Thomas Hobbes and the Debate over Natural Law and Religion

Stephen A. State

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134050543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

The argument laid out in this book discusses and interprets the work of Hobbes in relation to religion. It compares a traditional interpretation of Hobbes where Hobbes' use of conventional terminology when talking about natural law is seen as ironic or merely convenient despite an atheist viewpoint, with the view that Hobbes' morality is truly traditional and Christian.

The book considers other thinkers of the age in tandem with Hobbes and discusses in detail his theology inspired by corporeal mechanics. The position is that there are significant senses in which Hobbes can be said to be a traditional natural law theorist.

CHAPTER 1

ON THE RELIGIOUS QUESTION

Part (i)

If the debate and confusion over Hobbes’s position in the history of political thought is to be clarified, one problem which must be considered is the possibility of his having engaged in linguistic duplicity on matters of God and religion. Although a clarification of this problem is of interest in its own right, it also bears upon the related problem of Hobbes’s status (or lack thereof) as theistic natural law theorist. A very peculiar theistic natural law theorist indeed would be one who sought to undermine theology and religion altogether. By the same token, those claims which have been made regarding Hobbes as the watershed of modern secular thought can only be assessed by reference to Hobbes’s stance on religion.

There is, of course, a body of critical opinion which holds that Hobbes is forthrightly atheistic¹ and subversive of religion in his work; that he is the unique portent of a secular nationality wholly at odds with an otherwise religious age; that his “great work was in freeing, once for all, morals and politics from subservience to divinity and making them a branch of natural science.”²

As it stands this case is relatively weak. No attention is paid to Hobbes’s lengthy explicit discussion of religious and theological matters in Leviathan, nor to his religious invective in the Ecclesiastical History, nor to the at least superficial references to God as a commander of natural laws in de Cive and Leviathan.³ At the same time this view seems to imply that a ‘religious age’ is wholly at odds with reason which might lead one to wonder, among other things, what Aquinas could have been doing in reading Aristotle. In short this case at least in its ‘straw man’ formulation simply ignores too much. It solves the problem by failing even to concede an apparent conflict between Hobbes’s treatment of matters of religion, God, and faith and his treatment of matters of reason.

A more plausible case in textual terms is that which at least concedes that Hobbes has something to say about God and religion, but which in various ways argues that what he says - even if appearing to be orthodox - should not be taken at face value. This case, in other words, presents Hobbes as a writer engaged in esotericism.

The concept of an esoteric doctrine is not a particularly new development. George Boas⁴ has documented the sources in classical texts which gave rise to the belief that a practice of this kind was carried on. And in the twelfth century Avicenna was widely believed to have presented something like an esoteric doctrine in his writings on natural theology.⁵ The assumption, however, that more recent writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should have engaged in widespread esotericism - and that, therefore, the historians of ideas should make extensive use of such an assumption in understanding published texts of that time - is at once a more novel and more provocative proposition. That Hobbes might be singled out for his linguistic duplicity is an opinion perhaps no older than Gierke who suggested that Hobbes’s employment of conventional natural law terminology was, “like a ship under false colours (designed) to conceal the bare piratical idea of power.”⁶ Curiously, Hobbes’s contemporary commentators - at least those who condemned him - were more inclined to dispose with any hypothesis of concealment. They presented Hobbes as more straightforwardly corrupt - usually by an argument of entailment: to say s, y, z, … is to be an Atheist, or Socinion, or Anthropomorphite.⁷

But variants of the esoteric hypothesis have taken root. In the introduction we noted that critics had variously regarded his project as ironic, or artfully equivocal. One went as far as to suggest that his references to God as the commander of natural laws were proposed on the understanding that his audience would take him to be conveying precisely the opposite.⁸ But perhaps the definitive statement of this view with respect to Hobbes comes from strauss. Although Strauss states, “I cannot here prove that Hobbes was an atheist, even according to his own view of atheism.”⁹, he goes on to remark that,

Many present-day scholars tacitly assume that the pages in Hobbes’s writings devoted to religious subjects can be understood if they are read in the way in which one ought to read the corresponding utterances, say, of Lord Bertrand Russell. In other words, I am familiar with the fact that there are innumerable passages in Hobbes’s writings which were used by Hobbes and which can be used by everyone else for proving that Hobbes was a theist and even a good Anglican. The prevalent procedure would merely lead to historical errors, if to grave historical errors, but for the fact that its results are employed for buttressing the dogma that the mind of the individual is incapable of liberating itself from the opinions which rule his society.¹⁰

This articulation of the esoteric hypothesis¹¹ is potentially most damaging to an advocate of a theistic natural-law interpretation of Hobbes because it concedes that evidence exists to support the exoteric doctrine. As Strauss says, there are ‘innumerable passages’ which support, for example, the interpretation of Hobbes as a theist. But these passages are to be discounted. Obviously it is not a question of tallying up the passages in support of a particular interpretation, comparing them with the passages opposed and then achieving some kind of quantitative conclusion. Rather the procedure seems to be to eliminate certain passages at the outset. But how are we to recognise the bogus passages? Presumably they are tied up with contingencies of linguistic usage - i.e. subtle allusions, puns, oblique references, etc., for which it would be difficult to frame a general rule.

The interpreter who wishes to challenge the esotericist view faces special difficulties. Should he suggest, for example, that Hobbes is not an atheist, he must not only supply evidence for his view, but he must also demonstrate why his evidence should not be discounted. The procedure could go on indefinitely. The esoteric hypothesis always has the psychological advantage of being able to counter: ‘The evidence you have brought forward is merely further testimony to the intricately clever job of concealment in which the author has engaged; you have not cleared the author of atheism, you have been duped.’ But before we surrender ourselves to this Maguslike world of receding mirage a few general observations are in order.

Presumably it would make a great deal of difference in how we treated an author if we knew in advance that he was engaged in a project with more than one intended level of meaning. A telegram sent to the Foreign Office which consisted solely of the word ‘peccavi’ might signify nothing more than a civil servant with an interest in the classics and a need to proclaim his sense of guilt. If, however, we knew in advance that the civil servant in question was sending us a code we would approach is missive in a much different meaning. It might then appear that our civil servant was involved in affairs of the Indian sub-continent; a battle for military control was taking place there at the time of the telegraph message; the point of critical interest was an area called Sindh. And so the perceptive reader who knows what our civil servant is about will translate ‘peccavi’ not as ‘I have sinned’ but as ‘I have Sindh’.

The question which arises from this concerns the extent to which there are substantial grounds for being antecedently suspicious of an author’s esoteric presentation in the general context of the seventeenth century. How predictably can we assume an esoteric doctrine to have arisen? It would, of course, be naive to assume that writing carried no danger¹² to the seventeenth century author. But if our disposition to approach Hobbes as an esoteric writer is affected by generalisations about his contemporaries, it should at least be made clear that esotericism was manifestly not the only response of seventeenth century authors to the perceived danger involved in writing. An author need not have published at all; he might simply have written a diary in some opaque and arcane code as did Pepys. He might have published anonymously or under pseudonym as did Pufendorf (Severinus de Monzanbano). In short an esoteric doctrine was not the only nor necessarily the most plausible method of avoiding persecution in the seventeenth century.

A further significant possibility is that exhibited in the examples provided by Galileo and Sydney where on author publishes first and worries about the consequences later. Here, an author may be more or less circumspect - say, by using a dialogue form instead of a treatise - but the character of the work remains predominately forthright. The author may or may not recant under subsequent pressure but he writes with sufficient clarity to - as it were - face the music. A central point of this chapter will be to show that hobbes’s writing falls into this category of forthrightness. But the case for accepting or rejecting Hobbes as a practitioner of esotericism does not and cannot rest upon facile generalisations about his contemporaries. If it could be shown that concealment might plausibly be thought to have been a generally accepted practice, then this would probably influence our approach to Hobbes, although Hobbes’s inclusion in this practice would have to be demonstrated on oth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: On the Religious Question – part i
• Chapter 2: On the Religious Question – part ii
• Chapter 3: Hobbes and Hobbism; Philosophy and History: The Contribution to the Debate by Quentin Skinner
• Chapter 4: Natural Law part i – a minimal case
• Chapter 5: Natural Law part ii – refining the boundaries
• Bibliography