Religion, Secularization and Political Thought

Thomas Hobbes to J. S. Mill

James E. Crimmins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138997240
• eBook ISBN: 9781134047468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The increasing secularization of political thought between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries has often been noted, but rarely described in detail. The contributors to this volume consider the significance of the relationship between religious beliefs, dogma and secular ideas in British political philosophy from Thomas Hobbes to J.S. Mill.

During this period, Britain experienced the advance of natural science, the spread of education and other social improvements, and reforms in the political realm. These changes forced religion to account for itself and to justify its existence, both as a social institution and as a collection of fundamental articles of belief about the world and its operations. This book, originally published in 1990, conveys the crucial importance of the association between religion, secularization and political thought.

Chapter one

The religious and the secular in the work of Thomas Hobbes

S. A. State

Were we to visualize, in the manner of mathematical set theory, the ‘Religious’ and the ‘secular’ as potentially overlapping circles on a two-dimensional plane, the number of possible arrangements of those circles might be quite large. They could, however, be reduced to three general patterns: perfectly coextensive (with one subsuming the other), perfectly distinct, or overlapping in various ways. In the case of the religious and the secular as they appear in the work of Thomas Hobbes, a plausible argument could be advanced for all three possibilities depending upon which aspect of Hobbes’s thought is chosen for consideration and upon what is specified as “religious’ and ‘secular’.

Church and state

If we restate the distinction between religious and secular as a distinction between church and state then the two circles come very close to merging – at least in the context of those states where an official religion has been so declared by the civil sovereign. The word ‘church’ has, in Hobbes’s view, various significations ranging from the building itself to the universal multitude of Christians ‘how far soever they be dispersed’. This clarification of terminology is important to Hobbes and he wants to insist that there is only one pertinent sense in which it may be said that a church has the power to command and be obeyed. A church in this pertinent sense would be one which is united in the person of a sovereign, ‘at whose command they ought to assemble and without whose authority they ought not to assemble’.¹ Hobbes affirms that it follows from this definition that a church is equivalent to a civil commonwealth composed of Christians. This ‘political’ definition serves to limit the kind of churches that may properly be said to be authoritative and in Hobbes’s view it renders spurious the conventional distinctions between the ‘Christian’ and the man; the sword of justice and the shield of faith; the spiritual and the temporal; and, finally, between church and state. The distinctions are spurious in the sense that the antitheses which they suggest will disappear with a combination of semantic clarification and scriptural exegesis.

This political definition of the concept of church creates some problems for Hobbes’s account. For one thing the possibility of several authorized churches at the discretion of the sovereign within a single commonwealth (which he at one point suggests)² is difficult though not impossible to square with the equation of church and commonwealth. Presumably this problem is overcome by substituting one of the other definitions of ‘church’, all the while recalling that the sovereign retains authority even if he delegates some of his powers. A further problem concerns non-Christian religions within the Christian Commonwealth. It is not clear what ‘authority’ Jewish or Moslem ‘churches’ would have over their members. It seems that they are tolerated but it is not clear in what sense they could undertake any acts in a corporate capacity since they are not united in the person of sovereign.³ Moreover, the lack of authority in Christian churches in non-Christian countries is in part a contingency of Christian sacred history: Christ was a fisher of men not a commander, hence there was no kingdom on earth and no authority in the strict sense of the word. Other sacred histories need not take account of the New Testament. For this reason, Locke’s argument in A Letter Concerning Toleration is more generally useful. A church for him is any voluntary association of people practising a religion and they may in their corporate capacity enforce rules upon their members as long as those rules are not repugnant to civil society and as long as the enforcement of those rules entails nothing more drastic than excommunication.⁴

At any rate, the medieval distinction between regnum and sacerdotum which was manifested in John of Salisbury’s doctrine of the two swords – spiritual and temporal – has no place in Hobbes’s scheme. Indeed, merely to suggest the possibility of a contemporary spiritual authority distinct from temporal authority is, in his view, to distract people from their proper obligations. This does not mean, however, that the two cities of Augustinian description have collapsed into one; rather, it means that Jerusalem will only replace Athens at the coming of the Messiah. Until the time of their more permanent citizenship, people are advised to keep their hands clean, to have faith and to obey their sovereign on religious concerns. After Hobbes, John Locke would see his deference to prescribed doctrine as a good way to encourage hypocrisy; but, before him, Richard Hooker saw it the way Hobbes did, as an antidote of humility in the face of a religious zeal that threatened to undermine all social life.⁵

The Protestant invocation of that familiar passage from Rom. 13, ‘Grant unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’, would only be acceptable to Hobbes with the understanding that Caesar might acquire authority in religious matters as God’s lieutenant on earth, which is not, one suspects, what Zwingli or Calvin had in mind in mentioning the passage. Indeed when Hobbes alludes to the passage in Leviathan he ignores any possibility that the obligation to Caesar might be only partial in scope.⁶ Nevertheless, it is important to realize that although the sovereign may of necessity provide an authoritative interpretation of religious matters he does not therefore present a necessarily correct interpretation. No particular church nor any particular man is infallible.⁷ Religion remains a matter of private belief. Despite Hobbes’s disparaging remarks about the conscience he should be more widely recognized as a proponent of religious toleration. In the context of the question of what to do if one’s civil sovereign should forbid belief, Hobbes responds, ‘that such forbidding is of no effect; because belief and unbelief never follow men’s commands. Faith is a gift of God, which man can neither give, nor take away by promise of rewards, or menaces of torture’.⁸ Citizens are discouraged not from believing what they will but from contradicting authorized religion and thus embroiling the commonwealth in civil war. By the same token sovereigns are discouraged from probing into the private beliefs of their citizens; such probing would be more than a plausible concern for public safety could ever require.⁹ Furthermore, although the sovereign is presented as God’s lieutenant, Hobbes is not thereby pushing a version of gnosticism. The state of nature may sound a lot like Hell but Leviathan is decidedly not a heaven come down to earth and is designed more to prevent that sectarian nonsense about the Revolution of the Saints which was not uncommon in Hobbes’s day and which has reappeared with such surprising force in our own times.

Revelation and Reason

If the distinction between the religious and the secular can be understood in terms of the relationship between church and state, it may also be understood in terms of another distinction, that of faith and reason or, related to it, revelation and reason. And here the two circles with which we began can be given a new alignment even if it is not immediately clear what the nature of that alignment should be. The strongest case for separating the circles comes from Hobbes himself in recognition of the limits of a naturalistic or rational theology. In Leviathan and elsewhere Hobbes dabbles with arguments which attempt to achieve conclusions concerning theological matters without the help of divine revelation. Medieval Europe witnessed a variety of such attempts by, among others, Anselm, Roger Bacon and Raymond Lull.¹⁰ Some of the results of these attempts seem, in retrospect, not even incorrect but absurdly misconceived as they purport to demonstrate by purely rational means very specific, contingent details of Christian doctrine. Hobbes by contrast recognizes the limits to the kind of ‘religious’ knowledge that can be predicated upon the reflections of a ‘secular’ reason.

He does, however, venture two arguments designed to demonstrate the existence of God.¹¹ One is an argument of causal regression to a first mover, ‘so that’, in his words, ‘it is impossible to make any profound inquiry into natural causes, without being inclined thereby to believe there is one God eternal; though they cannot have any idea of him in their mind, answerable to his nature’.¹² The other is sometimes labelled the argument from design where Hobbes contends that ‘by the visible things in this world and their admirable order a man may conceive there is a cause of them which men call God’.¹³ If a philosophically-based God and a philosophically-based religion were possible then the religious sphere might be erased completely or at least subsumed under the sphere of secular reason. But Hobbes does not conceal the difficulties that arise in an attempt to provide a naturalistic or purely rational foundation to matters of religious significance, and he later concedes the inadequacy of reason in providing unambiguous knowledge of God and the origin of the world. In de Corpore he points out that reason is unable to determine whether the universe is finite or infinite and the argument of causal regression would leave undecided the issue of whether the first mover was ‘eternally immoveable’ or ‘eternally moved’.¹⁴

One piece of advice that Hobbes gives here is that matters of religious significance should be left for the pronouncements of ‘those that are lawfully authorized to order the worship of God’.¹⁵ Another piece of advice he gives is that on matters that may plausibly come within the compass of philosophy one yields to natural reason whereas on matters pertaining to religion one yields to revelation:

The Scripture was written to show unto men the Kingdom of God, and to prepare their minds to become his obedient subjects; leaving the world and the philosophy thereof, to the disputation of men, for the exercising of their natural reason.¹⁶

Both pieces of advice would serve to push the religious and the secular well apart. Religion is a matter of faith not secular reason; religion is a matter of authoritative determination not of scientific disputation. As it happens, Hobbes does not follow his own advice and his inconsistency here opens up the possibility for the third kind of relationship between the religious and the secular, that of overlap or interaction.

Overlapping spheres

There are at least three significant aspects of Hobbes’s work where the religious and the secular overlap, especially as these are understood in the sense of a relationship between matters of faith or revelation on the one hand and reason or science or philosophy on the other.

The first aspect arises in Hobbes’s discussion of divine natural law or, as it is sometimes called (by Hobbes and others), the divine law of reason. Since this topic promises to wed matters divine with matters rational almost by definition, Hobbes’s discussion – assuming we can make sense of it and assuming Hobbes’s sincerity – is bound to be instructive. The second area of overlap arises where reason, understood here primarily as conceptual analysis, is put to work as an instrument of scriptural exegesis. In this role, reason generates the semantic criteria which facilitate the understanding of the political message of divine revelation. Reason helps to clarify the nature and limits of ecclesiastical authority and the relationship between church and state. Finally, reason, understood more in the sense of science or p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The religious and the secular in the work of Thomas Hobbes
• 2. John Locke: Socinian or natural law theorist?
• 3. The religious, the secular and the worldly: Scotland 1680–1800
• 4. Science and secularization in Hume, Smith and Bentham
• 5. Edmund Burke and John Wesley: the legacy of Locke
• 6. Religion, utility and politics: Bentham versus Paley
• 7. From God to man? F. D. Maurice and changing ideas of God and man
• 8. J. S. Mill and the religion of humanity
• Bibliography
• Index