Hobbes: The Religion of Terror

Abstract

It may seem somewhat strange that an “atheist”, or someone capable of being suspected of being an atheist, should concern himself with the question of the religious foundation of the state, but Hobbes was actually the first in the modern trend of dissociating traditional religious belief and civil religion in the search for a non-traditional foundation for the state, although he endeavors to conceal the dissociation. In fact, Hobbes’s interest was not so much religious as political — the preservation of political order in the midst of the replacement of Christendom with a collection of national states. In this situation “Hobbes saw that public order was impossible without a civil theology beyond debate; it is the great and permanent achievement of the Leviathan to have clarified this point.”² It was the decline of Christianity as a force in some way guaranteeing the political order of Christian states that led Hobbes to seek a remedy for this problem through a reinterpretation of Christianity as a civil theology. In this chapter and the next we shall consider the metaphysical structures of Hobbes’ civil religion.

We have his own word for it that fear dogged [Hobbes’] steps. He was afraid of ‘Nights darkest Shade,’ of thieves, of persecution by his enemies, of death, which he called ‘a Leap in the Dark.’ His critics liked to say that his fear was a sort of inner confession of sin. It was his conscience plaguing him for his atheism.¹