Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2017
By the time Hobbes wrote Leviathan, he was a theist, but not in the sense presumed by either side of the present-day debate concerning the sincerity of his professed theism. On the one hand, Hobbes's expressed theology was neither merely deistic, nor confined to natural theology: the Hobbesian God is not merely a first mover, but a person who counsels, commands, and threatens. On the other hand, the Hobbesian God's existence depends on being constructed artificially by human convention. The Hobbesian God is not a natural person; he exists as a person only insofar as he is by fiction represented. Like the state and pagan gods, he is an artificial person by fiction. The upshot is that Hobbes was a sincere theist and that his seventeenth-century critics were right to think that, in their sense, he was an atheist: he did not steadfastly believe in an independently existing deity who precedes human convention. Hobbes was agnostic on this question. He nevertheless believed that God is brought into being as an artificial person. This ‘personal theology’ not only involved a heretical interpretation of the Trinity, it also came to play a significant role in his moral and political philosophy.
I am grateful to Elad Carmel, Robin Douglass, Bryan Garsten, Kinch Hoekstra, Al Martinich, Alison McQueen, Eva Odzuck, Johan Olsthoorn, Monicka Patterson-Tutschka, Patricia Springborg, Rosemary Wagner, two referees for this journal, and participants at the conference on Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Religion, 7–8 April 2015, King's College London, for comments on previous drafts.
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8 Arash Abizadeh, ‘Hobbes's agnostic theology before Leviathan’ (forthcoming).
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10 L 34.4: 614.
11 AW 35.16: 434/395–6; cf. EL 11.3: 65.
12 L 31.33: 568. The terminological distinction between propositions and oblations appears in AW 35.16: 434/3–396.
13 L 3.12: 46. For other attributes, see Holden, Thomas, ‘Hobbes's first cause’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 53 (2015), pp. 647–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 EL 11.4: 65–6; LL Appendix 1.4: 1144; 3.6: 1228; AB 33/308, 36–7/310, 40/313; HNH 7–8/393.
15 L 46.15: 1078.
16 L 31.14: 564.
17 L 3.12: 46.
18 L 34.2: 610; cf. 46.15: 1076.
19 L 31.19: 564; 31.22: 566.
20 L 34.5: 614.
21 L 12.7: 168. L 34 as a whole argues for this preference. See also 31.28: 566.
22 E.g. Curley, ‘“I durst not write so boldly”’; Jesseph, ‘Hobbes's atheism’; Gorham, Geoffrey, ‘The theological foundation of Hobbesian physics: a defence of corporeal God’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 21 (2013), pp. 240–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Here I am in agreement with Leijenhorst, Cees, ‘Hobbes’ corporeal deity’, Rivista di storia della filosofia, 59 (2004), pp. 73–95 Google Scholar.
24 L 7.3–4: 98.
25 L 11.25: 160, my emphasis; cf. 12.6: 166.
26 DC 26.1: 412–13/335–6, my emphasis; cf. DC 1.8: 10; AW 26.2: 305/308–9.
27 Hobbes wrote of an individuated corpus, a corpus animatum sentiens, a corpus animatum rationale, and a persona, respectively. DC 1.3: 3–4/4–5; 2.14: 21–22/23–4; L 16. Beyond ‘author’ and ‘person’, the English labels are mine.
28 Hobbes treated the question of self-identity or individuation in AW 12.1–6: 137–43; DC 11.7.
29 Hobbes explicitly included the civitas in his discussion in DC 11.7: 136. See L 22.9: 352 for the expression ‘artificiall, and fictitious Bodies’.
30 L 6.1: 78; 6.51–4: 92–4. The discussion of voluntary motion in L 6 concerns animals in general, and Hobbes's synonym for voluntary motion is ‘Animall motion’ (L 6.1: 78).
31 L 4.8: 52; DC 2.14: 21–2/24.
32 The kind described in DC 1.3: 3–4. See also L 5.5: 68.
33 L 5.6: 68.
34 L 5.17: 72; 5.2: 64. See Arash Abizadeh, ‘Hobbes on mind: practical deliberation, reasoning, and language’, Journal of the History of Philosophy (forthcoming).
35 L 16.4: 244.
36 L 16.1–2: 244.
37 L 16.13: 248.
38 L 41.9: 772; 42.3: 776–8.
39 E.g. ‘a person is he to whom the words and actions of men are attributed, either his own or another's: if his own, the person is natural; if another's, it is artificial (fictitia)’. DH 15.1: 130/83.
40 In chapter 42 of Leviathan, Hobbes referred back to his initial formulation in chapter 16 by saying that ‘a Person, (as I have shewn before, chapt. 13. [sic]) is he that is Represented’. L 42.3: 776. Skinner, Quentin, ‘Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the state’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 7 (1999), pp. 1–29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has tried to account for the apparent discrepancy by hypothesizing a shift in Hobbes's thinking, from the ‘representer’ formulation in L 16 to the ‘representee’ formulation in DH. The hypothesis is belied, however, by the fact that both usages occur in L 16 itself, and that the representer view appears in works post-dating DH (e.g. LL 16: 245; AB 37/310). For criticism, see Runciman, David, ‘What kind of person is Hobbes's state? A reply to Skinner’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 8 (2000), pp. 268–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Skinner amends his view in Skinner, Quentin, Visions of politics, iii: Hobbes and civil science (Cambridge, 2002), p. 190 Google Scholar, but comes close to advocating a position according to which the representer and representee are two distinct persons. See also Matheron, Alexandre, ‘Hobbes, la trinité et les caprices de la représentation’, in Zarka, Yves Charles and Bernhardt, Jean, eds., Thomas Hobbes: philosophie première, théorie de la science et politique (Paris, 1990), pp. 381–90Google Scholar.
41 L 16.3: 244. Hobbes explicitly treated the metaphorical use of ‘is’ in his attack on the deceitful ‘Conjuration’ that Christian clerics perform in ‘the Sacrament of the Lords Supper’: ‘The words, This is my Body, are equivalent to these, This signifies, or represents my Body; and it is an ordinary figure of Speech: but to take it literally, is an abuse’. L 44.11: 966–8.
42 L 16.3: 244. For the intrinsically theatrical component of personhood, see Vieira, Mónica Brito, The elements of representation in Hobbes: aesthetics, theatre, law, and theology in the construction of Hobbes's theory of the state (Leiden, 2009), especially pp. 82–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
43 Green, Michael J., ‘Authorization and political authority in Hobbes’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 53 (2015), pp. 25–47, at p. 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
44 L 16.4: 244.
45 L 16.1–4: 244.
46 L 16.3: 244.
47 L 16.4: 244.
48 L 16.10: 248; 16.5–6: 246.
49 L 16.9–13: 246–8. The following paragraph draws on Abizadeh, Arash, ‘Leviathan as mythology: the representation of Hobbesian sovereignty’, in Lloyd, S. A., ed., Hobbes today: insights for the twenty-first century (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 113–52, at pp. 138–9Google Scholar. Another scholar who explores the significance of the twelfth paragraph's location is Garsten, ‘Religion and representation in Hobbes’, p. 529, but Garsten takes it merely to imply that God, between Saul's kingship and the re-establishment of God's kingdom on earth upon Christ's return, is an ‘absent’ or ‘silent’ actor.
50 L 14.23: 210; 18.3: 266. For discussion of Hobbes's ‘mediation doctrine’, see Edwin Curley, ‘The covenant with God in Hobbes's Leviathan’, in Sorell and Foisneau, eds., Leviathan after 350 years, pp. 199–216. In my view, Curley (p. 202) is mistaken to treat the covenant with Abraham as an exception to Hobbes's mediation doctrine; see Abizadeh, ‘Leviathan as mythology’.
51 He wrote, for example, ‘The Person…whom Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and the Prophets beleeved, was God himself, that spake unto them supernaturally’, and wrote of them whom ‘God hath authorised [in a supernaturall way] to declare’ divine positive laws. L 43.6: 932; 26.39: 442–4.
52 L 16.9–12: 246–8.
53 Because ‘the Multitude naturally is not One, but Many; they cannot be understood for one; but many Authors’, so that the unified multitude's representer is authorized not by itself as a whole but individually by ‘every one of that Multitude in particular’. L 16.13–14: 250–2.
54 Another instance in Leviathan in which Hobbes expressed himself by establishing a prosaic rhythm, only to leave his point unsaid, appears in chapter 47. After seven short consecutive paragraphs, each comparing priests to fairies, Hobbes deployed the figure of aposiopesis to magnify the sting of his eighth barb: ‘The Fairies marry not; but there be amongst them Incubi, that have copulation with flesh and bloud. The Priests also marry not.’ L 47.30: 1122. See Skinner, Quentin, Reason and rhetoric in the philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), p. 419 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The chapter 16 example is not, strictly speaking, an aposiopesis, if by that figure we understand a sentence that stops suddenly to leave its point implied. But in other respects, the literary device Hobbes used in the two instances is the same.
55 Some readers may wonder whether, by omitting the explicit claim that God can be no author, Hobbes meant to imply that, unlike other artificial persons by fiction, God can be an author. The problem with such a reading of the omission is that, unlike the one I have given, it is completely unmotivated: Hobbes would have had no reason for passing in silence a view that God can be an author. To the contrary.
56 Cf. the discussion of God as the ‘author’ of nature in Holden, ‘Hobbes's first cause’.
57 L 32.5–6: 578–80.
58 L 45.31: 1042; 36.14: 668; 32.6: 580; 45.25: 1036. See Schuhmann, Karl, ‘Phantasms and idols: true philosophy and wrong religion in Hobbes’, Rivista di storia della filosofia, 59 (2004), pp. 15–31 Google Scholar. For the scandal, see EW iv: 334. I take up Hobbes's treatment of God's covenants with Abraham and Moses in particular (L 35.4–5: 636; 40.1–6: 736–40) in Abizadeh, ‘Leviathan as mythology’, pp. 142–8.
59 See Vieira, Elements of representation, p. 226.
60 L 16.11: 248; 33.1: 586; 33.25: 608; 40.4: 738; 40.7: 742; 42: 33: 810; 42.80: 866. See also DCv 16.16: 213–14; HE 395. The claim that the sovereign decides the content of scripture belies Pocock's assertion that while the Hobbesian sovereign is the ‘interpreter of God's word’, he is not its ‘author’, and that ‘The authority by which the sovereign interprets the prophetic word is clearly distinct from the authority by which the word is uttered.’ Pocock, J. G. A., Politics, language, and time: essays on political thought and history (Chicago, IL, 1989), pp. 166–8Google Scholar.
61 L 33.21: 604; 33.1: 586.
62 DH 15.3: 85/132, translation modified. Hobbes also here wrote that ‘it is required that the will of him that is represented be the author of the actions performed by those who represent him’, which appears (a) to attribute authorship to God and (b) to rule out the possibility of representation by fiction. Both appearances are dissipated by what Hobbes wrote immediately after this clause: he immediately stated that (a) it is the commonwealth, not God, who creates (and hence authors) God's artificial person and that (b) ‘Even an inanimate thing can be a person’ when ‘caretakers constituted by the commonwealth bear its person, so that it hath no will except that of the commonwealth’. DH 15.3–4: 85/132, translation modified.
63 Hobbes alluded to the Trinity in L 16.12: 248; 33.20: 602; 41.9: 772. In L 42.3: 776–8, he explicitly named the Trinity and gave his full interpretation.
64 L 42.3: 776; 41.9: 772.
65 L 40.6: 740.
66 Quoted in AB 43/315.
67 Edwards, Thomas, The first and second part of gangræna: or, A catalogue and discovery of many of the errors, heresies, blasphemies and pernicious practices of the sectaries of this time, vented and acted in England in these four last years (London, 1646), pp. 15, 30Google Scholar.
68 Hobbes did not say this, but the response would have been readily available to him had this hypothetical objection been pressed against him. In fact, Hobbes had noted that although ‘the person of God the Father’ had been directly represented by ‘whosoever had the Soveraignty of the Common-wealth amongst the Jews’, that person did not acquire ‘the name of Father, till such time as…his Son Jesus Christ’ appeared, which presumably implies not only that the person of the Father continued to exist, but that he was also mediately represented as Father by Jesus himself. L 40.14: 758, my emphasis. Cf. L 41.9: 772.
69 For discussion, see Warner, D. H. J., ‘Hobbes's interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity’, Journal of Religious History, 5 (1969), pp. 299–313 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
70 For discussion of whether Hobbes's account makes Moses a person of the Trinity, see Matheron, ‘Hobbes, la trinité et les caprices de la représentation’; Lessay, Franck, ‘Le vocabulaire de la personne’, in Zarka, Yves Charles, ed., Hobbes et son vocabulaire (Paris, 1992), pp. 155–86Google Scholar.
71 Ross, Alexander, Leviathan drawn out with a hook, or, Animadversions upon Mr. Hobbs his Leviathan (London, 1653), p. 54 Google Scholar.
72 Bramhall quoted in AB 43/315; AB 31–2/306. The same objection appeared in Tenison, Thomas, The creed of Mr. Hobbes examined; in a feigned conference between him and a student in divinity (London, 1670), pp. 40–1Google Scholar.
73 See, for example, L 36.14: 668: ‘our Saviour; who was both God that spake, and the Prophet to whom he spake’.
74 The same holds for Hobbes's profession that ‘the Godhead [as St Paul speaketh Col. 2. 9.] dwelleth bodily’ only in Christ. It also holds for his profession of the ‘onely Necessary Article of Christian Faith’. To profess ‘the beleef of this Article Jesus is the Christ’ is just to profess that Jesus was ‘the King of the Jews, promised in the Old Testament’, and ‘shall reign eternally’ after the day of resurrection over those ‘nations as should beleeve in him’ (L 36.13: 668; 43.19: 948; 36.20: 676–8; 43.18: 948; 43.11: 938). It is ultimately to express an intention or desire to obey Jesus as king ‘in the world to come’, i.e., once the current political order has ended: ‘the intent of beleeving that Iesus is the Christ’ is that, upon ‘the second coming of Christ’, one ‘intendeth then to obey him’ (L 42.34: 810; 43.23: 954). The Christian profession of faith is an oblation.
75 DH 15.3: 85/132, translation modified.
76 L 42.70: 852. On Hobbes's thoroughgoing Erastianism, see Collins, Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes.
77 Ross, Leviathan drawn out with a hook, dedication To the Reader; Whitehall, John, The Leviathan found out: Or the answer to Mr. Hobbes's Leviathan, in that which my Lord of Clarendon hath past over (London, 1679), pp. 130–1Google Scholar.
78 Matheron, ‘Hobbes, la trinité et les caprices de la représentation’.
79 L 38.5: 708; Review & Conclusion.14: 1139. Cf. L 38.2: 700. On Hobbes's views on religious toleration, see Arash Abizadeh, ‘Publicity, privacy, and religious toleration in Hobbes's Leviathan’, Modern Intellectual History, 10 (2013), pp. 259–89.
80 LL Appendix 1.83: 1178–80. Hobbes's Latin wording of the catechism roughly translates the order of Confirmation in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer.
81 LL Appendix 3.12: 1232, my emphasis.
82 Nothing Hobbes said in the Latin Leviathan substantively changes the relation of Moses to the Trinity: if in the English Leviathan Moses is not literally a person of the Trinity, in the Latin Leviathan Moses still ‘is’ a person of the Trinity in the metaphorical sense that he represents the person of God to the Israelites. See Matheron, ‘Hobbes, la trinité et les caprices de la représentation’, p. 389; Lessay, ‘Le vocabulaire de la personne’, p. 183.
83 LL 16: 249, translation in n. 26, my emphasis.
84 Vieira takes these passages to reflect the view that ‘God is…a natural person, or an author.’ Vieira, Elements of representation, p. 220. Hobbes offered the same wording in English in AB 44/316, but again did so by citing ‘the words of our Catechism’.
85 Lim, Paul C. H., Mystery unveiled: the crisis of the Trinity in early modern England (Oxford, 2012), p. 224 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
86 LL Appendix 1.15–17: 1150. See Lim, Mystery unveiled.
87 Patricia Springborg, ‘Hobbes's Historia ecclesiastica: introduction’, in HE.
88 HE 349–57.
89 HE 353–61.
90 HE 365.
91 HE 377–9.
92 HE 373–5.
93 HE 375, translation altered. Springborg's translation of fidem as ‘creed’ is misleading here, since it loses the connection to the specific propositional attitude of faith that Hobbes was invoking.
94 ‘Thunderstruck by the strange speech of the philosophers, plain-spoken men were not able to contradict them.’ HE 357.
95 HE 383.
96 LL Appendix 1.95–6: 1186.
97 LL Appendix 3.6: 1228, translation modified.
98 LL 16: 245.
99 In De homine, Hobbes called ‘fictitia’ both types of artificial person (those borne via true representation and via representation by fiction). But he implicitly recognized the distinct category of representation by fiction, without naming it, when he declared that ‘Even an inanimate thing can be a person.’ DH 15.3–4: 85/132. It is therefore a mistake to say, as Simendic does, that in De homine and the Latin Leviathan Hobbes ‘had done away with the rather confusing distinction between acting truly and acting by fiction’. Marko Simendic, ‘Thomas Hobbes's person as persona and “intelligent substance”’, Intellectual History Review, 22 (2012), pp. 147–62, at p. 152. Any interpretation unable to make sense of this central distinction fails to account for the basic premise of Hobbes's mature theology.
100 LL 16: 247, translation in n. 19.
101 See Paganini, Gianni, ‘Hobbes, Valla and the Trinity’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 11 (2003), pp. 183–218 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vieira, Elements of representation, pp. 209–11.
102 LL Appendix 1.83: 1180; see also LL Appendix 1.109: 1188.
103 AB 37–8/310–11.
104 L Intro.2: 18.
105 AW 26.6: 307/310; cf. EL 25.9: 149–50; DCv 18.4: 255.
106 6L 183–4; DH 10.2: 39. On the maker's knowledge tradition, see Pérez-Ramos, Antonio, Francis Bacon's idea of science and the maker's knowledge tradition (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar.