The Theology of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan

Abstract

In his greatest piece of political philosophy, the Leviathan of 1651, Thomas Hobbes dedicated the astonishing mass of eighteen voluminous chapters solely to the discussion of religious matters. Although his earlier political treatises, The elements of law of 1640 and the De cive of 1642, discussed theological doctrines at some length, they never accorded so great a role to questions of religion and theology as did Leviathan. The two books of Leviathan in which Hobbes promulgated his theological doctrines are almost exactly equal in length to books I and II, and one of the chapters in book III (‘Of power ecclesiasticall’) is in some ways the longest chapter in the work. The kind of contentious eschatological doctrines which Hobbes had been careful to leave unchallenged in his early works, namely the question whether the soul had an independent existence after the death of the body, figured particularly high in Leviathan. Why was it that Hobbes's interest in theology increased so sharply between 1642 and 1651, and what was the particular point of the theology of Leviathan?