are no oaths of this kind punished by law among us? 174 B. I do not know. But, I do not doubt that ecclesiastical controls can punish

them. For, it is both a scandal to the church and a most especially impudent transgression of the Third Commandment of the Decalogue. Any unnecessary oath whatsoever is no small sin, taking its origin from this, that men are habitual liars. Thus, one who has stated the truth, seeing that he is not believed and lest he seem not to have spoken seriously, will swear on God. And, it is surely God upon whom one should swear, if it were indeed necessary. Seeing that these oathtakers receive no punishment, some immoderate wags then begin to divide God up after the manner of the Anthropomorphites,216 swearing upon the different

214

The additions to the passages that Hobbes gives are noted with brackets.

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comburetur, damnum sustinebit; ipse autem salvabitur, ita tamen ut per ignem. Quid hoc, nisi quod qui fundamentum tenet hoc, Jesum esse Christum, id est, is, qui vere Christianus est, etsi superaediﬁcaverit lignum, foenum, culmum, id est, dogmata falsa, operam perdet, ipse tamen salvabitur; sed quasi per ignem, id est, animo erroribus expurgatis. Etiam 2 Tim. ii.25: Ministrum Domini docere oportet eos qui se opponunt, in militia, si forte Deus ipsis det resipiscientiam ut agnoscant veritatem. Nonne hoc contra eos est, qui haereticum bis citatum, nisi renunciet doctrinae suae, statim comburi faciunt aditumque, homini Christiano ad misericordiam divinam, quantum in ipsis est, occludunt? Quibus locis Scripturae Sacrae sententiam adde theologorum omnium, neminem a Christo recipi, qui metu mortis ad illum cogitur. A. Quomodo puniri solet blasphemia?

171

B. Blasphemia, si procedat ab animi sensu, atheismus est. Quis enim blasphemare 172 Deum auderet, quem esse et curam rerum humanarum gerere existimaret. Sed id quod vulgo blasphemia dicitur, nihil aliud est, praeter affectatum divinitatis in juramentis non necessariis abusum. Quod crimen deﬁnitur a Justiniano (Novella LXXVII.) hoc modo: ‘Blasphemia sunt, per Dei capillos, et caput, et his proxima verba.’ Deinde poena constituitur supplicium ultimum. A. Ejusmodi juramenta nullane lege puniuntur apud nos?

173

B. Nescio. Quin tamen puniri ea posse censuris ecclesiasticis non dubito. Nam 174 et scandalum est ecclesiae, et tertii praecepti Decalogi transgressio in primis audax. Juramentum quodlibet non necessarium, peccatum est non parvum, ortum habens ab eo, quod soleant homines mentiri. Itaque qui verum dixerit, videtque sibi creditum non esse, ne non serio dixisse videatur, jurare per quem, si jurare omnino necesse esset, jurare debet, Deum. Horum impunitatem cum videant ingenia quaedam luxuriantia, Deum in membra dividentes

215 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. 216 This name was given to those who said God was a body with human form. See below, § 180. Called Audians, from their founder, Audaeus, this sect arose in the fourth century in Syria and extended into Scythia. Jerome and Cyril of Alexandria wrote dismissively about them. Hobbes no doubt mentions them to show that his materialism is like that of Tertullian, not of the simple Audians. He may have learned of them from Epiphanius, who mentions them as heresy # 70.

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members in an effort to snatch some little praise for the novelty of their oaths. And, from this practice come those sayings, ‘by His body,’ ‘by His nails,’ ‘by His hair,’ which are at the same time blasphemous and heretical. Let the church see how these things should be punished.217

217 Hobbes makes the case then that, while interior belief cannot be coerced by law, it is nonetheless in the power of the church, with the support of the coercive power of the state, to proscribe forms of behavior which may have a deleterious effect or inﬂuence on others in Christian kingdoms. He would banish or inhibit those who advocate illicit religious belief or practice in order to prohibit them from propagating unbelief and contumacy throughout society; see § 141. He thus articulates the traditional view that conversions to unbelief should be prevented and that the moral tone of society, that is, people’s expectations of what is right and normal, should be protected by prohibiting public expressions of unbelief. See, for example, Aquinas, ST II–II.11.3.

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more anthropomorphitarum, per singula jurare coeperunt, nonnullam ex novitate juramentorum laudem aucupantes; atque inde verba illa, per corpus, per ungues, per capillos, blasphema simul et haeretica. Quomodo punienda sint, viderit ecclesia.

chapter 3 CONCERNING CERTAIN OBJECTIONS TO LEVIATHAN 175 A. In the year of our Lord 1651, there appeared a certain book, written in

the English language, entitled Leviathan and composed of four parts. The ﬁrst part concerned the nature of man and natural laws. The second part concerned the nature of the commonwealth and the right of the sovereign power. The third dealt with the Christian commonwealth, and the fourth, the kingdom of darkness. Each of these parts contains certain uncommon opinions, both philosophical and theological. In fact, there is so much that runs counter to the power of the Roman pontiffs over other princes that it easily appears that the book’s author was of the opinion that the cause of the civil war that was then being waged throughout England, Scotland and Ireland was none other than discord over theological questions, ﬁrst between the Roman and the English churches, and then, within the Church of England, between its Episcopal and Presbyterian ministers.218 That Civil War ﬁrst originated in Scotland in the year 1639, but, through some royal concessions, one of which was the lifting of episcopal power from

218 Hobbes is referring here ﬁrst to events of Tudor England, whereby Henry VIII and his son Edward and his daughter Elizabeth withdrew the church in England from the Roman Catholic Church and established a national church organization and confession under royal direction. The second set of events may be traced to the protracted struggles of the early

caput iii DE QUIBUSDAM OBJECTIONIBUS CONTRA LEVIATHAN A. Prodiit anno Domini MDCLI. liber quidem Anglico sermone scriptus, cui 175 titulus est Leviathan, cujus quatuor sunt partes; prima, de natura hominis, et legibus naturalibus; secunda, de natura civitatis, et jure potestatis summae; tertia, de republica Christiana; quarta, de regno tenebrarum. Insunt in singulis partibus paradoxa quaedam, tum philosophica tum theologica; et ita multa contra potestatem Romanorum Pontiﬁcum in alios principes, ut facile appareat authorem existimasse causam belli civilis, quod eo tempore per Angliam, Scotiam, et Hiberniam gerebatur, aliam non fuisse quam dissensionem, primo inter ecclesiam Romanam et Anglicanam, deinde in ecclesia Anglicana inter pastores Episcopales et Presbyterianos, circa quaestiones theologicas. Bellum illud civile incepit in Scotia anno MDCXXXIX; sed concessionibus quibusdam regiis,

Stuarts to consolidate and extend royal authority in and through the church and to counter the rise of rival Protestant beliefs and polities, especially that of Presbyterianism, with its disdain for church government by bishops and for ornate ritual, which they felt was insufﬁciently purged of ‘corruption’ and Roman inﬂuence.

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that kingdom, it died down.219 But, the war quickly ﬂared to life again in 1640, at the instigation of English Presbyterians.220 In that time, ecclesiastical administration was performed in virtue of the king’s letters through bishops.221 Then too, there sat a Parliament that was almost wholly Presbyterian, for that faction far surpassed the Episcopal faction in power and in the favor of the people.222 And so it was in the following year that the king, to placate Parliament, was forced to strip the bishops of all extraordinary ecclesiastical administration as well.223 That accomplished, no power remained any longer among the English to try heresies; there then emerged every type of sect of men, writing and publishing whatsoever theology each wished. The author of said book, who was already living for some time in Paris,224 made use of this freedom of writing now become so common.225 And, he defended 219 This refers to the First Bishops’ War, a series of brief engagements occurring early in 1639 between the forces of the king and Scottish troops united in their support of the Scottish Covenant, an oath sworn in 1638. The war arose as a result of Charles’ attempt to impose the prayer book conceived in England on the Scottish church, the Kirk, through his Scottish bishops, a move that had proven both futile and dangerous. Riots occurred in Edinburgh in 1637 whenever the bishops read from the prayer book, and calls for the abolition of episcopacy, that is, of church administration by bishops, led to the Covenanters’ demand that the Scottish Assembly itself act as decisive authority in church affairs. Unable to rouse his nobles or pay his soldiers, Charles was forced to yield to Scottish demands in the war; he signed the Treaty of Berwick in July of 1639. For their part, the Scots pledged to disband their troops, desist from holding seditious meetings and return control of Charles’ Scottish castles to royal ofﬁcers. Charles engaged to send back his soldiers and to issue a declaration assuring his Scottish subjects that all matters pertaining to the Kirk would be determined by the Assembly and all civil matters determined by parliaments and other lawful bodies. Charles knew his signature on the treaty meant the erection of a Presbyterian church polity, one ruled by presbyters or elders, in Scotland, rather than by bishops, though he doubtless also hoped for the eventual restoration of episcopacy, the system which he and Laud were strengthening in England. Then, to raise money to re-establish royal authority in Scotland, Charles called Parliament into session in April, 1640, but dissolved it when Parliamentarians wanted concessions in return for increased revenues. This session became known as the ‘Short Parliament.’ 220 This was the Second Bishops’ War of 1640, fought in the northern counties of England between covenanting Scots, impatient of fruitless negotiations with Charles, and forces loyal to the king under the command of Wentworth, the Earl of Strafford. On the morning of August 20, the Scottish army, some 25,000 strong, crossed the Tweed River at Coldstream. There, the king’s army under Conway fell back in a rout, and the city was left to the Scots. For several days, Charles, encamped at York, sought the advice and support of his lords, and, after a series of riots in London, on September 24, followed the course they had urged by issuing writs for the holding of a parliament to meet on November 3 of that year. Unable to expel the Scottish army without money and unable to raise money without Parliament, Charles was nevertheless prepared to maintain his conception of sovereignty against the men who were to assemble for the ‘Long Parliament,’ Pym, Hampton, Strode, St. John, Holles, Erle and Fiennes. In the Appendix, Hobbes claims the English Presbyterians had a hand in urging on the Scots, but this allegation, made also in Behemoth, does not seem to be supported by the evidence. 221 Charles’ Archbishop of Canterbury throughout this period was William Laud. A strong-

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quarum una erat sublatio potestatis episcopalis e regno Scotiae, illico sopitum est; sed cito, instigantibus Presbyterianis Anglicis, anno MDCXL resuscitatum. Erat eo tempore regimen ecclesiasticum administratum virtute literarum regiarum per episcopos. Sedebat etiam Parliamentum, totum fere Presbyterianum. Factio enim Presbyteriana factionem episcopalem potentia et favore populi longe superabat. Itaque anno proximo coactus est Rex, quo Parliamentum placaret, episcopos etiam a regimine omni ecclesiastico extraordinario removere. Quo facto, nulla amplius potestas remansit inter Anglos cognoscendi haereses, sed omnimodae sectae apparuerunt scribentium et publicantium qualem quisque voluit theologiam. Jam Parisiis degebat author dicti libri, vulgata jam

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, §§ 207 ff. and nn. 222 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, 428 ff. 223 This is an allusion to the abolition of the High Commission by the Long Parliament. 224 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. 225 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.

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remarkably well the rights of the king in things temporal as well as spiritual. But, while he endeavored to do this from the Holy Scriptures, he fell into certain novelties of doctrine, which many theologians have accused of heresy and atheism. 176 B. What are these doctrines? 177 A. Tell me how this sentence seems to you; I have taken it from the second

chapter of Leviathan, toward the end:226 And for fayries and walking ghosts, the opinion of them has I think been on purpose either taught, or not confuted, to keep in credit the use of exorcisme, of crosses, of holy water, and other such inventions of ghostly men.227 178 B. For my part, that sentence will seem true, sage and Christian so long as you

do not prove the contrary point of view from the Sacred Scripture. And, in this instance, I read in the Gospel of Matthew228 that, at the death of Christ on the cross, it was in fact dead bodies that were raised from the tombs, not souls. 179 A. Then, in the fourth chapter, at the beginning, our author denies that any

substances are incorporeal.229 What is this but either to deny that God exists or to assert that God is body?230 180 B. Clearly; he asserts that God is body.231 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.232 In 226 While these quotations in Latin depart substantially from the English Leviathan of 1651, I have followed the latter text in reproducing them here. 227 Leviathan 1.2.8.92. The cynicism that is evident here as to these practices of the medieval church was shared by 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). 228 Matthew 27:52. 229 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

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libertate scribendi utens. Et jura quidem regis, tum in temporalibus tum in spiritualibus, egregie vindicavit. Caeterum dum hoc ex Scripturis Sacris conatur facere, in dogmata lapsus est inaudita, quae a plerisque theologis haereseos et atheismi accusata sunt. B. Quaenam sunt illa dogmata?

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A. Quid tibi videtur oratio haec, capite secundo versus ﬁnem: Opinionem homi- 177 num de spiritibus mortuorum ambulantibus, de industria puto, traditam fuisse, aut non confutatam, ad sustentandam existimationem exorcismorum, signi crucis, aquae benedictae, aliarumque artium cleri. B. Mihi quidem vera, prudens, et Christiana videbitur, nisi contrarium evincas 178 ex Scriptura Sacra. Equidem lego (Matth.xxvii.52), Christo in cruce moriente corpora mortua e sepulchris excitata esse, non autem animas. A. Deinde, capite quarto sub initium, negat substantias ullas esse incorporeas. 179 Quid aliud est hoc, quam negare Deum esse, vel afﬁrmare Deum esse corpus? B. Afﬁrmat quidem Deum esse corpus. Sed ante eum idem afﬁrmavit Tertul- 180 lianus. Disputans enim contra Apellem aliosque sui temporis haereticos, qui Salvatorem nostrum Jesum Christum non corpus sed phantasma esse docue-

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). 230 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 2.31.15.401 ff., ‘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: FrancoAngeli, 2004): 73–96, pp. 81 ff., and, more generally, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, sub voce ‘mereology,’ found at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology. 231 On this point, see Cees Leijenhorst, ibid. 232 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.

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fact, he 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.’233 And, this doctrine was not condemned by any of the ﬁrst four general councils. Show me, if you can, the words ‘incorporeal’ or ‘immaterial’ in the Scriptures. But, I will show you, ‘For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,’234 that is, as Athanasius explains, ‘according to His deity.’235 ‘For in him we live, and move, and have our being’ are the words of the Apostle Paul.236 But, it is quantity that we all have. And, can that which has quantity be present in that which lacks quantity?237 ‘God is great,’ but it is impossible to understand greatness apart from body. Not even the Nicene Council itself deﬁned God as incorporeal, though the Fathers who were there, perhaps not all, did feel this way. And, Constantine himself approved the word homoousios, that is, co-essential, since it seemed to him to follow from it that God was incorporeal.238 Nonetheless, they did not want to import the word ‘incorporeal,’ which is not found in the Scriptures, into the creed.239

233 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. 206 ff. 234 See Colossians 2:9. 235 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. 236 Acts 17:28. 237 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

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runt, dictum hoc universale pronuntiavit: quidquid corpus non est, non est ens. Item contra Praxeam: Omnis substantia est corpus sui generis. Neque in ullo ex quatuor Conciliis primis generalibus doctrina haec condemnata est. Ostende, si potes, vocem incorporeum vel immateriale in Scripturis. Ego vero ostendam tibi plenitudinem divinitatis habitare in Christo corporaliter, id est, ut exponit Athanasius, Dealiter. Omnes sumus et movemur in Deo, sunt (Act. xvii.28) verba Pauli apostoli. Quantitatem autem habemus omnes. An quantum inesse potest in non quanto? Magnus est Deus, sed magnitudinem intelligere sine corpore impossibile est. Ne a Concilio Niceno quidem deﬁnitum est Deum esse incorporeum. Patres autem qui aderant, nescio an omnes, ita senserunt; et ipse Constantinus vocem illam, (µο σιος, id est, coessentialem, ideo comprobavit, quod ex ea voce videretur illi sequi Deum esse incorporeum. Nihilominus, vocem illam, incorporeum, quae non est in Scriptura Sacra, in symbolum inferre noluerunt. Neque

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. 238 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.) 239 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.’

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And in fact, even though an essence is not body, one cannot infer God’s incorporeality from the word ‘co-essential.’ The father of David and the son of Obadiah were co-essential; they were the very same man, namely, Jesse. Does it follow from this that the father of David and Jesse were incorporeal? Further, the Fathers present at the Council of Nicaea intended their creed as a condemnation not only of Arianism but of all those heresies that had crept into the church after the death of our Lord. One of these was the heresy of the Anthropomorphites, who had attributed the limbs of the human body to God.240 But, they did not intend to condemn those who had written with Tertullian that true, real and pure spirit was corporeal. Indeed, those who ascribe purity to God do well, for it is to do Him honor. But, to attribute thinness to Him, which is something of a step toward nothingness, is dangerous.241 John Damascene, in explaining the Nicene faith, states in the thirteenth chapter of the ﬁrst book [of On the Orthodox Faith]: Of the divine names, some are negative, meaning that which is above substance, like ?νο σιος (anousios), that is, without essence;242 :χρονος (achronos), that is, without time; Bναρχος (anarchos), that is, without beginning. This is not because He is inferior to those things, but because He is lifted up above all those things. For God is not to be numbered among the things that are, but He is above all such things.243

Here you see John Damascene, an Aristotelian philosopher, as is evident from his work on logic,244 and also a Father of the Church and a pious and learned man, who, because he is fearful of saying with Tertullian that God is body, seeks

240 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.

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vero ex voce coessentialis, quanquam essentia corpus non sit, inferri potest Dei incorporeitas. Pater Davidis, et ﬁlius Obedi, cum fuerit unus et idem Jesseus, erant coessentiales; sequiturne inde Patrem Davidis et Jesseum fuisse incorporeos? Praeterea, Patribus Concilii Niceni in animo erat condemnare per illud symbolum non modo Arianismum, sed etiam haereses omnes quae post mortem Domini in ecclesiam irrepserant; quarum una erat anthropomorphitarum, qui Deo corporis humani membra attribuerant; non autem condemnare eos qui verum, realem, et purum spiritum, corporeum esse cum Tertulliano scripserant. Illi quidem, qui Deo puritatem tribuunt, recte faciunt; est enim honoriﬁcum. Sed tenuitatem attribuere, quae gradus quidam est ad nihilitatem, periculosum est. Johannes Damascenus, exponens ﬁdem Nicenam, libri primi capite decimo tertio: Divinorum nominum, inquit, alia negativa sunt, signiﬁcantia id quod est supra substantiam, ut ?νο σιος, id est, sine essentia; :χρονος, sine tempore; Bναρχος, sine principio; non quod his inferior sit, sed quod supra haec omnia elatus sit. Deus enim in numero entium non est, sed supra ea omnia. Vides Johannem Damascenum, philosophum Aristotelicum, (ut videre est ex opere ejus dialectico), eundemque patrem ecclesiae et doctorem pium, dum metuit dicere cum Tertulliano Deum esse corpus, et studet crassitudinem corpoream attenuare,

241 Hobbes conceives of existence as substance, so that reduction in substance, as through loss of dimension, risks theological error. The point however is not that God has dimension but more that the theological language of thinness or lack of substance, in verging on incorporeality, leads to the denial of God’s existence. See below, § 180. 242 The Greek word ?νο σιος (anousios) is an example of an alpha-privative, that is, a form, beginning with an alpha, which indicates the absence or privation of that which the word commonly denotes, just as ‘a-symmetrical’ means ‘not symmetrical.’ Ο8σ α (ousia) means ‘substance’ or ‘being’ in Greek, so that a-(n)-ousios means ‘that which lacks being,’ and the ground of Hobbes’s objection to John’s statement is that it seems to attribute non-being to God. See below, n. 246. The key debate going on within the pages of the Appendix centers on the relation of Greek thought and Judaeo-Christian religion. Hobbes lamented the great price paid by the West for its knowledge of ancient political philosophy, namely, the blood shed in civil strife caused by the teaching on liberty which he believed the tradition imparted from authors like Aristotle and Cicero. In the Appendix, he concentrates on its effects on Western religion. 243 This text is drawn from John Damascene’s De Fide Orthodoxa, found in Patrologia Graeca, vol. 94, col. 845. 244 Hobbes is referring to those chapters of John’s summa, The Fount of Knowledge, known under the name Dialectica.

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to attenuate bodily thickness, which he considers unworthy of God,245 I know not why, and thus lapses into atheistic words in saying that God is anousios and nothing of those things that exist.246 181 A. I think that, in using anousios, he wanted to signify nothing other than

uncreated. 182 B. Perhaps. But, after he had said enough concerning the attribute of uncreat-

edness a few lines before,247 what need was there for him to say the same thing again with that name which is not to be tolerated, anousios? After all, he knew that all spirit, however thin, is nonetheless body,248 for what substance or real entity could he conceive of that would seem to be an incorporeal substance, except those idols or apparitions of the kind we see in mirrors, in sleep and in darkness, those the Apostle Paul says are nothing?249 183 A. As for the third doctrine, that author states in the sixth chapter, toward the

end: Feare of power invisible, feigned by the mind,250 or imagined from tales publiquely allowed [is] religion; not allowed, superstition. And, when the power imagined is truly such as we imagine, true religion.251

245 In bk 1, chap. 11, John discusses men’s gross ﬂesh, which makes an understanding of God impossible except through the images, types and symbols that are appropriate to our own nature. 246 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

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quam (nescio quare) Deo indignam putat, in verba athea incidere, dicentem Deum ?νο σιον esse, et nihil eorum quae sunt. A. Per ?νο σιον nihil ille (credo) signiﬁcare voluit, praeter increatum.

181

B. Fortasse. Quid autem opus erat, postquam paucis ante versibus de attributo 182 illo, increatum, satis locutus esset, rursus idem dicere per nomen illud non ferendum, ?νο σιος? Cum denique sciret spiritum omnem, utcunque tenuem, esse tamen corpus; quam substantiam sive ens reale potuit ille sibi ﬁngere, quod substantia videretur esse incorporea, praeter idola seu phantasmata qualia videmus in speculis, in somno, in tenebris, et quae Paulus apostolus dicit esse nihil? A. Tertio, capite sexto versus ﬁnem, Timor, inquit, potentiarum invisibilium, 183 sive potentiae illae ﬁctae sint a timente, sive conceptae a fabulis publice permissis, religio est. A non publice permissis, superstitio est. Quando vero potentiae quae timentur, verae sunt, vera religio.

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. 104 ff. 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. 247 John discusses this some pages before, in chap. 8. 248 In bk two, chap. 3 of his summa, John Damascene admits that even the angels, though incorporeal with respect to men, have something of thickness and matter with respect to God, who alone is immaterial and incorporeal. 249 The reference is to 1 Corinthians 8:4; see above, § 12. 250 Hobbes’s Latin in the 1668 edition reads timente, ‘[by] the one who fears,’ rather than mente, ‘by the mind.’ The Latin thus differs from the English original. 251 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.’

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184 B. The Preacher says the same thing: ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning

of wisdom;’252 as does the Psalmist: ‘The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.’253 185 A. Fourth, in the sixteenth chapter: The true God may be personated. As He was, ﬁrst by Moses, who governed the Israelites (that were not his, but God’s people) not in his own name with hoc dicit Moses (Moses says this) but in God’s name, with hoc dicit Dominus (The Lord says this). Secondly, by the Son of Man, His own Son our blessed Saviour Jesus Christ, that came to reduce the Jewes and induce all nations into the kingdome of His Father, not as of Himselfe but as sent from the Father. And, thirdly, by the Holy Ghost, or Comforter, speaking and working in the apostles: which Holy Ghost was a Comforter that came not of Himselfe, but was sent and proceeded from Them both.254 186 B. It seems the author wanted to explain the doctrine of the Trinity at this point,

although he does not name it: the intention is impeccable, but the explanation is wrong. For Moses, because he too bore the person of God in a certain way, as do all Christian kings, seems here to make up one of the persons in the Trinity. This is very careless. If the author had said that God, in His own person, created the world; that, in the person of the Son, He redeemed mankind; and that, in the person of the Holy Spirit, He sanctiﬁed the church; then he would have said nothing other than what is found in the catechism put out by the church. More speciﬁcally, if he had said that God, in His own person, had established the church for Himself through his servant Moses; in the person of Christ, redeemed it; and in the person of the Holy Spirit, sanctiﬁed it; then he would not have erred.255 187 A. But, he repeats the same explanation in numerous places.

252

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. 7 ff.

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B. Idem hoc dicitur ab Ecclesiaste (Ecclesiastici.i.16): Timor Domini est initium 184 sapientiae; et a Psalmista (Psal. xiii.1): Stultus in corde suo dixit, non est Deus. A. Quarto, capite decimo sexto, Etiam Dei veri personam gerebat, primo, Moses, 185 cum regeret populum non suum, sed Dei, dicendo hoc dicit Dominus; secundo, Filius, qui venit in mundum ad reducendos Judaeos, et inducendos omnes populos in regnum coeleste; tertio, Spiritus Sanctus, qui missus est ad sanctiﬁcandum Dei populum. B. Videtur author voluisse hoc loco doctrinam explicare Trinitatis, quanquam 186 Trinitatem non nominat. Pia voluntas, sed erronea est explicatio. Nam Mosem, quoniam is quoque aliquo modo gessit personam Dei, ut faciunt omnes reges Christiani, unam videtur facere personam in Trinitate. Valde hoc negligenter. Si dixisset Deum, in persona propria, creasse mundum; in persona Filii, redemisse genus humanum; in persona Spiritus Sancti, sancti ﬁcasse ecclesiam; nihil aliud dixisset, nisi quod est in catechismo ab ecclesia edito. A. Sed idem repetit in pluribus locis.

253

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 the verbal play on ‘induce.’ 255 I follow Schuhmann’s emendation of the text in the placement of this last sentence. 254

187

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188 B. Still, we can easily emend it in each place.256 189 A. In the thirty-fourth chapter, the author denies that it can be shown from

the canonical books of the Old Testament that angels are real and permanent substances, but rather supernatural apparitions, which are called angels because God uses them for the declaring of His will.257 190 B. It is certain that ‘angel’ is the name of an ofﬁce258 and also that all spirits,

because of the transparency of spiritual substance, are invisible, except in the sense according to which we say that apparitions are seen in a mirror, in sleep or in darkness. And so, whenever the Holy Scriptures say that someone has seen an angel, this vision is not human perception of the kind that takes place through the eyes. It is more like what Jacob experienced when he saw the angels ascending and descending the ladder, as he slept.259 The Sadducees denied that angels were substances.260 Why? Not because they did not believe in the Old Testament, but because there is no mention of the creation of angels in the Old Testament. Nonetheless, the Jews did not excommunicate them for their belief. Does the author also deny that the New Testament shows that angels are substances?

256

This is how Hobbes defended himself against Bishop Bramhall in The Answer:

As for the words recited, I confess there is a fault in the ratiocination, which nevertheless his Lordship hath not discovered, but no impiety. All that he objecteth is, that it followeth hereupon, that there be as many persons of a king, as there be petty constables in his kingdom. And so there are, or else he cannot be obeyed. But I never said that a king, and every one of his persons, are the same substance. The fault I here made, and saw not, was this; I was to prove that it is no contradiction, as Lucian and heathen scoffers would have it, to say of God, he was one and three. I saw the true deﬁnition of the word person would serve my turn in this manner; God, in his own person, both created the world, and instituted a church in Israel, using therein the ministry of Moses: the same God, in the person of his Son God and man, redeemed the same world, and the same church; the same God, in the person of the Holy Ghost, sanctiﬁed the same church, and all the faithful men in the world. Is not this a clear proof that it is no contradiction to say that God is three persons and one substance? And doth not the church distinguish the persons in the same manner? See the words of our catechism. Question. What dost thou chieﬂy learn in these articles of thy belief? Answer. First, I learn to believe in God the Father, that hath made me and all the world; Secondly, in God the Son, who hath redeemed me and all mankind; Thirdly, in God the Holy Ghost, that hath sanctiﬁed me and all the elect people of God. But at what time was the church sanctiﬁed? Was it not on the day of Pentecost, in the descending of the Holy Ghost upon the apostles? His Lordship all this while hath catched nothing. It is I that catched myself, for saying, instead of by the ministry of Moses, in the person of Moses. But this error I no sooner saw, than I no less publicly corrected than I had committed it, in my Leviathan converted into Latin, which by this time I think is printed

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B. Sed unoquoque loco facile emendari potest. Vel si dixisset Deum, in persona 188 propria, constituisse sibi, ministrante Mose, ecclesiam; in persona Filii, eandem redemisse; in persona Spiritus Sancti, eandem sanctiﬁcasse; non errasset. A. Capite trigesimo quarto, negat probari posse ex canone Veteris Testamenti, 189 angelos reales et permanentes substantias esse, sed phantasmata supernaturalia; quae, quia illis Deus utitur ad voluntatem suam declarandam, appellantur angeli. B. Certum est, angelum nomen esse ofﬁcii, spiritusque omnes, propter diapha- 190 nitatem substantiae spiritualis, invisibiles esse, nisi eo senso quo videri dicuntur phantasmata in speculo, somno, vel tenebris. Itaque quoties aliquis dicitur in Scripturis Sacris vidisse angelum, visio illa non est sensio humana quae ﬁt per oculos, sed qualem habuit Jacob, cum videret angelos ascendentes et descendentes per scalam, cum dormiret. Sadducaei negabant angelos esse substantias. Quare? Non quod non crederent Testamento Veteri, sed quia creationis angelorum in Veteri Testamento nulla est mentio. Neque tamen a Judaeis excommunicati sunt. An etiam negat probari posse angelos substantias esse ex Testamento Novo?

beyond the seas with this alteration, and also with the omission of some such passages as strangers are not concerned in. And I had corrected this error sooner, if I had sooner found it. For though I was told by Dr. Cosins, now Bishop of Durham, that the place above-cited was not applicable enough to the doctrine of the Trinity, yet I could not in reviewing the same espy the defect, till of late, when being solicited from beyond sea, to translate the book into Latin, and fearing some other man might do it not to my liking, I examined this passage and others of the like sense more narrowly. But how concludes his Lordship out of this, that I put out of the creed these words, the Father eternal, the Son eternal, the Holy Ghost eternal? Or these words, let us make man after our image, out of the Bible? Which last words neither I nor Bellarmine put out of the Bible, but we both put them out of the number of good arguments to prove the Trinity; for it is no unusual thing in the Hebrew, as may be seen by Bellarmine’s quotations, to join a noun of the plural number with a verb of the singular. And we may say also of many other texts of Scripture alleged to prove the Trinity, that they are not so ﬁrm as that high article requireth. But mark his Lordship’s Scholastic charity in the last words of this period: such bold presumption requireth another manner of confutation. This bishop, and others of his opinion, had been in their element, if they had been bishops in Queen Mary’s time. EW IV, p. 315. He shows himself very little moved by Bramhall’s criticisms. See within, ‘Hobbes and the Economic Trinity.’ 257 Leviathan 3.34.15.434. The Greek word Bγγελος (angelos) means ‘messenger.’ 258 That is, the duty of being a messenger. 259 See Genesis 28:11–15. 260 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.

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191 A. He does not. But, if they are, he says it can be shown from there that they

are corporeal substances. 192 B. None of the ancient Fathers found this to be an interpretive crux, nor do

any of the doctors of the reformed churches. The Church of England does not condemn it. 193 A. In the thirty-eighth chapter, he denies that the human soul is immortal of

its own nature, that is, by its very creation, but only by the grace of God in furnishing the fruit of the tree of life to Adam and Eve, provided they abstain from eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.261 But, when they had transgressed God’s command concerning eating this fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then they were cut off from access to the tree of life and became mortal, they and their posterity. And, once they died, they have remained dead262 until, through the death of Christ for the remission of their sins, they shall rise again to eternal life in the general resurrection of the dead. According to this doctrine, none of the souls of the dead, whether faithful or unfaithful, can in any way be immortal before the Day of Judgment. 194 B. Concerning this view, I have just explained my opinion at sufﬁcient length.263

But, I would add that I do not know how he who confesses eternal life can be said to sin against the Christian faith, whether he maintains it is received through creation or through redemption. Nor do I know how this view can be against Christian teaching or worship when, neither in the Holy Scripture which contains Christian teaching nor in the liturgy which contains Christian worship, is there ever found the verbal expression ‘immortal soul.’ But, ‘eternal life through Christ,’ yes, very frequently! 195 A. In the same chapter,264 he says that the kingdom of God which follows the

resurrection will be on earth. 196 B. Does he derive this from his own philosophy or from the Holy Scripture?265 197 A. He cites quite a few passages from the prophets, Isaiah, Obadiah, Joel,266

which, at least to me, are not well known. And, he adds what St. Peter says as to the burning and renewal of this world.267

261

Leviathan, chap. 38, passim. ‘Morientesque mortui remanserunt’ would seem to be Hobbes’s imitation of the Hebrew phrase which he references above at § 70. 262

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A. Non negat; sed si sunt, probari inde posse dicit substantias corporeas esse.

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B. Hoc neque antiquis Patribus omnibus, neque Doctoribus omnibus ecclesiarum 192 reformatarum, paradoxum est; neque ab ecclesia Anglicana condemnatur. A. Capite trigesimo octavo, animam humanam sua natura, id est, ab ipsa crea- 193 tione, immortalem esse negat, sed gratia Dei, praebentis Adamo et Evae fructum arboris vitae, dum non gustarent de fructu arboris scientiae boni et mali. Quando autem praeceptum Dei, de esu fructus arboris scientiae boni et mali, transgressi erant, tunc exclusi aditu ad arborem vitae, facti sunt mortales, et ipsi et eorum posteritas; morientesque mortui remanserunt, donec per mortem Christi remissis peccatis, reviviscant ad vitam aeternam in resurrectione mortuorum generali. Sed juxta hanc doctrinam, animae mortuorum nullae omnino existent immortales, impiorum nec piorum, ante diem judicii. B. De hac re sententiam meam satis ampliter modo explicavi. Addo autem, quod 194 non intelligo quomodo contra ﬁdem Christianam peccare dicatur is, qui vitam aeternam conﬁtetur, sive eam creationi, sive redemptioni acceptam ferat. Neque quomodo contra doctrinam vel cultum Christianum esse possit, cum neque in Scriptura Sacra, quae doctrinam, neque in liturgia, quae cultum Christianum continet, inveniatur usquam vox illa, immortalis anima; sed vita aeterna per Christum, frequentissime. A. Eodem capite, regnum Dei post resurrectionem futurum esse dicit in terra.

195

B. Ex suane philosophia hoc dicit, an ex Scriptura Sacra?

196

A. Loca aliquot adducit ex prophetis Isaia, Obadia, Joele, mihi quidem non 197 satis intellecta; et praeterea, id quod a S. Petro dicitur de conﬂagratione et renovatione hujus mundi.

263 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. 264 See Leviathan 3.38.3.480. 265 Note again the explicit contrast Hobbes draws between one’s own philosophical position and biblical religion. 266 Isaiah 33:20 ff. and 65:20 ff.; Obadiah 1:17; Joel 2:30 ff. 267 2 Peter 2:5 and 3:13.

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198 B. Then add to those passages this more obvious one from Revelation: 8. And when he had taken the book, the four beasts and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints. 9. And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; 10. And hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth.268

What is clearer than this? 199 A. In the same chapter, he says that the punishment of the damned will also

take place on earth and that it will not be eternal. 200 B. No one can doubt but that, if the damned are to be destroyed by the saints

militant, they will be destroyed on earth.269 And, if it is true that they will die a second death, then the process of their destruction will not be eternal. 201 A. In the thirty-ninth chapter, he deﬁnes a church in this way: I deﬁne a CHURCH to be, a company of men professing Christian religion, united in the person of one sovereign; at whose command they ought to assemble, and without whose authority they ought not to assemble.270

From this deﬁnition it follows that, in the time of the pagan emperors, neither the apostles’ council nor any of the other of the Christians’ councils before the one held at Nicaea were lawful. 202 B. There were quite a few meetings, or synods, of the Christians under the pagan

emperors. But, by the word ‘church,’ he understands a synod with authority to decide, whose decrees it was unjust not to obey. Such synods cannot take place without the sovereign power. 203 A. In the thirty-sixth chapter,271 he quotes John 1:1, ‘The Word was with God’

and John 1:14, ‘The Word was made ﬂesh,’ and he says that ‘Word’ means the same thing as promise and promise the same thing as that which is promised, namely, Jesus Christ. So also in Psalms, in Genesis272 and other similar places. 204 B. Why not? For, do you think that it is the term ‘word’ that was made ﬂesh

or the thing signiﬁed by the word? What is the meaning of those words of the same apostle in Revelation 13:8: ‘The Lamb was slain from the foundation of 268

Revelation 5:18 ff.; Hobbes has written ‘124 elders.’ Hobbes may be referring here to such passages in Revelations as 13:7, 20:8–9 and 20:14. 270 Leviathan 3.39.4.498. The prohibition to assemble recalls Elizabeth’s ‘Proclamation to 269

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B. Adde ergo illis, locum ex Apocalypsi (v. 8–11) manifestiorem: Animalia 198 quatuor et viginti quatuor presbyteri coram Agno prociderunt, habentes singuli citharas et phialas aureas plenas thuris, quae sunt sanctorum preces; et cantaverunt cantilenam novam, dicentes, dignus es accipere librum et aperire sigilla ejus, quia occisus fuisti, et redemisti nos Deo per sanguinem tuum, ab omni tribu, et lingua, et populo, et gente; et fecisti nos Deo nostro reges et sacerdotes, et regnabimus in terra. Quid hoc clarius? A. Eodem capite, punitionem reproborum in terra quoque fore dicit, nec aeter- 199 nam. B. Dubitandum non est, quin si reprobi a sanctis militantibus destruendi sint, 200 destruentur super terram; neque quidem aeterne, si verum sit morituros esse mortem secundam. A. Capite trigesimo nono, deﬁnit ecclesiam hoc modo: Ecclesia est hominum 201 numerus proﬁtentium religionem Christianam, unitorum in persona una suprema, cujus jussu convenire debent, et sine cujus authoritate convenire non debent. Ex qua deﬁnitione sequitur, quod tempore imperatorum ethnicorum, neque Concilium Apostolorum, neque aliud Christianorum Concilium ante Nicenum, erat licitum. B. Conventiones, id est, synodi fuere aliquot Christianorum sub imperatoribus 202 ethnicis. Sed per ecclesiam, intelligit synodum cum authoritate decernendi, et cujus decretis non obtemperare injustum erat. Tales autem synodi sine summa potestate existere non possunt. A. Capite trigesimo sexto, ubi dicitur (Joh. i.1), Verbum erat apud Deum, et (Joh. 203 i.14), Verbum factum est caro; verbum dicit idem signiﬁcare quod promissio, et promissionem idem quod res promissa, id est, Jesum Christum: ut Psalm. civ.19, et Genes. xl.13, aliisque locis similibus. B. Quidni? Nam vocem hanc, verbum, an rem verbo signiﬁcatam, carnem factam 204 esse putas? Quid signiﬁcant illa verba ejusdem apostoli (Apoc. xiii.8): Agnus occisus a fundatione mundi? Potuitne occidi antequam incarnaretur? Nonne 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. 271 Hobbes inexplicably cites chapter 43 in the 1668 text. 272 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.

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the world…’ Could He have been slain before He was incarnate? Does it not follow from this that both the incarnation and the passion of our Lord, which surely occurred in time, nonetheless took place from the foundation of the world?273 How can that be otherwise than in the Father’s eternal decree?274 And, what is this decree but the thing decreed? In the same way, is not the Holy Spirit also called the promise of the Father? Christ says, ‘I send the promise of my Father upon you.’275 205 A. In the [forty-second chapter of Leviathan],276 to the question ‘What if some

believer is ordered by his legitimate prince to deny Christ?,’ the author responds that it is permitted to obey, as in the example of Naaman the Syrian, to whom the prophet said, ‘Go in peace.’277 These words do not seem to me to be a granting of permission but a form of saying farewell. 206 B. And, perhaps they would be, if he had said something more to him, either to

express approval or disapproval. But, in that place, they can be understood only as a granting of permission. You know that, shortly before the Council of Nicaea, there had been quite a few Christians, good ones, certainly, but not very brave, who, in the face of death and tortures, renounced the Christian faith. What punishments do you think the general council at Nicaea meted out against them? The nineteenth canon of that council requires that those ‘who acted in this way before they were faced with danger and torture’ had to return to being catechumens again.278 But, as to those who renounced in the face of death itself, it stipulated nothing.

273

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. 73 ff. 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 (( χρνος), space (( χDρος), expression (το λεκτν) and the void (το κενν), which were things (τ να) intermediate between true, existent things (/ντα) and merely mental phenomena ($ννο µατα). 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

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sequitur inde, tum incarnationem tum passionem Domini, quae in tempore erant, fuisse tamen a fundatione mundi? Qui potest hoc esse aliter, quam in decreto aeterno Patris? Quod decretum, quid aliud est, quam res decreta? Nonne eodem modo etiam Spiritus Sanctus dicitur (Luc. xxiv.49), promissio Patris? Ego, dicit Christus, mittam in vos pro missionem Patris mei. A. Capite quadragesimo secundo, ad quaestionem, ‘Quid si quis ﬁdelis a prin- 205 cipe suo legitimo jubeatur negare Christum,’ respondet, licitum esse obedire; exemplo Naamani Syri, cui dictum est a propheta, vade in pace. Quae verba non mihi videntur permissio, sed formula valedictionis. B. Ita fortasse, si aliquid aliud illi vel approbando vel improbando respondisset: 206 at in hoc loco aliter quam pro permissione intelligi non possunt. Scis permultos fuisse Christianos, paulo ante synodum Nicenam, bonos quidem, sed non fortissimos, qui, morte et tormentis ostentatis, ﬁdei Christianae renuntiaverunt. Quas putas poenas in tales statuisse Nicenam illam synodum generalem? In canonibus illius synodi decimus nonus est, quo statuitur eos, qui citra tormenta et periculum id facerent, redire debent ad catechumenos. At de illis qui negarent intentata morte, nihil statuitur. Non tamen nego quin in apostolo vel in discipulo, qui

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. 274 On ‘eternal decree,’ see the Introduction and above, §§ 19–26. 275 Luke 24:49. Molesworth corrects Hobbes’s citation to verse 49 from 43. 276 Hobbes incorrectly and inexplicably cites ‘the same chapter,’ namely, presumably, chapter 36. 277 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. 325 ff. But cf. Carlos Eire, ‘Calvin and Nicodemism: A Reappraisal,’ Sixteenth Century Journal 10 (1979): 45–69. 278 It is not the nineteenth canon the deals with lapsed Christians but the twenty-ﬁfth. The eleventh sets out a process of reintroduction into the church of those who weakened without sufﬁcient cause.

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Now, I do not deny but that, in an apostle or disciple, that is, in one who had taken it upon himself to preach the teaching of Christ among the enemies of Christ, this was a sin and in Peter a great sin,279 but one of weakness and easily forgiven by Christ. 207 A. In the same chapter, the author asserts that Christian kings are permitted to

administer the sacraments.280

279 Hobbes’s point seems to be that the breaking of one’s word is particularly offensive, though this offense would attach to any such act, religious or not, based on the maxim, pacta sunt servanda. 280 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

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doctrinam Christi praedicare inter Christi hostes in se receperat, peccatum id esset; et in Petro magnum, sed inﬁrmitatis, et a Christo facile condonatum. A. Eodem capite, afﬁrmat licitum esse regibus Christianis administrare sacra- 207 menta.

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 a mixed 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. 168 ff. (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 150 ff.).

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208 B. And, with him, so felt almost all of the ministers of the Church of England

in the ﬁrst year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth.281 For, as soon as the Queen had vindicated her supremacy over the church, she issued certain instructions throughout all the dioceses, which she called Injunctions.282 One of those directed that all clerics should recognize by oath283 that the lawful supremacy over the church pertained to herself and to her successors.284 But, there were many who did not want to swear and gave as their reason that, should they concede this, they would also be conceding the Queen the

281 This assertion involves an exaggeration, if not a distortion, of the facts. The Act of Supremacy itself recognized no authority or power of ministry of divine service in English kings or queens, and Article 37 of the Thirty-nine Articles of 1563 states that:

Where we attribute to the Queen’s Majesty the chief government, by which titles we understand the minds of some slanderous folks to be offended, we give not to our princes the ministering either of God’s word or of sacraments, the which thing the Injunctions also lately set forth by Elizabeth our Queen doth most plainly testify: but only that prerogative which we see to have been given always to all godly princes in Holy Scriptures by God himself, that is, that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doers. 282 The Injunctions largely followed those issued by her predecessor Edward VI and were means of implementing the Act of Supremacy. The letters patent addressing the ecclesiastical commission were dated July 19, 1559. 283 ‘All and every archbishop, bishop, and all and every other ecclesiastical person, and other ecclesiastical ofﬁcer and minister; of what estate, dignity, preeminence, or degree soever he or they be or shall be, and all and every temporal judge, justice, mayor, and other lay or temporal ofﬁcer and minister, and every other person having your highness’s fee or wages, within this realm, or any your highness’s dominions’ were required to swear the following oath upon the Bible:

I, A.B., do utterly testify and declare in my conscience, that the queen’s highness is the only supreme governor of this realm, and of all other her highness’s dominions and countries, as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes, as temporal, and that no foreign prince, person, prelate, state or potentate, has, or ought to have, any jurisdiction, power, superiority, preeminence, or authority ecclesiastical or spiritual, within this realm; and therefore I do utterly renounce and forsake all foreign jurisdictions, powers, superiorities, and authorities, and do promise that from henceforth I shall bear faith and true allegiance to the queen’s highness, her heirs and lawful successors, and to my power shall assist and defend all jurisdictions, pre-eminences, privileges, and authorities granted or belonging to the queen’s highness, her heirs and successors, or united and annexed to the imperial crown of this realm. So help me God, and by the contents of this book.

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B. Omnes fere ministri ecclesiae Anglicanae, anno primo reginae Elizabethae, 208 idem senserunt cum illo. Simul enim ac regina suprematum ecclesiae sibi vendicasset emisit mandata quaedam, per omnes dioeceses, quae mandata appellavit injunctiones. Quarum una erat, ut clerici omnes cum juramento recognoscerent ecclesiae suprematum jure pertinere ad reginam et successores suos. Multi autem erant, qui jurare noluerunt, hanc, ut ipsi dicebant, ob causam; quod eo concesso, una conceditur reginam, si velit, posse administrare sacramenta. Manifestum

284 Elizabeth’s clariﬁcation of her position is found in an Appendix, published contemporaneously 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.

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power to administer the sacraments, should she desire.285 From this, it is clear that that part of the clergy believed that, in whosoever resided the supremacy of the church, to this person also was it permitted to administer all things usually done by priests, as often as he wished.286 At that point, the Queen, to remove this scruple, replied that it had never been her intention to take upon herself any administration or power other than that exercised by her father Henry and her brother Edward. And, by her letter, the Queen neither removed such power from her male successors nor arrogated it to herself, knowing that it was prohibited for women to speak in the churches.287 209 A. The whole of the forty-third chapter is taken up in proving that the penitent

sinner need believe nothing further for his salvation than that which is contained in this one article of faith, that Jesus is the Christ. 210 B. That article contains many things, as that Jesus is the Son of God, the king of

the Jews, the restorer of the kingdom of God. For, as the Apostle John testiﬁes, the aim of even the Gospel is none other than that we might know ‘that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.’288 The same apostle also says, ‘Every spirit that confesses Jesus as the Christ, come into the ﬂesh, is of God.’289 There are many other passages in the New Testament similar to this one.

285 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. 115 ff., 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. 29 ff. 286 See Leviathan 3.42.72.570.

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hinc est, clerum illum credidisse, in quocunque resideret ecclesiae suprematus, eidem quoque licere, quoties vult, ea omnia administrare, quae a sacerdotibus administrari solent. Caeterum ad tollendum scrupulum hunc rescripsit regina, nunquam sibi in animo fuisse aliam sibi administrationem aut potestatem assumere, quam qua usi sunt Pater ejus Henricus et frater Eduardus. Atque hoc re scripto nec successoribus suis masculis potestatem illam derogavit, nec sibi arrogavit; sciens prohibitum esse foeminis loqui in ecclesiis. A. Caput quadragesimum tertium totum in eo consumitur, ut probet peccatori 209 poenitenti ﬁdem aliam ad salutem necessariam non esse, quam quae continetur in hoc uno articulo, Jesum esse Christum. B. In illo articulo multa continentur, ut Jesum esse Filium Dei, regem Judaeo- 210 rum, restauratorem regni Dei. Etiam scopus Evangelii alius non est, ut testatur Johannes apostolus (xx.31), quam ut sciamus Jesum esse Christum Filium Dei viventis. Praeterea, dicit idem apostolus (1 Epist. iv.2): Omnis Spiritus qui conﬁtetur Jesum esse Christum et venisse in carne, ex Deo est. Multa item alia loca sunt in Testamento Novo hujus similia.

287 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 commonwealth 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. 288 John 20:31. 289 1 John 4:2.

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211 A. But, against this view is what we read at the end of the Athanasian Creed,

namely, ‘This is the catholic faith, which, except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.’ 212 B. Then, you will set the words of Athanasius against the Holy Scripture and

the words of the apostle? The church accepts his creed as an explanation or paraphrase of the Nicene Creed, but the words of Athanasius are not part of that creed. 213 A. There are many other paradoxical arguments in the same book, but, because

they are too of little importance for us to linger over now, I shall not bring them up. 214 B. As you wish. But, in these instances you have brought up, I ﬁnd nothing

against the faith of our church, although there are several which defeat the teaching of private theologians.

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A. Sed contra est, quod legitur in ﬁne symboli Athanasii, nempe hoc: Haec est 211 ﬁdes catholica, quam nisi quis pro certo credat, salvari non potest. B. Tunc Sacrae Scripturae et verbis apostoli oppones verba Athanasii? Cujus 212 symbolum recipitur quidem ab ecclesia ut expositio vel paraphrasis symboli Niceni; sed haec verba Athanasii nulla est pars illius symboli. A. Sunt alia paradoxa non pauca in eodem libro; sed quia minoris sunt quam 213 illis nunc immoraremur, non proferam. B. Ut libet. Sed in his quae protulisti, nihil invenio contra ﬁdem ecclesiae nostrae, 214 quamquam non pauca doctrinam theologorum privatorum superantia.

2. HOBBES AND THE ECONOMIC TRINITY In the Appendix which Thomas Hobbes added to the 1668 Latin version of Leviathan,1 he upbraided Epiphanius of Salamis (after 310–403), the Greek Church Father whose Panarion (‘Medicine Chest’) offered remedies to counteract the poison of heresy; Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621),2 the preeminent polemicist of the Catholic Church of his era and ‘instructor’ of Galileo,3 and Peter Lombard (1095–1160), the author through whose Sentences medieval theologians came to know the Fathers.4 Their offense in Hobbes’s eyes lay in their efforts to explain the tenets of Christian belief through non-scriptural, especially Greek philosophic, means. This line of criticism was not new. Writing in the second century, the Roman Tertullian asked what Athens had to do with Jerusalem. And, certainly since the Protestant Reformation, ‘Hellenization’ has been both a reproach and a boast among Christian theologians, who have variously found confusion and futility or progress in its development. In a letter of 1517 to a colleague, Martin

1

See especially Appendix, §§ 82 ff. 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. 3 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. 173 ff., 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. 4 Peter condemned the garruli ratiocinators (talkative logic-choppers) among his contemporaries for their addiction to argument. His work aimed at threading a middle path between authority and dialectic. 2

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Luther barely withheld from calling Aristotle the devil himself.5 Later, likely with Tempier’s famous condemnations of 1277 in mind, he said that Thomas Aquinas had written many heretical things; he then accused the angelic doctor of having authored the reign of Aristotle, that destroyer of pious teaching (vastator piae doctrinae).6 It was a quotation Hobbes himself would later hurl delightedly at one of his most relentless critics, the Most Reverend Father in God, John Bramhall, D.D., Anglican Bishop of Derry and Archbishop of Armagh.7 But, Hobbes’s own contemporaries and opponents, the Cambridge Platonists, Cudworth, More and Whichcote, and, later, the great Leibniz found the deposit of Greek thought in Christian theology congenial to their efforts and undertook to build out from its foundations.8 Following the exegetical work of such ﬁgures as Grotius, Spinoza, La Peyrère, Roger Simon and others in the seventeenth century,9 the eighteenth century saw a deepening of the debate over Hellenization10 – witness the ﬁgure of Lessing – to culminate in the nineteenth in the work of such diverse scholars and thinkers as Friedrich Schleiermacher, David Friedrich Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach and Friedrich Nietzsche, to name only speakers of German. 5

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. 6 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.’ 7 See The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, Clearly Stated and Debated between Dr. Bramhall and Thomas Hobbes, EW V, pp. 64, 63, 102 ff., 266 and 298 ff. 8 See Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England trans. by James P. Pettegrove (Austin, TX: University of Texas 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). 9 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. 10 For a description of this aspect of eighteenth-century Christianity, see Sheridan Gilley, ‘Christianity and Enlightenment,’ History of Western Ideas 1 (1981): 103–121.

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The debate, brought before an Anglophone audience by Edward Caird in his Gifford Lectures of 1902,11 continued and spread throughout the twentieth century, producing both the unfortunate Biblicism of religious Fundamentalism in the United States and elsewhere12 as well as interest in the history of theology in learned circles. An example of the latter is given in the Jesus Seminar,13 which continues to pursue the de-Hellenizing turn in Christian theology. In its relations to the decline of classical civilization and the rise of Christianity, the importance of the debate over Hellenization can scarcely be overstated. In its complexity and the scope of its implications and in its rewards to those who would be its students, it is one of the great chapters in the history of Western thought. That Hobbes could claim a place in this debate does not seem to have been apparent to his contemporaries; willing to consider the merits of Platonic or Aristotelian thought as a vehicle for theology,14 they did not countenance mate-

11 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. 12 ‘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. 13 Those interested in the work of the Jesus Seminar may reference the group’s Website at http://religion.rutgers.edu/jseminar/js_main.html. 14 Thus, a certain ‘S.P.’ of Cambridge wrote in 1662, ‘Christian religion was never bred up

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rialism. But, modern scholars too have failed to recognize the originality and perceptiveness of the position Hobbes developed regarding the Hellenization of Christianity and how it shaped and guided his approach to politics and to the sources and criteria of Christian doctrine.15 Failing to understand the bases and lines of argument he offered in these areas, we have failed to see how Hobbes, as Protestant thinker, is linked essentially to those for whom the relationship of Protestantism, politics and philosophy was intrinsic, including Locke, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel. Nonetheless, stemming from his interests and acumen as an early scientist, as a Protestant and as a scholar well versed in ancient thought and the classical languages, Hobbes set forth theological positions of sufﬁcient depth and interest to warrant our careful attention. Whether or not they are valuable in themselves as theology, his views were penetrating, considered and certainly different from his contemporaries’. And, while his own doctrinal positions met with hostility and disbelief, his tone and approach in these matters may have had a positive inﬂuence upon contemporary discussions.16 For, they reﬂect his belief that reasoned reﬂection and careful, historically informed exegesis can distinguish extraneous elements from Christianity’s authentic practice and confession.17 Among many examples of his efforts to obviate elements of pagan practice and teaching and purge them from Christian theology, one may cite his rejection of the incorporeality of the soul: Leviathan 4.46.18–19.692: And this shall sufﬁce for an example of the errors, which are brought into the Church, from the entities and essences of Aristotle:

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. 15 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). 16 See Mintz, op. cit.¸ pp. 69, 78, 83, 143, esp. 150 ff. 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). 17 In this sense and to a certain extent, one can claim the title of demythologizer for Hobbes avant la lettre.

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which it may be he knew to be false philosophy; but writ it as a thing consonant to, and corroborative of [Greek] religion; and fearing the fate of Socrates. Being once fallen into this error of separated essences, [those in the church who follow Aristotle] are thereby necessarily involved in many other absurdities that follow it. For seeing they will have these forms to be real, they are obliged to assign them some place. But because they hold them incorporeal, without all dimension of quantity, and all men know that place is dimension, and not to be ﬁlled, but by that which is corporeal; they are driven to uphold their credit with a distinction, that they are not indeed any where circumscriptive, but deﬁnitive; which term[s], being mere words, and in this occasion insigniﬁcant, pass only in Latin, that the vanity of them may be concealed… Can any man think that God is served with such absurdities? And yet all this is necessary to believe, to those that will believe the existence of an incorporeal soul, separated from the body.

In the related sphere of religious practice, Hobbes detected and decried the idolatrous remnants of pagan worship that he found in Christianity, especially in the Church of Rome, and, like a precise Protestant, he exulted in the prospect of their expulsion: Leviathan 4.45.36–8.680 ff.: The carrying about of images in procession is another relic of the religion of the Greeks and Romans. For they also carried their idols from place to place… According whereunto, amongst the divine honours which were given to Julius Caesar by the senate, this was one: that in the pomp (or procession) at the Circaean games, he should have thensam et ferculum,18 a sacred chariot and a shrine (which was as much as to be carried up and down as a god, just as at this day the Popes are carried by Switzers under a canopy). … And if a man would well observe that which is delivered in the histories, concerning the religious rites of the Greeks and Romans, I doubt not but he might ﬁnd many more of these old empty bottles of Gentilism, which the doctors of the Roman Church, either by negligence or ambition, have ﬁlled up again with the new wine of Christianity, that will not fail in time to break them.19

And, although it has not been recognized as such, another instance of Hobbes’s attempt to de-Hellenize Christianity is his notorious re-working of the doctrine of the Trinity, the central doctrine of the Christian faith. With scriptural evidence as our point of departure, four events in the history of Christian doctrine will prove key to understanding Hobbes’s Trinitarianism: 1) the establishment of 18 Hobbes’s source for this may be Suetonius, who mentions ‘tensam et ferculum’ and several other honors in his life of Caesar, chap. 76. 19 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.

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orthodoxy’s language, one substance and three persons, by the Roman Tertullian, who is also of interest for his materialism; 2) the ‘Platonizing’ of Christianity by Origen; 3) the Cappadocian Fathers’ distinction between the Immanent Trinity and the Economic Trinity; and 4) Augustine’s psychological theory of the divine processions.20 Hobbes’s theology is a matter of current interest. It ﬁgured not so long ago in an exchange between two highly respected American scholars, Edwin Curley and A.P. Martinich, regarding ‘ambiguous deception,’ irony, sincerity and orthodoxy.21 Quentin Skinner has said that, in writing about Christianity and the scriptures, Hobbes’s intention is satirical, aimed at dealing with his ‘intellectual adversaries less by arguing with them than by ridiculing their absurdities.’22 20 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. 21 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. 22 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 ‘pour 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

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And, Hobbes’s Trinitarianism in particular has received attention from scholars in France and Germany.23 One may doubt, I think, whether settling the question of Hobbes’s inner feelings and sentiments would much advance our understanding of his intentions in writing about religious doctrines; at most, we would learn a biographical detail. Hobbes is probably sincere; that is, Thomas the person inwardly believed what Hobbes the author outwardly said. We cannot know. He was evidently not

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. 85 ff. 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.’ ( historica) See Leviathan 2.18.3.229. On how the study and teaching of ‘historical faith’ (ﬁdes 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. 66 ff. 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.’ 23 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.

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especially or consistently devout, as he admits,24 and the life itself is susceptible to various interpretations. But, the most devout life would in any case afford us little guidance in understanding the complex and intricate relation of Hobbes’s theology to his politics and philosophy. It is hardly in any case an empty contrivance. If some of his doctrines and views are less heterodox than often thought, much in his theology, certainly his Trinitarianism, resists description as merely traditional or safely conventional. Instead, we shall see a theological outcome that is clearly out of the ordinary but also constructive and vigorously defended by way of learned reference to scripture. And, contrary to the conclusions of some or even to his own indications, Hobbes seems never to have doubted that he was largely correct in stating the doctrine of the Trinity, as witness the comments he gave in the Appendix added to the Latin Leviathan of 1668. But, he is not ironic or satirical in describing the religious settlement of the Christian commonwealth, a major theme prosecuted throughout the text, not merely in the until recently ignored last half. To that extent at least, reading the theology out of the argument of Leviathan defeats one of Hobbes’s purposes and does scant justice to the text, the thinker or the theoretical project. Athens and Jerusalem Matthew 28:19 records the disciples’ commission to preach the gospel to all nations, baptizing them in the ‘name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’ But, in undertaking to spread the ‘good news’ to their countrymen, the apostles retained many elements of their own Jewish identity and even imposed some of them, for example, dietary restrictions, on Gentile converts. Paul, a Hellenized Jew of Tarsus, in proselytizing among the Gentiles, spread the same message of salvation but dispensed with many of the elements retained by the ﬁrst apostles and treated them all as peripheral. And, like the experience of the Jews themselves, who had won concessions from civil authorities for their religious practices, both the disciples and Paul had to defend their new religion from the assumptions current in the Hellenistic/Roman world-view. Thus, in seeking to make its proclamation effective, the early church fought on two fronts, both against the various proponents and interpreters of the Jewish religious experience from which it took its origins and against the highly developed bearers of the culture in which it was immersed.25 24 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. 25 On this point and generally, see Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of

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One result of the church’s encounter with the world of classical antiquity was the development of ‘natural theology,’ found for example in the work of the three Cappadocian Fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa. Jaroslav Pelikan has described two characteristic ways in which Greek thought surfaced in their work and in the theology of the Fathers in general. The ﬁrst was as ‘apology’ (?πολογ α), that is, as defense of the faith, by which an armory of Greek concepts and distinctions was marshaled against Greek ideas and pagan religion. The second was as presupposition, that is, the corpus of assumptions and afﬁrmations made by these Christians regarding the existence of the natural order described in classical philosophy and theology. They took this body of thought about nature to be valid within its own sphere and on its own terms, but as supplemented, corrected and transcended by revelation.26 Hobbes set himself against both these aspects of Greek inﬂuence in Christian theology. As an early scientist, he voiced opposition to much of what Christian theology had adopted as presupposition from Greek learning about nature and the cosmos,27 rejecting in particular its understandings of mental processes and structures.28 And, he opposed the methods of articulation, argumentation and proof imported from Greek philosophy into Christians’ discussions about God. In eschewing these elements of ancient culture into Christianity, Hobbes resorted to the scriptures and the simplicity of the message of primitive Christianity preached by the early church, a turn of thought that has been characteristic of Protestantism.29 Of course, even among Protestants, theology and church practice have varied in the hospitality shown to borrowings from their own and others’ cultures. Paul Tillich and Karl Barth divided on this point in the last century, with Tillich freely

the New Testament Images of Jesus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 26 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. 3 ff., 38 ff., 184 ff., 191, 195, 206 ff. and 235. 27 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. 86 ff. More broadly, see also Cees Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes’s Natural Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 28 See within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’ 29 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.

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adopting the categories of the new ‘depth psychology’ as a vehicle and reference for theology and Barth, at least at some points in his career, rejecting such an approach and the engagement in the saeculum which it would have entailed30 And, while there has always been awareness of the debts owed by Christian theology to such cultural contents, there has also been both disagreement over which cultural artifacts should be considered intrinsic to the expression of the faith and also sensitivity regarding the appropriate methods, times and places of their employment. One substance, three persons The Trinitarian language of the Nicene Creed, ‘of one substance with the Father,’ and the tradition’s ‘one substance in three persons’ are artifacts of the inﬂuence of classical thought on the doctrinal formation of the Christian tradition.31 Although some scholars ﬁnd a rudimentary Trinitarianism in the scriptural record,32 the words cited above are not used there in the developed meanings which centuries of thought would add or clarify, and clearly their origins in the philosophic and religious pasts of Greeks and Romans exercised a greater or lesser hold as presupposition over the Christians who variously employed them. Of course, the foundation upon which the ediﬁce of Christian theology arose was what Paul, in 1 Corinthians 1:23, would call a ‘stumbling-block’ (σκ'νδαλον) to the Jews and ‘foolishness’ (µορ α) to the Greeks, namely, the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth: a blasphemous assertion for the former, a ridiculous description of an executed criminal for the latter. But, the κ ρυγµα, or proclamation, of Christian orthodoxy was that Jesus was God, not a second or derivative god but one with the deity whom He Himself called Father.33 And, they could ﬁnd

30 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. 31 For a history of the words persona and πρσωπον, see Siegmund Schlosmann, Persona und ΠΡΟΣΩΠΟΝ im Recht und im christlichen Dogma,’ (Kiel and Leipzig: Lipsius und Tischer, 1906), esp. pp. 98 ff. with respect to Augustine and Boethius, who had considerable impact on the development of scholasticism. 32 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). 33 The Greek word for proclamation, κ ρυγµα, derives from κ ρυξ (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:

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ample witness for this statement in the biblical record (e.g., John 1:18; Romans 9:5; I Corinthians 1:24; Colossians 1:15). Naturally enough, given their cultural inheritance and surroundings, Christ’s followers soon linked Him, as the visible aspect of the invisible God, to the passages in the Hebrew scriptures which spoke of God’s wisdom, spirit or word (Psalms and Wisdom) or which described visits by angels, understood as Christ’s appearances among the ancient Hebrews (for example, Isaiah 6:2 ff.). Indeed, though they themselves evidenced a shift away from traditional Jewish religious expression, it was the angelic mythology of Jewish writers of the Hellenistic era that provided the symbolic parameters within which this early identiﬁcation of Christ was ﬁrst framed.34 But, the development of Trinitarian thought from within Jewish cultural contents was soon overtaken by the work of Gnostic thinkers, who self-consciously applied categories and forms shaped by the inclinations and requirements of their own times and places.35 In turn, their opponents, known as the Apologists, developed more evidently biblical elements in their theology, though often in a syncretizing manner. In Justin Martyr, for example, Greek and early Christian elements mixed together. And the key, late-Greek theological term, impassibility,36 or immunity to change, 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. 34 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. 276 ff., 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. 35 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. 36 Thus, in distinguishing God from Dionysus, Apollo and Adonis, Justin, in his First Apology, § 25, says: Θε4D δ9 τ4D ?γενν τ4ω κα ?πα!εG HαυτοIς ?νε! καµεν; ‘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 (λγος) of God, which Wartele 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

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was adopted as a description of the divine, with the following result: once a Greek hearer of the gospel had heard of the activities of Jesus, the Son of the Father, in communion with the Spirit, the immediate question to be expected was, what is the time-immune, self-identical, impassible Identity that is all three, the enduring Continuity behind them all? There were two types of wrong answer to the Greek auditor’s legitimate question. The ﬁrst, modalism, asserted that there was a fourth being behind the three temporal manifestations, which served as the modes, aspects or energies by which the eternal and timeless divinity manifested itself in time. The second, subordinationism, asserted that one of the three was eternal, so that the other two were subordinate to it as its temporal manifestations. Both answers were rejected as heretical, and it is in part because Hobbes’s doctrine has been described as subordinationist37 that he has been considered heretical, on those occasions when he has not been taken for a dissembling atheist. The syncretism of the Apologists was to many too great a concession to Greek philosophy and Gnosticism. Further, it threatened a weakening of the principle of what was called God’s monarchy, that is, His unity and simplicity, the fundamental assumption and prerequisite of all monotheism. Substance and persons in Tertullian It was the Roman Tertullian, in his treatise against Praxeas, who settled upon what was to become the authoritative Trinitarian formulation in describing the one substance of God, together with the three persons of the Trinity, Father, Son

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). 37 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. 23 ff. 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. 135 ff.

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and Holy Spirit.38 With Hippolytus, Tertullian explained the often-cited biblical passages so as to defend the separate personality of the Son (and Holy Spirit) as distinct from the Father as person, though not as substance: the two constituted not one person (unus) but one substance (unum), distinguished not in essence (statu) but by grade or dignity (gradu). Finally, he deﬁned the unity of power and of substantia as a single substrate, the spirit participated in by the three persons; and this spirit he described in Stoic terms, that is, as a corporeal entity.39 To moderate the stress on the monarchy of God, with its devaluation of the role and dignity of Christ, Tertullian countered with a deepened sense of the articulation of the three persons, distinct among themselves but not separated. The ‘moments’ of differentiation into three persons he referred to as the ‘economy,’ ο κονοµ α in Greek or oikonomia as transliterated into Latin.40 Now, it is unclear how much Hobbes knew of Tertullian in 1651, and this bears on the relationship between Hobbes’s materialism and his religious views in general41 and to his doctrine of the Trinity in particular. Hobbes did not directly attribute corporeality to God in the English Leviathan, only to angels,42 although in the 1668 Appendix, now espousing the materiality of God,43 he would

38 On Tertullian, see, for example, Robert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1982), pp. 70–74. 39 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. 40 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. 41 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. 42 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. 3.34.17.435 ff., and 4.44.15.637. 43 In Considerations upon the Reputation of T. Hobbes, EW IV, 429, and Leviathan Appendix chapter 3, §§ 174 ff., 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

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claim the Roman Father in support of that view.44 It seems more likely than not that he knew of Tertullian in 1651 and that he may have already espoused the corporeality of God in an exchange with Descartes, so that he was probably hiding his true belief.45 Hobbes’s reluctance to offer a materialist description of the divine nature in the English Leviathan did not however prevent him from making statements according to which only that which is corporeal is real: Leviathan 3.34.15.433: The disciples of Christ, seeing him walking upon the sea, (Matthew 14. 26. and Mark 6. 49.) supposed him to be a Spirit, meaning thereby an aerial body, and not a phantasm: for it is said, they all saw him; which cannot be understood of the delusions of the brain, (which are not common to many at once, as visible bodies are; but singular, because of the differences of fancies), but of bodies only. In like manner, where he was taken for a spirit, by the same apostles (Luke 24. 3, 7)46: so also (Acts 12. 15) when St. Peter was delivered out of prison, it would not be believed; but when the maid said he was at the door, they said it was his angel; by which must be meant a corporeal substance, or we must say, the disciples themselves did follow the common opinion of both Jews and Gentiles, that some such apparitions were not imaginary, but real; and such as needed not the fancy of man for their existence: These the Jews called spirits, and angels, good or bad; as the Greeks called the same by the name of demons. And some such apparitions may be

Hobbes ed. by Luc Foisneau and George Wright (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2004), pp. 73–96. 44 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 the Calvinian 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. 45 See within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’ 46 Luke 24:3–7, recounts the Galilean women’s discovery of the empty tomb.

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real, and substantial; that is to say, subtle bodies, which God can form by the same power, by which he formed all things, and make use of, as of ministers, and messengers (that is to say, angels) to declare his will, and execute the same when he pleaseth, in extraordinary and supernatural manner. But when he hath so formed them, they are substances, endued with dimensions, and take up room, and can be moved from place to place, which is peculiar to bodies; and therefore are not ghosts incorporeal, that is to say, ghosts that are in no place; that is to say, that are no where; that is to say, that seeming to be somewhat, are nothing. But if corporeal be taken in the most vulgar manner, for such substances as are perceptible by our external senses; then is substance incorporeal, a thing not imaginary, but real; namely, a thin substance, invisible, but that hath the same dimensions that are in grosser bodies.

However we construe his intentions in the 1651 text, it is clear that his materialist treatment of subjects such as angels is not ironic or satirical. For, his materialism provides a basis for scriptural interpretation that leads him to innovative, considered and, it happens, often correct judgments in a number of areas. For example, he asserts that the meaning of spirit in the Hebrew scriptures nowhere entails incorporeality, as now seems the case.47 It is also his materialism which renders problematic the New Testament description of demons as incorporeal, as he states.48 His clarity, not to say candor, regarding this difﬁculty and the character of the explanation he offers for it, remove the point of a possible ironic intention.49 To the contrary, the materialist discussion of spiritual matters serves an aim pursued throughout Leviathan, namely, eliminating from Christian theology the remnants of Greek popular religion, its ‘superstition,’ mediated, Hobbes says, by Greek philosophy.50 We saw this project of de-Hellenization at work above in the quotation regarding the incorporeality of the soul,51 and it is operative throughout the text as a ‘ghostly’ rhetoric in critique of all aspects of Greek incorporeal spiritualism, especially as it contributed to the ‘fairy kingdom’ of the ‘ghostly’ men of the Roman clergy.52 Tertullian’s pronouncements regarding God’s corporeality were unmistak47 For a discussion of this point, see Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament vol. 1 trans. by J.A. Baker (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961), pp. 210–215, esp. p. 214. 48 See within, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’ 49 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. 50 See Leviathan 4.46.18.691. 51 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. 52 See the rich development of such metaphors in chapter 47 of Leviathan, with its ﬁnal

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able: ‘Quis enim negabit Deum corpus esse, etsi Deus spiritus est.’53 ‘Cum autem sit, habeat necesse est aliquid, per quod est, hoc erit corpus eius. Omne quod est, corpus est sui generis. Nihil est incorporale nisi quod non est.’54 ‘Igitur, corpus anima, quae nisi corporalis corpus non derelinquet.’55 ‘Si quid tormenti sive solacii anima praecerpit in carcere seu deversorio inferum, in igni vel in sinu Abrahae, probata erit corporalitas animae… In quantum enim omne corporale passibile est, in tantum quod passibile est corporale est.’56 Even Augustine was inclined to conceive of God as corporeal: ‘Ut quamvis non forma humani corporis, corporeum tamen aliquid cogitare cogerer per spatia locorum sive infusum mundo sive etiam extra mundum per inﬁnita diffusum.’57 There was thus some warrant for what Hobbes was trying to do, though, in the political context of contemporary theological discussion, his chances of reversing centuries of tradition were quite small.58 And, a measure of difﬁdence may also explain the differing treatments accorded God and other spiritual beings in the English Leviathan.59 Inherent in his understanding of language60 and of theology was the denial that we could know anything about God’s nature, and stating that God was corporeal seems to require knowledge, though this was an epistemological barrier that Hobbes himself would violate.61 A far greater theologian than Hobbes, Origen had struggled with what Jerome called that crimen tanti sacrilegii, namely, to afﬁrm that God and creatures were of the warning regarding some others who pretend to have a power in the world distinct from the civil state. See also within, note 60. 53 ‘For, who will deny that God is body, even though He is spirit.’ 54 ‘But, although He is, it is necessary that He have something through which He exists. This will be His body. For, everything which exists is body of its own kind. There is nothing that is incorporeal except that which does not exist.’ 55 ‘For, the soul is body, which, unless it is corporeal, will not leave the body.’ 56 ‘If the soul perceives anything of either torment or solace, in that prison or abode of the underworld, or in ﬁre or in Abram’s bosom, then the corporeality of the soul is proved. For, to the extent that everything corporeal experiences sensation, to that extent what experiences sensation is corporeal.’ 57 ‘But, while not in the form of the human body, I am forced to consider [God] something corporeal, either infused in the world throughout the spaces of places or spread out beyond the world through inﬁnite places.’ 58 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 59 See within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’ 60 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. 61 See within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’

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same nature.62 In the Greek Father’s case, that nature was reason, not body, as in Tertullian and Hobbes,63 but the issue is the same: can human understanding comprehend, and can human language express, God’s nature? Hobbes denies the possibility in several places.64 But, the project he undertakes as a political theorist, the description of the Christian commonwealth, requires him to make assertions about God, His natural and revealed words, His kingdoms, the ofﬁce of His ministers in the church, the ecclesiastical rights of political sovereigns, not to mention the Trinity itself. Nonetheless, his own understanding of language, namely, that words are mere ‘counters,’65 descriptions, but not the objects of intuitive knowledge,66 renders such sayings quite as hard as they are necessary: Leviathan 1.2.31.404:… [T]he name of God is not to be used rashly, and to no purpose; for that is as much, as in vain:67 and it is to no purpose unless it be by way of oath, and by order of the commonwealth, to make judgments certain;68 or between commonwealths, to avoid war. And that disputing of God’s nature is contrary to his honour: for it is supposed, that in this natural kingdom of God, there is no other way to know any thing, but by natural reason; that is, from the principles of natural science; which are so far from teaching us any thing of God’s nature, as they cannot teach us our own nature, nor the nature of the smallest creature living.

What Hobbes says of religious language and understanding thus applies with equal force to all language and understanding. And, as he is at pains to point out, revelation does not issue in knowledge,69 only in belief or opinion, even, or

62 On these points, see Manlio Simonetti, ‘Note sulla teologia trinitaria di Origene,’ Vetera Christianorum 8 (1971): 273–309, esp. pp. 279–280. 63 Hobbes nonetheless commends the piety of those who use the language of incorporeality; see Leviathan 1.12.7.170. 64 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. 65 See Leviathan 1.4.13.105. 66 For this language, see Noel Malcolm’s 1985 Cambridge dissertation, ‘Thomas Hobbes and Voluntarist Theology,’ #12565, Cambridge University (undated). 67 In contravention of Exodus 20:7 and Deuteronomy 5:11. See also Leviticus 19:12 and Numbers 30:2. 68 On Christ’s prohibition of swearing an oath, see Matthew 5:33–37; see also James 5:12. 69 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 hypo-

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especially, with regard to God’s manifestation of Himself as triune, as we shall see. If he withheld out of difﬁdence, then it is an attitude he shared with Origen and Jerome, though each used different philosophic vehicles in making theological points.70 Moreover, in seeking to understand Hobbes’s Trinitarianism, we must not make his contemporaries’ mistake of assuming that the theological language of timelessness and incorporeality has always been or must necessarily be the deﬁning characteristic of spirit in the Christian tradition. That assumption derives its inevitability for us precisely from the patristic developments we so brieﬂy canvass here; a glance at modern theology will reveal how problematic such assumptions have become, in Protestant and Catholic circles alike.71 That they were problematic for Hobbes shows how far he outstripped his contemporaries in learning and depth of understanding. And, for us, it is only by questioning the tradition as he did that we may understand his attempt to advance beyond it and thereby reach greater clarity as to his theoretical project.72 The Cappadocian Fathers and the Economic Trinity In the tradition after Tertullian, as a result of the work of the Cappadocian Fathers, the distinction between God in Himself and God in time came to distinguish the triune God in eternity, the Immanent Trinity, from the triune God active in time, the Economic Trinity.73 Thus, the tradition deﬁned the

thetical validity. See Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 360 ff., and Alan Ryan, ‘Hobbes and Individualism,’ Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes ed. by G.A.J. Rogers and Alan Ryan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 94 ff. 70 While he withholds from asserting the corporeality of God in the English Leviathan, he is not reluctant to employ a concept of God in his political theory; see within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’ 71 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. 72 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 (ρ ζειν 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. 73 On this distinction, see Pelikan, op. cit., pp. 196, 207–208, 250 and 265–266; Ted Peters,

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Immanent Trinity as God ad intra, the interior life of God in itself, in the divine perichoresis of the persons and apart from engagements with the world, its creation, fall, redemption and consummation. The Economic Trinity, the Trinity of manifestation, it took to be God active as person in time, God ad extra, God in connection with the world, God accomplishing the plan of salvation through history.74 Attributed to the Cappadocians, the distinction rests upon theological amendments made by Origen to the implications of Tertullian’s materialism and to the notion of ‘moments’ in the divine life. Missions and processions Corresponding to the immanent/economic distinction, the ‘moments’ or ‘events’ of God ad intra and ad extra were distinguished: ‘missions’ (from mittere, to send) involved personal engagement in time, as through the Incarnation and the appearances of the Holy Spirit; ‘processions’ (from procedere, to come forth) ‘occurred’ within the divine identity. In the Gospel of John, Christ says of Himself, ‘For from God I came forth and have come.’ (John 8:42). He speaks of the Holy Spirit as the Advocate ‘whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father’ (John 15:26). In the famous debate over the ﬁlioque, the Eastern and Western churches of course disputed the precise sense of the latter procession. Missions and processions in Origen The theological work of Clement of Alexandria and then especially of Origen represented a deepened and self-conscious application of Platonic spiritualism to all aspects of Christian culture.75 Reacting to those who over-emphasized God’s monarchy, Origen adopted new Trinitarian language as a means of emphasizing the distinctiveness of the persons. Also, he sought to avoid the language of substance out of fear of its Stoic, that is, materialist, connotations. To achieve this shift in perspective through language, he spoke not only of substance, but also of essence and substrate, giving these terms different ranges and shadings of meaning. What resulted was a Trinity of three πστασεις 76 or hypostases God as Trinity: 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. 74 See Peters, op. cit., pp. 20–23, 70–73. 75 See Simonetti, ‘Note…,’ pp. 273 ff. 76 Simonetti says that the Gnostic Valentinus was the ﬁrst to substitute πστασις for πρσωπον; see Simonetti, op. cit., note 30, page 11.

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united in one divinity. Also, instead of analogies drawn from material nature, Origen utilized the Platonic description of the intellectual nature shared by all rational entities. Finally, the suggestion of a time before and after in the activity of the divine life, as in the two-stage scheme of the Apologists and Tertullian, seemed to Origen to employ time-bound concepts to describe the divine processions, a reversal of the proper relationship between time and eternity. Instead, he described the procession of the Son as eternal and continuing, so that the Son’s ontology in the Immanent Trinity was removed essentially from time and the world. We shall see that Hobbes’s time-bound Trinitarianism does not accommodate Origen’s doctrine of the eternal procession of the Son, a theological loss his opponent Bramhall recognized and censured. Missions and processions in Augustine Like Origen, Augustine, the greatest of the Latin Fathers, employed analogy as the means of ﬁguring the divine perichoresis: the processions of the Son and Spirit correspond to the conception of an idea in the mind and the impulse of love arising in the depth of the human soul. The soul, he said, as a spiritual entity, has two spiritual activities, thought and volition, and two spiritual faculties corresponding to them, namely, the intellect, by which one understands the true, and the will, by which one is attracted to the good. As scripture revealed, the Son is born of the Father and has the same nature as the Father. But, the analogy to human sonship limped: a human father is related to his son by the relationship they share and vice versa, but they are distinguishable in substance as having different souls or essences as individuals. The father could not have the same form as the son because then they would not be two things. Augustine elucidates his analogy further by moving to the Son’s second name, word, λγος or verbum. As a word or idea is generated of some external object, so is the Son, the Word of God, conceived by the divine mind in an act of cognition. The Father, in contemplating the divine essence, generates the Son as the concept of the divine essence, which, occurring in the mind of God, is necessarily identical with the divine essence, and thus necessarily one and indivisible, by reason of God’s simplicity.77 The Son, though distinct as person from the Father, thus has the same divine, rational nature possessed by the Father, and unity of substance is preserved. Both in adoption and rejection of their views, Augustine’s theology was deeply indebted to classical sources, Platonic and Stoic chieﬂy, for his theory

77

There are logical problems implicit in this treatment which are probably not now proﬁtably addressed.

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of words and the psychology which underpinned it.78 But, of course, just here, Hobbes’s views differed profoundly. Hobbes’s doctrine of the Trinity The Trinitarian teaching that Hobbes set forth in the English Leviathan was new and, to my knowledge, unique to Hobbes; it was reproduced in somewhat truncated form in the text of the Latin Leviathan of 1668 and receives extended treatment in that work’s lengthy Appendix. It likely owed its origin to the theoretical activity caused Hobbes by the free-will debate with Bramhall, beginning around 1645,79 if there were not earlier stimuli.80 In general, Hobbes’s theological views, from The Elements of Law through to the 1651 text, move beyond conventional opinions to positions of greater depth and learning, as he evidently worked through the implications of his theoretical project, with its large and complex issues. Also, the political crisis he ﬂed in 1640 and then witnessed as exile in Paris must have impressed upon him the close, not to say inextricable, ties between religion and politics in the England of the Civil War and in general. Both Leviathan and Behemoth make it abundantly clear that religious differences bulked large in Hobbes’s understanding and explanation of the events that had led to the Civil War and its tragic outcomes. An interest in theology as such and in its bearing on politics is hardly surprising. The ﬁrst statement of Hobbes’s doctrine comes in Leviathan, chapter 16: Leviathan 1.16.12.220: The true God may be personated. As he was, ﬁrst, by Moses, who governed the Israelites (that were not his, but God’s people) not in his own name (with hoc dicit Moses81), but in God’s name (with hoc dicit Dominus82). Secondly, by the Son of man, his own Son, our blessed Saviour Jesus Christ, that came to reduce the Jews, and induce all nations

78 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). 79 Like its sheer bulk, the complexity of Hobbes’s religious thought shown in the English Leviathan shows considerable development over that of The Elements of Law or De Cive. Bramhall’s tenacity and intelligence and the role of Newcastle in arranging the exchange, together with the complicated religious problems raised by the Civil War, may have heightened Hobbes’s awareness of the importance and difﬁculty of the theological issues. 80 The group that met at Great Tew read the Fathers. 81 ‘Thus says Moses.’ 82 ‘Thus says the Lord.’

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into the kingdom of his father, not as of himself, but as sent from his father. And thirdly, by the Holy Ghost, or Comforter, speaking, and working in the Apostles; which Holy Ghost, was a Comforter that came not of himself, but was sent, and proceeded from them both.

After a restatement of the doctrine in chapter 33 in terms of inspiration,83 Hobbes gives his most extended discussion of the Trinity in chapters 40, 41 and 42. An expository device of considerable power in Hobbes’s hands, the chaining together of these three chapters accomplishes a sustained examination of the Economic Trinity, the Trinity through which God’s saving activity as person has been made manifest in faith to the elect in history. It issues in the detailed refutation of Cardinal Bellarmine’s assertions in De Summo Ponteﬁce regarding the jurisdiction of the church as the repository of the Gospel through the Holy Spirit, making chapter 42 by far the longest in Leviathan and the culmination of the major theme pursued in the book, namely, the proper relation of religion and politics in the Christian commonwealth. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit set out in chapter 42 of the 1651 text is thus intrinsic to his Erastian political program. For, in inspiring apostles by the Holy Spirit, the Savior imparted no coercive power to them and their successors in the Christian commonwealth, but left them only with a duty to proclaim His kingdom, to persuade others to submit themselves to it and, by precepts and good counsel, to teach what one is to do till He comes again.84 The sole ofﬁce which His ministers have in the Christian commonwealth is by or as the sovereign’s command. Otherwise, they have no ofﬁce in the Christian commonwealth distinct from that of its sovereign, nor are their precepts laws but merely ‘wholesome counsels.’85 A telling comparison with contemporary opinion is offered in the Presbyterians’ Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647. In the chapter ‘Of Church Censures,’ it states that ‘The Lord Jesus, as king and head of His Church, has therein appointed a government, in the hand of Church ofﬁcers, distinct from the civil magistrate.’86 Through its Trinitarianism as elsewhere, Hobbes’s theology 83

See Leviathan 3.33.20.422. On this point, within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’ 85 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, §§ 206 ff., 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. 42 ff. 86 The warning given in chapter 47 of Leviathan echoes Matthew 12; its suggestion that the Presbyterians are the new ghostly pretender to political power, succeeding the Church of Rome, gains its point from this assertion. That Hobbes, in 1651, should still be so concerned with the Presbyterians after Pride’s Purge had already ended their political importance gives 84

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clariﬁes and supports political teaching clearly contrary to that of his opponents. Chapter 40 deals with the rights of the kingdom of God in Abraham, Moses, the high priests and the kings of Judah; the chapter is an account of the history of the Jews from Abraham through the exile and Babylonian Captivity. It ends: Leviathan 3.40.14.511: And therefore, so far forth as concerneth the Old Testament, we may conclude that whosoever had the sovereignty of the commonwealth amongst the Jews, the same had also the supreme authority in matter of God’s external worship, and represented God’s person – that is the person of God the Father, though he were not called by the name of Father till such time as he sent into the world his son Jesus Christ, to redeem mankind from their sins and bring them into his everlasting kingdom, to be saved for evermore.

Chapter 41 takes up the ofﬁce of the Savior: Leviathan 3.41.9.520: Our Saviour, therefore, both in teaching and reigning, representeth (as Moses did) the person of God; which God (from that time forward, but not before) is called the Father; and being still one and the same substance, is one person as represented by Moses, and another person as represented by his son the Christ. For person being a relative to a representer, it is consequent to plurality of representers, that there be a plurality of persons, though of one and the same substance.

Chapter 42 resumes the discussion and takes up the person of the Holy Spirit:87 Leviathan 3.42.3.522: Here we have the person of God born88 now the third time. For as Moses and the high priests were God’s representative in the Old Testament, and our Saviour himself as man, during his abode on earth, so the Holy Ghost, that is to say the apostles and their successors, in the ofﬁce of preaching and teaching, that had received the holy Spirit, have represented him ever since. But a person, (as I have shown before, chap. [xvi]) is he that is represented, as often as he is represented. And therefore God, who has been

evidence of the production of Leviathan in France. He has evidently extended his analysis of the ﬂaws of Catholic theology to include Presbyterian theology, though the interesting theory regarding Greek demonology, with Aristotle’s hand in bringing it into philosophy and then patristic and scholastic use of the error of ‘incorporeal substances,’ does not ﬁt as well historically with Presbyterianism. Though contemporary events had an undoubted impact upon the writing of Leviathan, as in the ‘Review and Conclusion,’ they did not everywhere determine the broad outlines of its concerns; and some left merely a vestigial impress on the work, as in this case. On this point, see within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’ 87 The 1668 text lacks these paragraphs in Latin, and the discussion of the Holy Spirit is reserved to the chapters of the Appendix. 88 Modern orthography would require that this be written ‘borne,’ to show its origin in ‘to bear,’ not ‘to give birth.’

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represented (that is, personated) thrice, may properly enough be said to be three persons (though neither the word Person, nor Trinity, be ascribed to him in the Bible). St. John, indeed, saith (I John 5:7): ‘There be three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit; and these three are One.’89 But this disagreeth not, but accordeth ﬁtly with three persons in the proper signiﬁcation of persons, which is, that which is represented by another. For so God the Father, as represented by Moses, is one person; and as represented by his Son, another person; and as represented by the apostles, and by the doctors that taught by authority from them derived, is a third person; and yet every person here, is the person of one and the same God.

So, this, in brief compass, is Hobbes’s doctrine of the Trinity. It occasioned laughter and scorn in his day and continues to do so in ours, though with less justiﬁcation. Its contours will stand forth more clearly after a point-by-point analysis of its relation to the traditional elements we have discussed, as Hobbes modiﬁed or abandoned them in the two presentations he gave of it, ﬁrst in English in 1651 and then in Latin in 1668.90 The Immanent Trinity; the Economic Trinity The common criticism of Hobbes’s Trinitarian teaching is that it is subordinationist, reducing the Son and the Spirit to temporal manifestations of the eternal Father. But, this criticism is mistaken insofar as the Father too is temporally manifested in Moses, at least in the 1651 text.91 Now, the original impetus for subordinationism was the desire to safeguard the highest divinity from any identiﬁcation with time, again, operating within the Greek/patristic distinction between time and eternity. So, in describing each of the persons as historically manifested, Hobbes cannot have had that motivation,

89 Erasmus refused until his third Greek edition to adduce this verse as a proof of the Trinity because it was lacking in the better versions of the New Testament. It is however contained in the Authorized Version. On this point, see above, Appendix § 104 and nn. 90 Hobbes also discussed his doctrine of the Trinity at length in Answer to Bishop Bramhall, brieﬂy in An Historical Narration and The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Choice and once in Behemoth. 91 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.

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or at least not at that level. And, in fact, time is positively valued here in that God manifests Himself personally precisely in time understood as a succession of points, in which the unfolding of the divine life occurs. As Hobbes says: ‘[I]n the Trinity of heaven, the persons are the persons of one and the same God, though represented in three different times and occasions.’92 Hobbes’s positive valuation of time led him into positions that had offended patristic sensibilities and understandings and led the Fathers into the use of Greek ideas, as we have seen. Hobbes’s dogged opponent Bramhall, a faithful heir of the patristic tradition, reacted predictably to Hobbes’s time-bound account, lamenting the loss of just those elements and proofs of tri-unity in timelessness which he hallowed. These included (1) the timeless eternity of the Immanent Trinity; (2) the creedal statement as to the eternity of the Immanent Trinity;93 (3) biblical texts evidently proving the Immanent Trinity, and (4) Origen’s idea of the eternal procession of the Son from Father. Of course, he delightedly lampooned the seeming equating of Moses and the apostles with Christ (*). Who is so bold as blind Bayard? The emblem of a little boy attempting to lade all the water out of the sea with a cockle-shell, doth ﬁt T[homas] H[obbes] as exactly as if it had been shaped for him; who thinketh to measure the profound and inscrutable mysteries of religion by his own silly, shallow conceits. What is now become of the great adorable mystery of the Blessed Undivided Trinity? It is shrunk into nothing. Upon his grounds there was no Trinity (1): and we must blot these words out of our creed, ‘the Father eternal, the Son eternal and the Holy Ghost eternal’ (2): and [blot] these other words out of our Bibles, ‘Let us make man after our image.’ (3)94: unless we mean, that this was a consultation of God with Moses and the apostles(*). What is now become of the Eternal Generation of the Son of God (4), if this Sonship did not begin

92 See Leviathan 3.42.3.522. ‘Trinity of heaven’ is presumably Hobbes’s term for Immanent Trinity. 93 For Hobbes’s response to Bramhall’s citation of the Athanasian Creed, see Appendix §§ 14, 33, esp. 84 and 210 ff. 94 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.

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until about four thousand years after the creation were expired? … Such bold presumption requireth another manner of confutation.95

Bramhall is a valuable contemporary witness. If we speak in a privative sense of what is not there, it is quite true that Hobbes does not carry forward the distinction between the divine life ad intra and ad extra in terms of the polarity between time and eternity; we would not expect him to do that. Also, in that the persons of God are both epochal moments in the working out of the divine plan of salvation and in God’s appearances as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, little remains of the Cappadocians’ description of tri-unity in the Immanent Trinity. And, ﬁnally, Bramhall is right to note the abandonment of Origen’s work; the procession of the Son ab aeterno is not carried forward in terms of eternity, an idea which Hobbes in fact ridiculed as absurd: Leviathan 4.46.22.693: For the meaning of eternity, [the Schoolmen] will not have it to be an endless succession of time; for then they should not be able to render a reason how God’s will and preordaining of things to come should not be before his prescience of the same (as the efﬁcient cause before the effect or agent before the action), nor of many other their bold opinions concerning the incomprehensible nature of God. But they will teach us, that eternity is the standing still of the present time, a nunc-stans (as the Schools call it;) which neither they nor any else understand, no more than they would a hic-stans for an inﬁnite greatness of place.96

But, taken positively, Hobbes’s constructive theological task has been that of conceiving the Economic Trinity in strictly temporal terms, locating the central events of the Christian narrative in the lives of concrete, historical people, carrying out their roles97 in God’s plan of salvation. The persons of God, and 95 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. 96 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. 97 Rather than the word ‘role,’ Hobbes typically has ‘ofﬁce,’ which, stemming from ofﬁcium, meaning duty, holds quite different connotations.

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thus the progressive disclosure of God’s identity as triune, occur only in time and in the order described in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. This explains why Hobbes was drawn to deny that God was called Father prior to the birth of the Son98 and so also with the Spirit, in a way reminiscent of Tertullian’s abandoned, two-stage theory.99 Bramhall rightly recognized how pronounced Hobbes’s emphasis was on God’s monarchy in the Immanent Trinity, so strong was his focus on the temporal manifestation of the persons of the Economic Trinity. This emphasis is apparent in both the 1651 and 1668 accounts. And, though the two texts differ on speciﬁc points, as Hobbes himself stressed,100 they agree on essential points: in terms of divine personality, whatever the speciﬁc historic speciﬁcations of their appearances; in their materialism, and in opposing timelessness and incorporeality as properties of the spiritual. Hobbes recanted his description of the role of Moses in the Trinity and removed it from chapter 40 of the later text. Similarly, he removed from chapter 42 the description of the role of the apostles and teachers in the Trinity. Still, in the Appendix, as Matheron notes,101 the second text presents as retraction a decidedly recidivist restatement. Missions and processions In chapter 16 of the 1651 Leviathan, Hobbes stated that the Son and Holy Spirit were both sent and that the Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son, in accordance with the Western churches’ understanding: Leviathan 1.16.12.220:… our blessed Saviour Jesus Christ, that came… not as of himself, but as sent from his father. And thirdly, by the Holy Ghost… that came not of himself; but was sent, and proceeded from them both. (Italics added)

It is difﬁcult, if not impossible, to determine whether he parroted these formulas of the traditional distinctions or confessed them from inner belief and understanding. He considered various renderings of the text,102 and this indicates care 98

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. 100 See EW IV, 314 ff. 101 See Matheron, op. cit., p. 390. 102 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 99

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and deliberation. But, clearly, there is no adoption here of either Origen’s or Augustine’s theory of the processions; nor would one expect it, given their differing assumptions and procedures, especially as regards the working of the human mind. For Hobbes, will is simply the last desire in a train of desires which prompts one to act, the ‘last appetite or aversion, immediately adhering to the action or to the omission thereof.’103 Animals also have will in that they too experience appetite and aversion, according to this understanding. The patristic attempt to see an analogue between the life of the divine persons and the activities of the human psyche, as it was described in classical sources, no longer held meaning for Hobbes, and he abandoned it. But, there is another point here. As we saw in the instance of political coercion and the doctrine of the Holy Spirit,104 the theological point is tied to his politics. As with the soul’s incorporeality,105 Hobbes believed that Aristotle’s theory of ‘separated essences’ lay at the heart of traditional teaching on the acquisition of faith, wisdom and the other virtues leading to right action. Just as he abandoned the traditional account of the divine processions in Trinitarian theology, with its roots in ancient thought, so too he undertook to purge a defective psychology from politics. This was the scholastic theory of infused virtue (virtus infusa, from fundere, to pour),106 which led in his mind to political disobedience: Leviathan 4.46.18.691: But to what purpose (may some man say) is such subtlety in a work of this nature, where I pretend to nothing but what is necessary to the doctrine of government and obedience? It is to this purpose, that men may no longer suffer themselves to be abused, by them, that by this doctrine of separated essences, built on the vain philosophy of Aristotle, would fright them from obeying the laws of their country, with empty names; as men fright birds from the corn with an empty doublet, a hat, and a crooked stick… [It is upon this] ground they say, that faith, and wisdom, and other virtues are sometimes poured into a man, sometimes blown into him from Heaven, as if the virtuous and their virtues could be asunder; and a great many other things lack of understanding of the distinction between processions and missions; see Appendix, § 101. 103 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. 104 See above, pp. 196 ff. 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. 105 See above, pp. 178 ff. 106 On infused virtues as those given with grace by God, see Thomas, Summa Theologiae 1a2ae. 55,4 ff.; 1a2ae. 63.3 ff.; 1a2ae. 65.3, and 1a2ae. 110.3. See also Leviathan 2.29.8.336.

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that serve to lessen the dependance of subjects on the sovereign power of their country. For who will endeavour to obey the laws, if he expect obedience to be poured or blown into him?… And this shall sufﬁce for an example of the errors, which are brought into the Church, from the entities and essences of Aristotle… 107

If Hobbes addresses his reader here by way of an aside, the issue he raises here is clearly of no tangential importance. On the contrary, the relating of faith and action, of religion and politics, of church and state, lies at the very core of Hobbes’s political theory, as it does of modern political thought more generally. The late John Rawls, in re-considering the requirements of justice in our own era, drew attention to liberalism’s origins in the break with the past brought about by the Protestant Reformation and in the pluralism which its conﬂicts produced.108 The issues which Hobbes dealt with remain with us today.109 It need cause no surprise then if, in rejecting medieval scholasticism, the Protestant Hobbes adopts Melanchthon’s criticism of ‘that profane scholastic learning,’ through which, he says: Nothing is left sound in the Church, the Gospel is obscured, faith extinguished, the doctrine of works received, and instead of a Christian people, we are the people not even of the law110 but of Aristotle’s ethics.111

107 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.’ 108 See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (NY, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993), xxivff. 109 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,’ The Languages 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 and beyond 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. 110 Presumably, Melanchthon intends a reference to the Jews. 111 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:

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For, this was the terrain upon which Hobbes founded his Christian commonwealth, the Protestant rejection of ‘works,’ scholasticism and Aristotle.112 If people are to live in peace, he tells us, they must look for their common defense to that common sovereign with power to defend them from one another at home and from enemies abroad. To teach that one must await a divine gift, the infusion of grace, as the basis of virtuous action is to make obedience precarious, according to Hobbes, and peace less secure.113 It would be hasty to conclude that the theology of Leviathan was in every, or any given, instance determined by his politics or by his science; more likely, the various inﬂuences operating upon Hobbes’s intellectual growth were reciprocal.114 Precisely for this reason, one may pose, perhaps for the ﬁrst time, the question of the autonomous development of his theology as a legitimate, even pressing, historical problem. And, if, with respect to this particular as elsewhere, he gives little more than a caricature of the doctrine of infused grace, it is nonetheless Hobbes’s own caricature.

Constat enim natam 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. The political 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). 112 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). 113 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. 114 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.’

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In line with Hobbes’s method, no other illustrative or analogical explanation of the missions and processions of the divine persons is afforded than what can be drawn from an attentive reading of the relevant passages in scripture and the creeds, insofar as they are consistent with it. Still, in 1651, apart from its speciﬁc temporal speciﬁcations, he was close to the traditional distinction. As reﬂected in the 1668 Latin Appendix, however, either his thinking had changed, or, perhaps more likely, at the age of eighty his timidity in stating it had lessened. For, there, he denies that there is any difference between being born or begotten (the incarnation of Christ was commonly taken to be a mission) and proceeding: [95] A. … But tell me, what is the difference between ‘be born’ and ‘proceed’? [96] B. Look at Matthew 1:20, where the angel says to Joseph: ‘Fear not to take Mary as your wife. For what is born in her is of the Holy Spirit.’ [97] A. But I do not know whether this ‘is of the Holy Spirit’ means ‘born of the Holy Spirit’ or ‘proceeds from the Holy Spirit.’ [98] B. This passage is part of the Gospel of Matthew appointed for the feast of the circumcision, where one reads in the liturgy published in Latin by Edward VI, ‘What is born in her is accomplished by the Holy Spirit,’ and it is translated by our church as though it read, ‘He comes from the Holy Spirit.’ There you see how the Church of England has interpreted the passage, and I think rightly so. [99] A. With what result? Since the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, as is in the creed, and the Son also proceeds from the Holy Spirit, as it is in this text, and both are said to be ‘born,’ there seems to be no difference at all between being born and proceeding. To what purpose has the Roman Church distinguished between these words? [100] B. I do not know. But you know that at one time the Sphinx spread terror among the people by means of a riddle. [101] A. What distinction do the Fathers draw between these words? [102] B. None that I have seen. Cyril says that the Son is to the Holy Spirit as the Father is to the Son.115 115 Formerly, I attributed this passage to Cyril of Alexandria (c. 370–444); a more likely source may be the Catecheses of Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 315–386); see lecture 16, 24 (Migne, Patrologiae Graecae, vol. 33, col. 952) κα πατJρ µ9ν δ δωσιν KΥιω, κα Υ"ς µεταδ δωσιν Mγ 4ω Πνε µατι; ‘and the Father gives to the Son and the Son imparts to the Holy Spirit’ (taking Cyril’s (µετα-)δ δειν for Hobbes’s se habere ad, meaning ‘to exist in relation to’). Cf. Catecheses 4, 8; 4, 16; 6,2; esp. 6, 5 and 6; 6,9; 9,12; esp. the Appendix to 9; 16,1, and 16, 4. Throughout his work, Cyril, like Hobbes, expresses great caution not to go beyond the scriptures to pursue

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[103] A. Then, to Cyril it seemed that the Son bore the Holy Spirit, so we are back once again to equating ‘to be born’ and ‘to proceed.’ To me, it is clear enough that God’s Son was born of God, who comprehends the entire Trinity…

As realized by the abandonment of the tradition’s missions and processions, the effect of the 1668 text is no doubt radical and heterodox.116 Still, it merely intensiﬁes the tendency evident in the 1651 text toward a temporal and markedly monarchic interpretation of the divine life, in derogation of the work of Origen and the Cappadocian Fathers. Clearly, nothing has been ‘toned down’ and very little abandoned; indeed, his changes in this later text render the doctrine presumably only more offensive to orthodox opinion. Whatever its success, the doctrine in 1668 reﬂects the earlier intentions, namely, to interpret the Trinity in its traditional language of persons and substance but in temporal terms, stripping out Greek ideas and analogical constructions based on what is for him an outmoded, extra-biblical psychology. Persons Hobbes sought a more authentic notion of divine personality, in keeping with what he believed to be a more careful exegesis of the Latin word persona.117 As in his political teaching,118 so, in his doctrine of the Trinity, the theory of the that which is ?καταλ πτικον, incomprehensible. Just after the passage quoted, Cyril continues (Migne, op. cit., col. 953): φ σιν δ9 N πστασιν µJ πολυπραγµνειO Ε γPρ Qν γεγραµµνον, $λγοµενO R ο8 γγρπται, µJ τολµ σωµεν; ‘let us not trouble ourselves with the nature or substance [of God], for if something were written [in Scripture], we would speak of it; but it is not, so let us not be insolent.’ And, in the Appendix to Catechesis 9 (Migne, op. cit., col. 658), he says: κ'λλιν σο $στι σιωπSσαι, κα π στει προσκυνεGν, κατP τJν !ε αν φωνJν, N τολµηρDς $ρευνTUν B µ τε σI εφικσ!αι δ νασαι, µ τε σοι V ΓραφJ παρδωκενX ‘better to be silent and adore through faith according to the divine word than boldly to search for those things you cannot attain nor scripture reports.’ 116 This judgment, of course, rests on other judgments regarding the range of understandings, views and opinions accepted within Christian communities as constituting permissible expressions of the faith, in particular, about the Trinity and whether the distinction between the Trinity ad intra and ad extra continues to play a central role in the articulation of the doctrine of God in the West. Contemporary and current reactions to Hobbes’s theology and the evident failure of Deism are evidence that Trinitarianism, as conceived by the Cappadocian Fathers, continues to command the allegiance of the faithful. 117 More generally, though he does so famously in other ﬁelds, it is not characteristic of Hobbes to claim innovation in theology, nor is it a ‘modern’ theology, that is, one especially tailored to meet the pastoral or apologetic exigencies of his time. Given his views of revelation and scripture, he offers instead a theology of repristination. 118 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

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person lies at the center of his thought; it goes unchanged from the 1651 text into that of 1668. In the ﬁrst, as we have seen,119 he cited the traditional language: ‘there be a plurality of persons, though of one and the same substance.’120 But, in the discussion of the term that he gave in chapter 16,121 referenced in the discussion of chapter 42,122 he focuses on Cicero’s the use of persona: Leviathan 1.16.3.217: The word Person is Latin, instead whereof the Greeks have prosopon, which signiﬁes the face, as persona in Latin signiﬁes the disguise or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage; and sometimes more particularly that part of it which disguiseth the face (as a mask or vizard); and from the stage hath been translated to any representer of speech and action, as well in tribunals as theatres. So that a person is the same that an actor is, both on the stage and in common conversation; and to personate is to act, or represent, himself, or another; and he that acteth another, is said to bear his person, or act in his name; (in which sense Cicero useth it where he says, Unus sustineo tres personas; mei, adversarii, et judicis, I bear three persons; my own, my adversary’s, and the judge’s;) and is called in divers occasions diversly (as a representer, or representative, a lieutenant, a vicar, an attorney, a deputy, a procurator, an actor, and the like).

It may seem odd that Hobbes has cited a pagan as an authority regarding the interpretation of a term in Christian theology. But, it is certainly the correct

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. 119 See above, pp. 197 ff. 120 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. 121 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. 122 See Leviathan 3.42.3.522.

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procedure to determine the range of likely meanings from which came a neologism, for this was the way Hobbes no doubt viewed Tertullian’s use of the word persona.123 Quite correctly, he took the use of a word by native speakers as being indicative of the possible meaning(s) arising from it. In response to Bramhall’s criticism of his doctrine, he emphasized the philological point in his defense: ‘I saw the true deﬁnition of the word person would serve my turn…’124 Starting with an historically informed reading of the traditional Trinitarian language, Hobbes then offered an interpretation of divine personality that better matched his own concerns, not only philosophical but also theological, especially his fear that an overly substantive description of the persons of God led to tritheism, that is, the making of three gods. As he sees the matter, the persons are images of God; in line with his materialism, we might call them historical concretions of the divine life, taking on various roles, at various times and places. Conﬁdent both in his ﬁdelity to orthodox Trinitarian language and in the results of his earlier philological investigation of the Latin term, Hobbes spoke again of the issue in 1668, again citing the Roman. He distinguished the Greek Fathers’ development of Trinitarian language from what he took to be a more authentic, historically accurate interpretation of its key term, persona, according the Latin word exegetical priority over the Greek and seeking to show how the Fathers had misconstrued the former. As object lesson, he cited Cardinal Bellarmine for evidence of the confusion wrought by the unskillful interpretation of Latin words and their meanings through Greek assumptions and concepts: [81] A. … Tell me now what the word persona truly and properly means. [82] B. It is a Latin word, meaning any individual thing, no matter whether acting in accordance with its own will or by that of another. Thus Cicero says: ‘Though one single man, I play three parts [personae], my own, that of the judge and that of the opponent.’ [De Oratore II, 102] What does this mean but that Cicero himself took three parts: his own, that of the judge and of his opponent?… [if], f with the Greek Fathers, we used the word hypostasis in place of person, since hypostasis and substantia mean the same thing, in place of the three persons, we make three divine substances, that is, three Gods. Bellarmine and almost all the other doctors deﬁne person as the ﬁrst rational substance, that is, an individual substance that is single but intelligent, like God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, Gabriel, Peter. What are these ﬁrst three substances, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, if not three divine substances? But, this

123 It is a neologism in the sense that the language of Trinitarian orthodoxy takes its origins from Tertullian’s innovative use of the word persona in this context. 124 See An Answer…., EW IV, pp. 300–318, esp. p. 316. Note his discussion there of the hypostatic union.

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is contrary to the faith. Bellarmine did not understand the force of the Latin term persona, for, if it meant ﬁrst substance, would not the word prosopon mean the same thing in Greek?125 And it surely does not, for it means properly the face of a man, sometimes a natural one, sometimes a representation of a face, not only in the theater, but also in the forum and at church.126 But, what is a representation of a face but an image or stamp of the thing represented? And it is in this sense that our Saviour is called the stamp of the substance of God by St. Paul (Hebrews 1:[3]). (Emphasis added)

Gulled by the ‘insigniﬁcancy’ of the schoolmen’s language, the cardinal had followed the Greek Fathers’ mis-translation of personae, rendered as πστασεις, and had thereby been betrayed with them into tritheism. As evidence for his own interpretation, Hobbes cites the phrase from Hebrews 1:3, ‘character hypostaseos Dei,’ as his English text has it, or character substantiae Dei, as in the Latin text.127 In so doing, he re-emphasizes the (merely) representative function of the divine persons in bearing an image of the divine reality in given times and places. These images or persons are the temporal outcomes of God’s action in revealing and effecting the plan of salvation through covenant with His elect. This is as close as Hobbes came to explaining God’s self-disclosure in time, though his focus on the ﬁgure and ofﬁce of Christ, ‘our blessed Saviour,’ as he often calls Him, is the lynchpin of his theology.128 The point may be re-stated: the description of the divine persons as πστασεις, in Origen’s language, is read by Hobbes in one of the term’s original Greek meanings as indicating whatever is individual and stands on its own. On the basis of this interpretation, with scant or no justice to Origen and the patristic tradition, Hobbes faults this usage as suggestive of tritheism. Bellarmine and other thinkers in the theological tradition are thus wrong. Following the Fathers’ analogical interpretation of the persons of the Trinity in terms of rational, incorporeal substance (Hobbes’s ‘ﬁrst rational substance’), they deﬁne the three divine persons as three substances, that is, as Hobbes interprets, as three 125 What Hobbes seems to miss in the deﬁnition of πρσωπον is the explicitly artiﬁcial, representative element he found in persona. The persons of God are not the faces of God but His masks, temporally realized means of manifesting His will. 126 Hobbes’s point is that, while the Greek word πρσωπον 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. 130 ff. 127 The phrase is variously translated; the Revised English Bible has ‘the stamp of the very being of God.’ Coming from χαρ'σσειν (charassein), meaning to sharpen, to engrave, to inscribe, χαρακτ ρ (character) means not the mold or stamp which makes the impress, but the impress itself, viz., that which is marked, formed, cut in or struck, as on coins, seals, embossed letters, etc. 128 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. 195 ff.

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individuals, each standing on its own, contrary to the monotheism which Christians must faithfully profess. In contrast, Hobbes’s own account of divine personality, conceptually unchanged from the 1651 text, better expresses what he takes to be their representative character. And, importantly, he claims scriptural support for his theology in the passage from Hebrews. Here, he ﬁnds the word πστασις used to describe the one God in a way that is congruent both with one of its original Greek meanings and with the confession of the Nicene Creed, as Hobbes then understood it.129 In conclusion, we may say Hobbes sought to avoid the use of categories and concepts he felt did not clarify or strengthen the Christian faith but obscured it. In interpreting the Trinity on the basis of his reading of scripture, he sought to free it by skillful interpretation from Greek philosophic and religious inﬂuence coming from the patristic tradition and its ‘insigniﬁcant’ sequel in scholastic theology. His goal was to remove remnants of classical thought and inﬂuence in Christian theology. Faith itself, guided by a true reading of the scripture; an effective theory of agency, and the new science, must reject them. His Protestantism, his materialism, his skill in interpreting ancient texts and his project as a political theorist were elements in the articulation of his Trinitarianism. And, his theology as a whole played an indispensable role in describing the politics of the Christian commonwealth.

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On Hobbes’s explanation of the Nicene Creed, see the 1668 Appendix, §§ 1 ff.

3. THE HAUNTING OF THOMAS HOBBES1 The judgments that thinkers make of one another are sometimes just, often wrong and always revealing. In his Ignorant Philosopher, Voltaire says of Hobbes that he was a profound and bizarre philosopher, a good citizen, bold spirit and enemy of Descartes, one who saw before anyone else the chimera of innate ideas. Whoever studies morals, Voltaire says, must begin by refuting Hobbes’s book in his heart, but Hobbes’s own heart had refuted him even earlier. Contrary to Hobbes, the murderous Cromwell is no less culpable on a deserted island, where no law obtains, than in England, where it does. He ends by censuring Hobbes, for, ‘you were virtuous, like Spinoza, though, like him, you failed to teach the true principles of virtue, which you practiced and recommended to others.’2 Hegel, canvassing some seventeenth-century thinkers in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, speaks of Descartes, who did little with ethics; of Spinoza, whose masterpiece was his ethics, and of Hobbes, who, having incompletely developed spiritual matters, what he calls das Geistige, wrote only de cive, that is, on the citizen.3 Voltaire’s appraisal of Hobbes as a thinker is just in some ways, if quite conventional. Hegel’s appraisal of his thought, on the other hand, is wrong but revealing. No question engrossed Hobbes’s attention as a political theorist more than the relationship between church and state, politics and religion. For, implicit in this relationship was the question of the spirit’s activity in human lives. And, his interest in these questions was never greater than during the period of his own greatest productivity and insight and of England’s descent into civil war, regicide and dictatorship.

1

My research for this essay was conducted under the auspices of the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison, to whose then director, Paul Boyer, and fellows I am most indebted. 2 ‘Profond et bizarre philosophe, bon citoyen, esprit hardi, ennemi de Descartes…’; quoted from Voltaire, Le Philosophe Ignorant in Mélanges ed. by. J. Van Den Heuvel (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), pp. 918 ff. 3 See Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie ed. by H. Glockner, vol. 2 Sämtliche Werke, vol. 18 (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1927), p. 271, and op. cit., vol. 19, p. 364, cited in Nathan Rotenstreich, ‘Faces of the Social Contract,’ Revue Internationale di Philosophie 33 (1979): 484–505, p. 502.

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Thus, in the summer of 1641, already in exile in Paris for fear of the wars between king and Parliament that would convulse England, Hobbes writes to William Cavendish, third Earl of Devonshire. He refers to a proposal, added to the ‘Root and Branch Bill’ of that year, that lay commissioners replace the bishops and episcopal church government, so hated by the Puritans and their parliamentary supporters. The bill expressed several years’ acute dissatisfaction with the king’s personal rule and the spiritual direction of William Laud, Charles’s vigorous and inﬂuential Archbishop of Canterbury, whose taste in church ritual and vestment ran directly counter to much popular sentiment. (After years in the Tower of London, the prelate would be executed on a bill of attainder, for the ‘entertainment of the Scots,’ as Hobbes says in Behemoth.4) Hobbes distrusts the motives of those who want to uproot episcopal government and thereby relieve themselves of that great weight: they are just after the bishops’ jobs, he says, though the proposal is itself unobjectionable. He goes on: I am of the opinion, that Ministers ought to minister rather then governe; at least that all Church government [ought to] depend on the state, and authority of the Kingdome, wth out wch there can be no unity in ye church. your Lop may perhaps thinke this opinion, but a fancy of philosophy. but I am sure that Experience teaches, thus much, that the dispute for precedence betwene the spirituall and civill power, has of late more then any other thing in the world, bene the cause of civill wars in all places of Christendome.5

As we shall see, Hobbes had a great deal to say about das Geistige, both for its own sake and in relation to politics, for he saw a constant threat to peace and stable government in religious division and fanaticism. Nor was the threat conﬁned to the fervid experience of religious enthusiasts. It was also manifest to Hobbes in the doctrine espoused by Robert Boyle and Ralph Cudworth regarding the existence of the void in space, that scientiﬁc novelty against which he so strenuously fought, advocating instead for the plenum.6 For, as Prof. Pocock says, the doctrine of empty space ‘was a device of priestcraft, intended to ﬁll the space with incorporeal spirit, reintroduce the ghost to the machine, and furnish means of challenging the authority of the civil sovereign.’7 The culmination of Hobbes’s decade of thinking, reading and ﬁghting over 4

See EW VI, p. 254. See Correspondence, letter 37. I follow the convention of reproducing Hobbes’s seventeenth-century orthography, suggest an expansion of an elliptical expression and reproduce Malcolm’s emendation of ‘precedence’ for a lacuna in the text. 6 See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Airpump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). See below, n. 20. 7 See J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Thomas Hobbes: Atheist or Enthusiast?,’ History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 737–749. 5

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these complex and vexed matters is the English Leviathan of 1651. It is his rhetorically charged attempt to lay the ghosts of superstition and error that impeded science, corrupted faith and roiled politics. It marks a convergence of the scientiﬁc, spiritual and political interests that had seized his attention in England and continued throughout his Parisian sojourn. In it, he articulates an original theory of das Geistige, counting the debts which Greek philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, owed to Greek popular religion and Christian theologians’ debts in turn to the Stagirite. Rather than mediate their differences, Hobbes seeks everywhere to distinguish that which was Greek in Christianity from that which was Christian, that is, to separate Athens and Jerusalem. And, in this, he shows himself of similar intention to Kant8 and Heidegger,9 with Hegel decidedly in the other camp.10 Thus, it is illuminating that the latter misses Hobbes’s absorption with spirit. Alike in perceiving the problem, they conceive of spirit’s role in quite different terms and thus prescribe quite different remedies for post-Reformation Europe. Seeking to supplant religious fanaticism by teaching religious enlightenment and virtuous action (Voltaire notwithstanding), Hobbes approached the large questions of religion and politics by way of historical and philosophic analysis.11 He undertook to explain how pagan religion, with its superstitious fear of 8 Immanuel Kant repeated views he had expressed in the ﬁrst critique in lectures now recorded as Lectures on Philosophical Theology trans. by Allen W. Wood and Gertrude M. Clark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978); see his discussion of ‘ontotheology,’ that is, the consideration of God as the highest being, pp. 44 ff. 9 Martin Heidegger’s view of metaphysics as the ‘obliteration of the withdrawal of Being’ is well-known; see, for instance, Identity and Difference trans. by Joan Stambaugh (NY, NY: Harper and Row, 1969). Like Hobbes and Hegel, Heidegger, though once a Catholic seminarian, read and quoted Luther; see Thomas Sheehan, ‘Heidegger’s Early Years: Fragments for a Philosophical Biography,’ Heidegger, the Man and the Thinker ed. by Thomas Sheehan (Chicago, IL: Precedent, 1981), pp. 10–11, and John Caputo, Demystifying Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 5 ff., 51, 172 ff., et passim. In notes from a course he taught in 1922, ‘Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, Introduction into Phenomenological Research,’ Heidegger claimed that the Protestant scholasticism which followed Luther was the ‘rootbed’ of German idealism; see Gesamtausgabe vol. 61 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), p. 7. Heidegger’s knowledge of Luther and his capacity to link philosophy and Protestant theology were selling-points in favor of his candidacy for an academic position at Marburg, as a letter from his teacher Edmund Husserl to Paul Natorp reveals; see Husserl to Natorp, February 1, 1922 Briefwechsel vol. 5 ed. by Elisabeth Schuhmann and Karl Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), pp. 150–151. I owe this reference to the kindness of Prof. Thomas Sheehan. 10 On Hegel, see Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). That Hobbes found some of his sharpest critics among the Cambridge Platonists should not be surprising. See within, n. 20. 11 On the political implications of fanaticism in this period, see Dominique Colas, Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories trans. by Amy Jacobs (Stanford, cA: Stanford Univer-

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the shades of the departed, had entered into not only Judaism12 but also into Christianity, giving warrant for a shadow government of spiritual jurisdiction, the ‘kingdom of fairies,’13 whereas in fact there was and could be no other jurisdiction than temporal. ‘Temporal and spiritual government, are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and mistake their lawful sovereign.’14 To counter the threat of religious enthusiasm, Hobbes sought to understand the phenomenon, to locate its source and to argue for a remedy. Achieving religious enlightenment was thus not the work of therapy, but of historical analysis and reason. He canvassed descriptions of religious enthusiasm, in ancient and contemporary sources; then, he offered an account that brought it under his general theory of the passions. This of course contrasted with the ﬁrmly rooted opinion that people taken up in religious or other frenzy were possessed by demons:15

sity Press, 1997). Cf. Tracy B. Strong, ‘How to Write Scripture: Words, Authority, and Politics in Thomas Hobbes,’ Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 128–159. 12 On Hobbes’s views of the Greek inﬂuence upon Judaism following the conquests of Alexander and the establishment of the successor kingdoms, see, for example, Leviathan 3.41.8.519. See below, p. 237. 13 See Leviathan 4.47.21.712. This language of magic and superstition used against the Roman Catholic Church was a common-place among Protestants in Hobbes’s day; see Johann P. Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (NY, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 156 ff. What is singular, however, is Hobbes’s consistent and philosophically developed use of it as a rhetorical apparatus. It is the convergence point where his science, politics and theology meet and, as such, reveals the shaping intelligence which chose and ordered the metaphoric elements. Moreover, Hobbes viewed Presbyterians as the new ghostly pretender to political power. Again, this was not new; see Sommerville, op. cit., pp. 158 ff. But, he uses the parable of the house swept clean of demons (Matthew 12:44 ff. and Luke 11:25 ff.) to illustrate his point. See also Leviathan 1.12.32.182 and 4.47.34.714. 14 See Leviathan 3.39.5.498. 15 On possession in this period, see D.P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981). Hobbes’s attitudes toward these phenomena were not in advance of his intelligently skeptical contemporaries, religiously minded or not, and of course the Anglican clergy had sought to obliterate vestigial traces of magical and superstitious practices with considerable zeal but not uniform success. See below, n. 16 and Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (NY, NY: Scribner, 1971). Walker says that the doctrine that miracles had ceased, held as a ﬁrm principle, was perhaps ‘a fairly recent English invention,’ and one of its uses, in including diabolic phenomena as miracles, was to deny that they occurred. He continues: [The doctrine of the cessation of miracles] makes it possible for a pious Christian to live in a world entirely devoid of any supernatural occurrences; the miracles in the Bible truly happened, but they happen no more; divine providence still rules this world, but only through normal, natural means. Such a world, I suggest, is favorable to the development of early modern science, which is searching for invariable laws of nature; the search can be pursued without upsetting any Anglican’s religious convictions. And it is certainly a world that is unfavorable to witch-hunting and demoniacs.

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Leviathan 1.8.24.142: The opinions of the world, both in ancient and later ages, concerning the cause of madness, have been two. Some deriving them from the passions; some, from demons, or spirits, either good or bad, which they thought might enter into a man, possess him, and move his organs in such strange and uncouth manner, as madmen use to do. The former sort therefore, called such men, madmen: but the latter, called them sometimes demoniacs, (that is, possessed with spirits;) sometimes enurgumeni, (that is, agitated or moved with spirits;) and now in Italy they are called not only pazzi, madmen; but also spiritati, men possessed.

Whether it is the historical antecedent Hobbes has in mind, the memory of such ‘spiritati’ is recorded today in Sorrentini, a small hill town in Sicily, the so-called ‘town of poetry,’ not far from Messina. Here, from medieval times, the festival of St. Theodore has been celebrated to commemorate the saint who danced in the ﬂames to which he had been condemned.16 The ‘‘festa du santu che balla’

Walker, op. cit. pp. 72 ff. A bishop’s laughter at trial might be enough to save some poor fellow who was acting strangely from being executed. On the cessation of miracles in Hobbes, see Leviathan 3.32.9.414. 16 Suspicion and fear of witchcraft were experiences of which Hobbes’s contemporaries were well aware, for, though often thought characteristic of medieval society, demonology and witch trials were more prominent in the period 1450–1700; see R. Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), and Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-hunt (NY, NY: Basic Books, 1975). Some particularly virulent witch-hunts occurred during the English Civil War; for example, in 1643, John Hammond published the story of ‘a most certain, strange and true discovery of a witch, being taken by some of the Parliament men as she was standing on a small plank-board and sailing on it over the river of Newbury, together with the strange and true manner of her death, with the prophetical words and speeches she used at the same time.’ Soldiers ﬁghting for the Earl of Essex spotted her going down the river on her board and ﬁred at her, but, the pamphlet says, ‘with a deriding and loud laughter… she caught their bullets in her hands and chew’d them.’ Eventually, one of the soldiers shot and killed her. For the pamphlet’s representation of the witch on her board, see Appendix. ﬁg. 1. Matthew Hopkins, the so-called Witch-ﬁnder General of Essex, was active during this period, and it has been estimated that, having begun his work in 1644, he was able to condemn some 200–400 people to death, not by burning, as was done on the Continent, but by strangulation or hanging and then burning. Being the Witch-ﬁnder General was ﬁnancially lucrative; at a time when daily wages were as little as 2.5 pence, Hopkins was making £15 to £23 per town cleansed of witches; he dressed fashionably in Puritan tunic and cloak. See Appendix ﬁg. 2. He obtained his confessions primarily through sleep deprivation; thus, one John Lowe, 70-year-old vicar of Brandeston, was ‘swum in the moat,’ kept awake for three days and nights and then forced to walk without rest until his feet were blistered. Denied beneﬁt of clergy, Lowe recited his own burial service on the way to the gallows. Hopkins seems to have specialized in extracting confessions from elderly women with pets. ‘Faith Mills, of Fressingham, Suffolk, admitted that her three pet birds, Tom, Robert, and John, were in reality familiars who had wrought havoc by magically making a cow jump over a sty and breaking a cart. She was hanged.’ Eventually, opposition to Hopkins’ bloody

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(festival of the saint who dances) was also known as the ‘festa ‘ di spiritati,’ that is, the festival of the possessed (‘indemoniati’). It is recorded that, on the day of the festival, those possessed were brought by relatives to the public square. Here, before the church, they were grasped by the hair by the sacristan. They were then conveyed before the statue of the saint, dressed in the proper attire to insure the efﬁcacy of the rite of exorcism. The demoniac would spit at the statue and tear his garments, working to a frenzy until dribble issued from his mouth. The good work of the sacristan was to hold the demoniac by the hair, loosening his grip on the poor soul only when the saint had liberated him from the demon.17 Reports of such events were not uncommon in Hobbes’s era, and his efforts to explain the phenomena in terms of his natural philosophy were pioneering.18 persecutions grew, and his activities were curtailed by Puritan minister Reverend John Gaule of Great Staughton, who in 1646 published a pamphlet, called Select Cases of Conscience towards Witches and Witchcraft, an exposé of Hopkins’ methods. Gaule also preached against Hopkins’ brutality from the pulpit. In response, Hopkins published his own pamphlet entitled The Discovery of Witchcraft, but the tide had begun to turn against him. Two accounts exist of Hopkins’ demise: one, that he was himself accused of witchcraft and hanged, and two, that he died of tuberculosis. On the history of witchcraft, see English Witchcraft, 1560–1736, ed. by J.A. Sharpe, 6 voll. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), especially volume 3. See also: http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/heads/outtakes/gaskill.html 17 For a description of these events, see www.ed-calbria.com/letradizioni.htm. In Leviathan, Hobbes describes a number of such phenomena, their causes and remedies: Leviathan 1.8.25.142: There was once a great conﬂux of people in Abdera, a city of the Greeks, at the acting of the tragedy of Andromeda, upon an extreme hot day; whereupon, a great many of the spectators falling into fevers, had this accident from the heat, and from the tragedy together, that they did nothing but pronounce iambics, with the names of Perseus and Andromeda; which, together with the fever, was cured by the coming on of winter; and this madness was thought to proceed from the passion imprinted by the tragedy. Likewise there reigned a ﬁt of madness in another Grecian city, which seized only the young maidens; and caused many of them to hang themselves. This was by most then thought an act of the Devil. But one that suspected, that contempt of life in them, might proceed from some passion of the mind, and supposing they did not contemn also their honour, gave counsel to the magistrates, to strip such as so hanged themselves, and let them hang out naked. This, the story says, cured that madness. But on the other side, the same Grecians, did often ascribe madness to the operation of the Eumenides, or Furies; and sometimes of Ceres, Phoebus, and other gods; so much did men attribute to phantasms, as to think them aereal living bodies; and generally to call them spirits. On how ‘prophetic’ dreams are the product of a bad conscience, see Leviathan 1.2.6.91, and, for other phenomena, chapter 2, passim. 18 Hobbes reconstructs what was an old argument concerning natural psychology, even though that word, meaning the doctrine of the soul, was not introduced until later in the seventeenth century. With cues from Aristotle’s De Anima, the relation of the soul with the body was conceived differently within the different major medical traditions, those of Paracelsus (1493–1541) or Galen (131–201), and these beliefs often were related in turn to different religious beliefs and social status. Demonologists and skeptics disputed the role of the

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He was sure that ‘madness is nothing else but too much appearing passion.’19 The debate that took place after the Restoration regarding the existence of spirits shows that the issue had lost neither its currency nor its philosophic resonance.20 But, in addition to passion’s maddening effects on individuals, Hobbes detected a more general, mental sickness, one of whose causes was Greek metaphysics. Its effects in corrupting the Christian religion were grievous:

mind in producing the phenomena, for, whereas the demonologists saw forces external to the mind as producing mental events, the skeptics tended to see the deranged mind as producing bodily phenomena. As we saw above, p. 215, Hobbes seems to recognize this difference. His clear bent is to reduce all mental phenomena to the operations of matter in motion, in line with his materialist/mechanistic theory of science. As he says: Leviathan 4.45.2.658: This nature of sight having never been discovered by the ancient pretenders to natural knowledge; much less by those that consider not things so remote (as that knowledge is) from their present use; it was hard for men to conceive of those images in the fancy, and in the sense, otherwise, than of things really without us: which some (because they vanish away, they know not whither, nor how,) will have to be absolutely incorporeal, that is to say immaterial, or forms without matter; colour and ﬁgure, without any coloured or ﬁgured body; and that they can put on airy bodies (as a garment) to make them visible when they will to our bodily eyes; and others say, are bodies and living creatures, but made of air, or other more subtle and ethereal matter, which is, then, when they will be seen, condensed. But both of them agree on one general appellation of them, DEMONS. As if the dead of whom they dreamed, were not inhabitants of their own brain, but of the air, or of heaven, or hell; not phantasms, but ghosts; with just as much reason, as if one should say, he saw his own ghost in a looking-glass, or the ghosts of the stars in a river; or call the ordinary apparition of the sun, of the quantity of about a foot, the demon, or ghost of that great sun that enlighteneth the whole visible world: and by that means have feared them, as things of an unknown, that is, of an unlimited power to do them good or harm; and consequently, given occasion to the governors of the heathen commonwealths to regulate this their fear, by establishing that DEMONOLOGY (in which the poets, as principal priests of the heathen religion, were specially employed or reverenced) to the public peace, and to the obedience of subjects necessary thereunto; and to make some of them good demons, and others evil; the one as a spur to the observance, the other, as reins to withhold them from violation of the laws. 19 See Leviathan 1.8.23.141. See Karl Schuhmann, ‘Phantasms and Idols: True Philosophy and Wrong Religion in Hobbes,’ Nuove prospettive critiche sul Leviatano di Hobbes ed. by Luc Foisneau and George Wright (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2004), pp. 15–31. 20 See Pocock, op. cit., for a discussion of its post-Restoration history. The Restoration of 1660, in bringing back both the Stuart monarchy and the Church of England, created a complex religious situation in which Anglicans had to co-exist with a number of nonconformists despite a growing fear of atheism. The witch-hunting hysteria of the 1640’s had discredited such religious prosecutions, though few were willing to deny the possibility of witchcraft, and, in 1662, Thomas Browne, the author of Religio Medici, tentatively supported a diagnosis of bewitchment in the case of the Lowestoft witches, heard before the great common lawyer Sir Matthew Hale at Bury St. Edmunds. See http://www.nd.edu/~dharley/witchcraft/texts/Lowestoftcase.

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Leviathan 4.44.3.628: The enemy has been here in the night of our natural ignorance, and sown the tares of spiritual errors;21 and that, ﬁrst, by abusing, and putting out the light of the Scriptures: for we err, not knowing the Scriptures. Secondly, by introducing the demonology of the heathen poets, html. The English medical practitioner, John Webster, attacked the trial from the materialist principles of J.B. van Helmont in his Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft. But, the need to combat ‘atheism,’ such as Hobbes was accused of, reinforced the belief that ceasing to believe in witches and the Devil was the ﬁrst step to ceasing to believe in God. So felt Joseph Glanvill (1611–1680), whose Vanity of Dogmatizing of 1661 used skeptical arguments to show the fallibility of empirical study of the natural world. In 1668, Glanvill told the story of the ‘Demon Drummer of Tedworth’ in his Sadducismus Triumphatus. A local landowner, John Mompesson, owner of a house in the town of Tedworth, had brought suit against a local drummer, whom he accused of extorting money by false pretences. After he had won against the drummer and conﬁscated his drum, his house was plagued by nightly drumming noises, assumed to be the drummer’s revenge; Samuel Pepys recounts the story in his Diary, entry for June 15th, 1663. Following Glanvill’s death, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, who also subscribed to the realm of soul and spirit, brought out the ﬁnal version of Sadducismus triumphatus: or, Full and plain evidence concerning witches and apparitions. In two parts. The ﬁrst treating of their possibility. The second of their real existence, More/Glanvill argue that denying the reality of ghosts and witches was the ﬁrst step toward atheism. See Thomas Harmon Jobe, ‘The Devil in Restoration Science: The Glanvill-Webster Witchcraft Debate,’ Isis 72 (1981): 343–356. Like Glanvill, whom he supported, Robert Boyle (1627–1691) did not believe that everything in nature could be accounted for in purely mechanistic terms; indeed, Boyle expressed interest in ‘books of Magick I have read.’ Boyle’s opposition to Hobbes thus stemmed from more than disagreement over the social construction of knowledge; cf. Shapin and Schaeffer, op. cit.; Luc Foisneau, ‘Beyond the Air-pump,’ Nuovo prospettive critiche sul Leviatano di Hobbes, (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2004), pp. 33–49, and, on the controversy with Wallis, Alexander Byrd, ‘Squaring the Circle: Hobbes on Philosophy and Geometry,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996): 217–231. For a depiction of Boyle with his air-pump, see William Faithorne’s 1664 engraving in the Appendix ﬁg. 3. Boyle and his fellows were strongly resistant to a wholly materialist philosophy, such as Hobbes had long supported, in that their defense of science was that it was did not lead to ‘atheism’ precisely because it recognized the existence of what they took to be supernatural, that is, extra-material, activity in the world. Hence, Boyle’s interest in cases of witchcraft, leading in 1658 to the publication in English of The Devil of Mascon, an account of a famous poltergeist recorded in France earlier in the century. Clearly, as between the two, Hobbes saw more clearly on what grounds the new science must proceed, for, despite his resistance to experimentalism, his insistence on materialism was nearer the mark than Glanvill’s ‘experimental’ interest in incorporeal spirits. The reference to ‘Sadducismus’ in Granvill stems from his likening of those skeptical of witches’ power to the Sadducees, members of the Jewish upper class in the time of Jesus who denied the immortality of the soul because it was not taught in the Hebrew scriptures. For the frontispiece to Glanvill’s work, see Appendix ﬁg. 4. The engraving is by William Faithorne, who also made the frontispiece for the 1668 edition of Hobbes’s works by Blaeu. The scene depicts I Samuel 28:7 ff., Saul’s visit to the witch of Endor so that he might learn his fate from the ghost of Samuel, which she raises. On the theme of haunting in political philosophy, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International trans. by Peggy Kamuf (NY, NY: Routledge, 1994). 21 A reference to the discussion of heresies in Matthew 13:24 ff.:

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that is to say, their fabulous doctrine concerning demons, which are but idols, or phantasms of the brain, without any real nature of their own, distinct from human fancy; such as are dead men’s ghosts, and fairies, and other matter of old wives’ tales.22 Thirdly, by mixing with the Scripture divers relics of the religion, and much of the vain and erroneous philosophy of the Greeks, especially of Aristotle. Fourthly, by mingling with both these, false, or uncertain traditions, and feigned, or uncertain history. And so we come to err, by giving heed to seducing spirits, and the demonology of such as speak lies in hypocrisy, (or as it is in the original, [1 Tim. 4:1–2] of those that play the part of liars) with a seared conscience, that is, contrary to their own knowledge.23

24 Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his ﬁeld: 25 But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. 26 But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. 27 So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy ﬁeld? from whence then hath it tares? 28 He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? 29 But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. 30 Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together ﬁrst the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn… .36 Then Jesus sent the multitude away, and went into the house: and his disciples came unto him, saying, Declare unto us the parable of the tares of the ﬁeld. 37 He answered and said unto them, He that soweth the good seed is the Son of man; 38 The ﬁeld is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one; 39 The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels. 40 As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the ﬁre; so shall it be in the end of this world. Hobbes refers to this parable again in the 1668 Appendix, §§ 169 ff., in arguing against prosecution for heresy. 22 In the 1668 Appendix, §§ 27 ff., Hobbes identiﬁed both Hesiod and Vergil as possible sources of the Christian description of hell that appears in Dante, for instance, though he himself opted for a metaphorical reading of the biblical authors’ intentions. 23 The passage in the KJV: 1 Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits (πνε µασιν πλ'νοις) and doctrines of devils [διδασκαλ αις δαιµον ων]. 2 Speaking lies in hypocrisy ($ν ποκρ σει ψευδολγων) having their conscience seared with a hot iron; Branding, or searing, was a mark of slavery in antiquity, as when the fugitive slave was branded on his forehead with the letter F, for fugitivus, so that those who will fall away from the faith are as though enslaved to their self-serving hypocrisy.

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The purity of the primitive church, its integrity both in doctrine and in pastoral morals, and its success in turning men away from divinatory practices had succumbed to the corruption of a worldly institution, mired in false doctrine and besmirched by avaricious clergy: Leviathan 1.12.31.181: And whereas in the planting of Christian religion, the oracles ceased in all parts of the Roman empire, and the number of Christians increased wonderfully every day, and in every place, by the preaching of the Apostles, and Evangelists; a great part of that success, may reasonably be attributed, to the contempt, into which the priests of the Gentiles of that time, had brought themselves, by their uncleanness, avarice, and juggling between princes. Also the religion of the church of Rome, was partly, for the same cause abolished in England, and many other parts of Christendom; insomuch, as the failing of virtue in the pastors, maketh faith fail in the people: and partly from bringing of the philosophy, and doctrine of Aristotle into religion, by the Schoolmen; from whence there arose so many contradictions, and absurdities, as brought the clergy into a reputation both of ignorance, and of fraudulent intention; and inclined people to revolt from them, either against the will of their own princes, as in France and Holland; or with their will, as in England.

Hobbes reserves his most profound scorn for scholastic theologians, the ‘schoolmen,’ whose language was mad and meaningless and self-serving: Leviathan 1.8.27.146: There is yet another fault in the discourses of some men; which may also be numbered amongst the sorts of madness; namely, that abuse of words, whereof I have spoken before in the ﬁfth chapter, by the name of absurdity. And that is, when men speak such words, as put together, have in them no signiﬁcation at all… And this is incident to none but those, that converse in questions of matters incomprehensible, as the School-men; or in questions of abstruse philosophy… What is the meaning of these words[:] The ﬁrst cause does not necessarily inﬂow any thing into the second, by force of the essential subordination of the second causes, by which it may help it to work? They are the translation of the title of the sixth chapter of Suarez’ ﬁrst book, Of the Concourse, Motion, and Help of God. When men write whole volumes of such stuff, are they not mad, or intend to make others so? And particularly, in the question of transubstantiation; where after certain words spoken, they that say, the whiteness, roundness, magnitude, quality, corruptibility, all which are incorporeal, &c. go out of the wafer, into the body of our blessed Saviour, do they not make those nesses, tudes, and ties, to be so many spirits possessing his body? For by spirits, they mean always things, that being incorporeal, are nevertheless moveable from one place to another. So that this kind of absurdity, may rightly be numbered amongst the many sorts of madness; and

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all the time that guided by clear thoughts of their worldly lust, they forbear disputing, or writing thus, but [have] lucid intervals.

But, Aristotle’s teaching had corrupted more than Christian theology. His Politics had taught ancient writers to mistake the form of government for its true nature and ground. Living under popular rule, he had perpetuated the falsehood that only under a democracy could one be free. The Romans added a further error. Their casting off the Etruscan monarchy and subsequent establishment of the Republic led Cicero and others to defend the right to rebel, bequeathing to subsequent political thought a legacy of war and destruction. All these writers had followed the examples that their experience made apparent to them, and in this they mirrored the practice of grammarians who describe linguistic rules out of empirical practice and observation of only selected exemplars, never attaining the status of science. Living under popular rule, the political writers had described how to achieve virtue and success in their democracies, whether in ideal and exemplary terms or merely demotic. In so doing, they had produced political prudence, but not political science. Their faulty political theory gave pretext for such wars as Hobbes had witnessed during his exile: Leviathan 2.21.9.267: In these western parts of the world, we are made to receive our opinions concerning the institution, and rights of commonwealths, from Aristotle, Cicero, and other men, Greeks and Romans, that living under popular states, derived those rights, not from the principles of nature, but transcribed them into their books, out of the practice of their own commonwealths, which were popular; as the grammarians describe the rules of language, out of the practice of the time; or the rules of poetry, out of the poems of Homer and Virgil. And because the Athenians were taught, (to keep them from desire of changing their government,) that they were freemen, and all that lived under monarchy were slaves; therefore Aristotle puts it down in his Politics, (lib. 6. cap. 2.) In democracy, Liberty is to be supposed: for it is commonly held, that no man is Free in any other government. And as Aristotle; so Cicero, and other writers have grounded their civil doctrine, on the opinions of the Romans, who were taught to hate monarchy, at ﬁrst, by them that having deposed their sovereign,24 shared amongst them the sovereignty of Rome; and afterwards by their successors. And by reading of these Greek, and Latin authors, men from their childhood have gotten a habit (under a false show of liberty,) of favouring tumults, and of licentious controlling the actions of their sovereigns; and again of controlling those controllers, with the effusion of so much blood; as I think I may truly

24

Hobbes refers here to Tarquinius Superbus, the last of their Etruscan kings, whom the Romans expelled upon his son’s rape of Lucretia, installing in his place the Republic.

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say, there was never any thing so dearly bought, as these western parts have bought the learning of the Greek and Latin tongues.

Just how the haunting of Western political thought occurred is set out in chapter 46 of Leviathan, where Hobbes discusses the darkness that comes from the vain philosophy of Aristotle and fabulous traditions. He addresses his reader’s possible perplexity at the fact that, in a work of political philosophy, he has just given a refutation of the errors of Greek metaphysics: Leviathan 4.46.32.697: But to what purpose (may some man say) is such subtlety in a work of this nature, where I pretend to nothing but what is necessary to the doctrine of government and obedience? It is to this purpose, that men may no longer suffer themselves to be abused, by them, that by this doctrine of separated essences, built on the vain philosophy of Aristotle, would fright them from obeying the laws of their country, with empty names; as men fright birds from the corn with an empty doublet, a hat, and a crooked stick…

Notice the concern Hobbes manifests for the expectations and capacities of his reader: ‘may some man say’ and then the forthright, declamatory statement as explanation for his treatment of Aristotle: ‘It is to this purpose,’ which is then brought home with a vivid metaphor, that of the scarecrow, an empty ﬁgure of fear. Notice also that Aristotle’s theory of language, especially what he calls the ‘doctrine of separated essences,’ is key to the distortion of political thinking that he reprehends: Leviathan 4.46.32.697 (con’t)… For it is upon this ground, that when a man is dead and buried, they say his soul (that is his life) can walk separated from his body, and is seen by night amongst the graves. Upon the same ground they say, that the ﬁgure, and colour, and taste of a piece of bread, has a being, there, where they say there is no bread. And upon the same ground they say, that faith, and wisdom, and other virtues are sometimes poured into a man, sometimes blown into him from Heaven, as if the virtuous and their virtues could be asunder…

Let us consider ﬁrst the parenthetical comment, ‘the soul (that is his life).’ If we remove the parentheses, modern practice would insert a comma after ‘is,’ so that the comment would read, ‘the soul, that is, his life.’ Hobbes is not distinguishing between life and soul, as between essence (τ" τ ;ν εναι in Greek or íöò, or ‘bones,’ in Hebrew) and existence. That reading would cause problems. For one, it runs counter to the effort we have already seen him make to collapse the distinction between that which is temporal, and thus material, and that which is spiritual.25 It is also contrary to the point he is making in this passage, namely, 25

See above, p. 214.

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that dead men, that is, those lacking life, cannot walk and cannot in fact be or be seen amongst the graves. Such a reading dispatches neither ghosts nor the priestcraft that keeps them away. The clause is epexegetical; the second clause restates the ﬁrst. There is a larger point, however, and it concerns Hobbes’s audience and his reading of the scriptures within the communicative strategy of Leviathan. As he says in several places,26 human life to Jews and primitive Christians was a unitary phenomenon, not distinguishable into temporal/material and eternal/spiritual elements. The authentic insight stresses faithfulness and trust in divine action as a present reality in one’s life or their absence. Since that reality is of illimitable power, blessedness is closeness to such power, just as damnation is distance from it. The authentic distinction is thus less between eternal life and eternal punishment than between illimitable life with God and illimitable death apart from Him.27 Thus, it troubles Hobbes that the doctrine of the soul’s immortality reduces human dependence upon God and trust in His promises, as though the created soul were eternal by its own nature and not made so by the gracious action of God:

26

See, for example, Leviathan 3.38.4.481 and 4.44.13.636 et seqq. In the resurrection of the dead, the damned will rise to a second and ﬁnal death, whose bitterness stems from their realization of the happiness enjoyed by those who have God as their king: 27

Leviathan 3.38.14.489: And because such felicity in others, is not sensible but by comparison with their own actual miseries; it followeth that [the damned] are to suffer such bodily pains, and calamities, as are incident to those, who not only live under evil and cruel governors, but have also for enemy, the eternal king of the saints, God Almighty. And amongst these bodily pains, is to be reckoned also to every one of the wicked a second death. For though the Scripture be clear for an universal resurrection; yet we do not read, that to any of the reprobate is promised an eternal life. Following their return to life, the damned will live much as before but without hope of eternal life, so that they will enjoy ‘an immortality of the kind but not of the persons of men: they are not worthy to be counted amongst them that shall obtain the next world, and an absolute resurrection from the dead; but only a short time, as inmates of that world; and to the end only to receive condign punishment for their contumacy.’ Ibid. This strange and stark depiction of a life drawn out without hope and joy among one’s family and children, lived in the knowledge of the eternal blessedness of others, seems to me anything but a therapeutic attempt to attenuate the severity of the doctrines of heaven and hell and of God’s omnipotence. Cf. Richard Tuck, ‘The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes,’ Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. by Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 121 ff. and Richard Sherlock, ‘The Theology of Leviathan: Hobbes on Religion,’ Interpretation 10 (1982): 43–60.

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Leviathan 3.38.4.481: 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.28

And, he cannot ﬁnd the doctrine in the scripture: Leviathan 3.38.4.481: 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 Elias29,) is a doctrine not apparent in Scripture.

To the contrary, ‘The soul in Scripture, signiﬁeth always, either the life, or the living creature; and the body and soul jointly, the body alive.’30 Scholarly consensus today agrees that the idea of an immortal, immaterial soul derives from Greek ways of thinking; it not a Jewish or early Christian concept.31 The question itself was not new. Luther had doubted the soul’s immortality on religious grounds; Pomponazzi questioned it from an Aristotelian standpoint. But, Hobbes’s approach is neither theological nor philosophical only; it would be both. Critical of much past theological thinking, he offers arguments open to anyone who can reason about concepts and the interpretation of texts. This limits the number of Hobbes’s ideal readers.32 Thus, if, in discussing the soul, one 28

A reference to II Peter 3:13. Enoch was a son of Cain and father of Irad (Genesis 4:16–18), but it was Enoch, the son of Jared and father of Methuselah, who ‘walked with God: and he was not; for God took him’ (Genesis 5:24 and Hebrews 11:5). Enos was a son of Seth, grandson of Adam and the father of Cainan (Genesis 5:6, 9–11). For the chariot and horses of ﬁre attending Elijah’s (=Elias) ascension into heaven on the whirlwind, see II Kings 2: 11. 30 See Leviathan 4.44.40.637. 31 There is no doubt that the immortality of the soul became a key aspect of the Catholic Church’s confession. But, the late P.O. Kristeller cites only the medieval council of Vienne and the Lateran council of 1512 as authority, both articulating somewhat differing conceptions of the soul’s immortality and each under the inﬂuence of classical thought, Aristotelianism in the ﬁrst instance and Platonism in the second. He counts it a remnant of Platonic thought in Christianity. See P.O. Kristeller, ‘The Immortality of the Soul,’ Renaissance Thought and its Sources (NY, NY: Columbia University Press, 1979), 181–196 (=Renaissance Concepts of Man and Other Essays (NY, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1972)). 32 His was in fact a rather limited ideal audience in any case, even, or especially, among those who might have been expected to appreciate the attempt to coordinate the new science with religion. His consistent materialism was the obstacle; as Jobe notes, ‘the success of an Anglican natural theology ultimately depended upon a proper balance between the material and spiritual worlds: [the Cambridge Platonist Henry More and Joseph Glanvill] criticized the Paracelsians for merging the spiritual and material worlds too completely and the Cartesians 29

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considered that removing it as a possible support in people’s moral lives would cause them pain or occasion immorality, then perhaps it would be better not to teach the history of these ideas.33 But, Leviathan is intended for those who both can reason and are willing to reason about their religious beliefs. It is neither for fanatics nor those whom he calls the ‘simple people.’34 And, his own thinking had developed on this point. During the time he spent in Paris, Hobbes evidently came to doubt the immortality of the soul,35 or, better, he doubted that the notion of the soul’s natural immortality was required as an explanation of the Christian teaching on eternal life. The change seems to stem from his changing conceptions both of science and Christian theology. Thus, in Leviathan, he asserts that that which is eternal exists as an unending succession of temporal points,36 that is, within time, not outside of it.37 And, whereas, in De Cive, the soul’s immortality is dealt with ﬁdeistically as an issue which ‘cannot be understood by natural reason,’38 in the later text, it is explicitly denied. His appeal in Leviathan is thus not only to the natural reason of his readers but also to their

for separating them too completely.’ Hobbes would have no place among these options. See Thomas Harmon Jobe, ‘The Devil in Restoration Science: The Glanvill-Webster Debate,’ Isis 72 (1981): 343–356, p. 345, and Robert E. Stillman, ‘Hobbes’s Leviathan: Monsters, Metaphors and Magic,’ ELH 62 (1995): 791–819. 33 And, the doctrine may play a positive function; see the exchange in the 1668 Appendix, §§ 55 ff. 34 See Leviathan 1.2.8.92. 35 The former Cartesian Hoogeland may have played a role in this. I hope to write about this at further length. 36 See Leviathan 4.46.22.693: For the meaning of eternity, [the Schoolmen] will not have it to be an endless succession of time; for then they should not be able to render a reason how God’s will, and preordaining of things to come, should not be before his prescience of the same, as the efﬁcient cause before the effect, or agent before the action; nor of many other their bold opinions concerning the incomprehensible nature of God. But they will teach us, that eternity is the standing still of the present time, a nunc-stans (as the Schools call it;) which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a hic-stans for an inﬁnite greatness of place. For Thomas Aquinas’ development of the ‘nunc-stans,’ see Summa Theologiae, 1.10.2 and 4, quoting Boethius, De Trinitate iv. See Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, ‘Eternity’ The Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): 419–458, esp. p. 445, for a modern criticism of it. 37 The problem of time and the ‘eternal now’ is a theological one, and Hobbes’s discussion invites analysis of his description of God as ﬁrst cause in terms of its adequacy as theology. In his Systematic Theology, Paul Tillich describes the problem as that of maintaining the transcendence of God if He is described as ﬁrst cause in a chain of temporally caused events; see, for example, Systematic Theology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 106 ff., 208 ff., et passim. On God as cause and God as person, see below, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’ 38 See De Cive chap. 17, § 13, p. 269.

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faith, consistent with reason.39 Hobbes conceives of the critical exercise of reason as theology’s negative criterion; while there may be that which is above reason, there is nothing contrary to it.40 And, scripture provides theology’s positive content.41 From these two principles stems the extensive analysis of the biblical texts in Leviathan. The results on the theological side show amazing prescience and a depth of learning and understanding. What the political implications are, we shall see.42 To return to our passage. The three examples of the vanity of Aristotle’s philosophy applied in theology are clear: the supposed existence of disembodied spirits, the doctrine of transubstantiation and the gratia infusa theory of the virtues.43 Each of them, according to Hobbes, puts peace and stable government in doubt: Leviathan 4.46.32.697 (con’t)… and [they say] a great many other things that serve to lessen the dependance of subjects on the sovereign power of their country. For who will endeavour to obey the laws, if he expect obedience to be poured or blown into him? Or who will not obey a priest, that can make God, rather than his sovereign, nay than God himself?44 Or who, that is in fear of ghosts, will not bear great respect to those that can make the holy water, that drives them from him?

The fear of ghosts among the simple people keeps in credit the uses of priestcraft that Hobbes contemned. And, their tendency is to divert attention from political sovereignty as the guarantor of civil peace: Leviathan 4.46.32.697 (con’t)… And this shall sufﬁce for an example of the errors, which are brought into the Church, from the entities and essences of

39 Though his own lay theology was a conspicuous failure, the irenic tendency in Hobbes’s discussions may have had a signiﬁcant and helpful impact on subsequent debates. See Samuel Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). 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: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 40 See Leviathan 2.30.6.378 and 3.32.2.409. 41 See Leviathan 3.33.21.425. It is not surprising that Hobbes emphasizes the scriptures as the word of God. God’s ‘hand,’ His mighty deeds, that is, miracles, had, by common agreement, ceased; see above, note 15. His ‘spirit,’ that is, divine inspiration, was a problem if it led to civil unrest; see below, note 69. 42 See within, p. 231. 43 See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II.II.6.1. 44 A possible expansion of the elisions: who will not obey a priest that can make God rather than his sovereign; no, who will not obey a priest that can make God rather than obey God himself? The point is that a priest who can make God is more powerful than God.

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Aristotle: which it may be he knew to be false philosophy; but writ it as a thing consonant to, and corroborative of their religion; and fearing the fate of Socrates.

Now, Hannah Arendt generously came to Aristotle’s defense against Hobbes’s apparent calumny. She says, ‘Unlike this ﬁgment of Hobbes’ 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.’45 Nonetheless, W.D. Ross detects three outright accommodations to Greek popular religion in the Nicomachean Ethics: at 1099b11, where Aristotle asks whether the gods give men happiness, whereas his own views are presumably that we are largely responsible for our own happiness and that the unmoved mover is in any case unaffected by our happiness; at 1162a5, where he speaks of friendship between humans and god and parallels it with the friendship of parent and child, whereas the deity is impassible; and, at 1179a25, where Aristotle asks whether the person who studies is most beloved of ‘the gods’ and answers in the afﬁrmative. The question may be closer than Arendt thought.46 One of many philosophers with political problems, Aristotle did ﬂee Athens, after thirteen years spent there as a teacher at the Lyceum (335–322). Despite having fallen out with Alexander, his former royal student, owing to the disgrace and punishment of Callisthenes, he continued to be regarded as the king’s friend and a representative of the Macedonian regime. So, when Alexander’s death became known at Athens and the unrest occurred which led to the Lamian war, Aristotle was obliged to share in the general unpopularity of the Macedonians. The charge of impiety, which had been leveled at Anaxagoras and Socrates, was now brought against him, and he left the city, saying, according to many ancient authorities, that he would not give the Athenians the chance to sin a third time against philosophy. However we sort out Aristotle’s associations with contemporary religious and political authorities and beliefs, one may wonder just what in Aristotle Hobbes is calling the ‘doctrine of separated essences’ or also the ‘doctrine of incorporeal substances.’ For, separation from things was of course the ground of Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s theory of forms. In Metaphysics, book Ζ, he says that, separated from the things of which they were the models, Plato’s 45

Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Present: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (NY, NY: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 298. 46 See Richard Bodéüs, Aristotle and the Theology of the Living Immortals (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000), for the proposition that Aristotle used ‘the most traditional Greek ideas about the gods’ to develop and defend his physical, metaphysical and ethical teachings.

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ideas could explain neither how there could be permanence and order in this world nor how we could have objective knowledge of this world. The notion of participation that supposedly links the forms and material objects, Aristotle says, is impossible to explain. How then to explain Hobbes’s condemnation of Aristotle’s ‘separated essences’ and ‘incorporeal substances’?47 Hobbes was an accomplished classicist, and he often sees through English words to their Greek and Latin roots. Here, I think we would be right to see the Latin doctrina behind ‘doctrine,’ so that Hobbes is talking not about what we would call a religious dogma, but about a teaching, something Aristotle professed. And, where does Aristotle make assertions as to the existence of separated essences or beings without matter? We will not be far off if we look more closely at book Ζ in the Metaphysics since this is also where he sets out his own theory of form and matter. At 1032a of that book, Aristotle talks about things that come to be through nature and those that come to be through making. Then, at 1032b, he speaks of one of those things that are made, namely, health: γ γνεται δ9 τ" γι9ς νο σαντος οτωςO $πειδJ τοδ γ εια, αν'γκη ε γ ες σται τοδ π'ρξαι, (Yιον (µαλτητα, ε δ9 το&το, !ερµτηταO κα οτως ?ε

νοεG, Zως :ν ?γ'γ[η ε ς το&το α8τ"ς δ ναται σχατον ποιεGν. ε>τα Nδη V ?π" το του κ νησις πο ησις καλεGται, V $π τ" για νειν.\στε συµβα νειτρπον τινP τJν γ ειαν $ξ γιε ας γ γνεσ!αι κα τJν ο κ αν $ξ ο κ ας, τSς :νευ λης τJν χουσαν ]λανO V γPρ ατρικ $στι κα V ο κοδοµικJτ" εδος τSς γιε ας κα τSς οικ ας, λγω δ9 ο8σ αν :νευ λης τ" τ ;ν ε^ναι. (The healthy subject is produced as the result of the following train of thought: -since this is health, if the subject is to be healthy this must ﬁrst be present, e.g. a uniform state of body, and if this is to be present, there must be heat; and the physician goes on thinking thus until he reduces the matter to a ﬁnal something which he himself can produce. Then the process from this point onward, i.e. the process towards health, is called a ‘making’. Therefore it follows that in a sense health comes from health and house from house, that with matter from

47

The vigor of Hobbes’s thought stems in some large part from the violence he does to others’. Thus, in tracing this phrase, one can ﬁnd its likely reference, but doing so in no sense ratiﬁes the interpretive accuracy of Hobbes’s characterization of it in Aristotle’s thought. More generally, we cannot assume that Hobbes always goes to the ancient sources or that he ever does so free of assumptions; for example, his Thucydides translation likely owes a good deal to the Latin translation made by Valla, which he of course criticizes. His Aristotle, so to speak, has both scholastic features and Greek. Interpretation must be as open to this intense mediation of thought, particularly in view of the fact that his classical training made more direct appropriation of the sources possible. His era did not enclose Hobbes or limit his philosophical possibilities; it made them possible.

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that without matter; for the medical art and the building art are the form of health and of the house, and when I speak of substance without matter I mean the essence. trans. by Ross)48

Now, by 1651, when Leviathan appeared, Hobbes was a materialist and a monist. All the knowledge of phenomena of which the mind was capable he referred to the operation of matter in motion. And, of course, he denied the existence of innate ideas. Insofar as anything which one might name was not matter, that is, insofar as it was :νευ λη, incorporeal, it was nothing and no part of those things which are in the world. To be disembodied was thus to be unreal or, as he says, ‘phantastical,’ ‘vain,’ ‘ghostly.’49 On this view, the assertion that essence, the τ" τ ;ν εναι, was substance without matter (ο8σ α :νευ λης) was absurd, nonsensical, like speaking of a round quadrangle. To believe in incorporeal substances, the ο8σ αι :νευ λη, was to believe in strawmen, in wraiths, like those bird-like creatures inhabiting the twelfth book of the Odyssey, which ﬂee in terror at the coming of great Herakles.50 48 Furth’s impossible translation, neither Greek nor English, hence ‘Eek,’ brings out the fact that the Greek is very fragmentary here. Not even complete sentences. We may have no more than Aristotle’s (or his student’s) unredacted lecture notes in such passages: b6

The healthy [thing] comes-to-be when one [=the physician] reasons as follows: since health is this [todi], necessarily if [the thing] is to be healthy, this must be present – say, a ‘uniform state’ – and if that [is to be present], then ‘heat’ – and he goes on always thinking like this, until he is led to a ﬁnal ‘this’ which he himself is able to make. b9 Then the movement [kinesis] from this point forward is called a ‘making’ – that is, the [movement] toward being-healthy. b11 So that it follows that in a certain sense the health comes to be out of healthy, and the house out of house: that which has matter [from] that without matter; for the medical art and the house-building art are the form of the health and of the house, and by ‘substance without matter’, I mean the Essence. (trans. into Eek by Montgomery Furth) 49 In comparison with things, words and the markers we use to register our thoughts are unreal, according to Hobbes; that is, they do not exist. The only difference between instances of naming which are veridical and those that are not is that the object named exists in the ﬁrst instance, whereas it does not in the second. This seems to be true of religion as well, in that the true religion is the one which worships the true God, that is, the deity that exists. There is no way to demonstrate the existence of God, though one may prove it as the postulate of reason, but this truth, like all truth, remains hypothetical. See within, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’ For Hobbes’s proof of God’s existence, see Leviathan 1.11.25.167. For a discussion of the distinction between proof and demonstration, see A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 348 ff. 50 In his Considerations, Hobbes likens them to dream creatures:

It is by all Christians confessed, that God is incomprehensible; that is to say, that there is nothing can arise in our fancy from the naming of him, to resemble him either in shape, colour, stature, or nature; there is no idea of him; he is like nothing that we can think on. What then ought we to say of him? What attributes are to be given him (not

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It is this unreal spirit world of the disembodied, the dead walking among the graves at night, the world of Greek popular religion, that he accuses Aristotle of having imported into Greek metaphysics through his concept of essence, knowing it perhaps to be false philosophy, ‘but writ it as a thing consonant to, and corroborative of their religion; and fearing the fate of Socrates.’ Further, it was the fairy world of Greek metaphysics that had allowed the clergy, those ghostly men of the Roman Church,51 itself the ghost of the Roman Empire,52 to pretend to an authority separate from and superior to that of the political sovereign. For, chief among the errors of patristic and scholastic theologians in adopting Greek metaphysics, according to Hobbes, was the doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul.53 Through this belief, Hobbes

speaking otherwise than we think, nor otherwise than is ﬁt,) by those who mean to honour him? None but such as Mr. Hobbes hath set down, namely, expressions of reverence, such as are in use amongst men for signs of honour, and consequently signify goodness, greatness, and happiness; and either absolutely put, as good, holy, mighty, blessed, just, wise, merciful, &c., or superlative, as most good, most great, most mighty, almighty, most holy, &c., or negative of whatsoever is not perfect, as inﬁnite, eternal, and the like: and not such as neither reason nor Scripture hath approved for honourable. This is the doctrine that Mr. Hobbes hath written, both in his Leviathan, and in his book De Cive, and when occasion serves, maintains. What kind of attribute, I pray you, is, immaterial, or incorporeal substance? Where do you ﬁnd it in the Scripture? Whence came it hither, but from Plato and Aristotle, heathens, who mistook those thin inhabitants of the brain they see in sleep, for so many incorporeal men; and yet allowed them motion, which is proper only to things corporeal? Do you think it an honour to God to be one of these? And would you learn Christianity from Plato and Aristotle? See EW IV, p. 426. 51 See Leviathan 1.2.8.92. Much of this language was not new; as Prof. Springborg notes, ‘Among Elizabethans, Spenser, Marlowe and Kyd pioneered the idea of “Faerieland” as the realm of Aristotelian essences and Platonic daemons which shored up the Evil Empire of the Papacy and its imperial stooges;’ see ‘Hobbes, Heresy and the Historia Ecclesiastica,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994): 553–571, p. 566. 52 See Leviathan 4.47.21.712. 53 Prof. Martinich stresses the ‘drift toward ﬁdeism’ that links Hobbes to ﬁgures from the thirteenth century on who sought to ‘separate theology from philosophy;’ see Martinich, op. cit., pp. 346 ff. The character of their ‘union’ is open to varying interpretations; on apophasis, 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. 36, 40–56, 94, 137–138, 197–198 and 200–214, and his more recent What Has Athens To Do with Jerusalem?: Timaeus and Genesis in Counterpoint (Ann Arbor, ML: The University of Michigan Press, 1997). Nevertheless, rather than see Hobbes only or largely in terms of the medieval reaction to Aristotle and realism, it seems to me as necessary to consider him in relation to the work of the Fathers. On this point, see ‘Hobbes and the Economic Trinity.’ In this way, we trace his opposition to a ﬁliation of ideas that leads through Erasmus and Arminianism to Laudian Anglicanism. Hobbes is on the other side from these ﬁgures, clearly with Luther, less clearly with Melanchthon and Calvin, in repudiating both Greek philosophy

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says, church ofﬁcials acquired a power greater than that claimed by political authorities, for: Leviathan 4.44.16.638: This window it is, that gives entrance to the dark doctrine, ﬁrst, of eternal torments; and afterwards of purgatory, and consequently of the walking abroad, especially in places consecrated, solitary, or dark, of the ghosts of men deceased; and thereby to the pretences of exorcism and conjuration of phantasms; as also of invocation of men dead; and to the doctrine of indulgences; that is to say, of exemption for a time, or for ever, from the ﬁre of purgatory, wherein these incorporeal substances are pretended by burning to be cleansed, and made ﬁt for heaven. For men being generally possessed before the time of our Saviour, by contagion of the demonology of the Greeks, of an opinion, that the souls of men were substances distinct from their bodies, and therefore that when the body was dead, the soul of every man, whether godly or wicked, must subsist somewhere by virtue of its own nature, without acknowledging therein any supernatural gift of God[’]s.

All of Hobbes’s treatments of the chief tenets of Christianity reﬂect a desire to formulate the tenets of Christian theology in ways that avoid what he identiﬁed as the familiar Greek dualisms of body and spirit, time and eternity, ideal and real. We have seen this in the case of the mortality of the created soul,54 but it is equally true for the Trinity55 and thus the theory of divine personality,56 for the kingdom of God,57 the sacraments,58 the existence and form of angels as God’s messengers,59 spirit,60 biblical inspiration,61 prevenient grace,62 miracle,63 the biband patristic theology. The debate with Bramhall over the freedom of the will (and, implicitly, the image of God in humans) is only one reference point in this disagreement. Hegel offers a useful foil in that he was far more open to the theological anthropology of the Fathers. For a learned and incisive discussion of this point, see Dickey, op. cit., pp. 13 ff., et passim. 54 See Leviathan 3.38.4.481; 4.44.14.636, and 4.44.32.650. 55 See especially Leviathan, chapters 40–42; see also above, ‘Hobbes and the Economic Trinity.’ 56 Throughout Leviathan, Hobbes consistently develops a distinction between God as cause and God as person. The former describes a form of natural theology; the latter is explicitly and, it seems to me, exclusively Trinitarian in conception. It and such other distinctions as nature/grace, reason/faith, natural kingdom/spiritual kingdom, natural law/divine command, constitute the fulcrum upon which the book turns. See below, ‘Hobbes in Exile.’ 57 See Leviathan 2.29.15.370, chapter 31, esp. 3.35.13.448, et passim. 58 See Leviathan 3.35.19.450, esp. 3.41.8.519, and 3.42.49.554. 59 See Leviathan 3.34.15.433; 3.34.17.435; 3.34.23.438, and 3.35.16.449. Both the Hebrew _à"ìî (malach) and the Greek :γγελος (aggelos) mean both angel and messenger. 60 For Hobbes’s discussion of spirit, see Jürgen Overhoff, ‘The Theology of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan,’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51 (2000): 527–55, esp. pp. 532 ff. 61 See Leviathan, chapter 34 et passim. 62 See Leviathan 2.26.41.332; 3.42.11.527; 3.43.7.613; 3.43.9.614, and 3.43.19.622. 63 See Leviathan 1.12.28.180; 3.32.7.411; 3.32.8.413; 3.36.20.467; 3.37.2470; 3.37.3.470; 3.37.4.

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lical canon,64 etc.:. He is at every point giving a physicalist account of revelatory experience, arriving at conclusions grounded in an analysis of language, critical intelligence and historical understanding. The message of Leviathan is that civil peace can be achieved in post-Reformation Europe by purging the elements of Greek thought, especially its natural and political science, from Christian theology and political discourse. In their place, he would install the new natural science of matter and motion and his own political science. The goal of his exegesis of Christianity is not to deny the truth of doctrine or the historicity of the saving acts of God.65 He constantly proclaims them.66 It is to lead his reader to better understandings, ones more authentically rooted in the sacred scriptures and more theologically sound, as Hobbes understood Christianity, and certainly less politically disruptive. This issues in physicalist redescriptions of the events and doctrines, but also, Hobbes believes, a recovery of the authentic, that is, non-Greek, origins of Hebrew and Christian religion. Further, the point was not to create a Christianity better adapted to the modern era, though, like Hegel, Hobbes believed the Reformation had ended the tension between religion and politics in the West.67 This had happened in two ways. For one, coercive power had been removed from the hands of bishops and presbyters. Also, the civil sovereign, as described by Hobbes, could not force the conscience.68 These factors now produced a climate in which tolerance

470; 3.37.5471; 3. 37.6.471; 3.37.7473; 3.37.9.474; 3.37.1.475; 3.37.13.476, and 3.40.12.509. 64 See Leviathan chapter 33 and 3.42.48.554. 65 To the contrary, his account is meant to safeguard the incarnational claim that God acts in history. On this, see below, note 79. 66 For example, Appendix § 54: Let others look forward to what immortality they prefer. I look to that which Christ has acquired for us by His victory over death through His blood. 67 Hegel discusses the relation between the Enlightenment and the Reformation in several places, for example, in the Philosophy of History, where he attempts to explain why the German and French experiences of the Enlightenment were so different and begins by stressing German Protestantism. See. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History trans. by J. Sibree (NY, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956), pp. 444 ff. 68 The competence of the political sovereign extends to all public acts, whether by word or deed. This encompasses public worship; see Leviathan, chapter 45, esp. 4.45.13.667. While sovereign laws bind the conscience, they cannot reach to inner conviction, and what Hobbes says regarding miracles (Leviathan 3.37.13.476) applies to any doctrines to which public profession is required: A private man has always the liberty, (because thought is free,) to believe, or not believe in his heart, those acts that have been given out for miracles, according as he shall see, what beneﬁt can accrue by men’s belief, to those that pretend, or countenance them, and thereby conjecture whether they be miracles, or lies. But when it comes to confession of that faith, the private reason must submit to the public; that is to say, to God’s lieutenant.

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could ﬂourish.69 For, Christians were now ‘reduced,’ that is, led back, to the independence of the early church: Leviathan 4.47.19.710: But as the inventions of men are woven, so also are they ravelled out; the way is the same, but the order is inverted. The web begins at the ﬁrst elements of power, which are wisdom, humility, sincerity, and other virtues of the Apostles, whom the people converted, obeyed out of reverence, not by obligation. Their consciences were free, and their words and actions subject to none but the civil power… Leviathan 4.47.20.710: And therefore the analysis, or resolution, is by the same way; but beginneth with the knot that was last tied; as we may see in the dissolution of the praeterpolitical Church government in England. First, the power of the Popes was dissolved totally by Queen Elizabeth; and the bishops, who before exercised their functions in right of the Pope, did afterwards exercise the same in right of the Queen and her successors; though by retaining the phrase of jure divino, they were thought to demand it by immediate right from God: and so was untied the ﬁrst knot.70 After this, the presbyterians lately in England obtained the putting down of episcopacy: and so was the second knot dissolved.71 And almost at the same time, the power was taken also from the presbyterians:72 and so we are reduced to the independency of the primitive Christians to follow Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, every man as he liketh best: which, if it be without contention, and without measuring the doctrine of Christ,

69 On the relationship between Independency and tolerance, see Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience newly introduced by Peter Lake (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1946]). On freedom of conscience, see Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke on Toleration,’ Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory ed. by Mary Dietz (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1990). He quotes T.H. Green: ‘It is as giving a freer scope than any other form of church to this conviction, that God’s spirit is not bound, that independency has its historical interest;’ Nuttall, op. cit., pp. 113 ff. That Hobbes should ﬁnd common ground with the Independents on some points is not surprising; both he and they stressed liberty of conscience. They differed profoundly, however, both in their understandings of the workings of spirit, holy or otherwise, and of conscience, which for Hobbes was under the ﬁrm direction of public reason; see, for example, Leviathan 2.29.7.365. Generally, the political behaviors and beliefs that Nuttall describes of the Independents are precisely those against which Hobbes aimed his politics of the spirit. See 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. 70 A reference to the English Reformation of Henry VIII, carried out by his daughter Elizabeth I. 71 A reference to the Root and Branch Bill and the abolition of the episcopacy. 72 A reference to Pride’s Purge.

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by our affection to the person of his minister, (the fault which the apostle reprehended in the Corinthians,) is perhaps the best.

It is striking how forcefully Hobbes argues for liberty of conscience in religious matters, though this fact is often overlooked or misunderstood.73 Aside from his fears of war and anarchy, his great polemical opponent in Leviathan, largely responsible for the angry tone that is so prominent and effective there, is spiritual coercion, which he locates in Catholicism and Presbyterianism.74 He is their tireless opponent. Voltaire was right to see these elements in his character; he was bold and courageous. He entertained no doubt that, Charles, as sovereign, and Laud, as bishop under him, had the right to try to shape Englishmen and Scots into the mold his Christianity prescribed, but he was equally sure that they had been foolish and inept in carrying out their designs. They could affect only what was public in any case, ‘because thought is free.’75 And, as he returned to England from France, with Leviathan in his case, he must have had good hope for Cromwell, whose concern for ‘liberty of spirit’ Nuttall described as great as any other’s.76 So, Independency is best: Leviathan 4.47.20.710 (con’t)… First, because there ought to be no power over the consciences of men, but of the Word itself, working faith in every one, not always according to the purpose of them that plant and water, but of God himself, that giveth the increase.77 And secondly, because it is unreasonable in them, who teach there is such danger in every little error, to require of a man

73

See Leviathan 3.42.43.550:

When therefore any other man shall offer unto us any other rules, which the sovereign ruler hath not prescribed, they are but counsel, and advice; which, whether good or bad, he that is counselled, may without injustice refuse to observe; and when contrary to the laws already established, without injustice cannot observe, how good soever he conceiveth it to be. I say, he cannot in this case observe the same in his actions, nor in his discourse with other men; though he may without blame believe his private teachers, and wish he had the liberty to practise their advice, and that it were publicly received for law. For internal faith is in its own nature invisible, and consequently exempted from all human jurisdiction; whereas the words, and actions that proceed from it, as breaches of our civil obedience, are injustice both before God and man. (Emphasis added.) 74 Hobbes has the Inquisition in mind; see Leviathan 4.46.37.700. What must have been his extension of arguments against Catholicism to apply to Presbyterianism seems opportunistic in that they do not ﬁt well since Presbyterian theology did not draw from scholastic distinctions or Aristotelian philosophy. On faith and compulsion, see also Leviathan 3.42.9.526. 75 See, for example, Leviathan 3.37.13.476. 76 See Nuttall, op. cit, pp. 115 ff. 77 A reference to I Corinthians 3:7.

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endued with reason of his own, to follow the reason of any other man, or of the most voices of many other men, which is little better than to venture his salvation at cross and pile.78

If the untying of the people from the restraints of bishops and presbyters had diminished their power, then it was they themselves who knew best how to regain it through sanctity of life and humility of manner: Leviathan 4.47.20.710 (con’t)… Nor ought those teachers to be displeased with this loss of their ancient authority. For there is none should know better than they, that power is preserved by the same virtues by which it is acquired; that is to say, by wisdom, humility, clearness of doctrine, and sincerity of conversation; and not by suppression of the natural sciences, and of the morality of natural reason; nor by obscure language; nor by arrogating to themselves more knowledge than they make appear; nor by pious frauds; nor by such other faults, as in the pastors of God’s Church are not only faults, but also scandals, apt to make men stumble one time or other upon the suppression of their authority.

Here too, we see that his theology is aimed at returning Christianity to its authentic, ‘primitive’ forms, practices and beliefs, as these are attested in the scripture. It is this project which leads to what we may term his historical materialism,79 making his religious views both so different from his contemporaries’ understanding, as their mis-understanding shows, and of interest to us, with our own historicist leanings. It was neither ‘modern’ nor apologetic; much less was it enlightened or deistic, though it may have contributed to Deism. His is instead a theology of repristination, returning the church to its ancient confession and practice. He saw this as the work of learning and persuasion, not therapy or augury. While he displays all the common Protestant prejudices against Catholicism and uses the rhetorical apparatus of vituperation put at his disposal by his era, his approach is largely historical, textual and scientiﬁc. His results in some cases anticipate conclusions drawn many years later and often on the same grounds as he stated. 78 ‘Cross and pile’ is the equivalent of ‘heads or tails,’ that is, a game of chance in which the player ﬂips a coin to determine a speciﬁed outcome. 79 Clearly, Hobbes thought materialism as such need not be antagonistic to the tenets of the Christian religion. Indeed, it could be argued that it is congruent with the incarnational claim that history itself, the ﬂux of time, can manifest an epochal meaning. Platonic forms stood above time and change, but the signiﬁcance of salvation history in Islam, Judaism and Christianity is that God acts in history to effect His purposes. In this sense, Hobbes’s approach represents the victory of Jerusalem over Athens, though it is somewhat qualiﬁed by the presence of natural theology. This is true also for Hegel, though Hegel’s approach was not to separate faith and reason, as in Hobbes, but to show their intimate connection. For a discussion of Hegel’s Trinitarianism, see the account given by Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994). See above, note 53.

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It is clear that the religious is closely linked to the political in Hobbes’s thought, but it would frustrate Hobbes’s intentions were one to detect instances where the political determined the religious, because thoughts are free. Instead, the two must both cohere and be seen to cohere. Together with the scientiﬁc, they must be interdependent and mutually necessitating, or Hobbes has failed in his project. His intentions are best revealed in his interpretation of Aristotle as teacher of natural philosophy, political virtue and Christian theology. Not to see the analysis which underlies both the theory of political obligation and his discussion of Christian doctrines is to miss an important aspect of Hobbes’s project in Leviathan. Let us conclude our discussion by considering one example of Hobbes’s procedures, goals and insights in dealing with spirit, namely, the presence of demons and witches in the scriptures. It troubled Hobbes to ﬁnd them there, especially in the New Testament, where they are so frequent, and he exerted considerable effort to dispel them, as we would expect. Demons meant possession and the credit of priestcraft. He divides his treatment into two parts, corresponding to the Old and New Testaments, with considerable attention directed at the period that intervened between them. That era felt the cultural effects of the rise of Magna Graecia from the sixth and seventh centuries on, when Greeks established colonies in places as widely separated as Egypt, the eastern coast of the Black Sea and what is now Marseilles, including settlements in Sicily and the southern part of the Italian peninsula, sites of the temple ruins of Agrigentum and Paestum. More particularly, let us focus on developments within Judaism following the exploits of Alexander the Great, for, says Hobbes, it was his conquests that spread Greek culture, speciﬁcally, Greek ‘demonology,’ among Jews living not only in Palestine but also in what had become the center of learning in the ancient world, Alexandria in Egypt.80 Leviathan 4.45.4.659: The Grecians, by their colonies and conquests, communicated their language and writings into Asia, Egypt, and Italy; and therein, by necessary consequence their demonology, or (as St. Paul calls it) their doc-

80 On Jewish-Greek interaction, 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. 276 ff., and, on the inﬂuence of Hellenism on Judaism after Alexander, 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.

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trines of devils:81 And by that means, the contagion was derived also to the Jews, both of Judea and Alexandria, and other parts, whereinto they were dispersed.82

The Jews, Hobbes says, had lapsed into superstition in this era for the same reasons as had the Greeks and Romans, namely, lack of curiosity into the causes of things and preference for the pleasures of the body over those of the mind.83 One could easily understand how pagans could adopt such practices and beliefs; they found gods everywhere.84 But, the case of the Jews was troubling, given their history: Leviathan 1.8.25.142: But for the Jews to have such opinion, is somewhat strange. For neither Moses nor Abraham pretended to prophecy by possession of a spirit; but from the voice of God; or by a vision or dream: nor is there any thing in his law, moral or ceremonial, by which they were taught, there was any such enthusiasm, or any possession.

81 A reference to I Timothy 4:1, referred to above, note 23. See also I Corinthians 8–10, where Paul speaks of sacriﬁce to idols, the ‘devils’ of the Gentiles. Hebrew by this time was less and less the language most Jews spoke, whether living inside or outside Palestine. They had spoken Aramaic during the Exile, and it remained the language of most of Jesus’ contemporaries. So many Jews spoke Greek and so few spoke Hebrew that the Septuagint version of the Hebrew scriptures was produced in the third century to provide a Greek translation. 82 Hobbes had probably read Josephus, whom he cites at Leviathan 3.33.1.415 and 3.33.20. 422. 83 See Leviathan 1.8.25.142. 84 See Leviathan 1.12.16.173:

Men, women, a bird, a crocodile, a calf, a dog, a snake, an onion, a leek, [were] deiﬁed. Besides that, they ﬁlled almost all places, with spirits called demons: the plains, with Pan, and Panises, or Satyrs; the woods, with Fawns, and Nymphs; the sea, with Tritons, and other Nymphs; every river, and fountain, with a ghost of his name, and with Nymphs; every house with its Lares, or familiars; every man with his Genius; hell with ghosts, and spiritual ofﬁcers, as Charon, Cerberus, and the Furies; and in the night time, all places with larvae, lemures, ghosts of men deceased, and a whole kingdom of fairies and bugbears. They have also ascribed divinity, and built temples to meer accidents, and qualities; such as are time, night, day, peace, concord, love, contention, virtue, honour, health, rust, fever, and the like; which when they prayed for, or against, they prayed to, as if there were ghosts of those names hanging over their heads, and letting fall, or withholding that good, or evil, for, or against which they prayed. They invoked also their own wit, by the name of Muses; their own ignorance, by the name of Fortune; their own lust, by the name of Cupid; their own rage, by the name Furies; their own privy members, by the name of Priapus, and attributed their pollutions, to Incubi, and Succubae: insomuch as there was nothing, which a poet could introduce as a person in his poem, which they did not make either a god, or a devil.

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Note that discussion of revelatory or supernatural experience does not trouble Hobbes so long as a physicalist explanation is ready to hand which avoids the threat of possession by an incorporeal spirit and thus the arts of priestcraft. Here, the scripture describes physical phenomena, namely, a voice, vision or a dream, as the means whereby God effected the transmission of His wishes and commands. The Hebrew scriptures of course know of witches and witchcraft, for example, the witch of Endor, whom Saul seeks to learn his fate from the spirit of Samuel.85 But, their arts are proscribed, and they themselves are subject to death: Exodus 22:18: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live;’ or Leviticus 20:27: ‘A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.’ Those who claimed such powers challenged God’s power and manifested their lack of trust in His providence.86 Hobbes continues: Leviathan 1.8.25.142 (con’t)… When God is said, Numb. 11:25. to take from the spirit that was in Moses, and give to the 70 elders, the Spirit of God (taking it for the substance of God) is not divided. The Scriptures, by the Spirit of God in man, mean a man’s spirit, inclined to godliness.87

This example comes from an exchange Moses had with God in which he laments the range and extent of his responsibilities as leader of the people. God promises him help and directs him to assemble some elders: Numbers 11:25: And the LORD came down in a cloud, and spake unto him, and took of the spirit that was upon him, and gave it unto the seventy elders: and it came to pass, that, when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied, and did not cease.

Here, the representation of spirit is in material terms; there is no warrant to interpret God’s action as possession by an alien spirit. God speaks to Moses, not through him, and takes something which he has and shares it among the

85

See I Samuel 28:7 ff. See also Leviathan 3.36.8.457. Hobbes distinguishes between the actual possession of occult powers and the claim to possess them. He doubts the possession but would punish those making the claim; see Leviathan 1.2.8.92. For a discussion of contemporary views, including Selden’s, see Wallace Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (Washington: The American Historical Association, 1911), pp. 244 ff. The current literature on witchcraft is voluminous; see, for example, www.nd.edu/~dharley/witchcraft. 87 The spirit which is inclined toward God, that is, one’s upright character, is itself a gift from God. 86

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seventy, in fulﬁllment of a promise to lighten his burden.88 And, in fact, modern scholars agree that spirit (äeø; ruah) in the Hebrew scriptures never denotes ecstatic possession in the sense of seizure (raptus) of an individual by an external, incorporeal entity.89 So also Hobbes: Leviathan 1.8.25.142 (con’t)… And where it is said, Exod. 28. 3. whom I have ﬁlled with the spirit of wisdom to make garments for Aaron, is not meant a spirit put into them, that can make garments; but the wisdom of their own spirits in that kind of work.90 In the like sense, the spirit of man, when it produceth unclean actions, is ordinarily called an unclean spirit, and so other spirits, though not always, yet as often as the virtue or vice so styled, is extraordinary, and eminent. Neither did the other prophets of the old Testament pretend enthusiasm; or, that God spake in them; but to them, by voice, vision, or dream;91 and the burthen of the Lord was not possession, but command.92

Again, Hobbes is right to insist that the classical prophets did not attribute their inspiration to the spirit. This includes Amos, Micah, Hosea and Isaiah in the eighth century and Jeremiah, Zephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk in the seventh. They preferred to speak of the word of God as a way of authenticating their message. Thus, Amos asks (Amos 3:8), ‘The lion hath roared, who will 88

For a closely argued analysis of the question whether God speaks in the scriptures, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reﬂections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 89 For a discussion of this point, see Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament vol. 1 trans. by J.A. Baker (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961), pp. 210–215, esp. p. 214. Nuttall quotes Gunkel to the effect that spirit (äeø; ruah) in the Hebrew Scriptures is always ‘stofﬂich vorgestellt;’ Nuttall, op. cit., p. 170, note 2. The word itself is found there 378 times, plus 11 instances of the Aramaic cognate in Deuteronomy. Its meaning included the notions of wind, breath and such divine power as induced ecstasy and prophetic speech (Numbers 24:2, I Samuel 10:6 and 10; 19:20, 23 ff.). In these last instances, the recipients of the Lord’s spirit are promised a change in ‘heart’ or to ‘be turned into another man;’ Balaam is said to fall into a trance, but ‘having his eyes open.’ 90 A reference to the clothes which Aaron was to wear as high priest; see Exodus 28:3: 3 And thou shalt speak unto all that are wise hearted, whom I have ﬁlled with the spirit of wisdom, that they may make Aaron’s garments to consecrate him, that he may minister unto me in the priest’s ofﬁce. 4 And these are the garments which they shall make; a breastplate, and an ephod, and a robe, and a broidered coat, a mitre, and a girdle: and they shall make holy garments for Aaron thy brother, and his sons, that he may minister unto me in the priest’s ofﬁce. Special skills which humans possess are neither the product of demonic possession nor of merely human development; like all gifts, they stem from the grace of God. 91 That is, by physical means. 92 Presumably a reference to Jeremiah 23.

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not fear? the Lord GOD hath spoken, who can but prophesy?’ And Jeremiah says (Jeremiah 20:9), ‘Then I said, I will not make mention of Him, nor speak any more in His name. But His word was in mine heart as a burning ﬁre shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.’ The reasons given for this attitude are various: perhaps the connotation of spirit had been drawn too closely with the ecstatic; perhaps they were reacting against cult abuse, or perhaps the conviction was emerging that the work of spirit lay in the eschatological future. In the exilic and post-exilic period, spirit as the inspirer of prophecy was reasserted, though the role attributed to it in Hellenistic times greatly diminished. Philo’s attempt to merge Jewish theology and Greek philosophy resulted in a stress upon inspiration through ecstasy or upon the Stoic Logos-principle. In rabbinic Judaism, spirit was largely the spirit of prophecy, but this prophetic role belonged emphatically to the past. Generally, spirit (äeø; ruah) was subordinated to law (äTez; torah), though spirit had inspired word, or Torah.93 The community of the Dead Sea scrolls knew of spirit as a present experience, and in this it may be have had an eschatological consciousness like that of the ﬁrst Christians. If, prior to the contagion of Greek demonology, the Jews had had no notion of incorporeal spirits, after it, they did, as a careful reading of contemporary reaction to Jesus shows: Leviathan 1.8.25.142: And hence it came to pass, when our Saviour (Mark 3. 21)94 was compassed about with the multitude, those of the house doubted95 he was mad, and went out to hold him: but the Scribes said he had Beelzebub, and that was it, by which he cast out devils; as if the greater madman had awed the lesser.

In the introduction to the passage Hobbes cites, Jesus has cast out devils and unclean spirits and has thereby gained a large following that is both demanding and unrelenting. His friends attempt an intervention, fearing he was overwhelmed by the press of the throng. But, the scribes attribute his ability to cast out devils to the prince of devils, namely, Beelzebub.96 This explanation can refer 93 As with the dispute between Quakers and Presbyterians, Weber’s notion of the routinization of charisma is relevant here. 94 Cf. Matthew 12:24 ff., and Luke 11:14 ff. 95 ‘Doubt’ here means ‘fear’ or ‘be suspicious or uncertain’ or ‘apprehend.’ See OED sub voce doubt, II 5 ff. 96 The KJV New Testament commonly has this spelling, which means ‘lord of the ﬂies’ and is perhaps a mocking, Jewish alteration of the proper form, Baal-zebub, which means ‘Prince Baal,’ the name of the deity worshipped by Israel’s neighbors. This name appears in a story that illustrates the prophetic condemnation of divinatory practices. Samarian King Ahaziah

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only to possession by demons and to the supposed power of Jesus to command such beings through the occult power of Beelzebub in him.97 Further, to attribute these acts to such a spirit was to forge a link between Jesus and the forces of evil, for, whereas, in Greek experience, ‘demons’ (δαιµον α) were both good and evil, Jews of this period recognized only evil spirits.98 Finally, the scribes’ attempt to associate Jesus with such spirits bespeaks the fear of them among the people, whom they seek to inﬂuence. But, this raises a problem: if, as Hobbes has said, incorporeal spirits, capable of possessing demoniacs, do not exist, why did the Savior not teach the people and loose the bonds of their slavery to superstition? Or, as Hobbes asks: Leviathan 4.45.5.660: Which doctrine, if it be not true, why (may some say) did not our Saviour contradict it, and teach the contrary? Nay, why does he use on divers occasions, such forms of speech as seem to conﬁrm it?99

Notice again the parenthetical comment. This is not Hobbes’s question but one he anticipates from his readers. He himself was aware that Paul denied the existence of the Gentiles’ ‘demonology.’100 This was why the apostle permitted early Christians to eat meat sacriﬁced to idols: precisely because those idols were really ‘nothing.’101 Indeed, Hobbes too is quite willing to concede the existence of spirits, provided only that they are acknowledged as material spirits, having body, even if only super-reﬁned, ‘subtle’ matter, lacking perceptible form, such as ‘ﬂesh and bone’. Though not in Leviathan, he will later describe God in these terms.102 What this seeming cavil regarding the corporeality of spirit safeguards is the new science, the faith of the church and civil peace. For, it permits the application

was sick, having fallen through a second-story lattice. He sent messengers to Baal-zebub to inquire whether he will recover from his illness. An angel says to Elijah (II Kings 1:2–4), ‘Arise, go up to meet the messengers of the king of Samaria, and say unto them, Is it not because there is not a God in Israel, that ye go to inquire of Baalzebub the god of Ekron? 4 Now therefore thus saith the LORD, Thou shalt not come down from that bed on which thou art gone up, but shalt surely die. And Elijah departed.’ Engaging in divinatory practices implicitly denied God’s existence. 97 There is the further point that ba’al (ìòa) may mean master or owner of a house, so that the phrase could be used in this double sense. 98 A point Hobbes recognizes; see Leviathan 4.45.4.659. 99 While evidence in Acts and the Pauline epistles for demons and possession is rare, in the Gospels, they are frequent. There, the writers distinguish possession from sickness, as in Matthew (Matthew 4:24), where we read of ‘the sick, those afﬂicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics and paralytics.’ 100 See above, p. 237. 101 See I Corinthians 8, cited by Hobbes at Leviathan 4.44.18.640. 102 On this point, see the discussion above in ‘Hobbes and the Economic Trinity,’

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of the principle of non-contradiction to physical entities, thereby rendering space rational in material terms. Two material bodies by deﬁnition cannot inhabit the same space at the same time, making demonic possession impossible on rational grounds and priestcraft therefore unnecessary. Nor can any thought enter our heads except as prompted by sense,103 in rejection of innate ideas and the ghost in the machine. Nor can anything be wholly here and wholly there at the same time, exposing as absurd the notions of transubstantiation and the ‘sacriﬁce’ of the mass: Leviathan 1.3.12.99: Also because whatsoever (as I said before,) we conceive, has been perceived ﬁrst by sense, either all at once, or by parts; a man can have no thought, representing any thing, not subject to sense. No man therefore can conceive any thing, but he must conceive it in some place; and indued with some determinate magnitude; and which may be divided into parts; nor that any thing is all in this place, and all in another place at the same time; nor that two, or more things can be in one, and the same place at once: for none of these things ever have, or can be incident to sense; but are absurd speeches, taken upon credit (without any signiﬁcation at all,) from deceived philosophers, and deceived, or deceiving schoolmen.

What does the Savior or scripture teach or show, negatively or positively, about the existence of incorporeal demons? Leviathan 4.45.5.660 (con’t)… To this I answer, that ﬁrst, where Christ saith, A spirit hath not ﬂesh and bone,104 though he show that there be spirits, yet he denies not that they are bodies. And where St. Paul says, we shall rise spiritual bodies,105 he acknowledgeth the nature of spirits, but that they are bodily spirits; which is not difﬁcult to understand. For air and many other things are bodies, though not ﬂesh and bone, or any other gross body, to be discerned by the eye.

Hobbes sees further difﬁculties in Christ’s dealing with spirits and seeks to counter them and reach the desired conclusion:

103 The preaching and teaching of the gospel utilize means no less material than any other communication; see Leviathan 2.29.8.366. Their efﬁcacy of course depends upon God’s prior election, that is, His predestination; see Leviathan 2.26.41.332. 104 A reference to the appearance of the resurrected Christ in Luke 24:36–40:

36 Peace be unto you. 37 But they were terriﬁed and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. 38 And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? 39 Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not ﬂesh and bones, as ye see me have. 105

A reference to I Corinthians 15:44.

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Leviathan 4.45.5.660 (con’t)… But when our Saviour speaketh to the devil, and commandeth him to go out of a man,106 if by the devil, be meant a disease, as phrensy, or lunacy, or a corporeal spirit, is not the speech improper? Can diseases hear? Or can there be a corporeal spirit in a body of ﬂesh and bone, full already of vital and animal spirits?107 Are there not therefore spirits, that neither have bodies, nor are mere imaginations? To the ﬁrst I answer, that the addressing of our Saviour’s command to the madness, or lunacy he cureth, is no more improper, than was his rebuking of the fever,108 or of the wind and sea;109 for neither do these hear; or than was the command of God, to the light, to the ﬁrmament, to the sun, and stars, when he commanded them to be; for they could not hear before they had a being.110 But those speeches are not improper, because they signify the power of God’s word; no more therefore is it improper, to command madness, or lunacy (under the appellation of devils, by which they were then commonly understood,)111 to depart out of a man’s body. To the second, concerning their being incorporeal, I have not yet observed any place of Scripture, from whence it can be gathered, that any man was ever possessed with any other corporeal spirit, but that of his own, by which his body is naturally moved.112 106

A reference to Luke 4:25. ‘Full’ (plenum ( in Latin): they have no capacity in them to make room for another corporeal entity; that is, they cannot be possessed. 108 A reference to Luke 4:39. 109 A reference to Luke 8:24. 110 A reference to the creation account of Genesis 1. 111 Implied here is the traditional understanding that Christ ‘accommodated’ Himself to the understanding of the people. On accommodationism, see Dickey, op. cit., pp. 13 ff.; for its presence in Calvin, see Ford Lewis Battle, ‘God Was Accommodating Himself to Human Capacity,’ Interpretation 31 (1977): 19–38. 112 Compare this statement with one that had come earlier, Leviathan 1.8.26.145: 107

But why then does our Saviour proceed in the curing of them, as if they were possessed; and not as if they were mad? To which I can give no other kind of answer, but that which is given to those that urge the Scripture in like manner against the opinion of the motion of the earth. The Scripture was written to shew unto men the kingdom of God, and to prepare their minds to become his obedient subjects; leaving the world, and the philosophy thereof, to the disputation of men, for the exercising of their natural reason. Whether the earth’s, or sun’s motion make the day, and night; or whether the exorbitant actions of men, proceed from passion, or from the devil, (so we worship him not) it is all one, as to our obedience, and subjection to God Almighty; which is the thing for which the Scripture was written. As for that our Saviour speaketh to the disease, as to a person; it is the usual phrase of all that cure by words only, as Christ did, (and enchanters pretend to do, whether they speak to a devil or not.) For is not Christ also said (Matt. 8. 26.) to have rebuked the winds? Is not he said also (Luke 4. 39.) to rebuke a fever? Yet this does not argue that a fever is a devil. And whereas many of those devils are said to confess Christ; it is not necessary

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We have followed Hobbes a long way in his treatment of demons and witches, though it is only one of several topics we might have chosen. He has demonstrated keen exegetical skill and dexterity, a depth of knowledge about many lands and peoples, over long periods of time, and a dogged determination to argue his opponents down, not largely through ﬁery rhetoric, but through detailed historical and biblical analysis and reasoned argument.113 But, he is not done. He again poses the question, why did the Savior not liberate the people from their superstitious fear of possession by demons: Leviathan 4.45.8.662 (con’t)… But if there be no immaterial spirit, nor any possession of men’s bodies by any spirit corporeal, it may again be asked, why our Saviour and his apostles did not teach the people so; and in such clear words, as they might no more doubt thereof. But such questions as these, are more curious, than necessary for a Christian man’s salvation. Men may as well ask, why Christ that could have given to all men faith, piety, and all manner of moral virtues, gave it to some only, and not to all: and why he left the search of natural causes, and sciences, to the natural reason and industry of men, and did not reveal it to all, or any man supernaturally; and many other such questions. Of which nevertheless there may be alleged probable and pious reasons. For as God, when he brought the Israelites into the land of Promise, did not secure them therein, by subduing all the nations round about them; but left many of them, as thorns in their sides, to awaken from time to time their piety and industry: so our Saviour, in conducting us toward his heavenly kingdom, did not destroy all the difﬁculties of natural questions; but left them to exercise our industry, and reason; the scope of his preaching, being only to show us this plain and direct way to salvation, namely, the belief of this article, that he was

to interpret those places otherwise, than that those madmen confessed him. And whereas our Saviour (Matt. 12. 43.) speaketh of an unclean spirit, that having gone out of a man, wandereth through dry places, seeking rest, and ﬁnding none, and returning into the same man, with seven other spirits worse than himself; it is manifestly a parable, alluding to a man, that after a little endeavour to quit his lusts, is vanquished by the strength of them; and becomes seven times worse than he was. So that I see nothing at all in the Scripture, that requireth a belief, that demoniacs were any other thing but madmen. 113 But, cf. David Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Roger D. Lund, ‘The Bite of Leviathan: Hobbes and Philosophic Drollery,’ English Literary History 65 (1998): 825–855. One can recognize the undoubted rhetorical aspect of Leviathan without losing sight of its more important philosophic and exegetical dimensions.

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the Christ, the Son of the living God, sent into the world to sacriﬁce himself for our sins, and at his coming again, gloriously to reign over his elect, and to save them from their enemies eternally: To which, the opinion of possession by spirits, or phantasms, are no impediment in the way; though it be to some an occasion of going out of the way, and to follow their own inventions. If we require of the Scripture an account of all questions, which may be raised to trouble us in the performance of God’s commands; we may as well complain of Moses for not having set down the time of the creation of such spirits, as well as of the creation of the earth and sea, and of men and beasts. To conclude, I ﬁnd in Scripture that there be angels, and spirits, good and evil; but not that they are incorporeal, as are the apparitions men see in the dark, or in a dream, or vision; which the Latins call spectra, and took for demons. And I ﬁnd that there are spirits corporeal, (though subtle and invisible) but not that any man’s body was possessed or inhabited by them; and that the bodies of the saints shall be such, namely, spiritual bodies, as St. Paul calls them.114

This is an argument by reduction, but it is a reductio designed to silence questions Hobbes considers diversionary, needless and perhaps foolish to ask. He no doubt considered that people’s lives as subjects in a Christian commonwealth would be better off if they went unasked. Certainly, they should be no part of the language of politics. In conclusion, two points might be made. First, the question of sincerity. Hobbes may have been sincere in what he said, but I do not think we can know. This would apply both to his inner convictions and to the passion one ﬁnds in Leviathan. The latter may be counterfeit, and we cannot know the former. But, were it possible to know, we would not be much assisted in understanding his thought. It seems clear however that he meant what he said; that is, he wished as a theorist to be taken at his word. He persisted in these arguments and analyses for many more years in his long life, just as he had used them, in different forms and guises, from his ﬁrst efforts as a theorist. Second, the seventeenth century is, of course, the century of genius, and here we have one of its mighty titans, Thomas Hobbes, dealing the deathblow to the scarecrow philosophy of Aristotle. Hoc habet. Still, how close to the surface the bodies of the ancient dead lie. One might say that Hobbes was indeed haunted by the very ghost he sought to lay.

114

A reference to I Corinthians 15:44.

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4. HOBBES IN EXILE In a diary entry, dated September 7, 1651, John Evelyn described a procession he had witnessed in Paris as guest at Thomas Hobbes’s apartment overlooking the parade route.1 He and his host looked down from the window upon a resplendent prince, attending Parlement for the lit de justice that would presage a splendid reign, the longest in Europe’s history. They saw the ‘whole equipage and glorious cavalcade of the young French monarch Lewis the XIVth passing to Parliament, when ﬁrst he tooke the kingly government on him, as now out of minority and Queene regents pupillage.’2 This specular scene is rich in irony and implication. We see the two men witnessing an event whose associations must have caused them some pain. Both were exiles from civil war and on the losing side: the one youthful, wellconnected, politically agile, if rather compliant; the other advanced in years, ‘discountenanced’ before the English court in exile, menaced by Catholic authorities in the land to which he had ﬂed, apprehensive about returning to England. Though much lay ahead before he could claim to rule France, Louis had just emerged victorious over the popular insurrection of the Fronde. The Englishmen’s king, having lost to the men of Parliament, had only shortly before taken a walk that ended not only his reign and life but also forms of government, both political and ecclesiastical, that England had known for over 600 years.

1

See Diary of John Evelyn ed. by William Bray vol. 4 (London: Bickers and Son, 1906), pp. 26. Evelyn says his acquaintance with Hobbes had been of long duration, and he notes another visit with him in England on Dec. 14, 1655, saying he ‘had been long acquainted in France;’ op. cit., p. 80. But, on February 4, 1679, Evelyn notes a sermon preached by the Dean of Salisbury, Dr. Pierce, on I John 4:1, ‘Try the spirits…,’ during which the preacher ‘inveighed against the pernicious doctrines of Mr. Hobbes;’ op. cit., p. 347. A powerful controversialist, Pierce (1622–1691) had suffered during the Civil War as a royalist divine and returned to England to serve as Charles II’s chaplain-in-ordinary; he became dean of Salisbury on May 4, 1675. 2 After Louis XIII’s death in 1643, Anne of Austria was regent for the young Louis (1638– 1715, reigned 1643–1715), but the real power was wielded by Anne’s adviser, Giulio Raimondo Mazzarino, better known as Cardinal Mazarin (1602–1661), successor to his mentor, Cardinal Richelieu. Louis would not take over the government until Mazarin’s death. The centralizing policies of both cardinals prepared the ground for Louis’s assertion of absolute monarchy, based on the theory of divine right.

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Not long after the tableau at the window, we have another image, this time from Hobbes himself, as he describes his return to England and the terms of his re-settlement there: I returned to my homeland, not quite sure of my safety. But in no other place could I have been safer. It was cold; there was deep snow; I was an old man; and the wind was bitter. My bucking horse and the rough road gave me trouble. Coming to London, in order to avoid the appearance of having arrived secretly, I had to be reconciled to the Council of State.3 With this accomplished, I immediately retired in utter peace, and I devoted myself to my studies as before.4

The eleven years Hobbes spent in France provided the opportunity for his maturation as a thinker, especially with respect to his political philosophy, as a comparison of The Elements of Law of 1640 with the English Leviathan of 1651 reveals. He left England with a writing plan and ﬁrm opinions; he returned

3

Hobbes described the necessity of his reconciliation in the ‘Review and Conclusion’ that linked Leviathan to the circumstances of the Engagement Controversy: Leviathan 4.Conclusion.7.720: By this also a man may understand, when it is, that men may be said to be conquered; and in what the nature of conquest, and the right of a conqueror consisteth: for this submission is it implieth them all. Conquest, is not the victory itself; but the acquisition by victory, of a right, over the persons of men. He therefore that is slain, is overcome, but not conquered: he that is taken, and put into prison, or chains, is not conquered, though overcome; for he is still an enemy, and may save himself if he can: but he that upon promise of obedience, hath his life and liberty allowed him, is then conquered, and a subject; and not before… Likewise, if a man, when his country is conquered, be out of it, he is not conquered, nor subject: but if at his return, he submit to the government, he is bound to obey it. So that conquest (to deﬁne it) is the acquiring of the right of sovereignty by victory. Which right, is acquired, in the people’s submission, by which they contract with the victor, promising obedience, for life and liberty. Apart from the ‘Review,’ whose political tendencies are difﬁcult to specify historically, the teaching of the English Leviathan bore most clearly on English political circumstances obtaining some time signiﬁcantly prior to its publication; see Glenn Burgess, ‘Contexts for Writing and Publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan,’ History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 675–702, and M.M. Goldsmith, ‘Hobbes’s Ambiguous Politics,’ History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 639– 673. 4 Quoted from the translation of The Life of Thomas Hobbes that appeared in Interpretation 10 (1982): 1–7. In fact, probably much as he wished, he was soon immersed in controversy and would remain so for most of the rest of his long life. As Goldsmith recounts, all of his three treatises on government came out in England and in English between February, 1650, and May, 1651; see M.M. Goldsmith, ‘Hobbes’s Ambiguous Politics,’ History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 639–673, and Philip Milton, ‘Did Hobbes Translate De Cive?,’ History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 627–639. And, while he was likely responsible only for the appearance of Leviathan, he enjoyed a notoriety that belies his claim to have retired to ‘utter peace.’

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poorer,5 but with a powerful statement of his political doctrine in De Cive and his masterpiece of engaged political prose, Leviathan. The purpose of this essay is to trace a few ﬁliations of ideas through these years in order to sketch a diachronic account of his development in France,6 with attention given to his political theory in general and to his theory of the public person as public theologian in particular. Our focus is the English Leviathan. And, while it may seem rather remote in time and circumstance from that period in Hobbes’s long life, we shall take the Appendix that he added to the Latin Leviathan of 1668 as our terminus ad quem, just as The Elements of Law of 1640 will serve as terminus a quo. These two ﬁxed points will permit us to see where there is continuity, development and outright change in view. The special value of the 1668 text for this purpose stems from its self-consciously retrospective character, for, in it, by way of a dialogue with himself (‘A’ and ‘B’), Hobbes explicitly responds to critics of the 1651 text. Four points bear special emphasis. First, it is in the 1668 text that Hobbes unequivocally asserts the corporeality of God,7 taking Tertullian as warrant.8 5 As Hobbes says in his posthumously published defense against John Wallis, Considerations Upon the Reputation &c Thomas Hobbes:

[Hobbes] was the ﬁrst that had ventured to write in the King’s defence; and one, amongst very few, that upon no other ground but knowledge of his duty and principles of equity, without special interest, was in all points perfectly loyal. The third of November [1640] following, there began a new Parliament, consisting for the greatest part of such men as the people had elected only for their averseness to the King’s interest. These proceeded so ﬁercely in the very beginning, against those that had written or preached in the defence of any part of that power, which they also intended to take away, and in gracing those whom the King had disgraced for sedition, that Mr. Hobbes, doubting how they would use him, went over into France, the ﬁrst of all that ﬂed, and there continued eleven years, to his damage some thousands of pounds deep. See EW IV, p. 414. In being ﬁrst, Hobbes must have preceded Secretary Windebank’s ﬂight on December 10 of that year; see M.M. Goldsmith, ‘Hobbes’s Ambiguous Politics,’ History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 639–673, p. 640. 6 See generally Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes and His Disciples in France and England,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 8 (1966): 153–167. 7 Hobbes had not asserted the materiality of God in the 1651 text; see Leviathan 1.12.7.170. The issue had however likely arisen in the famous exchange of letters with Descartes, which took place just before and after his arrival in France in 1640. See below, pp. 257ff. See also Agostino Lupoli, ‘‘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; 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, and Martinich’s discussion, op. cit., pp. 163 ff. 8 In his essay De Carne Christi, written in 208, Tertullian wrote against Marcion, who

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Second, he states once more his doctrine that the soul, if it is to be distinguished from the body or bodily life, is mortal, an assertion that had appeared in the 1651 text, though not in The Elements or De Cive. Third, and perhaps most importantly for his political theory, at the end of the Latin Leviathan, he points to a distinction that had served him, as we shall see, in various forms since at least The Elements, namely, the difference in concept between God as person and God as cause. His theodicy turns on this distinction.9 He shows quite clearly that he had remained unconvinced by his earlier critics, who argued that, in describing God as the cause of all things, he made God the author of sin. He crows over his own interpretive skill as he happily chides the scholastics: Itaque Scholastici, ubi videri voluerunt subtilissimi, ibi hebetudinem indicarunt maxime. Si subtiles fuissent, differentiam inter causam facti et authorem facile invenissent. Auctor facti is est, qui ﬁeri jubet; causa est is per cujus vires factum est.10 believed that Christ was not actually born of the ﬂesh but was a phantasm of human form. In defending the orthodox belief in the 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 14 n.s. (1963): 46–66. 9 See my ‘Authority and Theodicy in Hobbes’s Leviathan,’ Nuove prospettive critiche sul Leviatano di Hobbes ed. by Luc Foisneau and George Wright (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2004), pp. 175–204. 10 ‘And so, just at the point where the scholastics wanted to seem most subtle, they most showed their dullness. If they had been sharp thinkers, they would easily have found the distinction between the cause of something that is done and its author. The author of that which is done is he who orders that it be done; the cause is he through whose powers it is done.’ In his The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, Hobbes also stated this view in vindicating God’s freedom and immunity from sin: The Bishop had argued in this manner: ‘If there be no liberty, there shall be no last judgment, no rewards nor punishments after death.’ To this I answered, that though God cannot sin, because what he doth, his doing maketh just, and because he is not subject to another’s law, and that therefore it is blasphemy to say that God can sin; yet to say, that God hath so ordered the world that sin may be necessarily committed, is not blasphemy. And I can also further say, though God be the cause of all motion and of all actions, and therefore unless sin be no motion nor action, it must derive a necessity from the ﬁrst mover; nevertheless it cannot be said that God is the author of sin, because not he that necessitateth an action, but he that doth command and warrant it, is the author. And if God own an action, though otherwise it were a sin, it is now no sin. See EW IV, p. 138. Romans 9 takes up the question of divine forgiveness and condemnation, as at verses 13–18: As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated. What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So

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And, fourth, he reiterates the view he stated in 1651 that Christian rulers possess the cura animarum, which allows them to administer the sacraments, adducing a new, if rather forced, defense of this teaching.11 These four points, the corporeality of God, the mortality of the created soul, the distinction between divine cause and person and the sovereign’s cura animarum, enter our discussion because they all ﬁgure in Hobbes’s description of the public person as public theologian. Let us consider them in order. ‘… de anima et Deo corporeis’ Apart from the exchange in the 1668 Appendix, the texts in which Hobbes most clearly enunciates his theory of the corporeality of God are the posthumously published Answer to Dr. Bramhall and the Decameron Physiologicum, both late works, exemplifying some characteristic turns in theological perspective.12

then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth. 11

See Appendix §§ 207 ff. See also Leviathan 3.42.71.570:

If a man therefore should ask a pastor, in the execution of his ofﬁce, as the chief priests and elders of the people (Matthew 21:23) asked our Saviour, By what authority dost thou these things, and who gave thee this authority: he can make no other just answer, but that he doth it by the authority of the commonwealth, given him by the king, or assembly that representeth it. All pastors, except the supreme, execute their charges in the right, that is by the authority of the civil sovereign, that is, jure civili. But the king, and every other sovereign, executeth his ofﬁce of supreme pastor, by immediate authority from God, that is to say, in God’s right, or jure divino. And therefore none but kings can put into their titles (a mark of their submission to God only) Dei gratia rex, &c. Bishops ought to say in the beginning of their mandates, By the favour of the King’s Majesty, bishop of such a diocese; or as civil ministers, in His Majesty’s name. For in saying, Divina providentia, which is the same with Dei gratia, though disguised, they deny to have received their authority from the civil state; and slyly slip off the collar of their civil subjection, contrary to the unity and defence of the commonwealth. 12

In chapter three of the Decameron, in a dialogue between ‘A’ and ‘B,’ Hobbes argues against the existence of the void in nature as inconsistent with God’s presence in nature: A. It is hard to suppose, and harder to believe, that the inﬁnite and omnipotent Creator of all things should make a work so vast as is the world we see, and not leave a few little spaces with nothing at all in them; which put altogether in respect of the whole creation, would be insensible. B. Why say you that? Do you think any argument can be drawn from it to prove there is vacuum?

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As is well known, Hobbes insists upon the incomprehensibility of God and the honoriﬁc character of His attributes;13 nonetheless, in the Answer, he not only states that God is corporeal: ‘Let us now see how [Bishop Bramhall] proves incorporeity by his own reason without Scripture. Either God, he saith, is incorporeal or ﬁnite. He knows I deny both, and say he is corporeal and inﬁnite.’14 He also offers an explanation of the manner in which He makes and moves every type and sort of body at His pleasure in describing God as an inﬁnitely ﬁne spirit, material and ﬂuid; His action is ﬁgured in the operation of one ﬂuid upon another: I have seen, and so have many more, two waters, one of the river, the other a mineral water, so like that no man could discern the one from the other by his sight; yet when they have been both put together, the whole substance could not by the eye be distinguished from milk. Yet we know that the one was not mixed with the other, so as every part of the one to be in every part of the other, for that is impossible, unless two bodies can be in the same place. How then could the change be made in every part, but only by the activity of the mineral water, changing it everywhere to the sense, and yet not being every where, and in every part of the water? If then such gross bodies have so great activity, what shall we think of spirits, whose kinds be as many as there be kinds of liquor, and activity greater? Can it then be doubted, that God, who is an inﬁnitely ﬁne spirit, and withal intelligent, can make and change all species and kinds of body as he pleaseth?15

This statement apparently transgresses the limits of intelligibility which Hobbes sets in talking about God,16 so he immediately adds:

A. Why not? For in so great an agitation of natural bodies, may not some small parts of them be cast out, and leave the places empty from whence they were thrown? B. Because He that created them is not a fancy, but the most real substance that is; who being inﬁnite, there can be no place empty where He is, nor full where He is not. See EW VII, p. 89. 13 For a discussion of Hobbes’s distinction between ‘argument’ and ‘oblation,’ see Zarka, op. cit., pp. 88 ff. 14 EW IV, pp. 305. Saying that God is corporeal seems to attribute a characteristic to God that is not negative but descriptive of His nature. On this point, see below, n. 87. 15 See EW IV, pp. 309–310. See the path-marking essay of Agostino Lupoli, ‘“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, and Cees Leijenhorst, ‘Hobbes’s Corporeal Deity,’ Nuove prospettive critiche sul Leviatano di Hobbes ed. by Luc Foisneau and George Wright (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2004): 73–96. 16 See below, n. 87.

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But I dare not say, that this is the way by which God Almighty worketh, because it is past my apprehension; yet it serves very well to demonstrate, that the omnipotence of God implieth no contradiction, and is better than by pretence of magnifying the ﬁneness of the Divine substance, to reduce it to a spright or phantasm, which is nothing.17

Here, Hobbes asserts the corporeality of God but falls short of specifying precisely how God operates as physical cause, offering it only as an hypothesis, which, nonetheless, is more consistent with divine omnipotence, in Hobbes’s eyes, than incorporeality. Whereas, in the English Leviathan, no mention is made of a corporeal God, now we have a ﬂat assertion of the doctrine and advocacy of it against any form of immaterial spiritualism. Hobbes’s difﬁdence on this point recalls an experience he had had when ﬁrst an exile in Paris, namely, the hostile reception he received from Descartes, to whom he had written just prior to leaving England in 1640, with Mersenne as intermediary.18 Hobbes’s side of the exchange of letters no longer exists, but the responses prompted from Descartes, writing to Hobbes in Latin and to Mersenne in French, suggest a likely ground of the Frenchman’s aversion both to the Englishman and to his thought. Descartes has received only part of Hobbes’s extensive letter, only three pages of a 56-page letter, but he is not slow in responding to what he ﬁnds there.19 Rather than wait for the rest of the letter to arrive,20 he wants immediately to sever and foreclose every contact with Hobbes, hoping not to have to respond to the remainder or even to receive it. He rejects much in the letter outright and withholds comment on things which do not concern him: ‘Omittam initium de anima et Deo corporeis, de spirito interno, et reliquis quae me non tangunt.’21 Descartes’ Latin indicates that both the soul and God were described as corporeal,22 and it is at least plausible that this was the ground of Descartes’ 17

Ibid. See Malcolm, Correspondence, liiiff. and pp. 60 ff. 19 See Malcolm, op. cit., p. 100. 20 See Correspondence, Letter 32. 21 ‘I will omit the beginning part about the corporeal soul and God, about interior spirit and the remaining things, which do not pertain to me.’ 22 In reporting the letter in his splendid edition of Hobbes’s correspondence, Malcolm recognizes that the plural ablative form ‘corporeis’ requires that the adjective modify both ‘anima’ and ‘Deo,’ but he attributes the claim that God is corporeal not to Hobbes but to Descartes, by way of a logical extension. See Malcolm, Correspondence vol. 1, pp. 54 ff. One reason for this judgment is evidence drawn from a treatise on optics (‘Latin Optical MS’) written perhaps at or near the same time, in which he excludes God, Who is inconceivable, from being corporeal (‘excepto Deo… inconceptibili’). This judgment as to Descartes’ possible action prompts some questions regarding both the intentions behind Hobbes’s letter and his philosophic development. The notion of a corporeal God was quite foreign to Descartes at any 18

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embarrassment and irritation at Hobbes’s evident and dangerous departure from orthodox theological opinion. Descartes in no way wanted to upset the religious

time but not to Hobbes, who may have implied it in the 1651 text and later avows it. While his correspondence indicates that Descartes was not always a good reader of other people’s ideas, it would be surprising if he attributed so striking a departure from the theological tradition to Hobbes without clear indication on Hobbes’s part. Or, even if the assertion was lacking, Descartes may have drawn the logical inference which Hobbes intended; Hobbes had after all ﬁrst stated his materialist conception of the soul in The Elements of Law, written prior to leaving England. Also, fears at associating himself with Hobbes’s theological views on God are a more reasonable ground for the rupture between the two men than some others, for example, the fear or claim of plagiarism, though Descartes felt concern on this point, though not of course regarding the corporeality of God. See Lupoli, art. cit, and Correspondence, Letter 34, n. 5. Descartes, who lived in Holland from 1628 till 1646, at times in Leiden, no doubt knew of the fracas that arose there concerning Conrad Vorstius; in line with James I’s insistence, the German theologian had been condemned by the Synod of Dort in 1619 and deprived of his professorship at the city’s university. At the time of the exchange with Hobbes, Descartes was embroiled in controversy over the introduction of his own thought at the University of Utrecht. In 1641, following publication of the Meditations on First Philosophy, its rector, Gisbert Voetius (1589–1676), accused him of atheism and sought a ban on his thought from the city magistrates. When the magistrates summoned Descartes to appear, he refused, and a judgment was passed against him. Owing to the intervention of the French ambassador and the Prince of Orange, the magistrates had to be satisﬁed with a decree forbidding any public argument for or against the thinker’s ideas. See K. van Berkel, ‘Descartes in debat met Voetius. De mislukte introductie van het Cartesianisme aan de Utrechte Universiteit (1639– 1645),’ Tijdschrift voor de Geschiedenis der Geneeskunde, Natuurwetenschappen, Wiskunde en Techniek 7 (1984): 4–18. (Though I cannot argue the point here, I do not believe the comments on the soul in the Anti-White necessarily constitute an interpretive difﬁculty.) Certainly, Hobbes need not say in the letter everything that he put in the treatise, and he may have changed or developed his views in the presumed interim. And, what one says in a letter differs from the material of a treatise; Hobbes may have wanted to express himself more freely in the former than the latter, for a variety of reasons, for example, the different addressees. He esteemed Descartes and may have wanted to draw attention to his own brilliance, as through bold assertions, which might have been expected to cause apprehension to Charles Cavendish, a recipient of the treatise. The exchange gives ample indication that Hobbes misjudged his French correspondent, but this fact is not conclusive as to Hobbes’s intentions. Moreover, it is no argument against attribution to Hobbes that he says that God is incomprehensible; he commonly makes this statement and nonetheless has a great deal about God, as we have already seen above, p. 256. Descartes’ Latin requires an attribution, and it seems to me more likely that Hobbes made the assertion in the letter, together possibly with a retraction, not unlike the one that follows the natural hypothesis given in the Answer, or that he at least gave Descartes to understand that intention. The difference between the letter and the Appendix of 1668 would then be that Hobbes in the earlier writing withheld from stating what was a probable or even inevitable conclusion of his thinking, apparent, if to others, then likely to him; whereas, in the later work, he avowed it and, as in the Answer, hastened to restrict its epistemic force. The 28 years that divide the treatise and the letter from the Appendix and Answer would then mark a development less in Hobbes’s thought than in his willingness to express it. We should count his longest exile not to have been political but intellectual. If, by 1640, Hobbes advanced the corporeality of the soul and of ‘spirits,’ as in the Elements, nothing

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establishment, and clearly a theology employing materialism as vehicle would do just that.23 And, of course, nothing could have been further from Descartes’ own philosophic and theological predilections. Hobbes was surely disappointed at the rebuff; it seems unlikely that he had harbored the ulterior motives that Descartes attributes to him in letters to Mersenne.24 The exchange with Descartes originated by way of a private letter, requested and transmitted by a mutual friend, for the best of reasons on both men’s part: as to Mersenne, surely to advance the interests of his English friend with the great thinker of his day; on Hobbes’s part, to gain recognition as a thinker of boldness and originality, worthy of recognition and conversation. The rupture was unfortunate, though one may doubt whether a more congenial exchange would not have led to the same ultimate conclusion. It does not seem, however, to have undermined the close friendship and loyalty he enjoyed with Mersenne, who was at the center of a highly inﬂuential circle of scientists and intellectuals in Paris.25 But, if he withheld in physics what he was later to offer, namely, a description of God in His actions in the physical world as a corporeal entity, this should not blind us to the explanatory work which the concept of God as ﬁrst cause does in his political theory, though he will again be at pains to restrict the epistemological force given the concept of God. Thus, while he might have been willing to suppress this feature of his natural science during and long after the period of his Parisian exile, only to take it up much later when once again in England, he nonetheless employed the so-called ‘God of causes’ extensively in the political science set out in Leviathan, as we shall see.

prevented him from at least entertaining the corporeality of God and advancing it as a thesis with his interlocutors. And, to the extent that the incorporeality of spirit bore on his theory of superstition and demonic possession and their impact on political obligation, much impelled him, if not to describe God as corporeal, then to refute any other description of His nature as warranting its application to ghosts, angels and devils. 23 See Martinich, op. cit., pp. 163 ff., and, most importantly, Lupoli art. cit., pp. 575 ff. 24 See Correspondence, p. 100, quoting from a letter from Descartes to Mersenne: Otherwise, having read at leisure that last paper by the Englishman, I have become completely convinced of the truth of the judgment which I expressed about him in my letter to you a fortnight ago; and I think it best if I have nothing to do with him and therefore refrain from replying to him. For if his character is as I suspect, we could scarcely communicate without becoming enemies. So it is better for us, him and me, to leave it there. I also beg you to communicate as little as possible to him of those of my opinions which you know, and which have not appeared in print. For, unless I am very much mistaken, he is aiming to make his reputation at my expense, and by devious means. 25

See the proﬁle of Mersenne given by Malcolm, Correspondence, pp. 862–865.

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Hobbes probably had an interest in astrology, black magic, demonology and necromancy dating from the 1630’s.26 In his study of a book catalogue made in 162927 which he ascribed to Hobbes, Arrigo Pacchi expressed surprise that so many of the titles deal with these subjects,28 hardly ﬁtting for a ‘Galilean’ thinker like Hobbes, a rigorous nominalist, utilizing a deductive method to develop a materialist philosophy.29 A glance at the names and titles listed yields Hippocrates, Ptolemy and commentaries on the latter by the mathematician and astrologer Cardano (1501–1576),30 the translator and historian of ancient science Giorgio Valla (1447–1500) and the Greek Humanist Trapezunzio (1395– 26 By this point in his development, Hobbes had also already given considerable attention to both demonstrative science and politics: the ﬁrst, by way of his well-known ‘discovery’ of Euclid’s geometry, some time between the end of 1629 and November of 1630 (Schuhmann, Chronique, p. 36); the second, through the publication of his translation of Thucydides in 1630, whose purpose was to make evident the follies of Athenian democracy to his fellow-citizens, in the wake of Charles I’s submission to Parliament’s demand for the Petition of Right in 1628 and the beginning of the Personal Rule in 1629 (Schuhmann, Chronique, p. 35). 27 The catalogue listed books from the Bodleian Library at Oxford under the following rubrics: De Scientiis, De Grammatica et Linguis, De Arithmetica et Numeris (with ten editions with commentaries on Euclid’s Elementa), De Geometria et Mensuris, De Astronomia, De Astrologia, De Perspectiva, Tractatus philosophici miscellanei etc., De Re Militari, Politica. See Schuhmann, Chronique, p. 35. 28 On this point, see Arrigo Pacchi, Convenzione e ipotesi nella formazione della ﬁlosoﬁa naturale di Thomas Hobbes (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1965), pp. 23–25; James Jay Hamilton, ‘Hobbes’s Study and the Hardwick Library,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 16 (1978): 445–453, and especially Arrigo Pacchi, ‘Una “biblioteca ideale” di Thomas Hobbes: Il ms. E2 dell’archivio di Chatsworth,’ Acme: annali della facoltà di lettere e ﬁlosoﬁa dell’università degli studi di Milano 21 (1968): 5–42. Malcolm notes that Pacchi misidentiﬁed the handwriting of the manuscript as being Hobbes’s, whereas it is actually the very similar hand of his friend, John Payne; see Malcolm, Correspondence, p. 874. He suggests that the list was either drawn up by Payne at Hobbes’s request for pedagogical purposes or that the manuscript came into Hobbes’s possession after Payne’s death in 1651. Whether it was the former or latter, both men in the 1630’s must have delved into what were some of the standard texts on these questions, of such great interest since the Renaissance, so it does not seem unreasonable to ascribe an interest in them to Hobbes. As is clear, his mechanistic understanding of science was advanced in direct opposition to the occult sciences promoted in some of these works, as he must have known. Whichever is the case, however, they give an indication of the discourse within which Hobbes’s science was debated, even later by those in the Royal Society who advocated some form of supernaturalism. On Boyle and Glanvill, see above, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’ As is easily the case, because mechanism and materialism won out and given the great success of science in our era, we fail to realize how contestable and deeply controversial Hobbes’s theories remained throughout his life. 29 See Pacchi, op. cit, pp. 155 ff. 30 On Cardano, see Anthony Grafton, ‘Girolamo Cardano and the Tradition of Classical Astrology,’ Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 142 (1998): 323–354.

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c. 1473). The teacher of Hermetism, Hermes Trismegistus, is represented, as are such Arab astrologers/astronomers as Alcabizio (d. 967), Alfragani (c. 860) and Alchindi (c. 800–c. 873), whose works still animated discussion in postRenaissance Europe. We also ﬁnd critical works, such as the Disputationes adversus astologos by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, as well as Savonarola’s Adversus diviniatricem astronomiam.31 As for books on the occult, magic and necromancy, we ﬁnd the names of Pietro d’Abano (1250–1316), Cornelius Agrippa of Nettersheim (1486–1535), and Bodin, whose Daemonomania was a study of the good and evil spirits in the world, ending in the exhortation that ‘one accused of being a witch ought never to be fully acquitted and set free unless the calumny of the accuser is clearer than the sun, inasmuch as the proof of such crimes is so obscure and difﬁcult that not one witch in a million would be punished if the procedure were governed by the ordinary rules.’ Witchcraft is also a referred to in the Disquisitiones of Martin Antoine Del Rio (1551–1608), ﬁrst published in 1599, with 24 editions by 1755. ‘Natural magic’ is represented in the De Subtilitate (1550) and De Rerum Varietate (1557) of Cardano, the Magiae Naturalis sive de Miraculis Rerum Naturalium (1558) of Della Porta (1535–1615), together with writings by the mathematician and alchemist John Dee (1527–1609) and the Paracelsian physician Robert Fludd (1574–1637), as well as the Harmonices Mundi (1619) of Kepler (1571–1630) and the De Rerum Natura (1565) of Telesio (1500–1588). This interest in studies of occult powers need not surprise or offend us, for surely Hobbes’s study of them reﬂects his desire to learn what was valuable in them, if anything, and to refute what was not and to reduce all the phenomena ascribed to them to physical causes.32 These titles present a resume of the climate of opinion regarding these matters in Hobbes’s day, and his interest in them no doubt study stems from scientiﬁc interests, newly awakened in the 1630’s. A growing awareness in this period of the political ramiﬁcations of belief in spirits cannot be ruled out as incentive for his study. Certainly, an attack on possession by immaterial spirits will be fully developed in the English Leviathan, with its criticism of ‘demons’ and the striking attribution of them to Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘incorporeal substances,’ with its disastrous effects upon Western thought and religion.33

31

Ibid. The desire to reduce physical phenomena of matter and motion is evidenced early in Hobbes’s thinking, but cf. Stewart Duncan, ‘Hobbes’s Materialism in the Early 1640’s’ forthcoming in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy. 33 On this, see above, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’ 32

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Intervening between this early study of spirits and the 1651 text, the Elements of Law of 1640 sees Hobbes rather ﬁdeistically refer true knowledge of the existence of spirits to revelation, opining that ‘all nations of the world’ believed in them, though their belief that they were incorporeal was erroneous: Elements 1.11.§ 6.56: 6. It is true, that the heathens, and all nations of the world, have acknowledged that there are spirits, which for the most part they hold to be incorporeal; whereby it may be thought that a man by natural reason, may arrive, without the knowledge of Scripture, to the knowledge of this: that spirits are. But the erroneous collection34 thereof by the heathens may proceed, as I have said before, from ignorance of the causes of ghosts and phantasms, and such other apparitions. And from thence had the Grecians their number of gods, their number of daemons good and bad; and for every man his genius; which is not the acknowledging of this truth: that spirits are; but a false opinion concerning the force of imagination.35

Similarly, as to God’s attributes and nature, Hobbes defers to the long tradition of accommodationism within Christianity.36 Elements 1.11.§ 3.54:… And when God Almighty giveth those names to himself in the Scriptures, it is but ?ν!ροποπ'!ος [anthropopathos], that is to say, by descending to our manner of speaking: without which we are not capable of understanding him.

Our inability to have a natural knowledge of God means that our speech about Him is not proper but rather a means of rendering worship: Elements 1.11.§ 4.55: And therefore when we attribute the name of spirit unto God, we attribute it, not as a name of anything we conceive, no more than

34

Hobbes uses ‘collection’ as meaning inference, deduction, conclusion. See OED, sub voce collection, deﬁnition 5. 35 That is, what scripture taught the Jews and Christians regarding spirit should be distinguished from what the Greeks mistakenly knew as incorporeal spirit. This is not to assert that spirit is corporeal, as he will do latter, but it is to insist that the idea that spirit is incorporeal stems from an erroneous understanding of the operations of the human mind, not from the actual existence of such spirits. In Leviathan, he would ascribe the theory of language to which the error of Greek superstition led to its adoption by Aristotle and later the Catholic Church; see above, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’ Hobbes thus leaves open both the possibility that spirits exist and that they are corporeal, or, perhaps better, that, if they exist as scripture says, they are corporeal. 36 On accommodationism, see Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 13 ff.; for its presence in Calvin, see Ford Lewis Battle, ‘God Was Accommodating Himself to Human Capacity,’ Interpretation 31 (1977): 19–38.

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when we ascribe unto him sense and understanding; but as a signiﬁcation of our reverence, who desire to abstract from him all corporeal grossness.37

He then treats topics that represent a great investment of intellectual capital in Leviathan, namely, possession by spirits, that is, demonology, and the nature of the human soul: Elements 1.11.§ 5.55: Concerning other spirits, which some men call spirits incorporeal, and some corporeal, it is not possible, by natural means only, to come to knowledge of so much, as that there are such things. We who are Christians acknowledge that there be angels good and evil; and that they are spirits, and that the soul of man is a spirit; and that these spirits are immortal. But, to know it, that is to say, to have natural evidence of the same: it is impossible. For all evidence is conception… and all conception is imagination and proceedeth from sense… .And spirits we suppose to be those substances which work not upon the sense, and therefore not conceptible. But though the Scripture acknowledge spirits, yet doth it nowhere say, that they are incorporeal, meaning thereby, without dimensions and quantity; nor, I think, is that word incorporeal at all in the Bible; but it is said of the spirit, that it abideth in men; sometime that it dwelleth in them, sometimes that it cometh on them, that it descendeth, and cometh and goeth; and that spirits are angels, that is to say messengers: all which words do consignify locality; and locality is dimension; and whatsoever hath dimension, is body, be it never so subtile. To me therefore it seemeth, that the Scripture favoureth them more, who hold angels and spirits for corporeal, than them that hold the contrary. And it is a plain contradiction in natural discourse, to say of the soul of man, that it is tota in toto, and: tota in qualibet parte corporis, grounded neither upon reason nor revelation; but proceeding from the ignorance of what those things are which are called spectra, images that appear in the dark to children, and such as have strong fears, and other strong imaginations, as hath been said chapt. 3, sect. 5, where I call them phantasms. For taking them to be things really without us, like bodies, and seeing them to come and vanish so strangely as they do, unlike to bodies; what could they call them else, but incorporeal bodies? which is not a name, but an absurdity of speech.

As for the immortality of the soul, Hobbes again refers the matter to revelation in scripture as the source of our understanding:

37

In Leviathan, Hobbes would avoid attributing materiality to God, speaking of the ‘grossness of visible bodies;’ see Leviathan 1.12.7.170. If our surmise regarding his true belief in his 1640 letter to Descartes is correct, then it is perhaps correct to say that these texts contain a dissimulation or at least an equivocation sub silentio. If we allow that he said what he meant and meant what he said, then perhaps he did not say all that he might have.

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Elements 2.6.§ 6.48: This point therefore, [that Jesus is the Christ] and all the explications thereof are fundamental; as also all such as be evidently inferred from thence; as, belief in God the Father: John 12, 44: He that believeth in me, believeth not in me, but in him that sent me; 1 John 2, 23: He that denieth the Son, hath not the Father: Belief in God the Holy Ghost, of whom Christ saith, John 14, 26: But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name; and John 15, 26: But when the Comforter shall come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth: Belief of the Scriptures, by which we believe those points, and of the immortality of the soul, without which we cannot believe he is a Saviour.38

Hobbes’s view of the soul seems to have developed while he was living on the Continent.39 By 1651, he asserts that, if it is to be distinguished from the body or bodily life, the soul dies. There were many versions of mortalism in post-Reformation Europe; one was offered notably by Martin Luther. Hobbes’s version is different in that the Reformer said the soul slept, whereas Hobbes said it simply died. But, both ﬁgures stressed the evangelical effects of the doctrine of the soul’s natural immortality.40 Hobbes develops his theory of soul annihilation as a defense of God’s omnipotence and grace, as though the created soul’s natural immortality entailed an independence from divine action: Leviathan 3.38.4.481:… 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 Elias41,) 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. 38

Of course, Hobbes could mean by the ‘immortality of the soul’ the doctrine of annihilationism and resurrection that he later develops in Leviathan. 39 On this point, see above, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’ 40 A useful comparison is offered by Pomponazzi. 41 Enos (or Enoch) and Elias were translated into heaven without seeing death.

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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.42

But, the soul’s mortality has more than evangelical justiﬁcation, for it is a key weapon against the common belief that ghosts, the souls of the departed, walk among the gravestones at night, frightening and possessing the simple people, making them a prey to ‘offending priests:’43 This argument is the fruit of years of study in such texts as we listed above,44 but its most striking innovation is the claim that Aristotle is the distant forebear of the belief in ghosts among Christians. For, it was by way of patristic and especially scholastic theologians, that Aristotle’s linguistic and ontological views came to play a role in the Western religious tradition.45 And, it was through the ministry of the pope that such importations came to have political importance. Apart from the rhetorical commonplaces of seventeenth-century polemic literature,46 what is striking is Hobbes’s evidently original theory that Aristotle had imported into his theory of language and being the remnants of Greek popular superstition, its demonology: Leviathan 4.46.18.691: But to what purpose (may some man say) is such subtlety in a work of this nature, where I pretend to nothing but what is necessary to the doctrine of government and obedience? It is to this purpose, that men may no longer suffer themselves to be abused, by them, that by this doctrine of separated essences, built on the vain philosophy of Aristotle, would fright them from obeying the laws of their country, with empty names; as men fright birds from the corn with an empty doublet, a hat, and a crooked stick. For it is upon this ground, that when a man is dead and buried, they say his soul (that is his life) can walk separated from his body, and is seen by night amongst the graves. Upon the same ground they say, that the ﬁgure, and colour, and taste of a piece of bread, has a being, there, where they say 42 For Hobbes’s theology of promise, see Introduction and Leviathan 3.35.13.448, 3.36.4.454 and 3.38.4.481. On the theology of promise within modern Protestantism, see Ronald F. Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1985), pp. 145 ff. 43 See J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Thomas Hobbes: Atheist or Enthusiast?,’ History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 737–749. 44 See p. 260. 45 See above, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes.’ 46 See Sommerville, op. cit., pp. 156 ff.

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there is no bread. And upon the same ground they say, that faith, and wisdom, and other virtues are sometimes poured into a man, sometimes blown into him from Heaven, as if the virtuous and their virtues could be asunder; and a great many other things that serve to lessen the dependance of subjects on the sovereign power of their country. For who will endeavour to obey the laws, if he expect obedience to be poured or blown into him? Or who will not obey a priest, that can make God, rather than his sovereign, nay than God himself? Or who, that is in fear of ghosts, will not bear great respect to those that can make the holy water, that drives them from him? And this shall sufﬁce for an example of the errors, which are brought into the Church, from the entities and essences of Aristotle: which it may be he knew to be false philosophy; but writ it as a thing consonant to, and corroborative of their religion; and fearing the fate of Socrates.47

Hobbes is certain that ‘natural bodies’ were not the source of the belief in the immaterial spirits and demons; ‘Nature itself cannot err.’48 Rather, they were ‘feigned’ by erring Greeks and Romans to cheer their hopes and relieve their fears: Leviathan 1.11.26.167: And they that make little, or no inquiry into the natural causes of things, yet from the fear that proceeds from the ignorance itself, of what it is that hath the power to do them much good or harm, are inclined to suppose, and feign unto themselves, several kinds of powers invisible; and to stand in awe of their own imaginations; and in time of distress to invoke them; as also in the time of an expected good success, to give them thanks; making the creatures of their own fancy, their gods.49 47 For the startling thesis that Aristotle was a ‘reﬁned polytheist,’ teaching that the gods had concern for mortals, see Richard Bodéüs, Aristotle and the Theology of the Living Immortals trans. by Jan Garrett (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000). 48 Leviathan 1.4.13.105. 49 Cf. Luther’s statement in his Large Catechism:

On the other hand, you can easily see and judge how the world practices only false worship and idolatry. For no people has ever been so reprobate as not to institute and observe some divine worship; every one has set up as his special god whatever he looked to for blessings, help, and comfort… [T]hus every one made that his god to which his heart was inclined, so that even in the mind of the heathen to have a god means to trust and believe… Therefore the heathen really make their self-invented notions and dreams of God an idol, and put their trust in that which is altogether nothing. Hobbes and Luther agree in asserting that idolaters make up their gods, but both differ from Calvin. Luther saw in it the sin of work-righteousness; Calvin placed stress on the material/spiritual distinction. For Luther, see Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther trans. by Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), pp. 126–129. For Calvin, see Charles Partee, Calvin and Classical Philosophy (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1977), pp. 51–65, and Carlos Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin

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Thus, much as self-love or other passion conduces to partiality in the application of the natural laws,50 so fear and hope, the passions that lie at the root of popular superstition, together with the interests that result from them, prompt men to err and to seek to propitiate their own creations. Greek demonology, the worship of idols, had entered Christianity during the Christianization of the Hellenes; it was part neither of ancient Judaism nor of the primitive church but of pagan idolatry: Leviathan 4.45.10.665: Another relic of Gentilism is, the worship of images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Saviour preached, it was the general religion of the Gentiles to worship for gods those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies, which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. And this is the reason why St. Paul says, we know that an idol is nothing: Not that he thought that an image of metal, stone, or wood, was nothing; but that the thing which they honoured, or feared in the image, and held for a god, was a mere ﬁgment, without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the brain. And the worship of these with divine honour, is that which is in the Scripture called idolatry, and rebellion against God.51

The critique of Greek ‘demonology’ plays a central role in the theologico/political project attempted in Leviathan.52 In it, we see not only the characteristic outlines of the materialist attack upon Greek idealism but also an attack upon any philosophic theology, that is, any discussion of divine matters which claims to be positive rather than negative, apodictic rather than merely apophatic.53 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 197–212, esp. p. 209. The materialist Tertullian condemned both astrology and magic as idolatrous; see Tertullian, De Idololatria Critical Text, Translation and Commentary by W.H. Waszink and J.C.M. Van Winden (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1987), §§ 9.1–10.1. See also Leviathan 3.36.2.451, 4.45.4.659 and 4.45.23.671 et seqq. 50 Leviathan 2.26.21.322. 51 For the progress of Greek demonology in both Jewish and Christian contexts, see Leviathan 3.38.6.485, 4.44.3.628, 4.44.16.638; 4.45.16.657; 4.45.2.658; 4.45.4.659, and 4.47.15.708. 52 See Leviathan 1.4.13.105, 3.36.2.451 (citing St. Paul, 1 Timothy 4:1, on the ‘doctrine of devils’) and 4.46.18.691. 53 On apophasis, 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. 36, 40–56, 94, 137–138, 197–198 and 200–214, and his recent treatment, What Has Athens To Do with Jerusalem?: Timaeus and Genesis in Counterpoint (Ann Arbor, ML: The University of Michigan Press, 1997).

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With whatever justice, Hobbes saw in scholastic theology precisely such a philosophic theology, one that claimed to be an apodictic science of God; hence, his chiding of the schoolmen for their failure to distinguish God as cause from God as person. Hobbes too however develops a natural theology of God as cause, but it is articulated within the quite restricted conﬁnes of his theory of knowledge, which is always merely ‘conditional,’ that is, hypothetical.54 This natural theology provides the framework of his discussion of the public sovereign as public theologian, as we shall see.55 God as First Cause and God as Person It may be helpful at this point to discuss at some length the distinction that Hobbes draws between God as ﬁrst cause and God as person, mentioned above.56 It is one instance of the larger contrast he develops between faith and knowledge, grace and nature. Many scholars have elided it, even when they have correctly seen that Hobbes draws upon the natural-law tradition, with its theistic content.57 54

See, for example, Leviathan 1.7.3.131:

No discourse whatsoever, can end in absolute knowledge of fact, past, or to come. For, as for the knowledge of fact, it is originally, sense; and ever after, memory. And for the knowledge of consequence, which I have said before is called science, it is not absolute, but conditional. No man can know by discourse, that this, or that, is, has been, or will be; which is to know absolutely: but only, that if this be, that is; if this has been, that has been; if this shall be, that shall be: which is to know conditionally; and that not the consequence of one thing to another; but of one name of a thing, to another name of the same thing. On the hypothetical character of ﬁrst philosophy in Hobbes, see Yves Charles Zarka, Philosophie et politique á l’âge classique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), pp. 24 ff. 55 For a sympathetic but, in my view, erroneous, interpretation of Hobbes’s intentions, one may see the 1865 work of Frederick Albert Lange, The History of Materialism and Criticism of its Present Importance trans. from German by Ernest Chester Thomas; third edition introduced by Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1925). Tracing the history of materialist ideas from the Greek atomists to the 1860’s, Lange deals with issues about which Karl Marx wrote, though there is very little reference to Marx, who nonetheless criticized the book in a letter to Engels (March 11, 1865), saying that it was ‘confused; Malthusianism mixed with Darwinian; ﬂirts with all sides–but there are some nice things against Lassalle and the bourgeois consumers’ co-operative fellows.’ Nietzsche is said to have read Lange. 56 See p. 254. For Thomas’ discussion of God as ﬁrst cause, see ST I.12.12 and I.44.1; for his discussion of God as cause of sin, see ST I.II.79.1. 57 One might mention Taylor, Hood and Warrender in this connection. See also the work of Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition trans. by Daniela Gobetti (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 118 ff. Blumenberg says that Hobbes understands the natural human situation as that of the Roman princeps legibus solutus; see Blumenberg, op. cit., p. 218. But, the individual is bound by natural law in the state of nature, if he or she knows it, as is the sovereign in the commonwealth, though punishment of the sovereign’s violations of the natural law look to correction by God, not by the subject.

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But, natural reason, though it knows of God rightly as ﬁrst cause, does not reveal God as legislator or person. Rather, Hobbes says, it has been through grace that God has revealed His identity in history in and through the persons of Abraham, Moses, Christ and the church. This is the signiﬁcance of Hobbes’s doctrine of the Trinity, as he set it out in the English Leviathan of 1651 and repeated with changes in the Latin Leviathan of 1668.58 The role of revelation, that is, the onset of the Gospel,59 thus bears critically upon Hobbes’s ethical and political theory. For, the dictates of reason are improperly called laws so long as revelation does not identify God in His identity both as legislator and as their legislator, though it is only at God’s initiative in making the gift of faith that this disclosure is made.60 The distinction between natural laws and divine commands parallels another, viz., that between the natural word and kingdom of God and His ‘prophetic’ word and kingdom, as we shall see.61 And, it is within God’s natural kingdom that the worship of rational piety takes place, setting limits upon the worship prescribed by sovereigns within their own, even Christian, commonwealths. Hobbes had set out the distinction between the laws of nature and divine commands early in his productive life as a political theorist and early in his theological development, in the Elements of Law of 1640: Elements of Law 1.17.12.93: And forasmuch as law (to speak properly) is a command, and these dictates, as they proceed from nature, are not commands; they are not therefore called laws in respect of nature, but in respect of the author of nature, God Almighty.

This text also sets out the claim that human reason rightly concludes that God, as ﬁrst cause, the ‘ﬁrst power of all powers,’ necessarily exists, even though, given its ﬁnite nature, reason cannot conceive or declare what He is: Elements 1.11.§ 2.53: 2. Forasmuch as God Almighty is incomprehensible, it followeth that we can have no conception or image of the Deity; and consequently all his attributes signify our inability and defect of power to On natural, ethical obligation, see Alan Ryan, ‘Hobbes and Individualism,’ Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes ed. by G.A.J. Rogers and Alan Ryan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 58 For a discussion of Hobbes’s Trinitarianism, see above, ‘Hobbes and the Economic Trinity.’ 59 On this, see ‘1668 Appendix,’ Introduction et passim. 60 For faith as the ‘gift of God,’ see Leviathan 2.26.41.332; 3.42.11.527; 3.43.7.613; 3.43.9.64, and 3.43.19.622. 61 This distinction featured in Hobbes’s prior political works, though its development in those texts cannot be dealt with here. On natural theology in De Cive, see Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes’s “Christian Atheism”,’ Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment ed. by Michael Hunter and David Wootton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 111–130.

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conceive any thing concerning his nature, and not any conception of the same, excepting only this: that there is a God. For the effects we acknowledge naturally, do necessarily include a power of their producing, before they were produced; and that power presupposeth something existent that hath such power; and the thing so existing with power to produce, if it were not eternal, must needs have been produced by somewhat before it; and that again by something else before that: till we come to an eternal, that is to say, to the ﬁrst power of all powers, and ﬁrst cause of all causes. And this is it which all men call by the name of GOD: implying eternity, incomprehensibility, and omnipotency.62 And thus all men that will consider, may naturally know that God is, though not what he is; even as a man though born blind, though it be not possible for him to have any imagination what kind of thing is ﬁre; yet he cannot but know that something there is that men call ﬁre, because it warmeth him.63

In De Cive (1642 and 1647), Hobbes distinguishes between the conclusions of natural reason, improperly called the laws of nature because not revealed as laws, and the laws of God, properly so called, that is, revealed in Scripture as His commands:64 De Cive 3.§ 33.76.49: But those which we call the laws of nature (since they are nothing else but certain conclusions, understood by reason, of things to be done and omitted; but a law, to speak properly and accurately, is the speech of him who by right commands somewhat to others to be done or omitted), are not (in propriety of speech) laws, as they proceed from nature. Yet, as they are delivered by God in holy Scriptures, (as we shall see in the chapter following) they are most properly called by the name of laws. For the sacred Scripture is the speech of God commanding over all things by greatest right.

Later in this discussion, he gives his version of the familiar evangelical distinction between law and faith in the Gospel; it will be taken up again and developed in the English Leviathan: 62 On divine omnipotence, see Luc Foisneau, Hobbes et la toute-puissance de Dieu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000). 63 While the existence of God as ﬁrst cause cannot be demonstrated, it can be proven. Thus, Hobbes says in the Anti-White (XXVI, 1): ?φιλοσφως faciunt qui proﬁtentur se demonstraturos quod Deus existit. (They do so unphilosophically who say that they will demonstrate that God exists.), though he nonetheless offers proofs of God’s existence. On demonstration in Hobbes, see the discussion given by A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 346 ff. Though it is expressed in various ways, that the existence of God can be known while His nature cannot seems to me the orthodox position in Christianity, at least so much as is not mystical. 64 Scripture also ﬁgures in his discussion of the difference between paganism and Christianity; see Leviathan 4.45.24.672.

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De Cive 4.§ 84.62: As the law of nature is all of it divine, so the law of Christ by conversion… is all of it also… the doctrine of nature. I say, the whole law of Christ is explained in the fore-named chapters, not the whole doctrine of Christ; for faith is a part of Christian doctrine, which is not comprehended under the title of a law. For laws are made and given in reference to such actions as follow our will; not in order to our opinions and belief, which being out of our power, follow not the will.65 (italics added)

After this, the distinction between divine cause and divine person served him in justifying the ways of God to Bishop John Bramhall, his countryman, during their extended debate over free will and determinism. Taking place in Paris, most likely in 1645,66 the debate prompted Hobbes to exculpate God as author of sin, allowing nonetheless that He is its cause. In their exchange, the bishop exclaims how he hates Hobbes’s identiﬁcation of causal necessity with the familiar ‘divine decree’ of natural theology.67 Attempting to coordinate theology and natural science, Hobbes had described every outcome in the natural world, including every human action, as a conﬂuence of causal chains producing the given effect and at the same time uniﬁed immutably in the will of God: That which I say necessitateth and determineth every action (that [Bramhall] may no longer doubt of my meaning), is the sum of all those things, which now being existent, conduce and concur to the production of that action hereafter, whereof if any one thing now were wanting, the effect could not be produced. 65 Law, for the Protestant Hobbes, is the result of sin, so that, where there is no sin, there is no law:

In the kingdom of God after this life, there will be no laws; partly, because there is no room for laws, where there is none for sins; partly, because laws were given us from God, not to direct us in heaven, but unto heaven. See De Cive 17.§ 8.263. 66 For this dating, see Franck Lessay’s translation of An Answer, De la liberté et de la nécessité (Paris: Vrin, 1993), pp. 10 ff. 67 See The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance EW V, esp. pp. 233 ff. See also Sergio Landucci, ‘La Potenza e la Giustizia di Dio,’ La teodicea nell’età cartesiana (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1986), pp. 99–126, and Martinich, op. cit., pp. 273 ff. Note what the Presbyterian Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) says of God’s eternal decree and causality, in defense of human freedom and responsibility: God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established. Hobbes would return to the question of the eternal decree in his 1668 Appendix; see 1668 Appendix,’ Introduction and §§ 24 ff.

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This concourse of causes, whereof every one is determined to be of such as it is by a like concourse of former causes, may well be called (in respect they were all set and ordered the eternal cause of all things, God Almighty) the decree of God.68

The bishop objects that Hobbes’s determinism renders humans the passive objects of mechanical actions. Worse still, God is made out to be the cause of sin. Hobbes must address a familiar dilemma: is there no sin in the world, or is God, the cause of all things, also its cause? He answers: [T]hough God be the cause of all motion and of all actions, and therefore unless sin be no motion or action, it must derive a necessity from the ﬁrst mover; nevertheless it cannot be said that God is the author of sin, because not he that necessitateth an action, but he that doth command and warrant it, is the author.69

Then, in the English Leviathan, the distinction ﬁgures in Hobbes’s elaborate attempt to reconcile natural reason, curiosity and causality with revelation, faith and divine personality. In this, he develops advanced views, but nothing in his writings suggests a deistic or ‘enlightened’ reduction of the supernatural content of Christian doctrine, the biblical miracles or gospel narratives. To the contrary, Christ is the Savior, not merely an exemplary teacher of moral truths, and the concept of revelation is central to his thought in that it articulates the distinction between divine commands and natural laws. Anticipating the theoretical projects of Leibniz and Hegel,70 Hobbes laid the basis of his attempted coordination of Christian faith, ancient monotheism and true science upon the distinction between knowledge and belief, mirrored in the distinction between God as ﬁrst cause, known by natural reason, and God as person, revealed to faith. Thus, at the beginning of chapter 31 of Leviathan, entitled ‘Of the Kingdom of God by Nature,’ he draws his treatment of man and of commonwealth to a close in preparation for a discussion of the Christian commonwealth and its perversion in the ‘kingdom of darkness.’ He summarizes the book’s preparatory parts one and two, in anticipation of the material in parts three and four:

68

See EW V, 105. See EW V, 139. 70 On Leibniz, see Patrick Riley, Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), and, by the same author, ‘Leibniz’s Political and Moral Philosophy in the Novissima Sinica,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (1999): 217–239. On Hegel, see Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 69

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Leviathan 2.31.1.395: That the condition of mere nature, that is to say, of absolute liberty, such as is theirs, that neither are sovereigns, nor subjects, is anarchy, and the condition of war: that the precepts, by which men are guided to avoid that condition, are the laws of nature: that a commonwealth, without sovereign power, is but a word, without substance, and cannot stand: that subjects owe to sovereigns, simple obedience, in all things, wherein their obedience is not repugnant to the laws of God, I have sufﬁciently proved, in that which I have already written. There wants only, for the entire knowledge of civil duty, to know what are those laws of God. For without that, a man knows not, when he is commanded any thing by the civil power, whether it be contrary to the law of God, or not: and so, either by too much civil obedience, offends the Divine Majesty, or through fear of offending God, transgresses the commandments of the commonwealth. To avoid both these rocks, it is necessary to know what are the laws divine. And seeing the knowledge of all law, dependeth on the knowledge of the sovereign power; I shall say something in that which followeth, of the KINGDOM OF GOD.

God, as ruler, has made known His laws through three words: Leviathan 2.31.3.396: To rule by words, requires that such words be manifestly made known; for else they are no laws: for to the nature of laws belongeth a sufﬁcient, and clear promulgation, such as may take away the excuse of ignorance; which in the laws of men is but of one only kind, and that is, proclamation, or promulgation by the voice of man. But God declareth his laws three ways; by the dictates of natural reason, by revelation, and by the voice of some man, to whom by the operation of miracles, he procureth credit with the rest.71 From hence there ariseth a triple word of God, rational, sensible, and prophetic: to which correspondeth a triple hearing; right reason, sense supernatural, and faith.

Hobbes then eliminates ‘sense supernatural’ as a ‘hearing’ of God’s laws;72 that is, God has not made His will known to all, that is, universally, by means of miracles, but only to a few, in different ways and with different messages: Leviathan 2.31.3.396, con’t.:… As for sense supernatural, which consisteth in revelation, or inspiration, there have not been any universal laws so given, because God speaketh not in that manner, but to particular persons, and to divers men divers things. 71 Note that Hobbes reﬂects the traditional understanding of miracle, namely, that it is a means used by God to enhance the believability of His messenger, not proof of a message which must rather be apprehended in faith. 72 ‘Sense supernatural’ is Hobbes’s way to afﬁrm that all events, even the miraculous, are caused, even if by divine agency, through material means. Faith too is imparted through material means; see Leviathan 3.32.6.411.

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Two ‘words’ remain as the means by which God communicates His laws: the rational word of right reason, discovering the dictates of natural law, and faith, to which is revealed the ‘prophetic’ word. Coordinate with these two ‘words’ is the distinction between God’s ‘prophetic’ kingdom over the Jews (and, by implication, Christians) and His ‘natural’ kingdom over all others: Leviathan 2.31.4.397: From the difference between the other two kinds of God’s word, rational, and prophetic, there may be attributed to God, a twofold kingdom, natural, and prophetic: natural, wherein he governeth as many of mankind as acknowledge his providence, by the natural dictates of right reason; and prophetic, wherein having chosen out one peculiar nation (the Jews) for his subjects, he governed them, and none but them, not only by natural reason, but by positive laws, which he gave them by the mouths of his holy prophets. (emphasis added)

In His natural kingdom, God is providential sovereign over all the earth in virtue of His power as ﬁrst cause.73 It is in this sense that God’s omnipotence should be understood, that is, as the deliverance of reason, as it seeks the causes of things: Leviathan 1.13.6.169: This perpetual fear, always accompanying mankind in the ignorance of causes, as it were in the dark, must needs have for object something. And therefore when there is nothing to be seen, there is nothing to accuse, either of their good, or evil fortune, but some power, or agent invisible: in which sense perhaps it was, that some of the old poets said, that the gods were at ﬁrst created by human fear: which spoken of the gods, (that is to say, of the many gods of the Gentiles) is very true. But the acknowledging of one God, eternal, inﬁnite, and omnipotent, may more easily be derived, from the desire men have to know the causes of natural bodies, and their several virtues, and operations; than from the fear of what was to befall them in time to come.

Revelation does not make evident God’s status as ﬁrst cause; it was an insight apparent to the reasoning of the ancient pagan philosophers and the ground of their confession of philosophic monotheism:74

73 If there is an ancient source for Hobbes’s natural theism, it is more Stoic than Platonic, Aristotelian or, certainly, Epicurean. Of course, in contrast to Plato, he stresses creation ex nihilo; in contrast to Aristotle, he believes God has concern for worldly affairs, and, in contrast to Stoicism, he stresses God’s transcendence. See, for example, Appendix § 24 and nn. 74 See the work of Werner Jaeger generally and speciﬁcally, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers: The Gifford Lectures 1936 trans. by Edward S. Robinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1967).

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con’t: For he that from any effect he seeth come to pass, should reason to the next and immediate cause thereof, and from thence to the cause of that cause, and plunge himself profoundly in the pursuit of causes; shall at last come to this, that there must be (as even the heathen philosophers confessed) one ﬁrst mover; that is, a ﬁrst, and an eternal cause of all things; which is that which men mean by the name of God:…

This acknowledgement of God as ﬁrst cause and of His attributes differs from the self-interested behavior of idolaters, who also recognize the existence of powers beyond their control and seek to propitiate them:75 con’t: … and all this without thought of their fortune; the solicitude whereof, both inclines to fear, and hinders them from the search of the causes of other things; and thereby gives occasion of feigning of as many gods, as there be men that feign them.

God’s right to rule and inﬂict punishment stems from His omnipotence as ﬁrst cause: Leviathan: 1.2.31.397: The right of nature, whereby God reigneth over men, and punisheth those that break his laws, is to be derived, not from his creating them,76 as if he required obedience, as of gratitude for his beneﬁts; but from his irresistible power.

Though reason teaches natural obligation in this kingdom, given that their force as divine legislation is not (yet) revealed, the ‘theorems’ or ‘dictates of reason’ are improperly called ‘laws:’77 75 On this point, see above, ‘The Haunting of Thomas Hobbes’ and Wright, ‘Authority and Theodicy in Hobbes’s Leviathan,’ Nuove prospettive critiche sul Leviatano di Hobbes ed. by Luc Foisneau and George Wright (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2004), pp. 175–204. 76 In that the ‘magnitude and beginning of the world’ and thus of humans are questions not susceptible to rational demonstration, they must be determined by the sovereign. See Elements of Philosophy, EW I, p. 410. 77 Prior to their covenant with God, the Israelites had the same obligations as all others under the laws of nature:

Leviathan 3.42.37.545: The question now is, who it was that gave to these written tables the obligatory force of laws. There is no doubt but they were made laws by God himself: but because a law obliges not, nor is law to any, but to them that acknowledge it to be the act of the sovereign; how could the people of Israel that were forbidden to approach the mountain to hear what God said to Moses, be obliged to obedience to all those laws which Moses propounded to them? Some of them were indeed the laws of nature, as all the second table; and therefore to be acknowledged for God’s laws; not to the Israelites alone, but to all people. The force of natural obligation, in that it stems from a deliverance of reason, acting under

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Leviathan 1.15.41.216: These dictates of reason, men use to call by the name of laws; but improperly: for they are but conclusions, or theorems concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves; whereas law, properly, is the word of him, that by right hath command over others. But yet if we consider the same theorems, as delivered in the word of God, that by right commandeth all things; then are they properly called laws.

But, in God’s prophetic kingdom, the essential, evangelical character of Christianity as a revealed religion is made evident, not through legal compulsion but in the heartfelt willingness of the believer to incline to the words of repentance preached and taught by godly ministers: Leviathan 3.42.107.591. For our Saviour himself came not to judge, that is, to be king in this world; but to sacriﬁce himself for sinners, and leave doctors in his Church to lead, not to drive men to Christ, who never accepteth forced actions, (which is all the law produceth,) but the inward conversion of the heart; which is not the work of laws, but of counsel and doctrine.

As in De Cive,78 in Leviathan, Hobbes is no less insistent regarding the distinction between law and Gospel, which is articulated by way of the public/private distinction.79 It may seem strange that the ‘prophetic kingdom of God,’ which reveals God as legislator, is nonetheless characterized not by law but by Gospel. Indeed, it is perhaps only the Gospel, as the Protestant Hobbes understands it, which impels him to describe the sovereign’s positive law as generating mere external compulsion,80 ‘forced actions, (which is all the law produceth,)’ yielding only outward compliance, in conscientious obedience to the dictates of reason made effective as the laws of nature.81 More remarkably, Hobbes now revises the concept of ‘natural kingdom’ set out in the ﬁrst half of Leviathan. Nature is shown not to be a true kingdom! For, it is only in what must be His ‘prophetic kingdom’ that God actually reigns over those who obey His laws and trust His promises:

the stimulus of scientiﬁc curiosity, is no more, but also no less, than the force of the words, deﬁnitions and syllogisms by which we come to the insight that God is ﬁrst cause. In this sense, Hobbes can claim the political theory of Leviathan as an instance of the science of civil philosophy. 78 See above, p. 271. 79 The privatization of religion that is evident here is the opposite from that intended by the Reformers, though it has been a common result of their movement. 80 See Appendix, § 168. 81 It is quite possible for men to be ignorant of the laws of nature, just as they are ignorant of the laws of mathematics. On the mathematical character of the natural laws, see John Rogers, ‘Hobbes, Sovereignty and Consent,’ Nuove prospettive critiche sul Leviatano di Hobbes ed. by Luc Foisneau and George Wright (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2004), pp. 241–248.

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Leviathan 2.31.2.395: God is king, let the earth rejoice, saith the psalmist. (Psalms 96. 1). And again, (Psalms 98. 1) God is king though the nations be angry; and he that sitteth on the cherubims, though the earth be moved. Whether men will or not, they must be subject always to the divine power. By denying the existence, or providence of God, men may shake off their ease, but not their yoke. But to call this power of God, which extendeth itself not only to man, but also to beasts, and plants, and bodies inanimate, by the name of kingdom, is but a metaphorical use of the word. For he only is properly said to reign, that governs his subjects by his word, and by promise of rewards to those that obey it, and by threatening them with punishment that obey it not. Subjects therefore in the kingdom of God, are not bodies inanimate, nor creatures irrational; because they understand no precepts as his: nor atheists; nor they that believe not that God has any care of the actions of mankind; because they acknowledge no word for his, nor have hope of his rewards, or fear of his threatenings. They therefore that believe there is a God that governeth the world, and hath given precepts, and propounded rewards, and punishments to mankind, are God’s subjects; all the rest, are to be understood as enemies.

Nature and nature’s God here receive their proper determination from that which surpasses and completes them, viz., God as ruler of the prophetic kingdom of the faithful, gathered around the Word, trusting and obeying Him and living in hope of a future kingdom. This prophetic Word is not the λγος of Greek philosophy; it is the promise of a gracious God, acting in history.82 But, neither is it that insight which curiosity produced of God as ﬁrst cause, the God of true religion, to be distinguished from the gods of idolaters. It was by distinguishing the concept of God as ﬁrst cause from the concept of God as person that Hobbes exculpated God as the cause of sin.83 God still addresses men through their reason; that is why Hobbes excludes inanimate objects, animals and irrational atheists as addressees of God’s word. But, that word now includes such elements as promise and threat, and these seem to pertain more to God’s revelation of Himself as person. It is not too much to say that, in setting out this elaborate theory of the two ‘words,’ Hobbes is describing two, interlocking, aporetic discourses, one of faith and grace, the other of knowledge and nature.84 One cannot speak aright 82

On this point, see above, Introduction to Appendix. See above, pp. 268ff. 84 Cf. John Pocock, ‘Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,’ Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (NY, NY: Atheneum, 1973), pp. 148–201, and Patricia Springborg, ‘Leviathan and the Problem of Ecclesiastical Authority,’ Political Theory 3 (1975): 289–303. 83

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of natural reason and natural ‘laws’ until their character has been revealed by faith, as shown in the correction of the deﬁnition of ‘natural kingdom.’ But, faith, through the onset of the Gospel, imparts truths which surpass knowledge and are ineffable. Faith evidently completes reason in a sense, but its action in the human soul does not issue in such knowledge as might guide political action.85 Fides never achieves intellectus. The belief/knowledge distinction marks an essential, conscious86 and irresolvable tension in Hobbes’s thought.87 85

On this point, see below, p. 287. Reasoning to this apparent impasse is likely deliberate on Hobbes’s part in that, only in this way, can he assure two key outcomes: 1) he thereby precludes claims by religious leaders to a knowledge superior to that of the political sovereign, and 2) he preserves what he took to be the authentic character of faith, namely, trust in God’s promises. Given our current knowledge of Hobbes’s theological development, it is premature to say how or whether the two sides of this distinction affected one another. 87 That the natural kingdom of God is shown not to be a real kingdom only through the example of the ‘prophetic kingdom’ is evidence in my view of the failure of Hobbes’s political theory. For, he has breached the limits of intelligibility deﬁning each of the two spheres, whose co-existence, so to speak, was possible only by way of distinction and separation. While it is true that Hobbes distinguishes the language games of theology and philosophy, as Leijenhorst says, Zarka seems more accurate in saying, with respect to Hobbes’s description of God as corporeal, that, ‘C’est bien plutôt un blasphème, le blasphème d’une raison qui veut sortir des limites du connaissable.’ If philosophy, that is, science, deals with that which is demonstrable and if that which is demonstrable is only that which an artiﬁcer makes, in that we do not make God, we cannot know His nature, corporeal or not. See Leijenhorst, art. cit., p. 87, quoting Yves Charles Zarka, ‘Espace et représentation chez Hobbes,’ Recherches sur le XVII e siècle 7 (1984): 159–180, p. 175. On making in Hobbes, see Arthur Child, Fare e conoscere in Hobbes, Vico e Dewey. Introduction by E. Garin (Naples: Guida, 1970), and, more generally, the brilliant series of articles published by Michael Foster in Mind, now collected in Creation, Nature, and Political Order in the Philosophy of Michael Foster (1903–1959) ed. by Cameron Wybrow (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1992). Similarly, just as, in his later writings, he is drawn to identify God as corporeal and to specify how God is active in nature as a corporeal entity, so earlier, in the political theory of the English Leviathan, Hobbes is drawn to elide the difference between the two kingdoms by rectifying his theory of the natural kingdom of God, with its natural ‘laws,’ through reference to His prophetic kingdom. It is quite true that Hobbes underlines the absolute divorce between theology and philosophy, as famously in the ﬁrst chapter of De Corpore. But, unless we are willing to say that his political theory is not (civil) philosophy, given the role which his natural theology plays in government and law, we must admit that Hobbes postulates but does not maintain a ‘sharp distinction between philosophical and religious discourse about God,’ as Leijenhorst asserts; see Leijenhorst, art. cit., p. 94. Within the space of their reconciliation, he cannot maintain the faith/knowledge distinction, though his political theory in general and the formal universality of the natural laws in particular depend upon his success in doing precisely that. See within, p. 307. On the deductive character of Hobbes’s political science, see Gigliola Rossini, ‘The Criticism of Rhetorical Historiography and the Ideal of Scientiﬁc Method: History, Nature and Science in the Political Language of Thomas Hobbes,’ The Languages of Political Theory in Early-modern Europe ed. by Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 303–324. 86

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If we consider the political expression of this distinction, viz., that between natural law and divine command, we see it is too simple to characterize Hobbes as either a divine-command theorist or a natural-law theorist. He is both and thus neither.88 The distinction between God as ﬁrst cause and as person which sets up the distinction between natural law and divine command is essential to his thought. The difﬁculty we encounter in conceiving the noetic status of Hobbes’s natural theology, true but not demonstrated, somehow more than belief but less than knowledge, should not blind us to the centrality of theology for his concept of natural law. The problem lies less in discerning his project as a theorist than in understanding his missteps, misgivings and failures in executing that project.89

88

This is how he explained himself in debate with Bishop Bramhall regarding Leviathan 1.15.41.216, discussed above, p. 276: [Bramhall:] Yet, to let us see how inconsistent and irreconcileable he is with himself, elsewhere reckoning up all the laws of nature at large, even twenty in number, he hath not one word that concerneth religion, or hath the least relation in the world to God. As if a man were like the colt of a wild ass in the wilderness, without any owner or obligation. Thus in describing the laws of nature, this great clerk forgetteth the God of nature, and the main and principal laws of nature, which contain a man’s duty to his God, and the principal end of his creation. [Hobbes:] After I had ended the discourse he mentions of the laws of nature, I thought it ﬁttest in the last place, once for all, to say they were the laws of God, then when they were delivered in the word of God; but before, being not known by men for any thing but their own natural reason, they were but theorems, tending to peace, and those uncertain, as being but conclusions of particular men, and therefore not properly laws. EW IV, p. 284. He then goes on to cite De Cive’s fuller discussion of how the laws of nature may be derived from scripture. (Hobbes always uses the word ‘theorem’ in a sense nearer to ‘postulate,’ as in geometry and thus science, than to ‘hypothesis,’ or to ‘theory.’) Thus, contrary to Gauthier, the two ‘deﬁnitions’ of the laws of nature are not two deﬁnitions but two ways of viewing the status of the laws of nature: the ﬁrst, without the aid of revelation; the second, under its guidance. The difference between them lies for the Christian in what intervenes between them, namely, the onset of the Gospel; this is Hobbes’s rendering of the experience of conversion. Gauthier’s discussion of the laws of nature also omits both the role of revelation and the relation between the faith/belief distinction and the distinction between God as person and God as cause. See Gauthier, op. cit., pp. 35. Similarly, it should be clear that Hobbes has not ‘equivocated;’ cf. Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 126. 89 Cf. Mark Murphy, ‘Deviant Uses of Obligation in Hobbes’s Leviathan,’ History of Philosophy Quarterly 11 (1994): 281–294. It would be desirable to place Hobbes’s project and procedures in the larger historical perspective of natural law theory and explicitly to address the Taylor-Warrender-Hood line of interpretation; I hope to write on these questions in the future. See Stephen A. State, ‘Text and Context: Skinner, Hobbes and Theistic Natural Law,’ The Historical Journal 28 (1985): 27–50.

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Notice also that, although he recommends a ‘building-block’ approach to the construction of demonstrative truth out of progressively more complex propositions, in re-deﬁning the notion of kingdom, he was unable consistently to follow that method in Leviathan.90 Nonetheless, after having developed his doctrine of the Trinity in chapters 40–42, in chapter 44, he reverts to distinguishing between God’s natural power over men and creatures as ﬁrst cause and His gracious dealings with men in the history of salvation through pact and promise, ﬁrst with the Jews and then the Gentiles: Leviathan 4.44.4.629: [W]hereas the kingdom of God was ﬁrst instituted by the ministry of Moses, over the Jews only; who were therefore called his peculiar people; and ceased afterward, in the election of Saul, when they refused to be governed by God any more, and demanded a king after the manner of the nations; which God himself consented unto, as I have more at large proved before, in chapter 35. After that time, there was no other kingdom of God in the world, by any pact, or otherwise, than he ever was, is, and shall be king of all men, and of all creatures, as governing according to his will, by his inﬁnite power. Nevertheless, he promised by his prophets to restore this his government to them again, when the time he hath in his secret counsel appointed for it shall be fully come, and when they shall turn unto him by repentance, and amendment of life; and not only so, but he invited also the Gentiles to come in, and enjoy the happiness of his reign, on the same conditions of conversion and repentance; and he promised also to send his Son into the world, to expiate the sins of them all by his death, and to prepare them by his doctrine, to receive him at his second coming. Which second coming not yet being, the kingdom of God is not yet come, and we are not now under any other kings by pact, but our civil sovereigns; saving only, that Christian men are already in the kingdom of grace, in as much as they have already the promise of being received at his coming again.

‘Which second coming not yet being, the kingdom of God is not yet come.’ To the contrary, no doctrine was so destructive of civil peace as that the present church is the kingdom of God, described in scripture:91

90 Wittgenstein criticized Frazer along this line; see P.M.S. Hacker, ‘Developmental Hypotheses and Perspicuous Representations: Wittgenstein on Frazer’s Golden Bough,’ IYYUN The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 41 (1992): 277–299. 91 And, as he said of writing Leviathan in his Seven Philosophical Problems:

It was written in a time when the pretence of Christ’s kingdom was made use of for the most horrid actions that can be imagined; and it was in just indignation of that, that I desired to see the bottom of that doctrine of the kingdom of Christ, which divers ministers

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Leviathan 4.44.4.629: The greatest and main abuse of Scripture, and to which almost all the rest are either consequent or subservient, is the wresting of it, to prove that the kingdom of God, mentioned so often in the Scripture, is the present Church, or multitude of Christian men now living, or that being dead, are to rise again at the last day…92

For Hobbes, the claim to a legislative power in the church separate from that of the political sovereign was the grave error not only of Catholic, already expelled from England under Henry and Elizabeth, but also of Presbyterian, the new ghostly pretender:93 Leviathan 4.47.34.714: But who knows that this spirit of Rome, now gone out, and walking by missions through the dry places of China, Japan, and the Indies, that yield him little fruit, may not return, or rather an assembly of spirits94 worse than he, enter, and inhabit this clean swept house, and make the end thereof worse than the beginning?95 For it is not the Roman clergy

then preached for a pretence to their rebellion: which may reasonably extenuate, though not excuse the writing of it. EW VII, p. 5. 92 The quotation goes on to distinguish God’s natural power over men and creatures as ﬁrst cause from His gracious dealings with men through pact and promise, ﬁrst with the Jews and then the Gentiles, thus developing the Trinitarian doctrine set out earlier, esp. in chapters 40–42. 93 The linking of Catholic with Presbyterian is not original to Hobbes. Note what John Maxwell said in his ‘Sacro-sancta Regum Majestas, Or the Sacred and Royal Prerogative of Christian Kings’ of 1645: The calamities which the authors and abettors of the paradoxes have brought upon us, and the present distemper and distress we are cast into, are equal to those we have recorded in authentic [hi]story were set on foot betwixt Gregory the Seventh and Henry the Fourth; betwixt Innocent the Fourth and Frederick; betwixt Boniface the Eighth and Philip king of France. The Puritan and Presbyterian by their independent ecclesiastical sovereignty will act as much mischief ere it be long, if God in mercy do not the current of their fury and malice; as in many ages past, the pope of Rome hath done by his unjust and usurped tyranny over and above kings. It feareth me, the tragedies of Munster and this time shall never be forgotten. ‘Munster’ refers to the famous take-over of that city by the Anabaptists, led by Thomas Müntzer. On Müntzer, see James M. Stayer, The German Peasants’ War and the Community of Goods (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994). 94 Hobbes is surely referring with this phrase to the Presbyterians’ Westminster Assembly of Divines, which met throughout most of the period of his Parisian exile. 95 A reference to Matthew 12:43 ff.: When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and ﬁndeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and

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only, that pretends the kingdom of God to be of this world, and thereby to have a power therein, distinct from that of the civil state.96

For Hobbes, faith is trust in the sayings of the apostles and their followers regarding the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.97 This ‘prophetic kingdom’ of believers waits with hope in the divine promise of a future kingdom, and, precisely because its hope is as yet unrealized, it has no power in this world distinct from that of the civil state. It cannot make binding laws, and its pronouncements in and through the church, unless authorized, bear the character of counsels, not commands. Thus, ‘the question truly stated is, by what authority they are made law.’98 Leviathan 3.42.43.550: But the question here, is not what any Christian made a law, or canon to himself, (which he might again reject, by the same right he received it;) but what was so made a canon to them, as without injustice

when he is come, he ﬁndeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the ﬁrst. 96

Chapter 30 of the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), ‘Of Church Censures,’ states:

The Lord Jesus, as king and head of His Church, has therein appointed a government, in the hand of Church ofﬁcers, distinct from the civil magistrate. It is perplexing that Hobbes, in 1651, should be concerned with the Presbyterians after Pride’s Purge in 1648 had ended their political importance. He might have seen in them a tendency that ecclesiastically minded people might seek to give effect to in the future, to the prejudice of both the rights of political sovereigns and the evangelical character of the Christian religion. More likely, this emphasis in the English Leviathan predated Pride’s Purge and shows the various strata of thinking evident in that text. For, the stress upon Aristotle and his inﬂuence in Catholic theology does not ﬁt well with the Presbyterians, though it may bear on some of the Anglican theologians whom Hobbes knew. And, in sorting out Hobbes’s ambiguous politics, we must not forget that, while English politics ﬁgured in his thinking, it did not determine it; the central line of attack in Leviathan is against Aristotle and ‘church divinity,’ quite possibly because this was of greatest interest to Hobbes as perhaps the set of problems in which he felt he could make the most signiﬁcant contribution. See Quentin Skinner, ‘Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,’ The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660 ed. by G.E. Aylmer rev. ed. (London: 1974), pp. 79–94; Glenn Burgess, ‘Contexts for Writing and Publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan,’ History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 675–702; M.M. Goldsmith, ‘Hobbes’s Ambiguous Politics,’ History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 639–673; Jeffrey R. Collins, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649,’ Historical Journal 45 (2002): 305–331, and Johann Sommerville, ‘Hobbes and Independency,’ Nuove prospettive critiche sul Leviatano di Hobbes ed. by Luc Foisneau and George Wright (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2004), pp. 155–174. 97 See Leviathan 3.42.3.429 et seqq., and 3.43.7.613. 98 See Leviathan 3.33.21.425.

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they could not do any thing contrary thereunto. That the New Testament should in this sense be canonical, that is to say, a law in any place where the law of the commonwealth had not made it so, is contrary to the nature of a law. For a law, (as hath been already shown) is the commandment of that man, or assembly, to whom we have given sovereign authority, to make such rules for the direction of our actions, as he shall think ﬁt; and to punish us, when we do any thing contrary to the same. When therefore any other man shall offer unto us any other rules, which the sovereign ruler hath not prescribed, they are but counsel, and advice; which, whether good or bad, he that is counselled, may without injustice refuse to observe; and when contrary to the laws already established, without injustice cannot observe, how good soever he conceiveth it to be. I say, he cannot in this case observe the same in his actions, nor in his discourse with other men; though he may without blame believe his private teachers, and wish he had the liberty to practise their advice, and that it were publicly received for law. For internal faith is in its own nature invisible, and consequently exempted from all human jurisdiction; whereas the words, and actions that proceed from it, as breaches of our civil obedience, are injustice both before God and man. Seeing then our Saviour hath denied his kingdom to be in this world, seeing he hath said, he came not to judge, but to save the world, he hath not subjected us to other laws than those of the commonwealth; that is, the Jews to the law of Moses, (which he saith [Matth. 5.] he came not to destroy, but to fulﬁl) and other nations to the laws of their several sovereigns, and all men to the laws of nature; the observing whereof, both he himself, and his apostles, have in their teaching recommended to us, as a necessary condition of being admitted by him in the last day into his eternal kingdom, wherein shall be protection, and life everlasting. Seeing then our Saviour, and his apostles, left not new laws to oblige us in this world, but new doctrine to prepare us for the next; the books of the New Testament, which contain that doctrine, until obedience to them was commanded, by them that God had given power to on earth to be legislators, were not obligatory canons, that is, laws, but only good, and safe advice, for the direction of sinners in the way to salvation, which every man might take, and refuse at his own peril, without injustice.

Now, in emphasizing that the Savior and His apostles ‘hath not left new laws to oblige in this world,’ Hobbes aligns himself with the Lutheran position, early on recognized as at odds with both Catholic doctrine and pronounced Calvinist tendencies.99 Nothing distinguishes Luther from Calvin so much as Calvin’s view

99 See Heiko Oberman, ‘The Theology of Calvin,’ The Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reformation Thought (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark Ltd., 1992), pp. 234–239, esp. p. 237.

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of God as both ‘legislateur et roy.’100 And, no less perceptive and inﬂuential a Counter-Reformer than Politus (1484–1553), writing in 1520 at the instigation of the inﬂuential cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Nicholas von Schönberg, criticized Luther along this line in his Apologia.101 Then later, at the Council of Trent, Luther’s denial that Christ was ‘redemptor’ and ‘legislator’ was described as the heart of the ‘Lutheran error:’102 Si quis dixerit Christum Jesum a Deo hominibus datum fuisse ut redemptorem, cui ﬁdant, non etiam ut legislatorem, cui obediant: anathema sit.103

Further, Luther developed the famous ‘two-kingdom’ doctrine, according to which civil authority was recognized as God’s work but that of His ‘left hand’ (opus alienum) to be distinguished from the proper work of salvation (opus proprium).104 The restoration of ‘God’s kingdom’ Christians could know only

100

Ibid. See Patrick Preston, ‘Catharinus versus Luther, 1521,’ History 88 (2003): 364–378 and, by the same author, ‘Ambrosius Catharinus’ Commentary on the General Epistle of St. Jude,’ International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 2 (2002): 217–229. 102 See Canon 21, Sessio Sexta de Justiﬁcatione, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent: Original Text with English translation by Rev. H.J. Schroeder, O.P. (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Co., 1960), p. 323. 103 ‘If anyone say that Christ Jesus was given to men as a redeemer in whom to trust, and not also as a legislator whom to obey; let him be anathema.’ 104 On these points, cf. Jürgen Overhoff, ‘The Lutheranism of Thomas Hobbes,’ History of Political Thought 18 (1997): pp. 604–623, and ‘The Theology of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan,’ The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51 (2000): 527–554. But see also Basil Hall, Humanists and Protestants, 1500–1900 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1990), esp. chapter 7, ‘The Early Rise and Gradual Decline of Lutheranism in England 1520–1600,’ pp. 208–236. Overhoff misconstrues some details of the exchange with Descartes, discussed above, n. 22: for one, the aborted exchange was in no sense ‘comprehensive;’ for another, Descartes did not say that questions of religious orthodoxy were not important for him, and ﬁnally, as Letter 45 shows, he did not indicate to Mersenne the belief that the corporeality of the soul necessarily led to the corporeality of God, though he may have thought so. This telescopes what Descartes said. Further, Overhoff asserts what Hobbes denied, namely, that the Bible was the ‘ultimate yardstick by which Aristotle’s or any other man’s philosophical views [on the soul] were to be measured.’ He separates philosophy and religion and thoroughly discounts the Bible as a source of philosophic truth. What for Overhoff is the ‘traditional notion of a spiritual afterlife’ in an incorporeal eternity is in fact not that traditional, either among the ancients, Christians in general or, as he notes, Luther in particular; see Introduction and Appendix, § 46 et passim. Hobbes never urged acceptance of any doctrine, especially transubstantiation, even though it was unreasonable; he held no doctrine of Christianity to be contrary to reason, if some were above it. See Leviathan 2.30.6.379 and 3.32.2.409. Transubstantiation he called a greater fraud than those played by Pharaoh’s magicians; see Leviathan 4.44.11.633. 101

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eschatologically, that is, by anticipation through faith in its coming, apart from the works of the law.105 Calvin provides a counter example, as Oberman says: Calvin regards God as the Dieu des armées,106 the Christian essentially as a homo politicus, called into service of God, to whom he is related as commiles rather than as a slave, through Christ the Mediator, in whose army he is enlisted through the Spirit of Christ the King. The function of the King extends beyond that of the Mediator insofar as the majesty and power of God extends beyond the justiﬁcatio impii. God’s concern is not only the rule of the hearts of the faithful, but also, in wider scope, the rule of the whole world. Here we have not only a political eschatology, but also a political programme, insofar as faith in God is conﬁdence ‘a ses promesses non seulement de la vie avenir, mais de la vie presente.’

Moreover, Calvin’s doctrine of the church made it clear that there was continuity here and now between the ‘small kingdom’ established by Christ as king and the future establishment ‘in perfection.’107 Colas states:

105 The debate over this doctrine, especially in its relations to the rise of Hitler and what Meinecke called the ‘German catastrophe,’ has been voluminous. See, for example, Gerhard O. Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate: An Interpretation of its Historical Development (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1969). See Milbank’s discussion, The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 219 ff. 106 A reference to II Samuel 4:5, ‘David was thirty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned forty years.’ As Oberman says of Calvin, ‘God ‘advances’ his Kingdom and ‘makes it grow’: there is development. The climax, however, is not brought about only through intraecclesial evolution, but through God’s extra-ecclesial intervention as well. In the ascension, Christ as Mediator ascended to the royal throne and assumed the rule over his Church through the Word and Spirit. Yet, as the Son of God, he had already ruled from the beginning of creation as the ‘aeterna sapientia Dei, per quam reges regnant’;’ Ibid. 107 See Oberman, ibid. Theodore Beza (1519–1605), successor to Calvin at Geneva and champion of the Presbyterian theory of ecclesiastical power over temporal sovereigns, was as incorrect as Bellarmine, Hobbes insists, in asserting that ‘the Kingdom of God by Christ is already in this world:’

Leviathan 4.44.17.639 ff.: The most difﬁcult place to answer, of all those that can be brought, to prove the kingdom of God by Christ is already in this world, is alleged, not by Bellarmine, nor any other of the Church of Rome; but by Beza, that will have it to begin from the resurrection of Christ. But whether he intend thereby, to entitle the Presbytery to the supreme power ecclesiastical in the commonwealth of Geneva, (and consequently to every presbytery in every other commonwealth,) or to princes, and other civil sovereigns, I do not know. For the presbytery hath challenged the power to excommunicate their own kings, and to be the supreme moderators in religion, in the places where they have that form of Church government, no less than the Pope challengeth it universally. The words are

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[W]hile, like Luther, Calvin distinguished two regimes or governments affecting humanity, one concerning eternal life and the inner person, who was free, the other whose work was to organize civic justice and reform morals; while he distinguished the spiritual reign of Christ from that of the polis, he did not believe – and here he differed with Luther – that the regimes or reigns were in contradiction with each other: the ‘company of men’ was in no way the devil’s city. Taking up Saint Augustine’s comparison that on earth human beings were like pilgrims yearning for their true ‘country,’ Calvin deemed that they needed help on this voyage and that to deny them that help was to deprive them of their ‘human nature.’ The temporal regime was in no way ‘distasteful’ to the spiritual reign of Christ: ‘For the civil government doth now begin in us upon earth certain beginnings of the heavenly kingdom, and in this mortal and vanishing life doth as it were enter upon an immortal and incorruptible blessedness.’ We have here a rejection of any attempt to ﬂee the world, afﬁrmed in the following terms: the polis would only be useless if God’s reign, within us, had ‘extinguished’ our present life.108

As Christ is no legislator, according to Hobbes, so Christian ministers, His successors in the Holy Spirit, cannot coerce the evangelical liberty of Christians but are limited to giving counsel, except where the political authority has willed otherwise: Leviathan 3.42.9.526: Again, the ofﬁce of Christ’s ministers in this world, is to make men believe, and have faith in Christ: but faith hath no relation to, nor dependence at all upon compulsion, or commandment; but only upon certainty, or probability of arguments drawn from reason, or from something men believe already. Therefore the ministers of Christ in this world, have no power by that title, to punish any man for not believing, or for contradicting what they say; they have I say no power by that title of Christ’s ministers, to

(Mark 9. 1), Verily I say unto you, that there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power… .[I]f the kingdom of God began (as Beza on that place [Mark 9:1] would have it) at the resurrection; what reason is there for Christians ever since the resurrection to say in their prayers, Let thy kingdom come? It is therefore manifest, that the words of St. Mark are not so to be interpreted. There be some of them that stand here (saith our Saviour) that shall not taste of death till they have seen the kingdom of God come in power. If then this kingdom were to come at the resurrection of Christ, why is it said, some of them, rather than all? For they all lived till after Christ was risen. See also Leviathan 3.42.7.525 ff. 108 See Dominique Colas, Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories trans. by Amy Jacobs (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 142 ff.

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punish such: but if they have sovereign civil power, by politic institution, then they may indeed lawfully punish any contradiction to their laws whatsoever: and St. Paul, of himself and other the then preachers of the gospel, saith in express words (2 Cor. 1. 24), We have no dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy.

Thus, any religious speech other than that commanded by the sovereign, such as public worship or prayer, for example, is but counsel and exhortation, which one may refuse to heed, at peril of his eternal life, but without injustice. Apart from following the dictates of reason, revealed to be the commands of God, and the laws of the political sovereign, Christians’ faith in God according to Hobbes is not at ﬁrst a matter of duty, interest, gratitude or coercion but of Gospel, the free gift of grace.109 The Savior gave no new commandments in opening the kingdom of grace to the elect but taught and counseled them to believe and trust in Him and His promises over any others. With the cessation of miracles, the Bible serves as the positive source of knowledge of the Christian faith, made effective in the lives of individual believers by faith as the gift of God, with reason its negative criterion.110 In emphasizing that ‘Christ hath not given us new laws, but counsel,’ Hobbes recognizes no divine, positive laws, binding upon Christians: Leviathan 3.43.5.611: But what commandments are those that God hath given us? Are all those laws which were given to the Jews by the hand of Moses, the commandments of God? If they be, why are not Christians taught to obey them? If they be not, what others are so, besides the law of nature? For our Saviour Christ hath not given us new laws, but counsel to observe those we are subject to; that is to say, the laws of nature, and the laws of our several sovereigns: nor did he make any new law to the Jews in his sermon on the Mount, but only expounded the laws of Moses, to which they were subject before. The laws of God therefore are none but the laws of nature, whereof the principal is, that we should not violate our faith, that is, a commandment to obey our civil sovereigns, which we constituted over us, by mutual pact one with another. (italics added)

This is to say that there is no material conception of politics or society that is uniformly, uniquely or unimpeachably Christian, that is, one that God has com-

109 On faith as the gift of God, see Leviathan 2.26.41.332; 3.42.11.527; 3.43.7.613; 3.43.9.614, and 3.43.19.622. On the doctrine of prevenient grace, see Ronald F. Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985). 110 On how historical data become saving faith, see above, Introduction to the 1668 Appendix, n. 86.

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manded.111 Again, revelation enacts no legislation that is speciﬁc to Christians only or as such:112 Leviathan 2.26.40.331: Divine positive laws (for natural laws being eternal, and universal, are all divine,) are those, which being the commandments of God, (not from all eternity, nor universally addressed to all men, but only to a certain people, or to certain persons,) are declared for such, by those whom God hath authorized to declare them.113

While the material content of any commonwealth’s laws varies in historically particular ways, it is nonetheless subject to the formal obligations of natural law, which are equal for all, valid in all times and places. Each political community gives them substance, subject to sovereign authority. One may ask whether Hobbes’s skepticism regarding all material values, though not as to all formal, ethical duties under the dictates of reason, may not stem from his understanding of at least one version of the ethical import of Christianity itself.114 Here, as is often the case, distinguishing between natural laws and divine commands and between knowledge and faith has political importance. It dissolves a source of religiously motivated sedition in Christian commonwealths: Leviathan 1.15.8.205: There be some that proceed further; and will not have the law of nature, to be those rules which conduce to the preservation of man’s life on earth; but to the attaining of an eternal felicity after death; to which they think the breach of covenant may conduce; and consequently be just and reasonable; (such are they that think it a work of merit to kill, or

111 Of course, there can be no secular conception of politics or society: the division into secular and sacred collapses in Hobbes, who in any case requires subjects to swear an oath before God as condition for entrance into the commonwealth. See Leviathan 3.39.5.498, ‘Temporal and spiritual government, are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and mistake their lawful sovereign;’ and Leviathan 1.14.31.200, Answer EW IV, p. 291, and Appendix § 142. Hegel offers a comparison on the question of whether or in what sense there can, or must, be a Christian society, grounding itself, in his case, on Sittlichkeit; on this point, see Dickey, op. cit., passim but esp. pp. 96–112, 144, 152, 157, 160–162, 183–184, 227–228, 246, 273–274, 320 and 352. 112 For a comparison between Hobbes and Richard Hooker on divine, positive laws, see S.A. State, Thomas Hobbes and the Debate over Natural Law and Religion (New York, NY: Garland Publishing, Incorporated, 1991), pp. 75 ff. 113 This way of construing the relation of natural law and Christian religion relates the divine commands to speciﬁc people and times. Salvation history is thus necessarily historical and particular, though this fact in no sense diminishes its importance. By contrast, the formality of the natural laws assures their universal application to all people and in all times, Christian or not. On this point, see below, n. 165. 114 On this point, see John Milbank, op. cit., pp. 219 ff. For a different view, see Sam Black, ‘Science and Moral Skepticism in Hobbes,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 27 (1997): 173–207.

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depose, or rebel against, the sovereign power constituted over them by their own consent.) But because there is no natural knowledge of man’s estate after death; much less of the reward that is then to be given to breach of faith; but only a belief grounded upon other men’s saying, that they know it supernaturally, or that they know those, that knew them, that knew others, that knew it supernaturally; breach of faith cannot be called a precept of reason, or nature.

The competence of the ‘laws’ of nature thus extends only to preservation in this life, not the next. Eternal and valid for all people in all times and in all places, they nonetheless do not bear the promise of eternal life, as is given to the elect, that is, those with whom God has covenanted. The laws’ material content, that is, the speciﬁc acts which a sovereign requires subjects to do or omit, in both the civil and religious realms, does not inculpate them or violate their consciences, given that obedience to their lawful sovereign is part of the contract by which the commonwealth is made.115 And, the source of the Christian’s obligation under the natural laws is God’s revelation of His identity as their legislator, whereby the dictates of reason are shown to be His laws, properly so called. They thus bind the Christian in conscience, even when living under an inﬁdel or heretical sovereign, a point he makes with force against his great opponent in Leviathan, Cardinal Bellarmine: Leviathan 3.42.131.605: But to prove that Christians are not to tolerate inﬁdel, or heretical kings, [Bellarmine] allegeth a place in Deut. 17. where God forbiddeth the Jews, when they shall set a king over themselves, to choose a stranger: and from thence inferreth, that it is unlawful for a Christian to choose a king, that is not a Christian. And it is true, that he that is a Christian, that is, he that hath already obliged himself to receive our Saviour when he shall come, for his king, shall tempt God too much in choosing for king in this world, one that he knoweth will endeavour, both by terror and persuasion, to make him violate his faith. But, it is (saith he) the same danger, to choose one that is not a Christian, for king, and not to depose him when he is chosen. To this I say, the question is not of the danger of not deposing; but of the justice of deposing him. To choose him, may in some cases be unjust; but to depose him, when he is chosen, is in no case just. For it is always violation of faith, and consequently against the law of nature, which is the eternal law of

115 A great deal is made of the right of ﬂight and self-defense which the individual retains in entering into the commonwealth, but it is also important to emphasize the individual’s freedom from responsibility within the commonwealth for both the acts of the sovereign and for acts or omissions required of the subject by the sovereign.

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God. Nor do we read, that any such doctrine was accounted Christian in the time of the apostles; nor in the time of the Roman emperors, till the Popes had the civil sovereignty of Rome. But to this he hath replied, that the Christians of old deposed not Nero, nor Dioclesian, nor Julian, nor Valens an Arian,116 for this cause only, that they wanted117 temporal forces. Perhaps so. But did our Saviour, who for calling for,118 might have had twelve legions of immortal, invulnerable angels to assist him, want forces to depose Caesar, or at least Pilate, that unjustly, without ﬁnding fault in him, delivered him to the Jews to be cruciﬁed? Or if the apostles wanted temporal forces to depose Nero, was it therefore necessary for them in their epistles to the new made Christians, to teach them (as they did) to obey the powers constituted over them (whereof Nero in that time was one) and that they ought to obey them, not for fear of their wrath, but for conscience sake? Shall we say they did not only obey, but also teach what they meant not, for want of strength? It is not therefore for want of strength, but for conscience sake, that Christians are to tolerate their heathen princes, or princes (for I cannot call any one whose doctrine is the public doctrine, an heretic) that authorize the teaching of an error.

Conscience itself, rightly understood, forbids resistance and rebellion and requires the obedience of the Christian. That most people and even most Christians act out of self-interest and not conscience causes no conceptual problem, provided they see it is in their interest to obey the law.119 While Hobbes recognized an undoubted utility in fear of the divine, he stresses the utility and duty of teaching the people the true relation of natural obligation to both material and ideal interest.120 That Christianity can have seemed to lead to a contrary conclu-

116

Hobbes’s list includes two emperors who famously persecuted Christians, another who performed the ancient duties of the pontifex maximus and sought to re-establish paganism and a fourth who believed in the Arian heresy. 117 That is, lacked. 118 ‘For calling for’ – one of Hobbes’s strikingly effective ellipses; its concision suggests the ease with which the Savior might have effected this purpose. A possible expansion: ‘our Savior, who needed to do no more than call for twelve legions of angels,…’ 119 See above, Appendix § 137. 120 See Leviathan 2.30.3.376: And because, if the essential rights of sovereignty (speciﬁed before in the eighteenth chapter) be taken away, the commonwealth is thereby dissolved, and every man returneth into the condition, and calamity of a war with every other man, (which is the greatest evil that can happen in this life;) it is the ofﬁce of the sovereign, to maintain those rights entire; and consequently against his duty, ﬁrst, to transfer to another, or to lay from himself any of them…

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sion regarding one’s religious self-interest is the error that Leviathan seeks to obviate and remove.121 Any religious doctrine that offered a materially different conception of the good of the political community would impede Leviathan, acting not only as public person, teaching the people their political duty, but also as public theologian, safeguarding uniform doctrine and public worship.122 Division in public teaching or practice would weaken the bonds of political duty and civic affection among those who share membership not only in the political community but also in the religious community. Members of the visible church and the Hobbesian state are indistinguishable.123 Membership in political communities

Secondly, it is against his duty, to let the people be ignorant, or misinformed of the grounds, and reasons of those his essential rights; because thereby men are easy to be seduced, and drawn to resist him, when the commonwealth shall require their use and exercise. 121

This is how Hobbes put this question in De Cive:

For if one command somewhat to be done under penalty of natural death, another forbids it under pain of eternal death, and both by their own right, it will follow that the citizens, although innocent, are not only by right punishable, but that the city itself is altogether dissolved. For no man can serve two masters; nor is he less, but rather more, a master, whom we believe we are to obey for fear of damnation, than he whom we obey for fear of temporal death. It follows therefore that this one, whether man or court, to whom the city hath committed the supreme power, have also this right; that he both judge what opinions and doctrines are enemies unto peace, and also that he forbid them to be taught. EW II, p. 185. 122 On this point, see Richard Tuck, ‘The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes,’ Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain ed. by Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 120–138, esp. p. 130. Doing away with the notion of hell was not, in my view, a therapeutic device to reduce men’s fears; the loss of eternal life though eternal death would be a matter for some concern. Hobbes’s account of these matters in chapter 38 of Leviathan bespeaks several motivations. But there can be no doubt that the question has political relevance: Leviathan 3.38.1.478: The maintenance of civil society, depending on justice; and justice on the power of life and death, and other less rewards and punishments, residing in them that have the sovereignty of the commonwealth; it is impossible a commonwealth should stand, where any other than the sovereign, hath a power of giving greater rewards than life; and of inﬂicting greater punishments, than death. Now seeing eternal life is a greater reward, than the life present; and eternal torment a greater punishment than the death of nature; it is a thing worthy to be well considered, of all men that desire (by obeying authority) to avoid the calamities of confusion, and civil war, what is meant in Holy Scripture, by life eternal, and torment eternal; and for what offences, and against whom committed, men are to be eternally tormented; and for what actions, they are to obtain eternal life. 123 For a discussion of Hobbes’s doctrine of the church, see Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches trans. by Olive Wyon (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), vol. II, pp. 649 ff.

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cannot imperil their salvation, nor should their beliefs lead to action contrary to the commands of the sovereigns to whom they have promised obedience.124 The misdeeds of sovereigns are indeed culpable as the sins of those who bear the public person, but their sin is for God to punish, not the subject. They are, in Hobbes’s striking oxymoron, ‘mortal gods,’125 worthy of λατρε α (latreia), that is, ‘civil worship,’ for beneﬁts conferred, but not δουλε α (douleia), ‘divine worship,’ rendered by a slave (δο λος, doulos) alike to his or her lord and to the Lord.126 As between one another, sovereigns are in a state of nature. If we sum up Hobbes’s teaching on God as ﬁrst cause and as person, we may say that he recasts generations of thinking about the relation of knowledge and faith. This entailed a consistent program of de-Hellenization of the Christian religion, by which he recurred to what he deemed more authentically biblical patterns of thought over the logocentric emphases of patristic and scholastic theologians, with their debts to Plato, Aristotle and the Stoa. For him, the Bible, insofar as it is the word of God, is history of a certain type, namely, the record of the acts of God towards His elect, that is, narrated promise.127 That record is not the repository of natural scientiﬁc truths or even of substantive moral truths.128

124 As he says, Leviathan 3.43.22.624, ‘There can therefore be no contradiction between the laws of God, and the laws of a Christian commonwealth.’ 125 Leviathan 2.17.13.227: This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and defence. 126 See De Cive 15.§ 18.222. On divine and human worship, see Wright, ‘Authority and Theodicy in Hobbes’s Leviathan,’ Nuove prospettive critiche sul Leviatano di Hobbes ed. by Luc Foisneau and George Wright (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2004), pp. 175–204. 127 On this, see Ronald Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985). 128 Moral skepticism in Hobbes may not have the signiﬁcance or origin often cited, for one source of moral skepticism is the Christian prophetic tradition itself. The question of the so-called ‘third use’ of the law has engaged the attention of a number of modern students of Luther, including Pinoma, Aulen, Wingren, Nygren and Bring in Scandinavia and Althaus, Ebeling, Elert and Schlink in Germany. The issue is whether Luther describes a use of the law as a foundation for Christian social ethics, the so-called usus didacticus, to be distinguished from both the usus theologicus, whose function before God is to accuse and frighten the sinner, and the usus civilis, whose function is civil and political regulation. This ‘third use’ would be to inform believers as to what they must do in this world by prescribing normative structures and behaviors aimed at sanctiﬁcation, so that to deny this function is to deny that there is or ever will be a social order identical with the kingdom of Christ. Asserting this is the gravest fault which Hobbes condemns in interpreters of the Bible:

Leviathan 4.44.4.629: The greatest and main abuse of Scripture, and to which almost all the rest are either consequent or subservient, is the wresting of it, to prove that the kingdom of God, mentioned so often in the Scripture, is the present Church, or multitude of Christian men now living, or that being dead, are to rise again at the last day.

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‘Christ as word of God’ is the fulﬁllment of God’s promise to the prophets and to all the faithful, not Christ as λγος, that is, the source and guarantor of rational speech and action among humans.129 Indeed, it was by importing philosophic concepts regarding a presumed knowledge of divine things that the Roman Church had sought to impose its government upon the minds and hearts of the faithful.130 This is the import of the angry, fourth part of Leviathan on the ‘kingdom of darkness,’ which deals not only with bad philosophy but also with what Hobbes took to be bad faith. It is as fully a vindication of evangelical liberty131 as of natural scientiﬁc curiosity. Let us now turn ﬁnally to Hobbes’s teaching on the public person as public theologian.

According to William H. Lazareth, those texts in which Luther seems to advocate the usus didacticus, for instance, the Second Dispute against the Antinomians of 1538, are forgeries. Those of undoubted authenticity describe only a two-fold use of the law; these include the Explanations of the Ninety-ﬁve Theses of 1517, On Secular Authority of 1523, Against the Heavenly Prophets of 1525, the Small Catechism of 1529, the Lectures on Galatians of 1531, the Smalkald Articles (pt. iii, art. ii) of 1537, and the Formula of Concord (art. v) of 1577. Both Melanchthon’s Loci Communes of 1533 and Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion of 1536 describe a three-fold use of the law and in this way depart from Luther’s view. Indeed, the Smalkald Articles of 1537 may represent Luther’s explicit distancing of himself from them. See Werner Elert, ‘The Third Use of the Law,’ The Lutheran World Review I (1949): 38–48, and William H. Lazareth, Christians in Society: Luther, the Bible and Social Ethics (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001). Lazareth, in rejecting the called ‘third use,’ found in the Formula of Concord, sides with the so-called Gnesio-Lutherans, who opposed the ‘Philippists,’ that is, the followers of Philip Melanchthon. These issues may seem recondite, but note this charged comment in the current The Christian Statesman, http://www.natreformassn.org/statesman/01/retreat.html: Modern Reformation’s September/October 2000 article by Michael Horton, ‘Deﬁning the Two Kingdoms: One of Luther’s and Calvin’s Great Discoveries,’ signals the dramatic inroads of retreatist Lutheran amillennialism into the Reformed camp and publicizes the proto-Calvinistic abandonment of biblical law. For an analysis of the theological use of λγος in Philo and in Christian theology, see Pelikan’s discussion in What Has Athens, op. cit., esp. pp. 67–110. On the theology of promise, 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). 130 See Leviathan 4.47.21.712. 131 On the question of evangelical liberty, see Klaus-M. Kodalle, ‘“Sterbliche Götter”: Martin Luthers Ansichten zu Staat, Recht and Gewalt als Vorgriff auf Hobbes,’ Hobbes Oggi ed. by Andrea Napoli (Milan: F. Angeli, 1990), pp. 123–142. 129

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In the second half of Leviathan, Hobbes sets out a detailed description of his conception of a commonwealth ruled by a Christian sovereign. It issues, in chapter 43, in what we may take to be one of the principal theoretical climaxes of the book, namely, the assertion that ‘there can therefore be no contradiction between the laws of God and laws of a Christian commonwealth.’132 This conception is developed from within his description of both natural theology and natural law, for it is within their theoretical parameters that the requirements of natural piety obtain in any commonwealth, Christian or not. Hobbes has no doubt that religion and the worship of that which is divine is a natural feature of human life, not to be eradicated or disparaged, and three speciﬁcations of religious experience ﬁgure in his account of it: 1) the superstitious fear of the idolatrous, 2) the philosophers’ knowledge of God as ﬁrst cause and 3) the Christian’s faith in a personal God. It is human superstition, leading to self-justiﬁcation, that produces those greedy deities who require sacriﬁce in whatever forms they demand it, animals, other humans, even the sacriﬁce of the intellect (sacriﬁcium intellectus).133 But, as Christian thinkers knew, the sacriﬁcial principle and the conceptions of the divine upon which it rested had long been the subject of philosophic resistance as early as the Greeks themselves ﬁrst began to philosophize.134 Thus, Xenophanes fashioned a language of rational worship that was appropriate to an elevated conception of the divine.135 Plato had only to draw this and other strains together and systematize them in order to forbid it all, and especially Homer, in his ideal state.136 Homer and Hesiod had worked a calumny against the divine, for, as Plato says in his Timaeus, the gods are not greedy or desirous of sacriﬁce but generous.137

132

See Leviathan 4.43.22.624. Cf. Paul Dumouchel, ‘The Political Problem of Religion: Hobbes’s Reading of the Bible,’ English Philosophy in the Age of Locke ed. by M.A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 1–27. 133 For an analysis of modern interpretations of sacriﬁce, including that of Girard, see John Milbank, ‘Stories of Sacriﬁce,’ Modern Theology 2 (1996): 75–102. 134 On this point, see Walter Burkert, op. cit. See also below, note 137. 135 On Xenophanes, see Harald Anton Thrap Reiche, A History of the Concepts !εοπρεπ ς and εροπρεπ ς (diss. presented 1955, Harvard University Department of Classics). 136 On this point, see Burkert, op. cit., p. 246. 137 Note Hegel’s statement: Those who look upon the essence of nature as pure inwardness, and therefore inaccessible to us, take up the same line as that ancient creed which regarded God as envious and jealous; a creed which both Plato and Aristotle pronounced against long ago. All that God is, He imparts and reveals; and He does so, at ﬁrst, in and through nature.

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Moreover, the sacriﬁcial principle, according to which the gods require some service from humans, reﬂects both an exaggeration of our own human capacities and a stultifying burden upon human autonomy, reason and freedom.138 Sacriﬁce’s key offense to reason derives from the intention of the one who sacriﬁces, not merely the impact upon its victim.139 Hobbes carries on this philosophic criticism of popular religion, but he does it by way of the new science, with its new respect for a unique human possession.140 For, it is through our natural curiosity to know the causes of things that all people, heathen included, free themselves from superstitious fear by delving into that study of causes, viz., science, which ultimately leads to acknowledgement of God as ﬁrst cause: Leviathan 1.12.6.169: This perpetual fear, always accompanying mankind in the ignorance of causes, as it were in the dark, must needs have for object something. And therefore when there is nothing to be seen, there is nothing to accuse, either of their good, or evil fortune, but some power, or agent

See The Logic of Hegel trans. by William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 254. See also Paul Lakeland, The Politics of Salvation: The Hegelian Idea of the State (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1984), and Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994). 138 Kant, in the second critique, vindicates such autonomy against conceptions very like those Hobbes describes. On this point, see Paul Tillich’s development of what he calls ‘theonomous ethics’ in Systematic Theology vol. 1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 84 ff., 147 ff., and esp. vol. 3, pp. 249 ff. 139 Note Martial’s lines in book eight of the Epigrammaton: Qui ﬁngit sacros auro uel marmore uultus, non facit ille deos: qui rogat, ille facit. ‘It is not he who fashions the sacred visages in gold or marble who makes them gods; he makes them gods who prays to them.’ 140 See Leviathan 1.3.5.96: The train of regulated thoughts is of two kinds; one, when of an effect imagined, we seek the causes, or means that produce it: and this is common to man and beast. The other is, when imagining any thing whatsoever, we seek all the possible effects, that can by it be produced; that is to say, we imagine what we can do with it, when we have it. Of which I have not at any time seen any sign, but in man only; for this is a curiosity hardly incident to the nature of any living creature that has no other passion but sensual, such as are hunger, thirst, lust, and anger. In sum, the discourse of the mind, when it is governed by design, is nothing but seeking, or the faculty of invention, which the Latins called sagacitas, and solertia; a hunting out of the causes, of some effect, present or past; or of the effects, of some present or past cause. On curiosity, Heiko Oberman, Contra Vanam Curiositatem: Ein Kapitel der Theologie zwischen Seelenwinkel und Weltall (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1974).

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invisible: in which sense perhaps it was, that some of the old poets said, that the gods were at ﬁrst created by human fear: which spoken of the gods, (that is to say, of the many gods of the Gentiles) is very true But the acknowledging of one God, eternal, inﬁnite, and omnipotent, may more easily be derived, from the desire men have to know the causes of natural bodies, and their several virtues, and operations; than from the fear of what was to befall them in time to come. For he that from any effect he seeth come to pass, should reason to the next and immediate cause thereof, and from thence to the cause of that cause, and plunge himself profoundly in the pursuit of causes; shall at last come to this, that there must be (as even the heathen philosophers confessed) one ﬁrst mover; that is, a ﬁrst, and an eternal cause of all things; which is that which men mean by the name of God: and all this without thought of their fortune; the solicitude whereof, both inclines to fear, and hinders them from the search of the causes of other things; and thereby gives occasion of feigning of as many gods, as there be men that feign them.141

For Hobbes, science, viz., the study of causes, leads to natural theology, viz., the acknowledgement of God as ﬁrst cause, though, as has been said,142 this is not a demonstrative knowledge: We create neither God nor nature; therefore, we cannot demonstrate Him or His existence, as we can geometry and government.143 But, it is the pursuit of scientiﬁc inquiry that opens the possibility of freedom

141 The Latin text, OL, III, p. 86, may help clarify some of the references in the last part of this passage:

… atque hoc sine omni fortunarum suarum cogitatione, quarum (scil. fortunarum) sollicitudo et metum gignit et ab inquisitione causarum naturalium animum avertit, simulque Deorum ﬁngendorum occasionem praebet, quot sunt fere qui eos ﬁngunt. 142 143

See above, note 63. As he says in the Six Lessons:

Of arts, some are demonstrable, others indemonstrable; and demonstrable are those the construction of the subject whereof is in the power of the artist himself, who, in his demonstration, does no more but deduce the consequences of his own operation. The reason whereof is this, that the science of every subject is derived from a precognition of the causes, generation, and construction of the same; and consequently where the causes are known, there is place for demonstration, but not where the causes are to seek for. Geometry therefore is demonstrable, for the lines and ﬁgures from which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves; and civil philosophy is demonstrable, because we make the commonwealth ourselves. But because of natural bodies we know not the construction, but seek it from the effects, there lies no demonstration of what the causes be we seek for, but only of what they may be. See EW VII, p. 183.

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from superstitious fear through natural religious enlightenment, accomplished by such as are possessed by curiosity, the ‘lust of the mind.’144 Now, although natural curiosity can lead to a true belief regarding a ﬁrst cause, ﬁnite minds cannot produce a proper concept of an inﬁnite God.145 Religious language can thus express no knowledge of God’s nature but merely manifest a will to honor the divine power: Leviathan 2.31.28.240: He that will attribute to God nothing but what is warranted by natural reason, must either use such negative attributes (as inﬁnite, eternal, incomprehensible) or superlatives (as most high, most great, and the like) or indeﬁnite (as good, just, holy, creator)146 and in such sense as if he meant not to declare what he is (for that were to circumscribe him within the limits of our fancy,) but how much we admire him, and how ready we would be to obey him, which is a sign of humility, and of a will to honour him as much as we can. For there is but one name to signify our conception of his nature, and that is, I AM: and but one name of his relation to us, and that is God, in which is contained Father, King, and Lord.147

It may be surprising that natural reason can know the name of God but can generally assert so little and nothing apodictically.148 But, this theological result, 144

See Leviathan 1.6.35.124:

Desire to know why, and how, CURIOSITY; such as is in no living creature but man: so that man is distinguished, not only by his reason, but also by this singular passion from other animals; in whom the appetite of food, and other pleasures of sense, by predominance, take away the care of knowing causes; which is a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure. 145

Cf. Thomas’s answer in ST I.12.13 as to whether a higher knowledge of God can be obtained through grace than by natural reason. 146 Note that, in describing ‘creator’ as one of the divine attributes, Hobbes is explaining what natural reason discloses of God as ﬁrst cause; this is necessarily the case because natural reason does not and cannot know God as the Christian knows Him, namely, as person and author of the divine words. A distinction is thus to be drawn between creation in the sense of origin from an un-originated (‘ﬁrst’), thus un-generated, ﬁrst mover, presumably physical and eternally moving, and creation ex nihilo, a teaching whose truth is revealed only through faith. 147 Cf. Leviathan 1.12.6.64. Again, the names, ‘Father, King, and Lord’ do not imply personality in the Christian sense because natural reason does not know God as person. In fact, all these names were attributed to Zeus/Jupiter by Plato, Cicero and other ancients, as, for example, during the allegorization of Roman religion by the Stoics, as Hobbes may have known. In a passage parallel to this one in Elements of Law (1.11.2.53–54), Hobbes says, ‘And this is it which all men call by the name of GOD.’ The change from ‘GOD’ to the ‘I AM’ of Leviathan recalls Exodus 3:14, the response of Jahweh in answer to Moses’ request for a name to reveal to the Israelites as the author of His actions. 148 In eschewing the traditional use of the analogy of being (analogia entis), Hobbes is not unique. To the contrary, because of their strong views on the broken relation between nature

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not to say impasse, is implicit in the ineffability thesis that Hobbes employs,149 and it is in fact endemic to his conception of language in general. Reason discloses nothing regarding the existence of that which it knows150 in that our knowledge always remains ‘conditional,’ that is, hypothetical.151 And, religious language in the natural kingdom of God,152 the worship of natural piety, is in no better or worse situation in this regard than natural science: Leviathan 2.31.33.404: Fifthly, it is a part of rational worship, to speak considerately of God; for it argues a fear of him,153 and fear, is a confession of his power.154 Hence followeth, that the name of God is not to be used rashly, and and grace and God and man, it has been characteristic of many in the Protestant tradition to deny that analogous talk about God is in any useful sense descriptive of His nature. 149 For a criticism of the ineffability thesis, see William P. Alston, ‘Ineffability’ The Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 506–522. For a criticism of Tillich’s use of the 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. 150 This had been Hobbes’s position since at least 1640. Note his statement, in Objectiones (iii, 4), written as a response to Descartes’ notion of innate ideas, as to the capacity of men to know things in their essence or of their languages to embody a world: 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. On conventionalism, see Arrigo Pacchi, Convenzione e ipotesi nella ﬁlosoﬁa di Thomas Hobbes (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1965). Note this statement by Noel Malcolm: ‘[T]he absolute “eternal truths” of nominalism arose from the voluntarist demotion of “essences” from ontology to logic, and the truths of scientiﬁc explanation were made hypothetical by the voluntarist insistence that essences demoted in this way were descriptions and not objects of intuitive knowledge;’ Noel Malcolm, ‘Thomas Hobbes and Voluntarist Theology’ Cambridge dissertation 12656 (1985), p. 131. Cf. f Norberto Bobbio, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition’ trans. by Daniela Gobetti (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 117 ff. 151 See Leviathan 1.7.3.131. 152 In the course of his discussion of these points, Hobbes reﬁnes the conception of the natural ‘kingdom’ of God to include only those beings which are capable of reason; see above, p. 277. 153 Fear of God remains an element of religious piety among Christians. Thus, Luther prefaces each of his explanations of the Ten Commandments in his Small Catechism with the phrase, ‘We should fear, love and trust God…’ Thus, on the ﬁrst commandment, he says: Du solt nicht ander Götter haben. Was ist das? Antwort. Wir sollen Gott über alleding fürchten, lieben und vertrauen. 154 Rational fear of God as ﬁrst cause differs from irrational, that is, superstitious, fear of divine power to the extent that reason rightly knows, and does not invent, its object, namely, the true God, God as ﬁrst cause; see Hobbes’s deﬁnition of true religion, Leviathan 1.6.36.124; 3.43.7.613, 4.46.4–5.683 ff., and 4.47.20.710.

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to no purpose; for that is as much, as in vain: and it is to no purpose unless it be by way of oath, and by order of the commonwealth, to make judgments certain; or between commonwealths, to avoid war. And that disputing of God’s nature is contrary to his honour: for it is supposed, that in this natural kingdom of God, there is no other way to know any thing, but by natural reason; that is, from the principles of natural science; which are so far from teaching us any thing of God’s nature, as they cannot teach us our own nature, nor the nature of the smallest creature living.

Again, though our concepts do not produce knowledge of God’s nature, they nonetheless make apparent the undoubted truth that He is ﬁrst cause, the ‘power of all powers,’ ruler by right of all the world in virtue of His irresistible power, as we have seen. This fact of natural reason, that God exists as ﬁrst cause, is at once a necessary conclusion and incitement to worship. And, it is in chapter 31 of Leviathan that Hobbes sets out his account of the worship that is ﬁtting in God’s ‘natural kingdom,’ the kingdom of natural reason. In providing particular legal and political content within the formal universality of the natural kingdom of God, the Christian sovereign is under the same rational restraints and limits as any sovereign, Christian or not.155 Hobbes’s theory of the Christian commonwealth is thus as applicable to all commonwealths, past, present or future, of any religion.156 Strictly observing the distinctions we have noted between cause and person and God’s natural and prophetic kingdoms, Hobbes describes what human responses are appropriate with respect to that entity whom reason, unaided by revelation, discovers as ﬁrst cause: Leviathan 2.31.7.399: Having spoken of the right of God’s sovereignty, as grounded only on nature; we are to consider next, what are the Divine laws, or dictates of natural reason; which laws concern either the natural duties of one man to another, or the honour naturally due to our Divine Sovereign. The ﬁrst are the same laws of nature, of which I have spoken already in the 14th and 15th chapters of this treatise; namely, equity, justice, mercy, humility, and the rest of the moral virtues. It remaineth therefore that we consider, what precepts are dictated to men, by their natural reason only, without other word of God, touching the honour and worship of the Divine Majesty. 155 As in the religious realm, ethical/political obligation under the laws of nature is determined by universal, formal laws, given concrete content in domestic legal and political systems. On the derivation of natural law, see John Deigh, ‘Reason and Ethics in Hobbes’s Leviathan,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 34 (1996): 33–60. 156 A commonwealth without religion is unthinkable for Hobbes because its subjects could not be bound by oath; see Leviathan 1.15.33.201.

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The ‘worship of the Divine Majesty’ is our rational service to God, which Hobbes describes from within the concept which reason has yielded of Him as ﬁrst cause.157 That is, he begins with the necessary conclusions implied in our rational acknowledgement of God as ﬁrst cause, namely, His attributes: Leviathan 2.31.14.401: That we may know what worship of God is taught us by the light of nature, I will begin with his attributes. Where, ﬁrst, it is manifest, we ought to attribute to him existence. For no man can have the will to honour that, which he thinks not to have any being.

God as ﬁrst cause is transcendent: Leviathan 2.31.15.401: Secondly, that 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.

Moreover, implied in the priority of God to the world is the conclusion that the world is not eternal:158 Leviathan 2.31.16.402: 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.

He continues by stressing against the Epicureans that God as ﬁrst cause is providential, that is, that He has care of the world: Leviathan 2.31.17.402: Fourthly, that they who attributing (as they think) ease to God, take from him the care of mankind; take from him his honour: for it takes away men’s love, and fear of him; which is the root of honour.

He then deduces several consequences from the fact that, in our limitation, we attribute inﬁnity to God: Leviathan 2.31.18.402: Fifthly, in those things that signify greatness, and power; to say he is ﬁnite, is not to honour him: for it is not a sign of the will to honour God, to attribute to him less than we can; and ﬁnite, is less than we can; because to ﬁnite, it is easy to add more. Leviathan 2.31.19.402: Therefore to attribute ﬁgure to him, is not honour; for all ﬁgure is ﬁnite: 157 Once one has had the realization that God is ﬁrst cause, the desire to worship is neither merely a psychological phenomenon, nor is its ground merely psychological, as, for example, fear or hope. Rather, as Hobbes’s procedure indicates, worship is itself guided by a logical process of deduction, whereby appropriate action, private and public, is ﬁtted to concept. Hobbes’s political theology is antithetical to mysticism. 158 On this point, see Lupoli, op. cit., pp. 604 ff.

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Leviathan 2.31.20.402: Nor to say we conceive, and imagine, or have an idea of him, in our mind: for whatsoever we conceive is ﬁnite: Leviathan 2.31.21.402: Nor to attribute to him parts, or totality; which are the attributes only of things ﬁnite: Leviathan 2.31.22.402: Nor to say he is in this, or that place: for whatsoever is in place, is bounded, and ﬁnite: Leviathan 2.31.23.402: Nor that he is moved, or resteth: for both these attributes ascribe to him place: Leviathan 2.31.24.402: Nor that there be more Gods than one; because it implies them all ﬁnite: for there cannot be more than one inﬁnite: Leviathan 2.31.25.402: Nor to ascribe to him (unless metaphorically, meaning not the passion but the effect) passions that partake of grief; as repentance, anger, mercy: or of want; as appetite, hope, desire; or of any passive faculty: for passion, is power limited by somewhat else.

Implicit in all our talk about God is the recognition that our words, while necessary and, within their limits, true, are nonetheless inapposite: Leviathan 2.31.26.402: And therefore when we ascribe to God a will, it is not to be understood, as that of man, for a rational appetite; but as the power, by which he effecteth every thing. Leviathan 2.31.27.403: Likewise when we attribute to him sight, and other acts of sense; as also knowledge, and understanding; which in us is nothing else, but a tumult of the mind, raised by external things that press the organical parts of man’s body: for there is no such thing in God; and, being things that depend on natural causes, cannot be attributed to him.

He concludes in an afﬁrmation of apophatic theology: Leviathan 2.31.28.403: He that will attribute to God, nothing but what is warranted by natural reason, must either use such negative attributes, as inﬁnite, eternal, incomprehensible; or superlatives, as most high, most great, and the like; or indeﬁnite, as good, just, holy, creator; and in such sense, as if he meant not to declare what he is, (for that were to circumscribe him within the limits of our fancy,) but how much we admire him, and how ready we would be to obey him; which is a sign of humility, and of a will to honour him as much as we can: For there is but one name to signify our conception of his nature, and that is, I AM: and but one name of his relation to us, and that is God; in which is contained Father, King, and Lord.

At this point, Hobbes describes the forms of divine worship prescribed by natural reason. These include signs of the intention to honor God, as, for example,

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through prayers; thanksgiving, including gifts and sacriﬁces, if they are the best, for these too are thanksgivings; faithfulness to God and swearing upon Him; considerate speech, as an argument of His power and our fear; avoidance of dispute concerning His nature, which is unfathomable; the use of beautiful phrases and words in prayer, for ‘the heathens did absurdly, to worship images for gods, but their doing it in verse, and with music, both of voice, and instruments, was reasonable.’159 But, worship in public and obedience to the laws of nature are the service most required by reason: Leviathan 2.31.35.405: Seventhly, reason directeth not only to worship God in secret; but also, and especially, in public, and in the sight of men: For without that, (that which in honour is most acceptable) the procuring others to honour him, is lost. Lastly, obedience to his laws (that is, in this case to the laws of nature,) is the greatest worship of all. For as obedience is more acceptable to God than sacriﬁce; so also to set light by his commandments, is the greatest of all contumelies. And these are the laws of that divine worship, which natural reason dictateth to private men.

While there are innumerable ways to manifest signs of honor to God, all of those that are public are within the competence of the sovereign authority variously to prescribe, forbid and reform. Indeed, the duty of the sovereign extends to commanding uniform, public worship: Leviathan 2.31.37.405: But seeing a commonwealth is but one person, it ought also to exhibit to God but one worship; which then it doth, when it commandeth it to be exhibited by private men, publicly. And this is public worship; the property whereof, is to be uniform: for those actions that are done differently, by different men, cannot be said to be a public worship. And therefore, where many sorts of worship be allowed, proceeding from the different religions of private men, it cannot be said there is any public worship, nor that the commonwealth is of any religion at all.

Natural theology, stemming from the concept of God as ﬁrst cause, and public worship, that is, natural, rational piety, play an integral role within Hobbes’s theory of the commonwealth, for it is into this formal structure of natural political theology that Hobbes places the Christian commonwealth. It is a chief responsibility of the sovereign to teach the people their duty under God and His natural laws, that is, ‘the Divine laws, or dictates of natural reason; which laws concern either the natural duties of one man to another, or the honour naturally due to our Divine Sovereign,’160 for prudence and self159 160

See Leviathan 2.31.34.404. See above, p. 299.

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interest alone, made manifest in ‘terror of legal punishment,’ are not sufﬁcient to guarantee compliance:161 Leviathan 2.30.3.376: And because, if the essential rights of sovereignty (speciﬁed before in the eighteenth chapter) be taken away, the commonwealth is thereby dissolved, and every man returneth into the condition, and calamity of a war with every other man, (which is the greatest evil that can happen in this life;) it is the ofﬁce of the sovereign, to maintain those rights entire; and consequently against his duty, ﬁrst, to transfer to another, or to lay from himself any of them… Secondly, it is against his duty, to let the people be ignorant, or misinformed of the grounds, and reasons of those his essential rights; because thereby men are easy to be seduced, and drawn to resist him, when the commonwealth shall require their use and exercise. Leviathan 2.30.4.377: And the grounds of these rights, have the rather need to be diligently, and truly taught; because they cannot be maintained by any civil law, or terror of legal punishment. For a civil law, that shall forbid rebellion (and such is all resistance to the essential rights of sovereignty), is not (as a civil law) any obligation, but by virtue only of the law of nature, that forbiddeth the violation of faith; which natural obligation if men know not, they cannot know the right of any law the sovereign maketh. And for the punishment, they take it but for an act of hostility; which when they think they have strength enough, they will endeavour by acts of hostility, to avoid.162

And, although Hobbes is often not sanguine about the ‘simple people,’ he is conﬁdent that they can proﬁtably receive such instruction from the sovereign:163 Leviathan 2.30.6.378: But they say again, that though the principles be right, yet common people are not of capacity enough to be made to understand them. I should be glad, that the rich, and potent subjects of a kingdom, or those that are accounted the most learned, were no less incapable than they. But all men know, that the obstructions to this kind of doctrine, proceed not so much from the difﬁculty of the matter, as from the interest of them that are to learn. Potent men, digest hardly any thing that setteth up a power to bridle 161 On this point, see F.C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes: An Interpretation of Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 212 ff., 239 ff., et passim. 162 Though he was critical of Hobbes, Samuel Parker made similar points in A Discourse on Ecclesiastical Polity; see Hans-Dieter Metzger, Thomas Hobbes und die englische Revolution, 1640–1660 (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1991), pp. 255 ff. 163 The role of the sovereign as public theologian was given concrete reality during Hobbes’s formative period, when King James’s knowledge of theology and advocacy of the episcopal system were vital political factors. In advocating for the episcopal system and uniform worship, he would be followed by his son, acting through the vigorous but impolitic Archbishop Laud, who, for example, sought to impose the Book of Common Prayer upon the Scottish Kirk. Cf. Gerald M. Mara, ‘Hobbes’s Counsel to Sovereigns,’ The Journal of Politics 50 (1988): 390–411.

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their affections; and learned men, any thing that discovereth their errors, and thereby lesseneth their authority: whereas the common people’s minds, unless they be tainted with dependance on the potent, or scribbled over with the opinions of their doctors, are like clean paper, ﬁt to receive whatsoever by public authority shall be imprinted in them… I conclude therefore, that in the instruction of the people in the essential rights (which are the natural, and fundamental laws) of sovereignty, there is no difﬁculty, (whilst a sovereign has his power entire,) but what proceeds from his own fault, or the fault of those whom he trusteth in the administration of the commonwealth; and consequently, it is his duty, to cause them so to be instructed; and not only his duty, but his beneﬁt also, and security, against the danger that may arrive to himself in his natural person, from rebellion.164

Maintenance of government itself requires the sovereign to propound the bases of sovereign right in natural obligation under God as ﬁrst cause, for, without knowledge of them, fear of punishment is not sufﬁcient support for any civil enactment. Instruction of the people in natural law and theology are thus both necessary incidents of sovereign power in Hobbes’s conception. In Hobbes’s account of religious belief, one may mark an important difference from Hegel. For, although the church is a department of the state in Hobbes’s Erastian conception, the extinction of ecclesiastical independence, much less its superiority, vis-à-vis the state, nonetheless privileges an inviolate preserve of thought in the individual, though this does not encompass mere subjectivity.165

164

See also Leviathan 2.18.16.236, discussing the separation of governmental powers:

And this division is it, whereof it is said, a kingdom divided in itself cannot stand: for unless this division precede, division into opposite armies can never happen. If there had not ﬁrst been an opinion received of the greatest part of England, that these powers were divided between the King, and the Lords, and the House of Commons, the people had never been divided and fallen into this civil war; ﬁrst between those that disagreed in politics; and after between the dissenters about the liberty of religion; which have so instructed men in this point of sovereign right, that there be few now (in England,) that do not see, that these rights are inseparable, and will be so generally acknowledged at the next return of peace; and so continue, till their miseries are forgotten; and no longer, except the vulgar be better taught than they have hitherto been. 165 Conscience for Hobbes is originally and properly a form of shared knowledge and only improperly arbitrium; see Leviathan 1.7.4.131. Sovereign power may coerce religious behavior in conformity with its own desires, subject to natural law, without however implicating conscientious, that is, rational, religious scruple on the part of the subject. As Hobbes explains in chapter 26, ‘Divine positive laws (for natural laws being eternal, and universal, are all divine,) are those, which being the commandments of God, (not from all eternity, nor universally addressed to all men, but only to a certain people, or to certain persons,) are declared for such, by those whom God hath authorized to declare them.’ The question, apart from how they may be known, concerns the source of the binding force of the sovereign’s religious laws:

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In contrast to Hegel, who sharply criticized Kant’s ethical formalism, it is only by separating (public) reason, in the form of knowledge of God as ﬁrst cause, from (private) faith in the promises of God as person that Hobbes solves the key difﬁculty that he has posed for himself in Leviathan, namely, how one knows whose law to obey, God’s or man’s, when they seem to conﬂict: Leviathan 2.31.1.395: There wants166 only, for the entire knowledge of civil duty, to know what are those laws of God. For without that, a man knows not, when he is commanded any thing by the civil power, whether it be contrary to the law of God, or not: and so, either by too much civil obedience, offends the Divine Majesty, or through fear of offending God, transgresses the commandments of the commonwealth. To avoid both these rocks, it is necessary to know what are the laws divine. And seeing the knowledge of all law, dependeth on the knowledge of the sovereign power; I shall say something in that which followeth, of the KINGDOM OF GOD.

The laws of the God of faith cannot contradict the laws of the commonwealth because they are co-extensive: the biblical God has ordered the faithful to be

Leviathan 2.26.41.331: But for the second, how he can be bound to obey them; it is not so hard. For if the law declared, be not against the law of nature (which is undoubtedly God’s law) and he undertake to obey it, he is bound by his own act; bound I say to obey it, but not bound to believe it: for men’s belief, and interior cogitations, are not subject to the commands, but only to the operation of God, ordinary, or extraordinary. Faith of supernatural law, is not a fulﬁlling, but only an assenting to the same; and not a duty that we exhibit to God, but a gift which God freely giveth to whom he pleaseth; as also unbelief is not a breach of any of his laws; but a rejection of them all, except the laws natural… [I]n a commonwealth, a subject that has no certain and assured revelation particularly to himself concerning the will of God, is to obey for such, the command of the commonwealth: for if men were at liberty, to take for God’s commandments, their own dreams, and fancies, or the dreams and fancies of private men; scarce two men would agree upon what is God’s commandment; and yet in respect of them, every man would despise the commandments of the commonwealth. I conclude therefore, that in all things not contrary to the moral law, (that is to say, to the law of nature,) all subjects are bound to obey that for divine law, which is declared to be so, by the laws of the commonwealth. Which also is evident to any man’s reason; for whatsoever is not against the law of nature, may be made law in the name of them that have the sovereign power; and there is no reason men should be the less obliged by it, when it is propounded in the name of God. Besides, there is no place in the world where men are permitted to pretend other commandments of God, than are declared for such by the commonwealth. Christian states punish those that revolt from Christian religion, and all other states, those that set up any religion by them forbidden. For in whatsoever is not regulated by the commonwealth, it is equity, (which is the law of nature, and therefore an eternal law of God) that every man equally enjoy his liberty. 166

That is, lacks.

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subject to the higher powers;167 thus, when there is in fact sovereign authority, to obey the law is consistent with self-interest, required by right reason and commanded by faith. Because the restraints upon religious behavior are imposed by reason, nature and the concept of God as ﬁrst cause, they apply equally to the situation of the believer in Islam. While interior belief cannot be coerced by public authority, public confession of the sovereign’s faith during corporate worship can be required and failure to comply made subject to punishment, and here Hobbes confronts a problem characteristic of his era of conﬂicting confessions, namely, religious dissimulation.168 His answer is also characteristic: Leviathan 3.42.11.527: But what (may some object) if a king, or a senate, or other sovereign person forbid us to believe in Christ? To this I answer, that such forbidding is of no effect; because belief, and unbelief never follow men’s commands. Faith is a gift of God, which man can neither give, nor take away by promise of rewards, or menaces of torture. And if it be further asked, what if we be commanded by our lawful prince, to say with our tongue, we believe not; must we obey such command? Profession with the tongue is but an external thing, and no more than any other gesture whereby we signify our obedience; and wherein a Christian, holding ﬁrmly in his heart the faith of Christ, hath the same liberty which the prophet Elisha allowed to Naaman the Syrian. Naaman was converted in his heart to the God of Israel; for he saith (2 Kings 5. 17) Thy servant will henceforth offer neither burnt offering, nor sacriﬁce unto other gods, but unto the Lord. In this thing the Lord pardon thy servant, that when my master goeth into the house of Rimmon to worship there, and he leaneth on my hand; and I bow myself in the house of Rimmon; when I bow myself in the house of Rimmon, the Lord pardon thy servant in this thing. This the prophet approved, and bid him Go in peace. Here Naaman believed in his heart; but by bowing before the idol Rimmon, he denied the true God in effect, as much as if he had done it with his lips. But then what shall we answer to our Saviour’s saying, Whosoever denieth me before men, I will deny him before my Father which is in heaven? This we may say, that whatsoever a subject, as Naaman was, is compelled to [do] 167 Hobbes discusses Paul’s injunction in Romans 13:1–6, to be subject to the higher powers in Leviathan 3.42.10.526 and 3.42.102.589. 168 Naaman and Nicodemus, Jesus’ reluctant disciple, were often cited in this period 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), pp. 61–84. For dissimulation in Bodin, see Diego Quaglioni, ‘Jean Bodino Nicodemita?’ Il Pensiero Politico 17, (1984): 319–334. Quaglioni asserts that religious dissimulation bespeaks its advocates’ awareness of the impossibility of a profound renovation of religious sentiment.

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in obedience to his sovereign, and doth it not in order to his own mind, but in order to the laws of his country, that action is not his, but his sovereign’s; nor is it he that in this case denieth Christ before men, but his governor, and the law of his country. If any man shall accuse this doctrine, as repugnant to true, and unfeigned Christianity; I ask him, in case there should be a subject in any Christian commonwealth, that should be inwardly in his heart of the Mahomedan religion, whether if his sovereign command him to be present at the divine service of the Christian church, and that on pain of death, he think that Mahomedan obliged in conscience to suffer death for that cause, rather than to obey that command of his lawful prince. If he say, he ought rather to suffer death, then he authorizeth all private men to disobey their princes, in maintenance of their religion, true, or false: if he say, he ought to be obedient, then he alloweth to himself, that which he denieth to another, contrary to the words of our Saviour, Whatsoever you would that men should do unto you, that do ye unto them; and contrary to the law of nature, (which is the indubitable everlasting law of God) Do not to another, that which thou wouldest not he should do unto thee.

In addition to Christ’s injunction, the Golden Rule, as a precept of natural justice, requires Christians to allow to the follower of what they consider a false religion that freedom to dissemble which they would unjustly deny to members of their own polity and religion under similar circumstances.169 The ‘indubitable everlasting law of God’ establishes universal criteria of justice which revealed religion does not and, certainly in the case of Christianity, cannot, contravene.170 This is not necessarily to excuse those in power for forcing external compliance: 169 On the necessity of rejecting Aristotle’s ‘localism’ in favor of a theory of natural laws whose force all could recognize, see 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. 170 It should be clear that no particular agreement among or within groups of people could establish what Hobbes describes as the ‘indubitable everlasting law of God,’ so that any given social contract cannot be the source of such natural laws or their universal obligation. Such laws are both natural and morally binding, as he says in distinguishing natural and positive laws:

Leviathan 2.26.41.332: Another division of laws, is into natural and positive. Natural are those which have been laws from all eternity; and are called not only natural, but also moral laws; consisting in the moral virtues, as justice, equity, and all habits of the mind that conduce to peace, and charity; of which I have already spoken in the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth chapters [of Leviathan]. Positive, are those which have not been from eternity; but have been made laws by the will of those that have had the sovereign power over others; and are either written, or made known to men, by some other argument of the will of their legislator. I hope to write more on this subject in the future.

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As to the laws of the Gentiles, concerning religion in the primitive times of the church, I confess they were contrary to Christian faith. But none of their laws, nor terrors, nor a man’s own will, are able to take away faith, though they can compel to an external obedience; and though I may blame the Ethnic princes for compelling men to speak what they thought not,171 yet I absolve not all those that have had the power in Christian churches from the same fault.172

Neither is it to deny revealed religion; it is to insist upon its character as grounded in faith in a revelation, not knowledge. Through its universality, the purely abstract, formal concept of God as ﬁrst cause and the deductions from His attributes which structure public instruction and rational worship due the Divine Majesty insure that its criteria apply in all places and all times, though with inﬁnite variation in individual circumstances, depending upon the requirements of the public theologian. This is not to make Christianity into a civil religion, at least as Rousseau understood that term;173 for, while the subject outwardly and conscientiously complies with the sovereign’s commands regarding worship and doctrine, inner belief and conviction, according to Hobbes, cannot be touched: ‘Thought is free.’174 ‘To obey is one thing, to believe is another.’175 ‘Belief, and unbelief never follow men’s commands. Faith is a gift of God, which man can neither give, nor take away by promise of rewards, or menaces of torture.’176 ‘[The sovereign] may oblige me to obedience, so, as not by act or word to declare I believe him not; but not to think any otherwise than my reason persuades me.’177 Finally: 171 Hobbes, however, urges sovereigns to lead and prescribe the forms of public worship to be used in their lands; see above, p. 302. 172 Answer EW IV, p. 340. See Robert Louis Wilken, ‘In Defense of Constantine,’ First Things 112 (2001): 36–40, for a discussion of the intolerance of paganism, especially that of Porphyry. See also Appendix §§ 133. 173 For Rousseau, not unlike Machiavelli and Nietzsche, ‘Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always proﬁts by such a regime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes.’ See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract trans. by G.D. Cole (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 436–439. The opposite of such criticism appears in Hobbes, who in fact privileges precisely that freedom of thought which must undermine those ‘social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen and faithful subject.’ Ibid. See the seminal article on this subject by Robert N. Bellah, ‘Civil Religion in America,’ Dædalus 96 (1967): 1–21. Hobbes’s appeal to his fellow-citizens is not to their sentiments but to their reason, faith and interest. In emphasizing free thought in this context, he perpetuates precisely that religious inwardness that Marx critiqued in his essay on the Jewish question. 174 See Leviathan 3.37.13.476. 175 See Answer, EW IV, p. 339. 176 See Leviathan 3.42.11.527. 177 See Leviathan 3.32.5.410.

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Leviathan 3.42.80.575: In sum, [the sovereign] hath the supreme power in all causes, as well ecclesiastical, as civil, as far as concerneth actions, and words, for those only are known, and may be accused; and of that which cannot be accused, there is no judge at all, but God, that knoweth the heart.

The divide between the public and the private that Hobbes enshrines in his system is antithetical to developing the ‘habits of the heart’ that mark an effective civil religion.178 Rather, it is to make rational that which is public in Christianity, in response to the rational dictate incident to our concept of God as ﬁrst cause and in the interest of civil peace. Given Hobbes’s emphasis on the Trinity and his acceptance of miracle, his doctrine of the church and religion is not Deism, though he may have contributed to it. Conclusion We have traced a few lines in Hobbes’s development that led through the years in Paris. It seems fair to say that, although he accommodated himself to the new intellectual and social parameters within which he lived, he did not greatly change the address of his studies, at least as regards religion and politics, and his eye remained ﬁxed on the English political situation. But, while he grew both as a theorist and in his willingness to express what he recognized were controversial views, he likely long suppressed his true views regarding the materiality of God for fear of social opprobrium and religious persecution. He did not change his views, however, as is evident in his avowal and defense of them late in life. The link we have presumed between his theology and his physics is largely undeveloped in the English Leviathan, so there is an unstated content at work behind the text. This may be one reason why some have sought to read double meanings into it, though we may doubt whether its avowal was necessary for his purposes in that work or would have helped its reception. When he states his views, the link is described from within strictly delimited noetic parameters. In the 1651 text, the ‘God of causes’ does however play a prominent role in his theory of the public person as public theologian by way of the religion of ‘rational worship.’ These elements mark the culmination of several themes that were present in The Elements, developed in De Cive and then elaborated in Leviathan with an innovative and striking theory about Aristotle’s theory of language and its inﬂuence in Christian theology.

178 This element in Hobbes’s thought upset Carl Schmitt, who saw in it the ‘seed of death that destroyed the mighty Leviathan from the inside and killed the mortal god;’ quoted in Wolfgang Palaver, ‘Hobbes and the Katéchon: The Secularization of Sacriﬁcial Christianity,’ Contagion 2 (1995): 57–74, p. 69.

AFTERWORD Through a complex and interesting process in the history of political ideas that is itself worthy of study, Hobbes has become a paragon of modernity, the touchstone for many of our ideas about how we differ from what has gone before. This is true no less in the era of so-called post-modernity. But, while it is clear that, in order to understand him, we must see him as a ﬁgure of his era, pursuing this approach narrowly has not yielded anything like unanimity regarding some essential aspects of his thinking. Nowhere is this assessment truer than with regard to Hobbes’s theology. It was always amazing that this aspect of his thinking could be denigrated and ignored, not only in relation to the other aspects of his theoretical project but, in particular, in itself, given Hobbes’s very large investment in thinking about religious issues and their possible resolutions. We may view Hobbes’s religious teachings skeptically, for example, as subversive of Christianity, or, as was done here, we may see them as organically derived from and supportive of Christianity, at least of a certain type. In any case, the recent turn in interest to Hobbes’s religious views bespeaks the necessity of considering the doctrines which Hobbes puts forward in themselves and not only within the context of his own thought and times but also within the context of the history of theology, especially Protestant theology. They can no longer simply be laughed away; they should be interpreted. In undertaking that task, we do no more than repeat the course which Hobbes’s own contemporaries followed in often condemning him, though we are obliged neither to repeat their errors nor to adopt their prejudices. And, of course, his contemporaries were not of one mind with respect to his theology. Nor do his contemporaries’ judgments pre-empt our own judgments within the larger context of the history of political thought as to his intentions, success and failures. Hobbes, as presented here, is less skeptical and subversive and perhaps more traditional, if no less radical, than other treatments have suggested. In such a comparison, he is both more at home in his era and stands higher above it by reason of individual genius. It would be a failure of interpretation to see Hobbes or any thinker as a prism in which each interpreter may read his or her own predilections. And, the best check upon such fragmentation and dispersion of interpretation is careful attention to the text itself, hence the numerous quotations found in these pages.

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Afterword

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Unpublished Fitzgerald, Edward Thomas. “Thomas Hobbes’s Philosophy of Language: A Study of Naming and Signifying,” Master’s thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1961. Malcolm, Noel. “Thomas Hobbes and Voluntarist Theology.” Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, n.d. Reiche, Harald Anton Thrap. “A History of the Concepts !εοπρετς and εροπρετς.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1955.

INDEX OF SUBJECTS Accommodationism, 189, 243–244, 262 Act of Supremacy, 115 n, 168, 169 n, 170 Adoptionists, 47 n Altar of Victory, 166 n–167 n Anabaptists, 281 Analogia entis; analogy of being Hobbes’s opposition to, 123 n, 297 n–298 n Angels, 100–102, 158, 263 materialist conception of, 150 n, 158–160, 188–189 Anthropomorphites, 140–142, 152 Apollinarians, 110 n Apology to the Augsburg Confession, 32 Apophasis, 230 n, 267 Apophatic theology, 297, 301 Apostle’s Creed, 52, 58, 60 Aramaic, 237 Arianism, 47 n, 108–110, 132 n, 151 n Athanasian Creed, 56, 58, 172 Atheism early modern deﬁnitions of, 25 n– 26 n punishment of, 118–120 Audianism, 141 n Baptism, 58 Bible. See Scripture Blasphemy punishment of, 120–122, 140–142 Body Hobbes’s deﬁnition of, 90 Bolognese Glossators, 127 n Cambridge Platonists: opposition to Hobbes among, 213 n Canon, biblical formation of, 92 n

Cartesians, 224 n–225 n “Catholic” Hobbes’s deﬁnition of, 104 n Catholic Church belief in immortality of soul, 224 n, 230–231 corruption within, 220 importance of tradition for, 61 n linkages to Presbyterianism of, 281–282 pagan inﬂuences on, 179 persecution by, 112 usurpation of governmental authority by, 230–231 view toward rituals of, 93 n Christianity, early, 29 n, 42 n encounter with Greek thought of, 182–183 heresy within, 102 independency of, 233–234 purity of, 220 view toward life in, 223 Church of England conﬂict within, 144 view toward rituals of, 93 n Church of the Holy Sepulcher, 125 n Church distinction between visible and invisible in, 107 n government of, 13 n Hobbes’s deﬁnition of, 162 lack of legislative power of, 280– 281 Church-state relations, 13, 20, 27, 38, 104–108, 108 n–109 n, 112–114, 128 n–129 n, 180 n–181 n, 196, 232– 233, 280 n, 281–288, 302–308

338

Index of Subjects

Civil Religion, 308 n Civil War (English), 4–5, 144–145, 211–212, 251, 304 n causes of, 195 Civil worship, 292 Clergy low standards of in Elizabethan England, 133 n Comma Johanneum, 96 n Commonwealth, Christian, 272–273, 288–289, 294, 302–303 Hobbes’s theory of, 299 Confession of Augsburg, 92 n Conscience freedom from coercion of, 232–233, 304, 304 n–305 n, 306–309 Copula, 42, 44 n Hobbes’s deﬁnition of, 40 n De Corpore, 4, 45 Council of Antioch, 132 n Council of Constantinople, 110 Council of Ephesus, 110 Council of Nicaea, 58, 59 n, 102, 108– 110, 124, 132 n, 150, 151 n, 152, 164, 166 n Council of Trent, 284 Council of Vienne, 18, 224 n Culture, Greek expansion of, 236 Curiosity, 295 n, 297 Day of Judgment, 66–68 Death, eternal, 291 n Deism, 235 Demonology Hobbes’s critique of, 267 Demons presence of in Scripture, 236 The Devil of Mascon, 218 n Divine commands, 269–273, 275–276 communication of, 273–274 Divine impassibility, doctrine of, 192 n Divine worship, 292 Ecclesiastes, 18, 70

Economic Trinity, 180, 192–193, 196– 201, 206 n deﬁnition of, 193 Election, 31 n The Elements of Law, 252 Elizabethan religious settlement, 114 n Epicureans, 300 Episcopalianism opposition to in early modern England, 212 Erastianism deﬁnition of, 126 n Essays and Reviews, 177 n Essence, 84 Aristotle’s view of, 229–230 Hobbes’s deﬁnition of, 82 Eternal life, 66 Eternity Hobbes’s concept of, 225 Experimentalism Hobbes’s rejection of, 78 n–79 n Fairy world, 214, 230 Faith, 270–271, 273 n, 276–278, 306 differentiation of from knowledge, 36 n–37 n Hobbes’s deﬁnition of, 283 nature of, 287 Fall of Humankind, 66 Fanaticism, religious, 214 Fear distinction between rational and irrational, 298 n of God, 298 role of superstition in, 266–267, 274–275, 294–297 Festa du santu che balla, 215–216 Fifth Lateran Council, 18, 25, 224 n Filioque, 193 First Bishops’ War, 146 n Forms, theory of Aristotle’s rejection of, 227–228 “Fountain of Wisdon,” 84 n, 85 n The Frogs, 8 n–9 n Fronde, 251

Index of Subjects Fundamentalism, 177 n Gehenna, 54 Das Geistige, 211–212 General Council of Chalcedon, 110 Ghosts Hobbes’s rejection of, 265 Gnosticism, 185 Goshen, 54 Gospel of John, 38–39 Government separation of powers within, 304 n threat posed by religious fanaticism to, 212–213, 226–227 Gratia infusa, 226 De Haeretico Comburendo, 137 n Hebrew decline in use of, 237 n Heresy, 98–143 deﬁnition of, 128 Hobbes’s deﬁnition of, 104 n punishment of, 122–142 High Commission, Court of, 11, 115 n, 136 n–137 n abolition of, 146, 147 n Historical Narration Concerning Heresy, 47 n History revealing of God within, 269 Homoousios, 151 Horizon (term) history of, 192 n Humans natural state of, 302 Hypostasis, 56, 76–78, 86–88 Idols worship of, 267 Immanent Trinity, 192–193, 199–201, 206 n deﬁnition of, 193 Impassibility, 185–186 Incorporeal substances, 92, 227–228 Hobbes’s rejection of, 19–20, 22–23, 25, 228 Independency, 13 n, 233–234

339

Ineffability thesis, 188 n, 298 Infused virtue, theory of political dangers of, 202–203 Injunctions, 168 Jansenism, 68 n Jesus Seminar, 177 Judaism, rabbinic subordination of spirit to law in, 240 belief in evil spirits within, 240–241 Judaizers, 100 n Justice, 42 n Justinian’s Code, 126, 127 n Kingdom of darkness, 272, 293 Kingdom of God future nature of, 280–281, 283–285 Language abstract aspects of, 80–82 Hobbes’s philosophy of, 191 Latin as medium of learned communication, 5 n Law, 116–118, 270–271, 276, 283 usus civilis of, 292 n usus didacticus of, 292 n–293 n usus theologicus of, 292 n Laws of nature. See natural laws Lectures on the Psalter, 30–31 Leviathan, 144–173, 252 discussion of church-state relations in, 180 n–181 n English edition of, 3–5 important place of theology in, 182 intended readership of, 224–225 Latin Appendix to, 7, 11, 15–34, 175, 253–254 Latin translation of, 1–15 title page of, 14, 104 n–105 n Libertines, 60 n Logos idea of, 42 n–43 n Long Parliament, 146 n Manichaeanism, 126

340

Index of Subjects

Materialism attack on Greek idealism of, 267 Ministers lack of coercive power of, 286–287 Miracles, 273 cessation of, 214 n, 226 n, 287 Modalism, 186 Monophysites, 110 n Mortalism, 68 n–69 n Munster, 281 n–282 n Natural law, 116–118, 191–192, 294, 305 n centrality of theology in, 279 Natural laws, 268 n, 269–273, 275–276, 278 n, 287–290, 302–304, 307 n Natural reason, 299 prescriptions for worship of, 300–302 Natural theology, 183, 268, 279, 294, 302 relationship to science of, 296–297 role in government and law of, 278 n Natural-law tradition inﬂuence of on Hobbes, 268 New Testament, 283–284 opposition to punishing heretics of, 138–140 Nicene Creed, 15, 16 n, 36–92, 108, 133 n, 150, 172, 184 Nicomachean Ethics accommodations to popular religion in, 227 Nominalism Hobbes’s adherence to, 78 n, 82 n– 83 n Nunc-stans, concept of, 225 n Oath ex ofﬁcio, 136 n–137 n Oikonomia, 187 Old Testament: opposition to witchcraft in, 238 Pantheism Hobbes’s rejection of, 149 n Pantheon, 111 n Paracelsians, 224 n

Persona, 207–209 Hobbes’s deﬁnition of, 84 Peter Pence and Dispensation Act, 105 n Phaedo, 71 n Philippists, 293 n Philosophy, Classical inﬂuence on Western political thought of, 221–222 Philosophy, Greek inﬂuence on Christianity of, 41 n, 43 n, 102, 175–178, 181 n, 183– 184, 199 217–221, 224, 226–227, 230–231, 265–266 inﬂuence on Judaism of, 240 Pneutomachi, 110 n Possession, 236 early modern theories of, 217 n Hobbes’s rejection of, 214–216, 242–244, 261, 263 Pregnancy, 74 Presbyterianism, 13 n, 145 n, 233 linkages to Catholicism of, 281–282 Pride’s Purge, 233 n, 282 n Proclamation concept of, 184 n–185 n Promise, doctrine of, 31–33, 265, 277 Hobbes’s deﬁnition of, 162 Hobbes’s theology of, 292–293 Protestant Reformation, 144, 232–233 Protestantism inﬂuence on Hobbes of, 14–15, 34, 55 n, 156 n, 178, 203–204, 235, 271 n, 276, 297 n–298 n Punishment, 116–120 Hobbes’s understanding of, 116 n– 117 n Purgatory, 19–20, 23 Puritans view toward rituals of, 93 n Reason ability to determine God as ﬁrst cause of, 274–275

Index of Subjects connection to soul, 17–18 Hobbes’s view of, 72 n–73 n inability to describe nature of world, 298 n inability to know God as person, 297 n Reformation. See Protestant Reformation Religion, Greek, 41 n importance of spirit world in, 229– 230, 262 Religion, pagan inﬂuence on Christianity of, 213– 214, 262 n, 265–267 inﬂuence on Judaism of, 213–214, 236–237, 240 Religion, popular philosophic critique of, 294–295 Religion Hobbes’s deﬁnition of, 29 importance of for Hobbes, 14, 203–204 origins of, 26–29 Resurrection of the Body, 60–68, 223, 264–265, 281 Revelation, 269 Roman Catholic Church. See Catholic Church Root and Branch Bill, 212, 233 n Sacriﬁce, 294–295 Sadducees, 70, 158, 159 n, 218 n Salvation history of, 288 n Scholasticism, 22, 254, 268 distinction between existence and essence in, 85 n Hobbes’s opposition to, 220 Science relationship to natural theology of, 296–297 Scottish Covenant, 146 n Scripture accommodation to human understanding of, 243 n–244 n, 262

341

Second Bishops’ War, 146 n Second Coming (of Christ), 280 Second Council of Constantinople, 58, 59 n Sect Hobbes’s deﬁnition of, 98 Secularization, 72 n Separated essences, theory of, 202, 227–228 Hobbes’s rejection of, 228 Short Parliament, 146 n Social contract, 307 n Socinianism, 186 Sola scriptura, 36 n–37 n, 68 n, 92 n Soul, 194, 263–264 debate over immortality of, 15– 18, 20, 23–25, 60–72, 160–162, 223–225, 285 n material nature of, 258 n mortality of, 254, 264–265 relationship with body, 216 n–217 n Sovereign as public theologian, 302–304 duty of Christians to obey, 289–291 role in worship of, 302 sacerdotal aspects of, 166–170, 255, 302–309 Spirit discussion of in Old Testament, 238–240 Hobbes’s deﬁnition of, 90 Spirits, 231, 236–245, 261, 282 n Hobbes’s view toward, 218–219 material nature of, 241–245, 258 n, 262–263 Spirits, incorporeal, 226 Spiritualism, Platonic, 193–194 Star Chamber, 115 n Stoicism, 52 n–53 n, 274 n views of immortality of soul, 62 n Story of the Cross, 67 n Subordinationism, 186, 198–199 Substantia Hobbes’s deﬁnition of, 78

342

Index of Subjects

Superstition, 28, 294 Synod of Dort, 258 n Tartarus, 54 Third Council of Ephesus, 74 n Thirty-nine Articles, 92, 92 n–93 n, 135 n, 168 n Toleration, religious, 232–234, 304–309 Transubstantiation, 285 n Hobbes’s opposition to, 220, 226, 242 Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, 64 Tree of Life, 64 Trinitarianism development of, 184–187, 192–194 De Trinitate, 150 n Trinity, 48–50, 56 n, 86–90, 94–96, 132, 156, 158 n–159 n, 179–180, 184–187,

191–202, 205–207, 209–210, 280, 281 n, 309 debate over, 102, 108–110 missions and processions of, 193– 194, 201–202, 206 Tritheism, 209–210 Westminster Assembly of Divines, 282 n Westminster Confession of Faith, 196, 271 n, 282 n Will Hobbes’s deﬁnition of, 202 Witchcraft, 261 early modern views toward, 217 n– 218 n Witches presence in Scripture of, 236, 248 Worship, 299–302

INDEX OF NAMES Aaron (brother of Moses), 239 Adam, 64–68 Adrian IV, 128 n–129 n Aeneas, 55 n Agrippa of Nettersheim, Cornelius, 261 Ahaziah, 240 n–241 n Alcabizio, 261 Alchindi, 261 Alexander III, 126, 127 n Alexander the Great, 227 Alfragani, 261 Ambrose, 166 n–167 n Amos, 42, 239–240 Anchises, 55 n Andromeda, 216 n Anne of Austria, 251 n Antoine Del Rio, Martin, 261 Apelles, 148 Aquinas, Thomas, 18 n, 22 n, 40 n, 46 n, 73 n, 85 n, 176, 297 n Arendt, Hannah, 20 n–21 n, 227 Aristophanes, 8–9 Aristotle, 17, 19, 27 n, 39 n, 44, 44 n– 45 n, 48, 70 , 80–82, 90, 176, 203, 216 n, 245, 274 n, 282 n, 307 n ﬂight from Athens of, 227 Hobbes’s view of, 204 n inﬂuence on Christianity of, 226– 227, 261, 265–266 political philosophy of, 221 theory of form and matter of, 228– 230, 261 theory of language of, 81 n, 222, 262 n, 265 Arius, 108, 109 n, 110, 124, 125 n Athanasius, 48, 57 n, 64–66, 86, 124, 125 n, 151 n, 164 n

Aubrey, John, 1 n Audaeus, 141 n, 154 n Augustine of Hippo, 50 n, 66 n, 93 n, 126, 152 n, 164 n, 175 n, 180, 190, 286 concept of soul of, 194 missions and processions of trinity in, 194–195, 202 Trinitarianism of, 194–195 Baal-zebub. See Beelzebub Bacon, Francis, 120 n Bancroft, Richard, 134 n, 137 n Bandinelli, Rolando, 128 n Barbarossa, Frederick, 126, 127 n, 128 n–129 n Barth, Karl, 183–184 analogia ﬁdei of, 123 n Basil of Caesarea, 183 Bayle, Pierre, 120 n Beelzebub, 240–241 Bellarmine, Robert, 54, 59 n, 86, 88–90, 175, 208–209, 285 n, 289–290 Berkel, Abraham, 6 n Beza, Theodore, 285 n–286 n Blaeu, Joan, 1–2 Blaeu, Pieter, 1–2, 5 n–6 n Blaeu, Willem Janszoon, 2 n Blumenberg, Hans, 53, 67 n, 268 n Bodéüs, Richard, 227 n Bodin, Jean, 261 Boniface IV, 111 n Boniface VIII, 18 n Bosse, Abraham (engraver), 105 n Boyle, Robert, 212 opposition to materialism of, 218 n Bramhall, John, 6–7, 158 n–159 n, 176, 180 n, 195, 199–200, 208, 231 n, 271–272

344

Index of Names

Browne, Thomas, 217 n Bultmann, Rudolf, 177 n Caird, Edward, 177 Callisthenes, 227 Calvin, John, 31 n, 266 Kingdom of God in, 284–286 Cappadocian Fathers, 192–193, 206 Cardano, Girolamo, 260, 261 Cavendish, Charles, 258 n Cavendish, William, 212 Charles I, 8–9, 109 n, 114, 146 n–147 n, 212, 234, 251, 260 n, 303 n Charles II, 7–9 Chillingworth, William, 93 n Christ. See Jesus Christ Church Fathers, 48 Cicero support for right of rebellion, 221– 222 use of persona in, 207 Clement of Alexandria, 193 Clement V, 18 n Coke, Edward, 137 n Constantine, 13, 38 n, 108, 122, 126, 150, 166 n Constantius II, 166 n Cosin, John, 159 n Cramner, Thomas, 93 n Cromwell, Oliver, 211, 234 Cudworth, Ralph, 212 Curley, Edwin, 180 Cyprian, 58 Cyril of Alexandria, 74 n, 94, 141 n Cyril of Jerusalem, 205 n, 206 D’Abano, Pietro, 261 Damascene, John, 84, 85 n David, 285 n Davies, John, 6 n Dee, John, 261 Descartes, René, 187, 211, 284 n–285 n, 298 n hostility toward Hobbes of, 257– 259 Diocletian, 290

Dioscorus of Alexandria, 110, 111 n Edward I, 105 n Edward VI, 108 n, 168 n Elias, 264 Elijah, 224 n, 241 n Elisha, 165 n, 306 Elizabeth I, 92 n, 106 n, 108 n, 112–114, 115 n, 128, 132–134, 137 n, 168–170 Enoch, 224 n Enos, 224 n, 264 Epicurus, 62 n Epiphanius, 88, 100 n, 141 n, 175 Erastus, 126 Esau, 254 n Euclid, 21–22 Eusebius, 130–132, 151 n, 166 n Eutyches, 110, 110 n–111 n Eve, 64 Evelyn, John, 251 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 177 n Fludd, Robert, 261 Foscarini, Paolo Antonio, 175 n Fuller, Thomas, 136 n Galen, 216 n Galileo, Galilei, 175 n Gassendi, Pierre, 5 Gauthier, David, 279 n Glanville, Joseph, 218 n, 224 n–225 n God the Father, 44–46, 57 n, 86–88, 94, 96, 156, 158 n–159 n, 180, 184, 187, 193, 194, 195–201 God the Son. See Jesus Christ God, 190, 254 as ﬁrst cause, 259, 268–280, 292, 294–297, 299–300, 302, 304–305, 308–309 as king of Israelites, 122 as legislator, 289 as person, 268–270, 277–279, 292, 297 n attributes of, 300–301 attribution of inﬁnity to, 300–301 care for world of, 300 corporeality of, 255–259, 285 n, 309

Index of Names existence of, 154 n–155 n impossibility of proving existence of, 229 n incomprehensibility of, 191, 255– 258, 262–263, 269–270, 297–299, 301 materialist conception of, 148–154, 253, 257 n–258 n modes of communication with humans of, 237–240 monarchy of, 186, 187, 201, 206 natural kingdom of, 274–278, 298– 299 omnipotence of, 270, 274–275 prophetic kingdom of, 274, 276– 277, 278 n, 280, 283, 299 will of, 271–272 Goodrich, Richard, 92 n Gratian, 166 n Gregory of Nazianzus, 183 Gregory of Nyssa, 183 Hale, Matthew, 217 n Heath, Nicholas, 170 n Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 204 n, 213, 231 n, 232, 235 n, 288 n, 294 n, 304 judgment on Hobbes of, 211 Heidegger, Martin, 21, 82 n, 213 Helmont, J. B. van, 218 n Henry II, 128 n Henry VIII, 105 n, 106 n, 108 n Hermes, 43 n Hesiod, 54, 55 n, 219 n, 294 Hippocrates, 260 Hippolytus, 187 Hoard, Samuel, 66 n Hobbes, Thomas accusations of heresy toward, 6–12, 148–150 advocacy for liberty of conscience by, 233–235, 276 attack on scholasticism of, 268 attempt to de-Hellenize Christianity by, 177, 179–181, 183,

345

189, 206, 210, 213–214, 217–219, 226–227, 235, 267–268, 292 belief in mortality of soul of, 22–25, 223–225, 230–231, 254, 264–265 biblical interpretation of, 16–17, 34, 225–226 civil theology of, 72 n, 93 n collapsing of distinction between temporal and spiritual in, 214, 222–223 correspondence with Descartes of, 257–259 criticism of scholasticism in, 203– 204 current interest in theology of, 180–181 determinism of, 271–272 development of thought, 252–255, 264, 278, 309 distinction between God as ﬁrst cause and God as person by, 254, 268–269, 272, 277–280, 281 n, 305 distinction between God as purpose and cause by, 254 distinction between law and faith by, 270–271, 276, 288, 292 distinction between natural and positive laws by, 307 n distinction between natural laws and divine commands by, 269– 273, 275–276, 279, 287–288 divorce between theology and philosophy in, 278 n doctrine of Holy Spirit of, 196 Erastianism of, 104–108, 108 n– 109 n, 112–114, 196, 281–284, 286–288, 291–292, 304–308 exile of, 225, 251 foreign correspondence of, 1–2 importance of “person” in thought of, 206–208 importance of religion in thought of, 211

346

Index of Names

interest in occult of, 260–261 interpretation of “spirit” in Scriptures of, 238–239 loyalty to Charles I of, 253 n materialism of, 148, 149 n, 164 n, 178–179, 187–190, 208, 224 n, 229–232, 235, 237–239, 241–245, 253, 255–262, 278 n, 309 missions and processions of Trinity in, 201–202, 205–206 natural theism of, 274 natural theology of, 268 opposition to Aristotle of, 245 opposition to Catholicism of, 214 n, 234, 281–282 opposition to Presbyterianism of, 196 n–197 n, 214 n, 234, 281–282 opposition to religious fanaticism of, 212–214 parallels to Martin Luther in, 23– 26, 30–33 philosophy of language of, 40 n, 191–192 possible Socinianism of, 186 n relationship to English Independency of, 233–234 return to England of, 252 revised deﬁnition of “natural kingdom” by, 276–280 sincerity of, 245 theory of knowledge of, 268 trinitarianism of, 179–182, 187–188, 192, 194–202, 205–210, 269, 280, 281 n view toward atheists of, 26 n–27 n view toward Christ of, 32–33 view toward punishment for heresy of, 142 view toward religion of, 27 work on Leviathan by, 1–15 Hollar, Wenzel (engraver), 105 n Holy Spirit, 56, 58, 86–88, 94, 96, 156, 158 n–159 n, 180, 187, 193, 196–198, 201–202, 205–206

Homer, 294 Hopkins, Matthew, 247 Jacob, 254 n James I, 108 n, 134 n–135 n, 167 n, 303 n Jeremiah, 54 n Jermyn, Henry, 10 n Jerome, 141 n Jesus Christ, 30–33, 46–57, 86–88, 94, 96, 156, 158 n–159 n, 162–164, 170, 180, 184, 185 n–186 n, 187, 193–201, 205–206, 209, 240–241, 244–245, 283, 287–288, 290 accommodation to human understanding of, 243 n–244 n as legislator, 284 as redeemer, 284 as Savior, 272 as Word, 194 debate over divinity of, 108–110 dual nature of, 74–76 redemptive action of, 66, 276, 280, 283 relationship to God the Father of, 151 n teaching about spirits of, 242–243 virgin birth of, 74–76 Job, 67 n, 264–265 John Damascene, 152–154 John the Faster (Patriarch of Constantinople), 111 n John, Saint, 170 Joseph, 163 n Jowett, Benjamin, 177 n Julian, 166 n–167 n, 290 Justinian, 111 n, 166 n Kant, Immanuel, 203 n, 213, 295 n Kavka, Greg, 191 n–192 n Kepler, Johannes, 261 Knaﬂa, Louis A., 135 n Knox, John, 171 n Kristeller, P. O., 224 n Lange, Frederick Albert, 268 n Laud, William, 146 n–147 n, 212, 234, 303 n

Index of Names Lazareth, William H., 293 n Legate, Bartholomew, 136 n Lloyd, S. A., 12 n Locke, John, 120 n Lombard, Peter, 22 n, 85 n, 88, 175, 207 n Louis XIV, 251 Lucretius, 62 n Lueber, Thomas. See Erastus Lupoli, Agostino, 204 n Luther, Martin, 12, 15 n, 16 n, 25– 26, 30, 69, 92 n, 112 n, 175–176, 266 “two kingdom” doctrine of, 284– 286, 292 n–293 n belief in mortality of soul, 23–25, 224, 264 inﬂuence on Heidegger, 213 n view toward Christ of, 30–33 Lyndwood, William, 167 n Macedonius, 110 Malcolm, Noel, 257 n, 260 n Marcian, 111 n, 149 n Martial, 295 n Martinich, A. P., 180, 230 n Martyr, Justin, 185 Marx, Karl, 268 n Maximus, 167 n Maxwell, John, 281 n Mazarin (Cardinal), 251 n Melanchthon, Philip, 107 n, 203, 293 n Mersenne, Marin, 5, 257, 259, 284 n More, Henry, 218 n, 224 n–225 n More, Thomas, 137 n Moses, 156, 158 n, 238–239, 254 n, 275 n, 280, 297 n role in Trinity, 198, 201 Müntzer, Thomas, 281 n Naaman the Syrian, 164, 165 n, 306 Nero, 290 Nestorius, 74 n, 110 Nicephorus, 150 n Nicodemus, 165 n, 306 n Oberman, Heiko, 12

347

Ockham, William of, 73 n Origen, 164 n, 180, 190–191, 193, 199, 206, 209 anti-materialism of, 193 missions and processions of Trinity in, 193–194, 202 trinitarianism of, 193–194 Overhoff, Jürgen, 180–181, 284 n–285 n Pacchi, Arrigo, 180 n, 260 Pagnino, Santes, 66 n Paracelsus, 216 n Parker, Samuel, 303 n Paul, Saint, 182, 267 rejection of pagan demonology by, 241 teaching about spirits of, 242 Payne, John, 260 n Payne, Robert, 114 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 183 Peter, Saint, 54, 264–265 Philip the Fair, 18 n Philo, 240 Phocus, 110 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 261 Pilate, 290 Pitkin, Hanna, 207 n Pius V, 92 n Pius XL, 74 n Plato, 17, 41 n, 62 n, 70, 71 n, 274 n opposition to sacriﬁce of, 294 Pocock, J. G. A., 212 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 60 belief in mortality of soul of, 224 Praxeas, 150 Ptolemy, 260 Rawls, John, 203 Ross, W. D., 227 Rousseau, John-Jacques civil religion of, 308 n St. Germaine, Christopher, 137 n Sarot, Marcel, 192 n Satan, 64, 102 Savonarola, Girolamo, 261 Schmitt, Carl, 309 n

348

Index of Names

Scot, Reginald, 19 n Scotus, Duns, 22 n Skinner, Quentin, 180 Socrates, 227 Sorbière, Samuel, 5–6, 9 n, 14 n, 60 n Spinoza, Baruch, 211 Springborg, Patricia, 15 n Stewart, Lyman, 177 n Stewart, Milton, 177 n Strauss, David Friedrich, 177 n Strauss, Leo, 45 Stubbs, Henry, 3 n Suarez, Francisco, 220 n Symmachus, 166 n–167 n Telesio, Bernardino, 261 Tertullian, 50 n, 141 n, 148–150, 152, 175, 180, 201 n, 253, 253 n–254 n, 267 n materialism of, 189–190, 193 trinitarianism of, 186–187 use of persona in, 208 Theodore, Saint, 215–216 Theodosius, 38 n, 111 n, 167 n Thomas, Ellesmere, 134 n–135 n, 137 n Tiberius, 166 n Tillich, Paul, 23 n–24 n, 27 n, 42 n–43 n, 154, 183–184, 225 n

Trajan, 166 n Trapezunzio, Giorgio, 260–261 Tricaud, François, 100 n Trismegistus, Hermes, 261 Tuck, Richard, 203 n Valens, 290 Valla, Giorgio, 260 Valla, Lorenzo, 207 n Virgil, 54, 55 n, 219 n Virgin Mary, 74, 110 Voetius, Gisbert, 258 n Voltaire judgment of Hobbes of, 211 Vorstius, Conrad, 258 n Wagenaar, Jacobus (Publisher), 6 n Walker, D. P., 214–215 Warﬁeld, B. B., 177 n Webster, John, 218 n Wentworth, Thomas, 146 n Wheldon, James, 1 n Whitgift, John, 167 n Wightman, Edward, 136 n Witch of Endor, 238, 248 Xenophanes, 294 Zarka, Yves Charles, 278 n Zelophehad, 171 n Zuccaro, Federico, 128 n

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

E. Labrousse: Pierre Bayle. Tome I: Du pays de foix a` la cite´ d’Erasme. 1963; 2nd printing 1984 ISBN 90-247-3136-4 For Tome II see below under Volume 6. P. Merlan: Monopsychism, Mysticism, Metaconsciousness. Problems of the Soul in the Neoaristotelian and Neoplatonic Tradition. 1963; 2nd printing 1969 ISBN 90-247-0178-3 H.G. van Leeuwen: The Problem of Certainty in English Thought, 1630–1690. With a Preface by R.H. Popkin. 1963; 2nd printing 1970 ISBN 90-247-0179-1 ` ´ 1963; 2nd P.W. Janssen: Les origines de la reforme des Carmes en France au 17 e Siecle. printing 1969 ISBN 90-247-0180-5 G. Sebba: Bibliographia Cartesiana. A Critical Guide to the Descartes Literature (1800–1960). 1964 ISBN 90-247-0181-3 E. Labrousse: Pierre Bayle. Tome II: Heterodoxie et rigorisme. 1964 ISBN 90-247-0182-1 K.W. Swart: The Sense of Decadence in 19th-Century France. 1964 ISBN 90-247-0183-X W. Rex: Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy. 1965 ISBN 90-247-0184-8 E. Heier: L.H. Nicolay (1737–1820) and His Contemporaries. Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, Gluck, Metastasio, Galiani, D’Escherny, Gessner, Bodmer, Lavater, Wieland, Frederick II, Falconet, W. Robertson, Paul I, Cagliostro, Gellert, Winckelmann, Poinsinet, Lloyd, Sanchez, Masson, and Others. 1965 ISBN 90-247-0185-6 H.M. Bracken: The Early Reception of Berkeley’s Immaterialism, 1710–1733. [1958] Rev. ed. 1965 ISBN 90-247-0186-4 R.A. Watson: The Downfall of Cartesianism, 1673–1712. A Study of Epistemological Issues in Late 17th-Century Cartesianism. 1966 ISBN 90-247-0187-2 R. Descartes: Regulæ ad Directionem Ingenii. Texte critique e´ tabli par Giovanni Crapulli avec ISBN 90-247-0188-0 la version hollandaise du 17e si`e` cle. 1966 ´ J. Chapelain: Soixante-dix-sept Lettres inedites a` Nicolas Heinsius (1649–1658). Publi´ees d’apr`e` s le manuscrit de Leyde avec une introduction et des notes par B. Bray. 1966 ISBN 90-247-0189-9 C. B. Brush: Montaigne and Bayle. Variations on the Theme of Skepticism. 1966 ISBN 90-247-0190-2 B. Neveu: Un historien a` l’Ecole de Port-Royal. S´e´ bastien le Nain de Tillemont (1637–1698). 1966 ISBN 90-247-0191-0 ` 1966 ISBN 90-247-0192-9 A. Faivre: Kirchberger et l’Illuminisme du 18 e siecle. J.A. Clarke: Huguenot Warrior. The Life and Times of Henri de Rohan (1579–1638). 1966 ISBN 90-247-0193-7 S. Kinser: The Works of Jacques-Auguste de Thou. 1966 ISBN 90-247-0194-5 ˜ de Gois. The Life and Thought of a Portuguese Humanist (1502–1574). E.F. Hirsch: Damiao 1967 ISBN 90-247-0195-3 P.J.S. Whitemore: The Order of Minims in 17th-Century France. 1967 ISBN 90-247-0196-1 ´ Fenelon et les Je´ suites. 1967 ISBN 90-247-0197-X H. Hillenaar: F W.N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley: The English Della Cruscans and Their Time, 1783–1828. 1967 ISBN 90-247-0198-8 C.B. Schmitt: Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469–1533) and his Critique of Aristotle. 1967 ISBN 90-247-0199-6 H.B. White: Peace among the Willows. The Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon. 1968 ISBN 90-247-0200-3

´ ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D’HISTOIRE DES IDEES * INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

L. Apt: Louis-Philippe de S´egur. An Intellectual in a Revolutionary Age. 1969 ISBN 90-247-0201-1 E.H. Kadler: Literary Figures in French Drama (1784–1834). 1969 ISBN 90-247-0202-X ´ ´ G. Postel: Le Thresor des propheties de l’univers. Manuscrit publi´e´ avec une introduction et des notes par F. Secret. 1969 ISBN 90-247-0203-8 E.G. Boscherini: Lexicon Spinozanum. 2 vols., 1970 Set ISBN 90-247-0205-4 C.A. Bolton: Church Reform in 18th-Century Italy. The Synod of Pistoia (1786). 1969 ISBN 90-247-0208-9 ´ D. Janicaud: Une g´enealogie du spiritualisme fran¸cais. Aux sources du bergsonisme: [F´e´ lix] Ravaisson [1813–1900] et la m´e´ taphysique. 1969 ISBN 90-247-0209-7 ` St. Fran¸cois de Sales et Yves de Paris. J.-E. d’Angers: L’Humanisme chr´e´ tien au 17 e siecle. 1970 ISBN 90-247-0210-0 H.B. White: Copp’d Hills towards Heaven. Shakespeare and the Classical Polity. 1970 ISBN 90-247-0250-X P.J. Olscamp: The Moral Philosophy of George Berkeley. 1970 ISBN 90-247-0303-4 C.G. Nore˜na: Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540). 1970 ISBN 90-247-5008-3 J. O’Higgens: Anthony Collins (1676–1729), the Man and His World. 1970 ISBN 90-247-5007-5 F.T. Brechka: Gerard van Swieten and His World (1700–1772). 1970 ISBN 90-247-5009-1 M.H. Waddicor: Montesquieu and the Pilosophy of Natural Law. 1970 ISBN 90-247-5039-3 O.R. Bloch: La Philosophie de Gassendi (1592–1655). Nominalisme, mat´e´ rialisme et me´ taphysique. 1971 ISBN 90-247-5035-0 J. Hoyles: The Waning of the Renaissance (1640–1740). Studies in the Thought and Poetry of Henry More, John Norris and Isaac Watts. 1971 ISBN 90-247-5077-6 For Henry More, see also below under Volume 122 and 127. H. Bots: Correspondance de Jacques Dupuy et de Nicolas Heinsius (1646–1656). 1971 ISBN 90-247-5092-X W.C. Lehmann: Henry Home, Lord Kames, and the Scottish Enlightenment. A Study in National Character and in the History of Ideas. 1971 ISBN 90-247-5018-0 C. Kramer: Emmery de Lyere et Marnix de Sainte Aldegonde. Un admirateur de S´e´ bastien Franck et de Montaigne aux prises avec le champion des calvinistes n´e´ erlandais.[Avec le texte d’Emmery de Lyere:] Antidote ou contrepoison contre les conseils sanguinaires et envinemez de Philippe de Marnix Sr. de Ste. Aldegonde. 1971 ISBN 90-247-5136-5 P. Dibon: Inventaire de la correspondance (1595–1650) d’Andre´ Rivet (1572–1651). 1971 ISBN 90-247-5112-8 K.A. Kottman: Law and Apocalypse. The Moral Thought of Luis de Leon (1527?–1591). 1972 ISBN 90-247-1183-5 F.G. Nauen: Revolution, Idealism and Human Freedom. Schelling, H¨o¨ lderlin and Hegel, and the Crisis of Early German Idealism. 1971 ISBN 90-247-5117-9 H. Jensen: Motivation and the Moral Sense in Francis Hutcheson’s [1694–1746] Ethical Theory. 1971 ISBN 90-247-1187-8 A. Rosenberg: [Simon] Tyssot de Patot and His Work (1655–1738). 1972 ISBN 90-247-1199-1 C. Walton: De la recherche du bien. A study of [Nicolas de] Malebranche’s [1638–1715] Science of Ethics. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1205-X

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59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

P.J.S. Whitmore (ed.): A 17th-Century Exposure of Superstition. Select Text of Claude Pithoys (1587–1676). 1972 ISBN 90-247-1298-X A. Sauvy: Livres saisis a` Paris entre 1678 et 1701. D’apr`es une e´ tude pre´ liminaire de Motoko Ninomiya. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1347-1 W.R. Redmond: Bibliography of the Philosophy in the Iberian Colonies of America. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1190-8 C.B. Schmitt: Cicero Scepticus. A Study of the Inﬂuence of the Academica in the Renaissance. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1299-8 J. Hoyles: The Edges of Augustanism. The Aesthetics of Spirituality in Thomas Ken, John Byrom and William Law. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1317-X J. Bruggeman and A.J. van de Ven (´e´ ds.): Inventaire des pi`e` ces d’Archives fran¸caises se rapportant a` l’Abbaye de Port-Royal des Champs et son cercle et a` la Re´ sistance contre la Bulle Unigenitus et a` l’Appel. 1972 ISBN 90-247-5122-5 J.W. Montgomery: Cross and Crucible. Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654), Phoenix of the Theologians. Volume I: Andreae’s Life, World-View, and Relations with Rosicrucianism and Alchemy; Volume II: The Chymische Hochzeit with Notes and Commentary. 1973 Set ISBN 90-247-5054-7 ´ ´ O. Lutaud: Des revolutions d’Angleterre a` la Revolution fran¸caise. ¸ Le tyrannicide & Killing No Murder (Cromwell, Athalie, Bonaparte). 1973 ISBN 90-247-1509-1 F. Duchesneau: L’Empirisme de Locke. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1349-8 R. Simon (´e´ d.): Henry de Boulainviller – Œuvres Philosophiques, Tome I. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1332-3 For Œuvres Philosophiques, Tome II see below under Volume 70. E.E. Harris: Salvation from Despair. A Reappraisal of Spinoza’s Philosophy. 1973 ISBN 90-247-5158-6 ´ J.-F. Battail: L’Avocat philosophe Geraud de Cordemoy (1626–1684). 1973 ISBN 90-247-1542-3 T. Liu: Discord in Zion. The Puritan Divines and the Puritan Revolution (1640–1660). 1973 ISBN 90-247-5156-X A. Strugnell: Diderot’s Politics. A Study of the Evolution of Diderot’s Political Thought after ´ the Encyclopedie. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1540-7 G. Defaux: Pantagruel et les Sophistes. Contribution a` l’histoire de l’humanisme chre´ tien au ISBN 90-247-1566-0 16 e si`e` cle. 1973 ´ philosophique en Russie (1830–1917). 1974 G. Planty-Bonjour: Hegel et la pensee ISBN 90-247-1576-8 R.J. Brook: [George] Berkeley’s Philosophy of Science. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1555-5 T.E. Jessop: A Bibliography of George Berkeley. With: Inventory of Berkeley’s Manuscript Remains by A.A. Luce. 2nd revised and enlarged ed. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1577-6 E.I. Perry: From Theology to History. French Religious Controversy and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1578-4 P. Dibbon, H. Bots et E. Bots-Estourgie: Inventaire de la correspondance (1631–1671) de Johannes Fredericus Gronovius [1611–1671]. 1974 ISBN 90-247-1600-4 A.B. Collins: The Secular is Sacred. Platonism and Thomism in Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology. 1974 ISBN 90-247-1588-1

´ ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D’HISTOIRE DES IDEES * INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 70.

71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

89. 90. 91.

R. Simon (´e´ d.): Henry de Boulainviller. Œuvres Philosophiques, Tome II. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1633-0 For Œuvres Philosophiques, Tome I see under Volume 58. ´ J.A.G. Tans et H. Schmitz du Moulin: Pasquier Quesnel devant la Congregation de l’Index. Correspondance avec Francesco Barberini et m´e´ moires sur la mise a` l’Index de son e´ dition des Œuvres de Saint L´e´ on, publie´ s avec introduction et annotations. 1974 ISBN 90-247-1661-6 J.W. Carven: Napoleon and the Lazarists (1804–1809). 1974 ISBN 90-247-1667-5 G. Symcox: The Crisis of French Sea Power (1688–1697). From the Guerre d’Escadre to the Guerre de Course. 1974 ISBN 90-247-1645-4 R. MacGillivray: Restoration Historians and the English Civil War. 1974 ISBN 90-247-1678-0 A. Soman (ed.): The Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Reappraisals and Documents. 1974 ISBN 90-247-1652-7 R.E. Wanner: Claude Fleury (1640–1723) as an Educational Historiographer and Thinker. With an Introduction by W.W. Brickman. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1684-5 R.T. Carroll: The Common-Sense Philosophy of Religion of Bishop Edward Stillingﬂeet (1635– 1699). 1975 ISBN 90-247-1647-0 ` Andr´e´ -Fran¸cois Deslandes, Citoyen et J. Macary: Masque et lumi`e` res au 18 e [siecle]. philosophe (1689–1757). 1975 ISBN 90-247-1698-5 S.M. Mason: Montesquieu’s Idea of Justice. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1670-5 ´ D.J.H. van Elden: Esprits ﬁns et esprits g´eometriques dans les portraits de Saint-Simon. ´ Contributions a` l’etude du vocabulaire et du style. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1726-4 I. Primer (ed.): Mandeville Studies. New Explorations in the Art and Thought of Dr Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733). 1975 ISBN 90-247-1686-1 C.G. Nore˜na: Studies in Spanish Renaissance Thought. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1727-2 G. Wilson: A Medievalist in the 18th Century. Le Grand d’Aussy and the Fabliaux ou Contes. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1782-5 J.-R. Armogathe: Theologia Cartesiana. L’explication physique de l’Eucharistie chez Descartes et Dom Robert Desgabets. 1977 ISBN 90-247-1869-4 B´e´ rault Stuart, Seigneur d’Aubigny: Traite´ sur l’art de la guerre. Introduction et e´ dition par ´ de Comminges. 1976 Elie ISBN 90-247-1871-6 S.L. Kaplan: Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV. 2 vols., 1976 Set ISBN 90-247-1873-2 ´ M. Lienhard (ed.): The Origins and Characteristics of Anabaptism / Les debuts et les car´ acteristiques de l’Anabaptisme. With an Extensive Bibliography / Avec une bibliographie d´e´ taille´ e. 1977 ISBN 90-247-1896-1 ` R. Descartes: Regles utiles et claires pour la direction de l’esprit en la recherche de la ve´ rite´ . Traduction selon le lexique cart´e´ sien, et annotation conceptuelle par J.-L. Marion. Avec des notes math´e´ matiques de P. Costabel. 1977 ISBN 90-247-1907-0 ´ ´ K. Hardesty: The ‘Supplement’ to the ‘Encyclopedie’. [Diderot et d’Alembert]. 1977 ISBN 90-247-1965-8 H.B. White: Antiquity Forgot. Essays on Shakespeare, [Francis] Bacon, and Rembrandt. 1978 ISBN 90-247-1971-2 P.B.M. Blaas: Continuity and Anachronism. Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930. 1978 ISBN 90-247-2063-X

´ ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D’HISTOIRE DES IDEES * INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

S.L. Kaplan (ed.): La Bagarre. Ferdinando Galiani’s (1728–1787) ‘Lost’ Parody. With an Introduction by the Editor. 1979 ISBN 90-247-2125-3 ´ E. McNiven Hine: A Critical Study of [Etienne Bonnot de] Condillac’s [1714–1780]‘Trait´e des Syst`e` mes’. 1979 ISBN 90-247-2120-2 M.R.G. Spiller: Concerning Natural Experimental Philosphy. Meric Casaubon [1599–1671] and the Royal Society. 1980 ISBN 90-247-2414-7 F. Duchesneau: La physiologie des Lumi`eres. Empirisme, mod`e` les et the´ ories. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2500-3 M. Heyd: Between Orthodoxy and the Enlightenment. Jean-Robert Chouet [1642–1731] and the Introduction of Cartesian Science in the Academy of Geneva. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2508-9 James O’Higgins: Yves de Vallone [1666/7–1705]: The Making of an Esprit Fort. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2520-8 M.L. Kuntz: Guillaume Postel [1510–1581]. Prophet of the Restitution of All Things. His Life and Thought. 1981 ISBN 90-247-2523-2 A. Rosenberg: Nicolas Gueudeville and His Work (1652–172?). 1982 ISBN 90-247-2533-X S.L. Jaki: Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem [1861-1916]. 1984 ISBN 90-247-2897-5; Pb (1987) 90-247-3532-7 Anne Conway [1631–1679]: The Principles of the Most Ancient Modern Philosophy. Edited and with an Introduction by P. Loptson. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2671-9 E.C. Patterson: [Mrs.] Mary [Fairfax Greig] Sommerville [1780–1872] and the Cultivation of Science (1815–1840). 1983 ISBN 90-247-2823-1 C.J. Berry: Hume, Hegel and Human Nature. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2682-4 ´ C.J. Betts: Early Deism in France. From the so-called ‘deistes’ of Lyon (1564) to Voltaire’s ‘Lettres philosophiques’ (1734). 1984 ISBN 90-247-2923-8 R. Gascoigne: Religion, Rationality and Community. Sacred and Secular in the Thought of Hegel and His Critics. 1985 ISBN 90-247-2992-0 S. Tweyman: Scepticism and Belief in Hume’s ‘Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’. 1986 ISBN 90-247-3090-2 G. Cerny: Theology, Politics and Letters at the Crossroads of European Civilization. Jacques Basnage [1653–1723] and the Baylean Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic. 1987 ISBN 90-247-3150-X Spinoza’s Algebraic Calculation of the Rainbow & Calculation of Changes. Edited and Translated from Dutch, with an Introduction, Explanatory Notes and an Appendix by M.J. Petry. 1985 ISBN 90-247-3149-6 R.G. McRae: Philosophy and the Absolute. The Modes of Hegel’s Speculation. 1985 ISBN 90-247-3151-8 J.D. North and J.J. Roche (eds.): The Light of Nature. Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science presented to A.C. Crombie. 1985 ISBN 90-247-3165-8 C. Walton and P.J. Johnson (eds.): [Thomas] Hobbes’s ‘Science of Natural Justice’. 1987 ISBN 90-247-3226-3 B.W. Head: Ideology and Social Science. Destutt de Tracy and French Liberalism. 1985 ISBN 90-247-3228-X A.Th. Peperzak: Philosophy and Politics. A Commentary on the Preface to Hegel’s Philosophy ISBN Hb 90-247-3337-5; Pb ISBN 90-247-3338-3 of Right. 1987

´ ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D’HISTOIRE DES IDEES * INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 114. S. Pines and Y. Yovel (eds.): Maimonides [1135-1204] and Philosophy. Papers Presented at the 6th Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter (May 1985). 1986 ISBN 90-247-3439-8 115. T.J. Saxby: The Quest for the New Jerusalem, Jean de Labadie [1610–1674] and the Labadists (1610–1744). 1987 ISBN 90-247-3485-1 116. C.E. Harline: Pamphlets, Printing, and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic. 1987 ISBN 90-247-3511-4 117. R.A. Watson and J.E. Force (eds.): The Sceptical Mode in Modern Philosophy. Essays in Honor of Richard H. Popkin. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3584-X 118. R.T. Bienvenu and M. Feingold (eds.): In the Presence of the Past. Essays in Honor of Frank Manuel. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1008-X 119. J. van den Berg and E.G.E. van der Wall (eds.): Jewish-Christian Relations in the 17th Century. Studies and Documents. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3617-X 120. N. Waszek: The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s Account of ‘Civil Society’. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3596-3 121. J. Walker (ed.): Thought and Faith in the Philosophy of Hegel. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1234-1 122. Henry More [1614–1687]: The Immortality of the Soul. Edited with Introduction and Notes by A. Jacob. 1987 ISBN 90-247-3512-2 123. P.B. Scheurer and G. Debrock (eds.): Newton’s Scientiﬁc and Philosophical Legacy. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3723-0 124. D.R. Kelley and R.H. Popkin (eds.): The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1259-7 125. R.M. Golden (ed.): The Huguenot Connection. The Edict of Nantes, Its Revocation, and Early French Migration to South Carolina. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3645-5 ` De la fondation de l’Universit´e´ d’Upsal a` Jacob 126. S. Lindroth: Les chemins du savoir en Suede. ´ Berzelius. Etudes et Portraits. Traduit du su´e´ dois, pre´ sente´ et annote´ par J.-F. Battail. Avec une introduction sur Sten Lindroth par G. Eriksson. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3579-3 127. S. Hutton (ed.): Henry More (1614–1687). Tercentenary Studies. With a Biography and Bibliography by R. Crocker. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0095-5 128. Y. Yovel (ed.): Kant’s Practical Philosophy Reconsidered. Papers Presented at the 7th Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter (December 1986). 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0405-5 129. J.E. Force and R.H. Popkin: Essays on the Context, Nature, and Inﬂuence of Isaac Newton’s Theology. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0583-3 130. N. Capaldi and D.W. Livingston (eds.): Liberty in Hume’s ‘History of England’. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0650-3 131. W. Brand: Hume’s Theory of Moral Judgment. A Study in the Unity of A Treatise of Human Nature. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1415-8 132. C.E. Harline (ed.): The Rhyme and Reason of Politics in Early Modern Europe. Collected Essays of Herbert H. Rowen. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1527-8 133. N. Malebranche: Treatise on Ethics (1684). Translated and edited by C. Walton. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-1763-7 134. B.C. Southgate: ‘Covetous of Truth’. The Life and Work of Thomas White (1593–1676). 1993 ISBN 0-7923-1926-5 135. G. Santinello, C.W.T. Blackwell and Ph. Weller (eds.): Models of the History of Philosophy. Vol. 1: From its Origins in the Renaissance to the ‘Historia Philosophica’. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2200-2 136. M.J. Petry (ed.): Hegel and Newtonianism. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2202-9

´ ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D’HISTOIRE DES IDEES * INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 137. Otto von Guericke: The New (so-called Magdeburg) Experiments [Experimenta Nova, Amsterdam 1672]. Translated and edited by M.G. Foley Ames. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2399-8 138. R.H. Popkin and G.M. Weiner (eds.): Jewish Christians and Cristian Jews. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2452-8 139. J.E. Force and R.H. Popkin (eds.): The Books of Nature and Scripture. Recent Essays on Natural Philosophy, Theology, and Biblical Criticism in the Netherlands of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2467-6 140. P. Rattansi and A. Clericuzio (eds.): Alchemy and Chemistry in the 16th and 17th Centuries. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2573-7 141. S. Jayne: Plato in Renaissance England. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3060-9 142. A.P. Coudert: Leibniz and the Kabbalah. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3114-1 143. M.H. Hoffheimer: Eduard Gans and the Hegelian Philosophy of Law. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3114-1 144. J.R.M. Neto: The Christianization of Pyrrhonism. Scepticism and Faith in Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Shestov. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3381-0 145. R.H. Popkin (ed.): Scepticism in the History of Philosophy. A Pan-American Dialogue. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3769-7 146. M. de Baar, M. L¨o¨ wensteyn, M. Monteiro and A.A. Sneller (eds.): Choosing the Better Part. Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678). 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3799-9 147. M. Degenaar: Molyneux’s Problem. Three Centuries of Discussion on the Perception of Forms. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3934-7 148. S. Berti, F. Charles-Daubert and R.H. Popkin (eds.): Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe. Studies on the Traite´ des trois imposteurs. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4192-9 149. G.K. Browning (ed.): Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reappraisal. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4480-4 150. G.A.J. Rogers, J.M. Vienne and Y.C. Zarka (eds.): The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context. Politics, Metaphysics and Religion. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4530-4 151. R.L. Williams: The Letters of Dominique Chaix, Botanist-Cur´e. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4615-7 152. R.H. Popkin, E. de Olaso and G. Tonelli (eds.): Scepticism in the Enlightenment. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4643-2 153. L. de la Forge. Translated and edited by D.M. Clarke: Treatise on the Human Mind (1664). 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4778-1 154. S.P. Foster: Melancholy Duty. The Hume-Gibbon Attack on Christianity. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4785-4 155. J. van der Zande and R.H. Popkin (eds.): The Skeptical Tradition Around 1800. Skepticism in ISBN 0-7923-4846-X Philosophy, Science, and Society. 1997 156. P. Ferretti: A Russian Advocate of Peace: Vasilii Malinovskii (1765–1814). 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4846-6 ISBN 0-7923-4996-2 157. M. Goldish: Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton. 1998 158. A.P. Coudert, R.H. Popkin and G.M. Weiner (eds.): Leibniz, Mysticism and Religion. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5223-8 159. B. Frid´en: Rousseau’s Economic Philosophy. Beyond the Market of Innocents. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5270-X 160. C.F. Fowler O.P.: Descartes on the Human Soul. Philosophy and the Demands of Christian Doctrine. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5473-7

´ ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D’HISTOIRE DES IDEES * INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 161. J.E. Force and R.H. Popkin (eds.): Newton and Religion. Context, Nature and Inﬂuence. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5744-2 162. J.V. Andreae: Christianapolis. Introduced and translated by E.H. Thompson. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5745-0 163. A.P. Coudert, S. Hutton, R.H. Popkin and G.M. Weiner (eds.): Judaeo-Christian Intellectual Culture in the Seventeenth Century. A Celebration of the Library of Narcissus Marsh (1638– 1713). 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5789-2 164. T. Verbeek (ed.): Johannes Clauberg and Cartesian Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5831-7 165. A. Fix: Fallen Angels. Balthasar Bekker, Spirit Belief, and Confessionalism in the Seventeenth Century Dutch Republic. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5876-7 166. S. Brown (ed.): The Young Leibniz and his Philosophy (1646–76). 2000 ISBN 0-7923-5997-6 ISBN 0-7923-6097-4 167. R. Ward: The Life of Henry More. Parts 1 and 2. 2000 168. Z. Janowski: Cartesian Theodicy. Descartes’ Quest for Certitude. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6127-X ´ 169. J.D. Popkin and R.H. Popkin (eds.): The Abb´e´ Gregoire and his World. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6247-0 170. C.G. Caffentzis: Exciting the Industry of Mankind. George Berkeley’s Philosophy of Money. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6297-7 171. A. Clericuzio: Elements, Principles and Corpuscles. A Study of Atomisms and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6782-0 172. H. Hotson: Paradise Postponed. Johann Heinrich Alsted and the Birth of Calvinist Millenarianism. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6787-1 173. M. Goldish and R.H. Popkin (eds.): Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture. Volume I. Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6850-9 174. K.A. Kottman (ed.): Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture. Volume II. Catholic Millenarianism: From Savonarola to the Abb´e´ Gre´ goire. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6849-5 175. J.E. Force and R.H. Popkin (eds.): Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture. Volume III. The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6848-7 176. J.C. Laursen and R.H. Popkin (eds.): Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture. Volume IV. Continental Millenarians: Protestants, Catholics, Heretics. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6847-9 177. C. von Linn´e: Nemesis Divina. (edited and translated with explanatory notes by M.J. Petry). 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6820-7 178. M.A. Bad´´ıa Cabrera: Hume’s Reﬂection on Religion. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-7024-4 179. R.L. Williams: Botanophilia in Eighteenth-Century France. The Spirit of the Enlightenment. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6886-X 180. R. Crocker (ed.): Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe. 2001 ISBN 1-4020-0047-2

´ ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D’HISTOIRE DES IDEES * INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 181. E. Slowik: Cartesian Spacetime. Descartes’ Physics and the Relational Theory of Space and Motion. 2001 ISBN 1-4020-0265-3 182. R.L. Williams: French Botany in the Enlightenment. The Ill-fated Voyages of La P´erouse and His Rescuers. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1109-1 183. A. Leshem: Newton on Mathematics and Spiritual Purity. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1151-2 184. G. Paganini (ed.): The Return of Scepticism. From Hobbes and Descartes to Bayle. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1377-9 185. R. Crocker: Henry More, 1614–1687. A Biography of the Cambridge Platonist. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1502-X 186. T.J. Hochstrasser and P. Schr¨o¨ der (eds.): Early Modern Natural Law Theories. Contexts and Strategies in the Early Enlightenment. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1569-0 187. F. Tomasoni: Modernity and the Final Aim of History. The Debate over Judaism from Kant to the Young Hegelians. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1594-1 188. J.E. Force and S. Hutton (eds.): Newton and Newtonianism. New Studies. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-1969-6 189. W. Schmidt-Biggemann: Philosophia perennis. Historical Outlines of Western Spirituality in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-3066-5 190. R. Faggionato: A Rosicrucian Utopia in Eighteenth-Century Russia. The Masonic Circle of N.I. Novikov. 2005 ISBN 1-4020-3486-5 191. L. Hill: The Passionate Society. The Social, Political and Moral Thought of Adam Ferguson. 2005 ISBN 1-4020-3889-5 192. D. Offord: Journeys to a Graveyard. Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing. 2005 ISBN 1-4020-3908-5 193. S. Clucas (ed.): John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought. 2006 ISBN 1-4020-4245-0 194. J.K. Jue: Heaven Upon Earth. Joseph Mede (1586-1638) and the Legacy of Millenarianism. 2006 ISBN 1-4020-4292-2 195. G. Wright: Religion, Politics and Thomas Hobbes. 2006 ISBN 1-4020-4467-4

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