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Hobbes and the Liberalization of Christianity*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

John W. Seaman
John W. Seaman
Affiliation:
McMaster University
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Abstract

Hobbes regarded traditional Christianity as one of the leading threats to the preservation of civil peace. This article argues that he responded to this threat by developing an innovative reinterpretation of Christianity designed to tame it from within. This reinterpretation involved the reshaping of leading Christian doctrines around the same liberal principles that underlie his conception of political authority, the natural law principles of equality of right and inalienable rights. Although this political “liberalization” of Christianity may well have enhanced the prospects of civil peace, it did so by undermining doctrines central to Christianity's biblical roots.

Résumé

Hobbes considérait le christianisme traditionnel comme l'une des principales menaces au maintien de la paix civile. Cet article démontre que Hobbes a répondu à cette menace par une réinterprétation novatrice du christianisme, se basant sur les principes mêmes de cette doctrine pour en atténuer (contrer) les impacts. Cette réinterprétation comportait le refaçonnement des principales doctrines chrétiennes autour des concepts libéraux propres à sa conception d'autorité politique, soit les principes de la loi naturelle de l'galité des droits et de l'inaliénabilité des droits. C'est en minant les doctrines centrales aux racines bibliques du christianisme que cette «libéralisation » du christianisme a peut-^tre pu augmenter les chances de conserver la paix civile.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 1999 , pp. 227 - 246
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1999

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References

1 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. by Macpherson, C. B. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 609Google Scholar.

2 Hobbes, Thomas, Behemoth or The Long Parliament, ed. by Tonnies, Ferdinand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 63–64Google Scholar.

3 This view can be found in Hood, F. C., The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes:An Interpretation of Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 1, 4, 5, 13, 24, 40, 175, 229, 233, 253Google Scholar; Martinich, A. P., The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1, 2, 5, 15, 27, 31, 43–45, 118–20, 333CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitchell, Joshua, “Hobbes and the Equality of All under the One,” Political Theory 21 (1993), 78–79, 83–84, 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eisenach, Eldon J., Two Worlds of Liberalism: Religion and Politics in Hobbes, Locke, and Mill (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 5, 6, 8, 15, 55, 57, 66Google Scholar; Glover, Willis B., “God and Thomas Hobbes,” in Brown, K. C., ed., Hobbes Studies (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), 142–143, 148–49, 151, 158, 168Google Scholar; Lloyd, S. A., Ideals as interests in Hobbes's Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 17, 21, 44–45, 252–53, 273–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wybrow, Cameron, “Hobbes as an Interpreter of Biblical Political Thought,” in Parker, Kim Ian, ed., Liberal Democracy and the Bible (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 41–42, 52,71 (but see 61–62)Google Scholar.

4 For a recent work largely devoted to developing this view, see Cooke, Paul D., Hobbes and Christianity: Reassessing the Bible in Leviathan (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), esp. xi-xiv, and chaps. 1, 2, 5Google Scholar. See also Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 198–199Google Scholar; “On the Basis of Hobbes''s Political Philosophy,” in Strauss, Leo, What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1976), 182–190Google Scholar; The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 71–77Google Scholar; and Blits, Jan H., “Hobbesian Fear,” Political Theory 17 (1989), 426–429CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Compare Willey, Basil, The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (Garden City: Doubleday, 1953), 79–80, 115–21Google Scholar. Compare also Johnston, David, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, who argues that Hobbes's purpose “was to subvert many of the most central tenets of Christian theology … and to replace them with … [his] own rationalized version of Christian doctrine” (181).

5 See Strauss, “On the Basis of Hobbes's Political Philosophy,” 171, 183, 187; The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 71, 74–77; Cooke, Hobbes and Christianity, xiv, 5, 14–15, 20, 21, 32–33, 36–38, 63, 112, 219; Curley, Edwin, “ ‘I Durst Not Write So Boldly’ or How to read Hobbes' theological-political treatise,” in Bostrenghi, Daniela, ed., Hobbes e Spinoza, Scienza e politico (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992), 512, 516–17, 589–90Google Scholar; and Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background, 80, 116, 120. A. P. Martinich, who is one of the leading spokesmen for the “Hobbes-as-Christian” view, maintains that Hobbes's scientific theory had the unintended consequence of turning Christianity into the “vinegar of atheism” (The Two Gods of Leviathan, 7; see also 8, 204, 336–37).

6 See Pabel, Hilmar M., “ ‘Give to Caesar that Which Is caers’Hobbes's Strategy in the Second Half of Leviathan,” Journal of Church and State 35 (1993), 335, 337–38, 343–44, 349CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Sherlock, Richard, “The Theology of Leviathan: Hobbes on Religion,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 10 (1982), 47, 58Google Scholar; Farr, James, “Atomes of Scripture: Hobbes and the Politics of Biblical Interpretation,” in Dietz, Mary G., ed., Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 175Google Scholar; and Lloyd, Ideals as interests in Hobbes's Leviathan, 5, 51, 190, chap. 9 throughout.

7 See Strauss, Natural Right and History, 181–82. Oakeshott, Compare Michael, “Introduction to Leviathan,” in Michael Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 63Google Scholar; and those works cited below in note 8.

8 For Hobbes as a tolerationist, see Tuck, Richard, “Hobbes and Locke on Toleration,” in Dietz, , ed., Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, 154, 157, 159, 165, 167, 169–70Google Scholar; and Ryan, Alan, “A More Tolerant Hobbes?” in Mendus, Susan, ed., Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 38–39, 40–41, 45, 54, 57–58Google Scholar. For Hobbes's liberal assault on theocracy, see Wybrow, “Hobbes as an Interpreter of Biblical Political Thought,” 70–71. The view that Hobbes's reshaped Christianity is rooted in his doctrine of the natural rights of masterless man can be found throughout Cooke, Hobbes and Christianity, esp. xi-xiv, 1–4, 14–15, 36–38, 103–12.

9 For an examination of the distinction in Hobbes between the subjects' authorization of all that the sovereign does and the subjects' more limited obligation to obey the sovereign, see Orwin, Clifford, “On the Sovereign Authorization,” Political Theory 3 (1975), 30–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Leviathan, 190–201, 211–13. On Hobbes's wide range of equal inalienable rights and his assumption of an equal right to material goods, see Seaman, John W., “Hobbes on Public Charity and the Prevention of Idleness: A Liberal Case for Welfare,” Polity 23 (1990), 112–115, 117–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Among other things, it would require a detailed examination of Hobbes's use of irony and its intended audience. Those interested in his use of irony in relation to religion should consult Curley, “I Durst Not Write So Boldly,” 517 et seq. The question of the audience Hobbes had in mind in dealing with religious matters is discussed in Cooke, Hobbes and Christianity, 17–18, 204–09, 232, 236–37.

12 Leviathan, 211.

13 Ibid., 214–15.

14 Gal. 3:28. See also 1 Cor. 12:13; and Col. 3:11. Ail biblical references, with the exception of those quoted from Hobbes's works, are to the New Revised Standard Version.

15 Hobbes, Thomas, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. by Tonnies, Ferdinand (2nd ed.; London: Frank Cass, 1984), 96Google Scholar; emphasis in original.

16 Hobbes, Thomas, De Cive (translated by Hobbes as Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society), in Gert, Bernard, ed., Man and Citizen (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1978), 158–159Google Scholar; emphasis in original.

17 Elements, 96–97.

18 John 15:13.

19 Compare Strauss's comment that where virtue is “reduced to social virtue or to benevolence or kindness or ‘the liberal virtues,’ ‘the severe virtues’ of selfrestraint will lose their standing” (Natural Right and History, 188).

20 Leviathan, 396. Compare De Cive, 290.

21 Leviathan, 396–97; emphasis in original.

22 See Ibid., 214–15, 318, 399.

23 For the conceptual absurdity and unbiblical nature of inspiration, see Ibid., 93, 140–46, 440–42, 691–92; for its connection with undermining the authority of the sovereign, see 366, 692.

24 Ibid., 141.

25 Ibid., 140; emphasis in original.

26 Ibid., 141.

27 See also Hobbes's treatment of madness and inspiration in Elements, 51.

28 Leviathan, 411

29 Ibid., 397.

30 Ibid., 442; emphasis in original. See also 179, 445, 502, 546–47, 722.

31 Ibid., 448.

32 Ibid., 484–85.

33 Ibid., 629. See also 704 on.

34 Ibid., 704.

35 Ibid., 442–47, 499–509; see also 546–47, 629.

36 Ibid., 448, 514–18, 525, 583–84, 630, 646.

37 Ibid., 514–17; emphasis in original. See also 588, 594–95.

38 Ibid., 525–26; emphasis in original.

39 Ibid., 599.

40 Ibid., 192.

41 Ibid., 211–12.

42 For other instances where the Bible appears to approve of disobedience to political authority, see Ex. 1:17; Dan. 1:3–16, 3:8–21; and Matt. 2:7–12.

43 Num. 12:1–15. See also the attempted revolt by Korah, Dathan and Abiram against the religious authority of Moses and Aaron (Num. 16:1–50).

44 See Leviathan, 332; see also 336, 337, 410, 478, 500–01, 526, 527, 550–51, 591.

45 Leviathan, 527; see also Elements, 183.

46 Leviathan, 395.

47 De Cive, 370. See also Leviathan, 610.

48 Leviathan, 700; see also 711.

49 There is a hint of a third foundation for this inalienable right in Hobbes's claim that Jesus never accepts forced actions, but only an inward conversion of the heart (see Leviathan, 592; compare 596).

50 Leviathan, 610–11, 615–25.

51 See Ibid., 527–28, 530–31, 625.

52 Ibid., 700; emphasis in original.

53 Behemoth, 62.

54 Leviathan, 711.

55 Ibid., 711.

56 To Edward Livingston from Madison — July 10, 1822, in Alley, Robert S., ed., James Madison on Religious Liberty (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1985), 82Google Scholar. See also Jefferson's, Thomas contention that “it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order” (Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, in Alley, , ed., James Madison on Religious Liberty, 61)Google Scholar.

57 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, ed. by Bradley, Phillips, Vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1990), 300Google Scholar; emphasis in original.