Material Messiah: Hobbes, Heresy, and a Kingdom Not of This World

Birch, Jonathan C. P.

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-51276-5_4

Jonathan C. P. Birch⁴

Part of the book series: Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World ((CTAW))

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Abstract

This chapter foregrounds a theme which runs throughout the study as a whole: the competing ‘metaphysics of Enlightenment’. More specifically, it documents the struggles between monist and dualist philosophies: materialist and spiritual theologies of power and goodness. In modern thought, these values have worked in creative tension: without sovereign power, effective governance of a commonwealth in the interests of its people is impossible; without justice, rooted in some value (goodness) that is independent of any one political administration, such governance is indistinguishable from arbitrary and despotic force. In this chapter, we will examine the Christology of Thomas Hobbes within the context of his authoritarian political theology and materialist metaphysics. Following Mark Lilla’s example, Aquinas will be a point of comparison, but on my reading, the gulf between the two thinkers will be (partly) bridged. Hobbes will be understood as an apophatic philosophical theologian and an independent-minded Christian heretic who sought a more enlightened society through the extinction of popular superstition and political violence, which he argued for using a materialist and politically authoritarian reading of the Bible generally and Jesus specifically.

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Notes

1.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 37, p. 468.
2.
This metaphysical retreat can be associated with a number of developments: for example in the ‘linguistic turn ’ of the (adopted) Anglo-American analytic tradition of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe (trans.), Oxford: Blackwell, 1963, and of course it is present in the continental tradition represented by Albert Camus , mostly famously in Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942): The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Justin O’Brien (trans.), New York: Alred A. Knopf, 1955.
3.
See the collections on European and North American traditions: Matthew C. Altmann (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; David Boucher and Andrew Vincent (eds.), British Idealism and Political Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000; and Gustavus Myers, The History of American Idealism , New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925.
4.
On the rise and fall of Marxist historiography in Britain , see David Renton , ‘Marxists and Historical Writing in Britain’, Making History: The Changing Face of the Professional in Britain, accessed 02 May 2019: https://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/marxist_history.html.
5.
The phrase was coined by Karl Jaspers in The Origin and Goal of History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953, pp. 1–25. I am not concerned here to defend large-scale convergence between different civilisations between 800 and 200 BCE. It will suffice to acknowledge that is was apparent in the philosophy of Plato , Aristotle , and many subsequent Hellenistic schools, and it was of course apparent in the Torah where the God who creates also governs.
6.
The concept of ‘a scientific revolution ’ is disowned by some historians, including those who have published books in its name: see Steven Shapin , The Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. I am not unsympathetic to the doubts of these historians, but there is little disagreement that very significant shifts in thinking about the natural world took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which would have wider social and cultural ramifications, so I will stick with the traditional moniker.
7.
The religious dimension of the English revolution has been reemphasised in recent decades: from Christopher Hill , World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, London: Penguin Books, 1971; to John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution, London: Longman, 1993; and Prior and Burgess (eds.), England’s Wars of Religion .
8.
This remained a pressing concern at the Council of Trent , where it was especially apparent in the Sixth Session (1547) and the Decree on Justification: ‘CANON I. If any one saith, that man may be justified before God by his own works, whether done through the teaching of human nature , or that of the law , without the grace of God through Jesus Christ ; let him be anathema. CANON II. If any one saith, that the grace of God, through Jesus Christ, is given only for this, that man may be able more easily to live justly, and to merit eternal life, as if, by free will without grace , he were able to do both, though hardly indeed and with difficulty; let him be anathema’ (The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Ecumenical Council of Trent, J. Waterworth [ed. and trans.], London: Dolman, 1848, p. 44).
9.
These were addressed by Humanists such as Erasmus in Querela Pacis [1517]: The Complaint of Peace, T. Paynell (trans.), Chicago: Open Court, 1917; while Thomas More addressed the human condition through satire and (imagined) better worlds: Utopia [1516], Ontario: Broadview Press, 2010.
10.
All these issues are addressed in Stefano Di Bella and Tad M. Schmaltz (eds.), The Problem of Universals in Early Modern Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
11.
See Walter Ott, Causation and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009; and Keith Allen and Tom Stoneham (eds.), Causation and Modern Philosophy, Routledge, 2011.
12.
See Krister Stendahl (ed.), Immortality and Resurrection: Four Essays, New York: Macmillan, 1965.
13.
Descartes’s debts to scholasticism have been a consistent theme in the work of one of the most important recent Cartesian scholars: see Roger Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999; and Descartes and the First Cartesians, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
14.
Descartes’s fullest treatment of this is in Meditatio Sexta which builds on Meditatio Secunda.
15.
See Discours de la méthode (1637), pt. v: in English see Cottingham et al. (eds. and trans.), Discourse on the Method, in Writings of Descartes (vol. 1), pp. 111–151: 131–140.
16.
See Frank B. Dilley, ‘Taking Consciousness Seriously: A Defense of Cartesian Dualism ’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (vol. 55.3), June 2004, pp. 135–153; and Richard Swinburne , The Evolution of the Soul, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
17.
The posthumous fortunes of Descartes and his philosophy, especially in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are detailed in F. Bouillier’s Histoire de la philosophie cartesienne (2 vols.) (3rd edn.), Paris: Durand, 1868.
18.
Quoted in Jolley, ‘The Reception of Descartes’ Philosophy’, p. 395.
19.
See Descartes, Meditatio Quinta, Meditations, pp. 90–91.
20.
See Jolley, ‘The Reception of Descartes’ Philosophy ’, pp. 395–399.
21.
See Descartes, Meditatio Prima, Meditations, pp. 22–31.
22.
Spinoza’s monism has received most attention of late, due in no small part to the work of Jacob and Israel.
23.
This tendency towards social elevation goes all the way back to Adrien Baillet’s La Vie de M. Des-Cartes (2 vols.), Paris: Horthemels, 1691.
24.
For a discussion of Descartes ’s family and childhood by a contemporary Cartesian scholar, see chap. 1 of Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: His Life and Thought, Jane Marie Todd (trans.), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
25.
See Noel Malcolm, ‘A Summary Biography of Hobbes’, Aspects of Hobbes, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002, pp. 1–26: 2.
26.
See ibid., 2.
27.
See ibid., pp. 4–5.
28.
See ibid., p. 5.
29.
See Rodis-Lewis, Descartes, chap. 1.
30.
Some have argued he served as a solider, others that he was an engineer and/or educator: see Kurt Smith, ‘Descartes’ Life and Works’, sect. 1, SEP, Winter 2014, accessed 13 September 2018: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-works/.
31.
Malcolm, ‘Summary Biography’, p. 9.
32.
Ibid., pp. 9–11.
33.
See ibid., 16–21. What Hobbes hoped to achieve for himself personally in writing Leviathan is beyond the scope of this chapter.
34.
Hobbes produced criticisms of all six of Descartes ’s Meditations, published in the Objectiones cum responsionibus section of the Meditationes: see Cottingham (ed.), Meditations. 126–239. Hobbes’s objections are available to view as a discreet set, rendered into contemporary English, by Jonathan Bennett in Early Modern Texts, 2007, accessed 6 March 2019: http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1642_2.pdf.
35.
As well as being a philosopher (in the broadest possible sense) Hobbes was also a historian, translator and literary critic: for a discussion of all these themes, see the five individually authored essays collected as ‘Part V: History Poetry and Paradox’, in A. P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 547–642.
36.
These theological claims are expounded at various points through Hobbes ’s writings, but especially in pt. iii of Leviathan and the Appendix to its Latin edition.
37.
One of the earliest recorded examples is in a sermon by the Presbyterian Principle of Magdalen College , University of Oxford , Henry Wilkinson, Onciones sex ad academicos Oxonienses latinè habitae, Oxford, 1658, p. 188. Although as Malcolm’s analysis of the early reception of Leviathan shows, denunciations of Hobbes were rarely of that precise kind (see Leviathan, Vol. 1: Introduction, pp. 146–162).
38.
The two men met to discuss natural philosophy and the design of experiments in Paris , 1647: see Desmond Clarke, ‘Blaise Pascal ’, sect. 1, SEP, Fall 2015, accessed 7 December 2017: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal/. Theologically Pascal’s perception of Descartes s eems entirely negative in the fragmentary comments from the posthumous Pensées: see Pascal, Pensées, A. J. Krailsheimer (trans.) (rev. edn.), London: Penguin, 1995, pp. 22, 62, 192, 217, 312.
39.
Pascal ’s Memorial can be found in the original French and Latin , and in English translation, in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, accessed 13 September 2018: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/pascal/memorial.i.html.
40.
See Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Ezra, and the Bible : The History of a Subversive Idea’, in Aspects of Hobbes, pp. 383–431.
41.
Israel ’s series of studies best represents this tendency.
42.
This was my own experience as a philosophy post-graduate graduate in the 1990s. On the relationship between the two thinkers, see Malcolm , ‘Hobbes and Spinoz a’, in Aspects of Hobbes, pp. 27–52.
43.
Hobbes is associated with authoritarian ism and censorship whereas the ‘radical Enlightenment’, in recent histography, is associated with democracy and human rights, although Edwin Curle y has insisted that Hobbes was in fact ‘a card carrying member of the radical enlightenment’ (‘Hobbes and the Cause of Religious Toleration ’, in Patricia Springborg (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 309–334: 326.
44.
See Hobbes, The Elements of Law , Natural and Politic, Ferdinand Tönnies (ed.), London: 1889.
45.
For a critical edition, see Hobbes, De Cive: The Latin Version, Howard Warrender (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
46.
Malcolm, ‘Summary Biography’, pp. 19–21.
47.
See David Berman , ‘Deism, Immortality, and the Art of Theological Lying’, in J. A. Leo Lemay (ed.), Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987, pp. 61–68. Berman was referring to the so called English deists, such as Toland , but a cynic could extend the argument to Hobbes . Given the ecclesiastical enemies Hobbes made due to his theological speculations, one would have to conclude he was not a very successful liar, unless we lower the bar of success to escaping formal charges: Members of Parliament were urged to suppress Leviathan on at least two occasions (in 1652 and 1657), but no further action was taken (see Malcolm, Leviathan, Vol. 1: Introduction, pp. 151–152).
48.
Lilla, Still Born God, p. 77.
49.
See Ludwig Feuerbach , The Essence of Christianity [Das Wesen des Christenthums], George Eliot (trans.), New York: L. Harper and Row, 1957.
50.
Moses interacts with God (Exodus 3:1–4:17), yet the Psalmist laments his absence (Psalm 22:1–2; Matthew 27:46), while Paul finds God’s judgements ‘unsearchable ’ (Roman s 11:33) and sets human and divine wisdom in opposition (see I Corinthians 1:18).
51.
Lilla, Still Born God, p. 46.
52.
See Aquinas , ST, pt. i, q. 1.
53.
See ibid., q. 2–26.
54.
See ibid., q. 27–43.
55.
See ibid., q. 44–49.
56.
See ibid., q. 50–64.
57.
See ibid., q. 65–74.
58.
See ibid., q. 75–119.
59.
The subtitle of Leviathan.
60.
Hobbes tutored the young prince in mathematics in 1646 (see Malcolm , ‘Summary Biography’, pp. 18–20).
61.
See Aquinas , De Regno ad regem Cypri, Gerlad B. Phelan (trans.), I. Th. Eschmann (revised.), Joseph Kenny (ed.), Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949, bk. 1.
62.
Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 1, sect. 3.
63.
Aquinas discussed the hierarchy of the sciences , including political, in ST, pt. i, q. 1, art. 5.
64.
Aquinas , De Regno, bk. 1, chap. 1, sect. 4.
65.
Although, as Malcolm has pointed out, it was political sovereignty which reigned supreme in Hobbes’s thinking, over and above the form that sovereignty might take (see ‘Summary Biography’, p. 20).
66.
See Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. i, chap. 11, p. 167; chap. 12, p. 170.
67.
Philosophers sometimes distinguish between physical and thoroughly metaphysical arguments for God’s existence: the former involves arguing from general features of the natural world, and Aristotle , Aquinas , and Hobbes as representative of that tradition; Scotus is sometimes considered to be an innovator in the latter: see William Lane Craig , The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz, London: Harper & Row, 1980, chaps. 5–6.
68.
Stephen A. State, ‘Hobbes, Thomas’, EOE (vol. 2), pp. 209–212: 211. For more on Hobbes ’s ambiguous relationship with natural theology , from a historian who came to recognise that this did have a role to play in Hobbes’s thought, however limited or ambivalent, see George Herbert Wright, Religion , Politics and Thomas Hobbes, Dordrecht: Springer, 2006.
69.
See Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. i, chap. 4, pp. 100–101.
70.
See ibid., pt. i, chap. 16.
71.
Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. i, chap. 4, p. 99; and pt. ii, chap. 21, p. 263.
72.
Ibid., pt. ii, chap. 31, p. 397.
73.
Not least in terms of soteriology.
74.
See Aquinas , ST, pt. i, q. 2–3; SC, bk. 1, chap. 32.
75.
See Aquinas, ST, pt. i, q. 2; SC, bk. 1, chaps. 3–13.
76.
See Aquinas, SC, bk. 1, chap. 14.
77.
See Aquinas ST, pt. i, q. 3; SC, bk. 1, chaps. 15–102.
78.
See Aquinas, SC, bk. 1, chap. 29.
79.
See ibid., chaps. 29–34.
80.
For a discussion by a leading contemporary Thomist , see Brian Davies , The Thought of Thomas Aquinas , chap. 3, especially p. 44.
81.
Pseudo-Dionysius ‘the Areopagite’ is the fountainhead of much of this tradition . The influence of the pseudonymous savant on the thought of Aquinas has come to the fore in recent decades: see Fran O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas, Leiden: Brill, 1992.
82.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. i, chap. 11, p. 167.
83.
See Denys Turner, The Darkness of God : Negativity in Christian Mysticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
84.
For a minimalist natural theology , see Calvin , bk. 1, chaps. 1–3; for a famous repudiation of natural theology, see Karl Barth , Church Dogmatics (vol. 1 of 14), G. T. Thomason and Harold Knight (trans.), Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1965, pt. i.
85.
See Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. i, chap. 11, pp. 167–168.
86.
Ibid., p. 167.
87.
‘Anxiety for the future, disposeth men to enquire into the causes of thing: because the knowledge of them, maketh men the better able to order the present to their own advantage’ (ibid., p. 167).
88.
See ibid., pt. i, chap. 12, pp. 173–178.
89.
See ibid., pp. 168–170.
90.
Aquinas does defend religion as a moral virtue but not without considering several objections (ST, pt. ii of ii, q. 81, art. 2).
91.
See Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion , and Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science : The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
92.
The most infamous was the Traité des trois imposteurs: Moïse, Jésus-Christ, Mahomet, which circulated throughout eighteenth-century Europe, and the (possibly earlier) Latin version De Tribus Impostoribu: see Alcofribas Nasier (trans.), Three Imposters, Whitefish, MA: Kessinger, 2003.
93.
For a recent statement, see D. Jesseph, ‘Hobbes’s Atheism’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy (vol. 26.1), 2002, pp. 140–166.
94.
For a study which details the variety of uses of ‘atheism ’ in an English context, see Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion , England. For a more recent study that is more open to the existence of atheism in the early modern period (in a sense that is recognisable to us today), see Michael Hunter and David Wooton (eds.), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992.
95.
See the entry ‘Atheism ’, Oxford Dictionaries, accessed 28 June 2018: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/atheism.
96.
Feuerbach style interpretations of religion are alive and well, and not only in the form of sceptical attacks, but in affirmative statements rooted in a non-realist philosophy of religion: see Don Cupitt , Is Nothing Sacred? Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion—Selected Essays, New York: Fordham University Press, 2002.
97.
See Hobbes, Leviathan: English and Latin (ii), pp. 1204–1205
98.
See Malcolm (ed.), The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (2 vols.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
99.
Hobbes ’s materialism is a central plank of Jesseph’s argument in ‘Hobbes’s Atheism’.
100.
For a discussion of the various dimensions of Hobbes ’s heterodoxy and its political implications, see Champion , ‘“The Kingdom of Darkness ”: Hobbes and Heterodoxy’, in Intellectual Consequences, pp. 95–120; and ‘Godless Politics: Hobbes and Public Religion ’, in God and the Enlightenment, pp. 42–62.
101.
See John Dowel, The Leviathan Heretical, or, The Charge Exhibited in Parliament Against M. Hobbs Justified, Oxford, 1673.
102.
Hobbes showed a keen interest in heresy himself, and in the years after the publication of Leviathan, contributed to the study thereof: including the posthumously published An Historical Narration Concerning Heresie and the Punishment Thereof, London, 1680; and Historia Ecclesiastica, London, 1688.
103.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. i, chap. iv, p. 108.
104.
See Descartes, Meditationes Quarta and Sexta.
105.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. 4, chap. 46, p. 682.
106.
Ibid., p. 689.
107.
See Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul, London: William Morden, 1659.
108.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. 4, chap. 44, p. 644.
109.
For a classic scholastic statement about the relationship between nature and grace , see Aquinas , ST, pt. i, q. 1. art. 8.
110.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 38, p. 490.
111.
See Aquinas , ST, pt. i, q. 75.
112.
See ibid., q. 76.
113.
See Denys Turner , Aquinas: A Portrait, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013, chap. 2.
114.
In fairness, Turner does acknowledge the difference between Aquinas’s position and later conceptions of materialism (see ibid, chap. 2).
115.
See Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. 4, chap. 44.
116.
See ibid., pt. 4, chap. 44, p. 645.
117.
Ibid., p. 645.
118.
It is a view challenged in Richard Tuck , Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
119.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. i, chap. 13, p. 185.
120.
See M. Gavre, ‘Hobbes and His Audience: Dynamics of Theorising’, in American Political Science Review (vol. 68), 1974, pp. 1542–1556.
121.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. i, chap. 13, p. 187.
122.
See Jairzihno Lopes Pereira, Augustine of Hippo and Martin Luther on Original Sin and the Justification of the Sinner, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013.
123.
See Council of Trent, Session 5.
124.
See Romans 7:7–12.
125.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. I, chap. 15, p. 202.
126.
Ibid., p. 202.
127.
See ibid., pt. i, chap. 6.
128.
Ibid., pp. 120–121.
129.
See John Stuart Mill , Utilitarianism, London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1863, chap. 4: ‘I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it’.
130.
According to Bertrand Russell , ‘John Stuart Mill , in his Utilitarianism, offers an argument which is so fallacious that it is hard to understand how he can have thought it valid’ (History of Western Philosophy , London: Routledge, 2004, p. 702).
131.
Aquinas , ST, pt. i, q. 5.
132.
See chap. 3, n. 49 of the current study: on the utilitarianism of Bentham and the deontological approach of Kant.
133.
See Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. i, chap. 6, p. 122.
134.
For an overview of the many facets of drinking culture and its enemies, see Adam Smyth (ed.), A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England , Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004.
135.
See Leviathan, pt. i, chap. 8, pp. 141–142; chap. 14, p. 214; chap. 42, p. 538.
136.
Hobbes, De Cive, chap. 4, sect. xix.
137.
Positive liberty has of course been associated with totalitarianism, such are the paradoxes of theories within formal conceptions of freedom : see the classic Isaiah Berlin essay (1958): ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Henry Hardy (ed.), Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 166–217.
138.
See Tuck, Hobbes, pp. 25–29.
139.
Hobbes, De Cive chap. 1, sect. 7.
140.
At least since Hume’s ethical writings, many philosophers (but by no means all) have doubted whether this is possible: see Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
141.
Hobbes, De Cive, chap. 1.
142.
See Aquinas , ST, pt. i, q. 5.
143.
See ibid., q. 44, art. 5.
144.
Ibid., pt. ii, q. 94, art. 2.
145.
Ibid., q. 64, art. 7.
146.
Ibid., q. 64, art. 7.
147.
Ibid., art. 3.
148.
See Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. i, chap. 8.
149.
See ibid., pt. i, throughout chap. 15; Romans 1:18–32.
150.
See ibid., pt. i, chap. 12, pp. 178–179; pt. 3, throughout chap. 36; Romans 4.
151.
It is found in the Bible itself, e.g. Isaiah 45:15.
152.
This is the argument throughout Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. 2.
153.
Hobbes writes ‘and (in summe) doing to others, as wee would be done to’ (ibid., chap. 17, p. 223).
154.
Ibid., p. 223.
155.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. ii, chap. 28, p. 360.
156.
See ibid., p. 360.
157.
Ibid., pt. iii, chap. 36, p. 451.
158.
Ibid., chap. 31, p. 396.
159.
Ibid., p. 396.
160.
Ibid., p. 396.
161.
See ibid., p. 399; read in conjunction with pt. i, chaps. 14–15.
162.
Ibid., pt. iii, chap. 31, p. 396.
163.
See Paul C. H. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
164.
See Martin Muslow and Jan Rohls (eds.), Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarianism, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe, Boston: Brill, 2005.
165.
See Pockock, ‘Within the Margins: The Definitions of Orthodoxy’, in Roger D. Lund (ed.), The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 48.
166.
See Dale C. Allison , The New Moses: A Matthew Typology, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993.
167.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 41, pp. 518–519.
168.
See Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974, chap. 2.
169.
Textual searches are easily carried out through Project Guttenberg’s on-line edition of Leviathan, based on the first English edition, prepared by Edward White and David Widger, January 2013, accessed 12 December 2018: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm.
170.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. i, chap. 16, p. 220.
171.
See Pelikan, TCT (vol. 2), pp. 180–200.
172.
Modalism is still a tendency that theologians are reckoning with today, one which has even been identified in Karl Barth’s resolutely Trinitarian theology; for a defence of Barth against this charge, see Dennis L. Jowers, ‘The Reproach of Modalism: A Difficulty for Karl Barth’s Doctrine of the Trinity’, Scottish Journal of Theology (vol. 52.6), May 2003, pp. 231–246.
173.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 41, pp. 520–521.
174.
Ibid., p. 520.
175.
That tendency can be seen in writers from Thomas Morgan in the eighteenth century through to Adolf von Harnack in the twentieth.
176.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 42, p. 522.
177.
Ibid., p. 522.
178.
One of the best surveys of the critical responses is Jon Parkin’s Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, but for an erudite and compact summary see Malc olm, Leviathan, Vol. 1: Introduction, pp. 146–165.
179.
See Malcolm, ‘Summary Biography’, pp. 20–21.
180.
See Malcolm, Leviathan Vol. 1: Introduction, pp. 165–175.
181.
See Hobbes, in Malcolm (ed.), Leviathan, Vol. 3: English and Latin, pp. 772–773.
182.
See Hobbes, in Malcolm (ed.), Leviathan, Vol. 2: English and Latin, pp. 248–249.
183.
Malcolm, Leviathan, Vol. 1: Introduction, p. 179.
184.
The dialogue takes place between the unimaginatively named ‘A’ and ‘B’, with ‘A’ posing the questions and occupying a role which hovers between student and literary interviewer, with ‘B’ seemingly answering on behalf of Hobbes . The first of these dialogues is on the Nicene Creed : see Hobbes, in Malcolm (ed.), Leviathan, Vol. 3: English and Latin, pp. 1142–1189.
185.
See ibid., pp. 1146–1149.
186.
See ibid., pp. 1144–1149.
187.
Ibid., p. 1150, although he equivocates on the question of what the Church Fathers understood by this term (see 1150–1154).
188.
See ibid., pp. 1146–1151.
189.
Ibid., pp. 1150–1153.
190.
See ibid., pp. 1152–1157, 1168–1171.
191.
See ibid., pp. 1178–1181.
192.
See ibid., pp. 1158–1169.
193.
Ibid., p. 1168.
194.
For evidence of earlier Christian conceptions of a corporeal God , see David L. Paulsen, ‘Early Christian Belief in a Corporeal Deity: Origen and Augustine as Reluctant Witnesses’, Harvard Theological Review (vol. 83.2), April 1990, pp. 105–116.
195.
Hobbes, Leviathan, Vol. 3: English and Latin, Appendix, chap. 3, p. 1228.
196.
Ibid., p. 1228.
197.
Ibid., p. 1228.
198.
On ancient rabbinic Judaism , see José Costa, ‘Le corps de Dieu dans le judaïsme rabbinique ancien. Problèmes d’interprétation’, Revue de l’histoire des religions (vol. 227), 2010, pp. 283–316.
199.
Cited by Hobbes, Leviathan, Vol. 3: English and Latin, Appendix, chap. 3, p. 1228.
200.
See Aquinas , ST, pt. i, q. 3, art. 1.
201.
Aquinas concludes each of his five arguments with variations on this phrasing (see ibid., q. 2, art. 3).
202.
Hobbes, Leviathan, Vol. 3: English and Latin, Appendix, chap. 1, p. 1146.
203.
See Thomas Williams, ‘John Duns Scotus ’, sect. 2.3, SEP, Spring 2016, accessed 14 September 2018: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/duns-scotus/.
204.
Hobbes, in Malcolm (ed.), Leviathan, Vol. 3: English and Latin, p. 1228.
205.
Tertullian , On the Prescription of Heretics , Peter Holmes (trans.), Christian Classics Ethereal Library, chap. 7, accessed 28 June 2018: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf03.v.iii.vii.html. Wright argues that Hobbes was ‘far more dubious of the value of patristic theology than his Anglican contemporaries’ (Religion , Politics, and Thomas Hobbes , p. x), which is probably true, but he was not consistently hostile. More generally, see D. W. Dockrill, ‘The Heritage of Patristic Platonism in Seventeenth Century English Philosophical Theology’, in G. A. J Rogers, J. M. Vienne, and Y. C. Zarka (eds.), The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context, Dordrecht: Springer, 1997, pp. 55–79.
206.
Tertullian , cited by Hobbes, in Malcolm (ed.), Leviathan, Vol. 3: English and Latin, p. 1228.
207.
See Hobbes, ibid., p. 1228.
208.
See Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iv.
209.
From Johannes Weiss, in Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes, Göttingen, 1892; and Schweitzer , Quest; to their modern successors, E. P. Sanders, Jesus, and Judaism, London: SCM Press, 1985; and Dale Allison, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010.
210.
From Chubb’s True Gospel (1738) to Robert W. Funk’s , A Credible Jesus: Fragments of a Vision, Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 2002.
211.
From Reimarus , Vom dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger, 1778; to S. G. F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity , Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967; and the more recent and popularist Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, New York: Random House, 2013.
212.
See Crossan , The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991; and Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994.
213.
See Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician , New York: Harper and Row, 1978.
214.
See Robert Goss , Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993; Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza , Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology , London: SCM Press, 1995.
215.
See Hobbes , Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 37. The context here was the function of miracles, which serve only to convince the elect.
216.
This represented a shift in Hobbes ’s position: compare De Cive, chap. xvii, and Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 42.
217.
See Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, and Champion , ‘Hobbes and Heresy ’. This doctrine of ‘Erastianism’, associated with placing the authority of the state over the Church in all matters, is named after the Swiss physician and theologian Thomas Erastus (1524–1583). Though a controversial intellectual in his lifetime, there does not seems to be any evidence that he held this particular doctrine. For a discussion of the principle in theory and pratice in an English context prior to Hobbes’s Leviathan, see Weldon S. Crowley, ‘Erastianism in England to 1640’, Journal of Church and State (vol. 32.3), Summer 1990, pp. 549–566.
218.
See Eusebius , Ecclesiastical History, Volume I [of 2]: Books 1–5, Kirsopp Lake (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926, bk. 3. chap. 8; and Calvin , Institutes, bk. II, chap. 15.
219.
See Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 41, p. 512.
220.
See ibid., chap. 41.
221.
Ibid., chap. 41, p. 512.
222.
Ibid., chap. 41, p. 513.
223.
Ibid., chap. 41, p. 513.
224.
Ibid., chap. 41, p. 513–514.
225.
See Crawford Gribben , ‘John N. Darby, Dispensational Eschatology , and the Formation of Trans-Atlantic Evangelicalism’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- and Kulturgeschichte (vol. 110), 2016, pp. 99–109.
226.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 41.
227.
Ibid., chap. 42, p. 525.
228.
Divine eternity has traditionally been interpreted in terms of a timeless God ; for a classic statement see Aquinas , ST, pt. i, q. 10.
229.
An alternative, one favoured by many modern Christian thinkers, is that of ‘everlasting ’: that God exists throughout and therefore within all of time, but had neither a beginning nor an end: see Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘God Everlasting ’, in Steven M. Cahn & David Shatz (eds.), Contemporary Philosophy of Religion , Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 181–203.
230.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 41, pp. 515–516.
231.
See ibid., chap. 41
232.
Ibid., chap. 41, p. 515.
233.
Ibid., chap. 41, p. 516.
234.
Luther’s radical distinction between law and gospel has been especially influential here. Whatever Jesus himself says about the law in the Gospels was rather eclipsed by the ‘good news’ centred on the salvific function of faith in Jesus as the Christ: see Krister Stendahl , ‘Judaism and Christianity : A Plea for a New Relationship’, Cross Currents (vol. 17), 1967, pp. 445–458; and John T. Pawlikowski, ‘Martin Luther and Judaism: Paths Towards Theological Reconciliation’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion (vol. 43.4), December 1975, pp. 681–693. Even writers as radical in their conclusion as Reimarus, who did not set Jesus over against the law per se, make the Pharisees t he sworn enemies of Jesus (see my discussion in the following chapter).
235.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 41, pp. 514–515. He cites the same passage in connection with Paul ’s notorious command, ‘Servants obey your masters in All things (Coll.3.20)’, in pt. ii, chap. 20, p. 259. Pau l’s authorship of that letter is disputed by modern scholars, but it remains as canonical today as it did for Hobbes .
236.
See ibid., pt. iii, chap. 43. Reimarus would make a similar argument (see the next chapter).
237.
Ibid., pp. 611–612.
238.
See ibid., chap. 32, p. 412.
239.
Ibid., p. 412.
240.
Ibid., chap. 37, p. 469.
241.
Ibid., p. 470.
242.
See Augustine, City of God , bk. 22, chaps. 5, 8–10.
243.
See Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 32.
244.
See Roger Scruton , The West and the Rest: Globalisation and the Terrorist Threat, London: Continuum, 2002, pp. 3–4.
245.
“Τὰ Καίσαρος ἀπόδοτε Καίσαρι καὶ τὰ τοῦ θεοῦ τῷ θεῷ”.
246.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. ii, chap. 20
247.
See Michael Cromartie (ed.), Caesar’s Coin Revisited: Christians and the Limits of Government, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996.
248.
See Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. ii, chap. 20, p. 257.
249.
See ibid., vol. ii chap. 20, p. 259.
250.
See ibid., chap. 19.
251.
See Matthew 17:24–27.
252.
Matthew 21:5.
253.
See Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. ii, chap. 20, p. 259.
254.
Hobbes advances a ‘divine ownership’ theory of the relationship between God and creation , which mirrors that between sovereign and subject. The former is articulated and defended by Aquinas in relation to God ‘redistributing’ his property from the Egyptians to the Israelites (Exodu s 11:1–2): see ST, pt. ii, q. 100, art. 9. This was also defended by Locke his Two Treatise: see Peter Laslett (ed.), Locke: Two Treatise of Government, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960, especially in the first.
255.
Hobbes, Dedication to De Cive, ‘To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Devonshire’, pp. 1–3: 3.
256.
See ibid., chap. 2, sect. XI.
257.
Ibid., chap. 3, sect. XIII.
258.
Ibid., chap. 3 sect. XIII.
259.
See Luther, Address to the Nobility of the German Nation [An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation, 1520], C. A. Buchheim (trans.), in Modern History Source Book: Fordham University, accessed 29 June 2018: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/luther-nobility.asp. For a discussion of the political theologies of the two, see Joshua Mitchell, ‘Luther and Hobbes on the Question: Who was Moses? Who was Christ?’, The Journal of Politics (vol. 53.3), August 1991, pp. 676–700.
260.
The association of Hobbes with deism is well established though unwarranted given the place he accords to biblical revelation : on Hobbes’s supposed deism, see Hill , World Turned Upside Down, p. 388.
261.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 43, p. 610.
262.
See Berndt Hamm, The Early Luther: Stages in a Reformation Reorientation, Martin J. Lohrmann (trans.), Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2014.
263.
Mainly through the language of ‘the elect ’ and the ‘reprobate ’.
264.
See Calvin, Christian Institutes, bk. 1, chap. 2, sect. 7.
265.
See Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. I, chap. 11.
266.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 43, p. 613.
267.
See Champion , ‘Hobbes and Heterodoxy’, pp. 95–120.
268.
Aquinas , ST, pt. ii/ii, q. 1, art. 5.
269.
Ibid., q. 2, art. 1.
270.
Ibid., q. 1, art. 2.
271.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 43, pp. 612–613.
272.
Ibid., p. 615.
273.
State, ‘Hobbes’, EOE, p. 211.
274.
Ibid., p. 210.
275.
See Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
276.
On the radical reductionist side, see Rosenberg , Atheist Guide, and to a less extent Dennett , Bacteria to Bach. For an appreciation of Hobbes as a precursor to computational models of cognitive psychology, see Pinker’s choice of Hobbes on Great Lives, BBC Radio 4, with Melvin Bragg (presenter) and Noel Malcolm (expert witness), 23 December 2011, accessed 7 July 2018: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018csyq.
277.
See Trenton Merricks, ‘Dualism , Physicalism , and the Incarnation’ in Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman (eds.), Persons: Human and Divine , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006, 281–300; van Inwagen , ‘Dualism and Materialism : Athens and Jerusalem ’, Faith and Philosophy (vol. 12.4), pp. 475–488; Lynne Rudder Baker , ‘Persons and the Metaphysics of Resurrection ’, Religious Studies (vol. 43.3), pp. 333–348; Hud Hudson, A Materialist Metaphysics of the Human Person, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. For a materialist approach to religion and spirituality, drawing on Christian resources but not committed to any particular confession, see Blanton , A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
278.
See Heather Walton , ‘The Consolation of Everyday Things’, LRI (vol. 4.15), pp. 137–152.
279.
State, ‘Hobbes’, p. 210.
280.
The phrase is taken from John Rawls : in his political theory, he acknowledged that persons can (and typically will) share a set of commitments necessary to sustain a liberal democracy , but for very different reasons, rooted in each person’s own ‘compressive worldview’ (Rawls, Political Liberalism, New York: Colombia University Press, 1993, pt. 2, lecture 4).
281.
Hobbes ’s concern with the individual person, one key facet of liberalism, is especially apparent to philosophers who oppose the whole emphasis, seeing Western thought as locked in to a political theology which lionises the individual human being over the collective human species: see Esposito, Two: The Machine of Political Theology, especially chaps. 1–2.
282.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 38, p. 490.
283.
Borrowed from Blanton’s Undying Life.
284.
Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 38, p. 490.
285.
Champion , ‘Hobbes and Heterodoxy’, p. 118.
286.
Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 43, p. 614.
287.
See ibid., pt. iii, chap. 43, where Hobbes considers a scanario when an ‘Infidel’ rules over the faithful: ‘But what Infidel King is so unreasonable, as knowing he has a Subject, that waiteth for the second coming of Christ, after the present world shall bee burnt..., and in the meantime thinketh himself bound to obey the Laws of that Infidel King, (which all Christians are obliged in conscience to doe,) to put to death, or to persecute such a Subject’? (p. 625).
288.
Ibid., p. 120.
289.
See William T. Cavanaugh , The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
290.
See Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. iii, chap. 43.

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Birch, J.C.P. (2019). Material Messiah: Hobbes, Heresy, and a Kingdom Not of This World. In: Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51276-5_4

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