Toleration and Its Limits

NOMOS XLVIII

Melissa S. Williams, Jeremy Waldron, Melissa S. Williams, Jeremy Waldron

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780814794111
• eBook ISBN: 9780814794593
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Toleration has a rich tradition in Western political philosophy. It is, after all, one of the defining topics of political philosophy—historically pivotal in the development of modern liberalism, prominent in the writings of such canonical figures as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, and central to our understanding of the idea of a society in which individuals have the right to live their own lives by their own values, left alone by the state so long as they respect the similar interests of others.
Toleration and Its Limits, the latest addition to the NOMOS series, explores the philosophical nuances of the concept of toleration and its scope in contemporary liberal democratic societies. Editors Melissa S. Williams and Jeremy Waldron carefully compiled essays that address the tradition's key historical figures; its role in the development and evolution of Western political theory; its relation to morality, liberalism, and identity; and its limits and dangers.
Contributors: Lawrence A. Alexander, Kathryn Abrams, Wendy Brown, Ingrid Creppell, Noah Feldman, Rainer Forst, David Heyd, Glyn Morgan, Glen Newey, Michael A. Rosenthal, Andrew Sabl, Steven D. Smith, and Alex Tuckness.

PART I
TOLERATION IN THE WESTERN CANON OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

1
HOBBES ON PUBLIC WORSHIP

JEREMY WALDRON

I

We usually assume that the difference between Thomas Hobbes and John Locke on the issue of religious toleration is explained by Hobbes’s greater concern about the danger to civil peace posed by religious disagreement. Both thinkers agree that there is no point trying to use civil laws to govern personal faith or belief.¹ “Faith,” writes Hobbes, “hath no relation to, nor dependence at all upon, Compulsion, or Commandment” (L 42: 342).² It is not under voluntary control and therefore not something that an individual can alter in response to any “promise of rewards or menaces of torture” (L 42: 343).³ But they disagree on the relation between religious views and political disturbance. Though Locke accepts that measures must be taken against any view that teaches that civil law is not to be obeyed, he does not think very many religions will have this consequence:

… no Sect can easily arrive to such a degree of madness, as that it should think fit to teach, for Doctrines of Religion, such things as manifestly undermine the Foundations of Society … because their own Interest, Peace, Reputation, every Thing, will be thereby endangered.⁴

Hobbes, by contrast, sees the connection between religious belief and subversion as endemic. Since religion is partly about eternal sanctions, it poses a standing danger to the use and effectiveness of civil sanctions to maintain order and peace in society. People quite rightly believe that God’s command is to be preferred to the command of anyone else including their sovereign, and so it is of the utmost concern to the sovereign what his subjects believe God’s commands to be (L 43: 403). True, the sovereign cannot control those beliefs directly. But he can control them indirectly by controlling their sources and in particular by controlling what people are taught to believe by those who hold themselves out as experts on God (L 42: 372). Locke is notoriously equivocal about the possibility and utility of this sort of indirect thought-control.⁵ Mostly he seems to believe that it is unnecessary and that the main source of political disturbance is not a proliferation of uncontrolled views about what God commands but competition for the privilege of establishment and the resentment of those believers whose faith and practice are not accorded full toleration.⁶ We may surmise that, had he known of Locke’s view, Hobbes would have thought it naïve and dangerous. A sovereign cannot neglect the supervision of the opinions that are taught in his realm, for “in the well governing of Opinions, consisteth the well governing of men’s Actions, in order to their Peace, and Concord” (L 18: 124). Hobbes thinks it pretty clear that the civil power needs to control the appointment of spiritual pastors, and supervise and license their activities, and this amounts in effect to establishing a national church.

II

The argument that derives the sovereign’s authority over teachers and doctrines from the need to keep peace and maintain respect for civil law is an important theme in Hobbes. But it is not the only case he makes for religious establishment.

In this chapter, I will examine a quite separate line of argument based on the requirements of what Hobbes calls “Publique Worship.” This argument has nothing to do with the sovereign’s responsibility to keep the peace. It concerns the intrinsic importance of uniformity in religious practice and is based on some interesting philosophical observations about the role of convention in action and language.

The argument I want to consider has not been discussed very thoroughly in the voluminous literature on Hobbes and religion.⁷ Hobbes devotes a lot of attention to it in Leviathan (Chapter 31) and De Cive (Chapter 15) but his commentators have not. I am not sure why this is. Perhaps it is because the argument is difficult to reconcile with the general view that Hobbes does not take religion very seriously. It is often thought that most of Hobbes’s political theory can be read as though the rumors are true, that it was written by an atheist.⁸ But not this part of Hobbes’s theory. The premise of the argument about public worship is that God is to be worshipped by all persons, natural and artificial.⁹ Without uniformity, Hobbes argues, without established forms of liturgy and religious practice, God cannot be worshipped by a commonwealth. Such worship as there is will be an unordered and confusing mélange of private individual and sectarian practices and that in itself will be an affront to God and a problem for society quite apart from any threat to the peace that it involves.

Commentators know that Hobbes devotes the whole second half of Leviathan to scriptural and ecclesiastical matters. And many of them get very excited about this, tracing in detail his views on basic theological doctrine, ancient Israel, early church history, the papacy, and so on.¹⁰ But the general tenor of these discussions is that Hobbes’s doctrinal, scriptural, and ecclesiastical theology is primarily defensive: He is combating the claims and pretensions of others (particularly Roman Catholics), which might tend to unsettle the state.¹¹ To put it another way, most of Hobbes’s argumentation about religion is perceived as having been premised on the social significance of the prevalence of certain religious beliefs. Whether in his view of natural religion in Chapter 12 of Leviathan, or his view about religious conflict, or his view of the subversive implications of papism, Hobbes can be read as saying, “Some people believe X (about God or about the mission of the church); this is likely to have effect Y in society; therefore the sovereign has to do Z (pander to credulity, prevent conflict, make sure everyone knows that Roman Catholic orthodoxy is false, etc.).” But his discussion of public worship cannot be read in that way. The argument is not “some people believe X; therefore, the sovereign has to do Z,” but rather “X is the case; therefore, the sovereign has to do Z.” And X, as I have said, is an explicitly religious premise about the necessity of worship, put forward affirmatively by Hobbes in his own voice.

Yet another way of putting this is to say that Hobbes’s argument about the requirements of public worship is not an argument about civil religion, if by “civil religion” we mean religion which “is a part of humane Politiques” (L 12: 79),¹² religion set up by statesmen “with a purpose to make those men who relyed on them, the more apt to Obedience, Peace, Lawes, Charity, and civill Society” (L 12: 79).¹³ Hobbes certainly believes in civil religion and would have been in favor of a national church even had he not accepted the argument about public worship that I am going to discuss. But there is more to religion than civil religion, i.e. religion established for purposes which independently are purposes of the state. The argument about public worship adds to Hobbes’s conception of the functions of the state: The state’s function is not just to keep the peace, but to coordinate worship so that uniform honor to the Almighty can be offered in the name of the whole commonwealth. Maybe non-uniform worship will also be socially inflammatory. But Hobbes’s position is that whether it is socially inflammatory or not, non-uniform worship falls short of what God requires of us as an organized community.

III

The premise of Hobbes’s account of public worship is a premise of natural law. Hobbes’s account of natural law has two parts. The first, set out in Chapters 14 and 15 of Leviathan, explains the natural law duties we owe to one another. The second part, set out in Chapter 31, concerns “what Praecepts are dictated to men, by their Naturall Reason onely, without other word of God, touching the Honour and Worship of the Divine Majesty” (L 31: 248).

That humans are required to worship God is, for Hobbes, beyond dispute. God rules over us by virtue of His enormous power: “[t]o those … whose Power is irresistible, the dominion of men adhaereth naturally” (L 31: 246–47). He has commanded us to worship Him, but even if He had not commanded it, it would be an overwhelmingly prudent thing to do (which is more or less what a natural law obligation amounted to in Hobbes’s theory):¹⁴

the worship we do him, proceeds from our duty, and is directed according to our capacity, by those rules of Honour, that Reason dictateth to be done by the weak to the more potent men, in hope of benefit, for fear of dammage, or in thankfulnesse for good already received from them. (L 31: 249–50)

Worship is a way of showing that we esteem God, that we think “as Highly of His Power, and Goodnesse, as is possible” (L 31: 248), and that we are ready to obey Him. In our worship, we also indicate our lack of hubris, i.e. our readiness to accept that our own enterprises cannot compete with God’s. Worship, says Hobbes, is similar to the way reason requires us to act towards any overwhelming superior, that is, to anyone whose power is so much greater than our own that it makes no sense to test our strength against his. In these circumstances, what reason requires is for us to praise, flatter, and bless the one who is our superior, to supplicate to him, thank him, pay attention to him and obey him, defer to him, speak considerately to him, and so on—all of which “are the honour the inferior giveth to the superior.”¹⁵

Worship, then, is “an outward act, the sign of inward honour; and whom we endeavour by our homage to appease, if they be angry or howsoever to make them favourable to us, we are said to worship.”¹⁶ The internal aspect of worship is just the attitude of esteem, humility, and readiness to serve that the action is ultimately supposed to convey. The external aspect, however, consists of words, actions, and gestures. Acts of worship often involve describing God, attributing to Him various properties and attributes, such as “infinite,” “eternal,” “most high,” “good,” “just,” “holy,” etc. These terms—vague (like “good”), superlative (like “most high”), and negative (like “infinite”)—really do not express much determinate meaning. But that is not a problem, says Hobbes, for their aim is to convey admiration and humility (L 31: 251). They are to be understood as speech acts of prostration not description, “for in the Attributes which we give to God, we are not to consider the signification of Philosophicall Truth, but the signification of Pious Intention, to do Him the greatest Honour we are able” (L 31: 252).¹⁷ By the same token, it is appropriate for our words or worship to be embellished with music and other forms of ornamentation (L 31: 252); we should not complain that such embellishment distracts from the propositional content of our speech, because the words of worship are, as Hobbes puts it in an early work, “rather oblations than propositions.”¹⁸ Their propositional content is secondary to what we should think of as the prostrative illocutionary force of our utterances.¹⁹ Non-verbal actions can also be signs of worship, and Hobbes offers, as examples of actions that naturally conveyed the sort of respect that worship requires, things like standing rather than sitting, kneeling, lying prostrate, and so on (DC 15: xi: 189).

The examples just given are of things which naturally convey honor.²⁰ But there are also things that fulfill this function in non-natural ways. These are drawn from among the “infinite number of Actions, and Gestures, of an indifferent nature” (L 31: 253), things which in themselves do not convey any unequivocal meaning so far as honor is concerned.²¹ Hobbes calls worship expressed in this way “Arbitrary Worship” (L 31: 249). The first category of arbitrary worship comprises forms “such as hee requireth, who is Worshipped” (L 31: 249): God might instruct us to worship Him in a way that would not count as a form of worship if He had not specifically required it. The others are actions and practices established as a result of human decision. We might decide that it is proper for men to remove their hats while in church, even though hat-wearing or hat-doffing has no inherent significance, and even though the contrary rule could as easily have been adopted. Hobbes’s general position with regard to this category is that anything which is taken to be a form of worship is a form of worship, unless it has a natural significance that indicates the contrary (DC 15: xviii: 197).

But taken to be a form of worship by whom? Here Hobbes is a little ambiguous (and, as we shall see in the next section, this ambiguity has some consequences for his theory). Sometimes he talks of signs of worship “such as the Worshipper thinks fit” (L 31: 249). But he quickly moves to a more social and spectatorial perspective:

Worship consists in the opinion of the beholders: for if to them the words, or actions by which we intend honour, seem ridiculous, and tending to contumely; they are no Worship; because no signes of honour; and no signes of Honour; because a signe is not a signe to him that giveth it, but to him to whom it is makes; that is, to the spectator. (L 31: 249)

In response to this, we might say that the signs used by the individual worshipper are intended for the benefit of God, not for the benefit of the on-lookers. But Hobbes’s account of worship is continuous with his account of honor (L 10: 63–69), and he sometimes toys with lines of thought that suggest tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: TOLERATION IN THE WESTERN CANON OFPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
• PART II: TOLERATION AND VIRTUE
• PART III: LIBERAL TOLERATION
• PART IV: TOLERATION AND IDENTITY
• Index