"I
Durst Not Write So Boldly"
or
How to Read
Hobbes' Theological-Political Treatise[1]
One of the most tantalizing anecdotes in Aubrey's not
so brief life of Hobbes concerns Hobbes' (alleged) reaction to Spinoza's Theological-Political
Treatise (TTP). As recently
emended, the entire passage runs as follows:
When Spinoza's Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus first came out [1670], Mr. Edmund Waller sent it to my
lord of Devonshire and desired him to send him word what Mr. Hobbes said of
it. Mr. H. told his lordship:- Ne
judicate ne judicemini ["Judge not that ye be not judged"-
Matthew 7:1] He told me he had outthrown him a bar's length, for he durst not
write so boldly.[2]
The natural reading of this is that Hobbes thought
Spinoza had said things which he, Hobbes, would have liked to say, but did not
dare say in print, for fear of persecution.
Leo Strauss was fond of the passage, since it lends support to his interpretation
of Hobbes as an atheist, forced by the repression of his times to conceal his
atheism in a cloak of insincere professions of (relative) religious orthodoxy.[3]
Not everyone, however, takes this passage as support
for a Straussian reading of Hobbes. The
tendency of English-language writers on Hobbes, at least since Oakeshott's
influential introduction to his edition of Leviathan, has been to accept
the sincerity of his professions of theism, and indeed, to represent him as a
genuine, if somewhat eccentric, Christian.[4] Most of these writers do not discuss the
passage in Aubrey, but those who do, reject any Straussian interpretation of
it. Glover, for example, remarks that it
is extremely improbable that Hobbes was referring (or understood by Aubrey to
be referring) to Spinoza's pantheism when he said this, since Hobbes equated
pantheism with atheism,[5]
and Aubrey testifies quite explicitly that Hobbes was not an atheist (Glover,
p. 166). Hood, on the other hand, thinks
we ought to be skeptical of the whole story:
It is not credible that Hobbes ever
confessed, even by implication, to such a babbler as Aubrey that he had
written much that he did not believe to be true. (p. 1)
It would be rash, he thinks, to treat this remark as
giving Hobbes' very words. One major
reason for his skepticism is that Aubrey's testimony, "for what it is
worth," is that Hobbes was not merely not an atheist, but in fact a
sincere Christian.[6]
Now I
think the whole question of Hobbes' religious views, of his sincerity in his
professions of Christian theism, and of his affinities with Spinoza, is fascinating
in its own right. But it is also worth
exploring because our answer to these questions may affect the way we conceive
the history of moral philosophy. If we
ask what defines modern moral philosophy as modern, one plausible answer
is that in the modern period skepticism about traditional religious beliefs had
become sufficiently widespread that it no longer seemed feasible to interpret
moral obligation in terms of a fundamental obligation to obey divine law;
instead, it had become an urgent matter to account for the notion of moral
obligation in purely secular terms.[7] If we then ask where modern moral philosophy
begins, it is tempting to say "with Hobbes."[8]
But
many passages in Hobbes suggest that he is not trying to give a purely secular
foundation for morality, at least not if having a moral theory requires having
a theory of moral obligation.[9] E.g., at the end of his discussion of the
laws of nature in Leviathan he writes:
These dictates of Reason men use to
call by the name of Lawes; but improperly: for they are but Conclusions, or
Theoremes concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defense of
themselves; wheras Law, properly is the word of him, that by right hath command
over others. But yet if we consider the
same Theoremes, as delivered in the word of God, that by right commandeth all
things; then are they properly called Lawes.[10]
This suggests that we can view the laws of nature as
dictates of morality, rather than counsels of prudence, only if we conceive of
them as divine commands. It would seem
to follow that if Hobbes is not serious about his apparent endorsements of
theism, he does not really have a moral theory.
In this case, he can hardly be the founder of modern moral
philosophy. On the other hand, if Hobbes
is serious about his endorsement of theism, it appears he is offering a fairly
traditional version of natural law theory.
In that case, he cannot be the founder of modern moral philosophy
because he is not modern enough. So our
answer to the question "How do we read Hobbes on the subject of religion?"
will affect, not only the way we view his moral philosophy, but also the way
we view his place in the history of moral philosophy.
1.
Let's
begin by looking a little further at the biographical evidence. Hood, though skeptical of Aubrey's accuracy
when his report suggests that Hobbes may have held unorthodox views, is
prepared to appeal to his testimony when his report suggests that Hobbes held
orthodox views. Aubrey does indeed
testify that Hobbes was a Christian:
For his being branded with atheism,
his writings and virtuous life testify against it. No man hath written better of [God], perhaps
not so well. To prevent such false and
malicious reports, I thought fit to insert and affirm as abovesaid. And that he was a Christian 'tis clear; for
he received the sacrament of Dr. [John] Pierson, and in his confession to Dr.
John Cosins, at [St. Germains], on his (as he thought) death-bed, declared that
he liked the religion of the church of England best of all other.[11]
Hobbes himself provides at least partial confirmation
of this story in his prose autobiography, writing that when he was very
seriously ill in St. Germains, near Paris (in 1647),
Dr. John Cosins, afterward Bishop of
Durham, offered to pray with him to God.
When he [Hobbes speaks of himself in the third person here] had thanked
him, he said, "Yes, if you will conduct the prayers according to the rite
of our Church." (OL I, xvi)
We might wonder what rite Hobbes thought Dr. Cosins
would have used if he had not set this condition, but Hobbes comments merely
that this was a great sign of reverence towards episcopal discipline. Hobbes writes this toward the end of his
life, sometime after the publication of his translation of the Iliad in
1675, but he had appealed to this incident earlier, in the dedicatory letter to
Seven Philosophical Problems (1662, EW VII, 5), inviting those who
doubted his religiosity to ask the Bishop of Durham about his conduct in 1647.
In
the autobiography, he goes on to offer as further evidence of his being, not
only disposed to the cause of the bishops, but also a sincere Christian (OL I,
xvii), the fact that on his return to England he went out of his way to attend
Anglican services, although at that time no one in England was legally obliged
to attend any service.[12] So if we argue that Hobbes was not a sincere
Christian, we must reject his own, very explicit testimony. Some will no doubt think we cannot do this
without impugning Hobbes' moral integrity.
I shall return to that question later.
For
now I simply note that the general tendency of Aubrey's testimony regarding
Hobbes' religious beliefs seems to undercut his picture of Hobbes as a pious
Christian. Consider the following
anecdote:
When Mr. T. Hobbes was sick in
France, the divines came to him and tormented him (both Roman Catholic, Church
of England, and Geneva). Said he to them
"Let me alone, or else I will detect all your cheats from Aaron to
yourselves." (I, 357-58)
It's rather hard to square this with Aubrey's earlier
picture of Hobbes cheerfully taking the last rites of the Church of
England. Aubrey's source here is
Elizabeth, viscountess Purbec, though he remarks that he thinks he himself has
heard Hobbes say "something to the same purpose." Perhaps Elizabeth's story is merely a corrupt
version of one Hobbes himself tells in the passage from his autobiography cited
above. On the occasion of that illness a
mutual friend summoned Mersenne to his bedside to try to persuade him to
convert to Roman Catholicism, arguing the power of the Church to remit
sins. Hobbes replied: "Father, I have debated all that with
myself long ago; to debate it now will be tiresome; you have more pleasant
things you can tell me; when did you last see Gassendi?" (OL, I, xvi)
But even if Aubrey's anecdote is apocryphal, it indicates what Hobbes'
friends thought the temper of his mind was.
And as we shall see, there's a good deal in Leviathan to suggest
that his attitude toward the clergy was not one of great reverence.[13]
Certainly
some of his friends thought him violently anticlerical. After Hobbes' death Aubrey asked Edmund
Waller- the same man who had asked for Hobbes' opinion of Spinoza's TTP- to
write some verses in praise of him.
Waller declined, explaining that he was
afraid of the churchmen. He quoted Horace-
Incedo per ignes
Suppositos cineri
doloso-
[I
pass through fires
Buried
beneath treacherous ashes]
that what was chiefly to be taken
notice of in his elegie was that he, being but one, and a private
person, pulled down all the churches, dispelled the mists of ignorance, and
laid-open their priest-craft. (I, 358)
Of course, it's perfectly possible to accept the
Christian religion and to reject all its institutional forms. Milton, whose sincerity in his professions of
Christianity admits no rational doubt, was also vehemently anticlerical.[14]
Still,
Aubrey's evidence regarding Hobbes' religious views makes it difficult to think
of him as someone who could embrace the ceremonies of the Church of England
without serious mental reservations. If
Hobbes had a deep distrust of the clergy and a low view of all the major sects
of his time, his reported preference for the Church of England might not amount
to much. Hobbes' doctrine of civil
obedience requires that a loyal subject conform himself externally to the forms
required by the sovereign, but leaves him free to think what his reason
persuades him of (L xxxii, 5, 411).
Though Hobbes was living in exile in France when he followed Dr. Cosins
in prayer, he would presumably have regarded Charles I as his sovereign. Even after 1649 he seems to have thought
himself bound by obedience to Charles II up to the point when, having been
prohibited from the royal court because of the teachings of Leviathan,
he was no longer under his protection (OL I, xvii).
There
is a passage in one of Hobbes' letters which suggests that he may have been
sincere in his dealings with Dr. Cosins, if only temporarily. In 1668 Hobbes reports visiting a young woman
who had, according to her mother, gone without food or drink for six
months. Evidently those around her
claimed that this was a miracle, that the young woman's piety enabled her to
survive without sustenance, and her mother made a bit of money from those whose
curiosity led them to want to see her.
Hobbes is clearly skeptical, and thinks the mother may be secretly
feeding her, though he does not think the woman and her mother are gaining
enough from this "to breed suspicion of a cheat." To determine whether the facts are as they
are alleged to be would require an examination of matters which a private
citizen who is male cannot decently pry into; the affair is not of sufficient
importance to justify state interference; it should be left to the Church to
determine whether or not the event is miraculous. Hobbes then compares the young woman's
situation with his own at an earlier time:
I myself in a sickness have been
without all manner of sustenance for more than six weeks together: which is
enough to make mee think that six months would not have made it a miracle. Nor do I much wonder that a young woman of
clear memory, hourely expecting death, should bee more devout then at other
times. 'Twas my own case. (EW VII, 464)
Presumably this is a reference to the illness of 1647. Hood cites it as confirmation of Hobbes'
piety, but the passage is somewhat double-edged, since it implies that his
piety reached that level only when death seemed imminent.
After
the great fire in London in 1666 some of the religious concluded that the
plague which preceded it was a sign of God's anger against the people of
England for the licentiousness of Charles' court and his tolerance of people
like Hobbes and Thomas White, a Catholic priest and longtime friend of Hobbes,
who held improper views about the immortality of the soul.[15] The House of Commons set up a committee to
inquire into "such books as tend to atheism, blasphemy and profaneness, or
against the essence and attributes of God," naming Leviathan as a
work which would require the committee's special attention. Aubrey's version of this is that some of the
bishops made a motion in Parliament "to have the good old gentleman burnt
for a heretic." (I, 339) Whether or
not there was a real danger of this, Hobbes took the threat seriously enough,
according to Aubrey, to burn some of his papers. Considering what Hobbes had been prepared to
publish in 1651, we must wonder what he was afraid to let the bishops see.
In
the end, this action in Parliament did not lead to any prosecution, but it did
have two other consequences. First,
Charles forbade Hobbes to publish anything further on sensitive subjects. So he was not able to publish his history of
the Civil War, Behemoth, during his lifetime. And he could not have Leviathan
reprinted in England, much to the dismay of prospective readers like Pepys, who
complained in his diary (3 Sept. 1688) that, because the book was so
"mightily called for," he had to pay 24s. for a second hand copy of a
work which had sold for 8s. before the bishops decided it could not be printed
again. Second, Hobbes was moved to
investigate the history of the law regarding heresy, first in an appendix to
the Latin Leviathan, published in Holland in 1668 (OL III, 539-59), and
then in an English essay published only in 1680, after his death. In the latter he argues that, after Charles
I, under pressure from Parliament in 1641, abolished the High Commission
charged with enforcing the English law regarding heresy, there were no "human
laws left in force to restrain any man from preaching or writing any doctrine
concerning religion that he pleased."[16] So at the time the English Leviathan
was published there was no valid positive law under which it could have been
prosecuted.
Hobbes'
account of the English law, however, leaves out a number of relevant
developments in the period after 1641.
The question of religious toleration was a major political issue
throughout this period, and one on which Parliament was sharply divided.[17] The general tendency of the Presbyterians, once
they had thrown off the domination of the Anglican Church, was to try to
establish their own form of Puritanism and not to tolerate divergence from it;
the general tendency of the Independents, and particularly of Cromwell, was to
favor a wide-ranging toleration, though this did not, of course, extend to
atheists, "papists," or unitarians.
Presbyterian intolerance reached its high-water mark in the ordinance
against blasphemy of May 1648 when Parliament made it a capital offense to deny
the doctrine of the trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the inspiration of the
Bible, the day of judgment, or a future state, with lesser penalties for lesser
heresies, e.g., an indeterminate prison sentence for holding that a man is
bound to believe no more than he can comprehend by reason.[18] As we shall see, what Hobbes wrote in L would
certainly have offered at least a pretext for prosecution under this law, had
it still been in effect in 1651. But
after Pride's purge of the Presbyterians in December 1648, the Independents had
the upper hand and in the blasphemy act of August 1650 they repealed the
earlier legislation and passed a much more moderate substitute. Anyone who proclaimed himself to be God, or
denied the immorality of such offenses as murder, adultery and incest, or held
that there is neither heaven nor hell, salvation nor damnation, might be
sentenced to prison for six months, and on a second offense, banished from the
Commonwealth. The limits of this
toleration were tested early in 1652, one year after the publication of L, when
the Racovian Catechism was first published in English, explaining the
definitive beliefs of the Socinian sect, a unitarian heresy. Parliament immediately resolved that the book
was blasphemous and ordered it to be burned.[19]
Though
he chose not to comment on these developments in his history of the law on
heresy, Hobbes was at least generally aware of them, as appears from the
following passage in Behemoth:
B:
What did the Rump at home during this time [in 1650-51, when Cromwell was engaged
in subduing Scotland]?
A: They voted liberty of conscience
to the sectaries; that is, they plucked out the sting of Presbytery, which
consisted in a severe imposing of odd opinions upon the people, impertinent to
religion, but conducing to the advancement of the power of the Presbyterian
ministers. (EW VI, 375)
Perhaps it would not have suited Hobbes to call
attention to Cromwell's role in these events, since he was anxious in the 1660s
to defend himself against the charge of having written L "in defense of
Oliver's title." (EW IV, 413) In any case, the relative toleration
existing in England in the 1650s, combined with his fear of persecution by the
Roman Catholic clergy in France (OL I, xvii), seems to have been Hobbes' main
motive for returning to England after the publication of L.
The
biographical evidence in general, and Aubrey's evidence in particular,
regarding Hobbes' religious beliefs, is very mixed. But I would agree that we cannot infer much
from the reported remark about Spinoza, which is, at best, a cryptic
utterance. Though Aubrey knew Hobbes
well personally, though he reports the remark I focus on as having been made
directly to him and not to a third party (unlike the more cautious comment Hobbes
is supposed to have made to Lord Devonshire), and though he obviously took some
pains to get his facts right, we have reason to believe he is not always reliable.[20] We must reckon with the possibility that
Hobbes did not actually say precisely what Aubrey says he said, but only
something rather like it, something which would not lend itself so readily to a
Straussian reading.
2.
Hood
is surely right to say that Aubrey's report of Hobbes' remark raises more
questions than it answers. For that
reason alone, quite apart from any doubts we might have about his accuracy as a
reporter, we can't attach much weight to what he says, taken in isolation from
Hobbes' published works. But we can use
his story to pose an interesting question.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Hobbes did say what Aubrey says
he said. What might he have meant by it?[21] What could Hobbes have read in the TTP which
might have inspired him to say to himself:
"I wish I had dared to say that"?
In
trying to answer these questions, I shall be arguing for the following theses:
(1) that if we compare Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise with
Hobbes' theological-political treatise, i.e., with his Leviathan, on a
variety of topics which they both discuss in the theological portions of their
works- specifically, on the topics of prophecy, miracles, and the authority of
scripture-we shall find quite a lot in Spinoza's work which Hobbes might have
found to be bolder than what he had written on the same topics; (2) that where
Spinoza's position is bolder, Hobbes' less radical position is often stated in
a way suggesting irony; (3) that since irony can function both as a protective
device and as a way of hinting at views one would hesitate to express openly,
Hobbes' use of it is evidence that he would have gone further than he did in
the direction of unorthodoxy, if the political situation had permitted him to
do so safely; (4) that it is entirely credible that Hobbes said to Aubrey what
Aubrey says he said; and finally, (5) that Hobbes is properly viewed as a
precursor of such Enlightenment figures as Voltaire and Hume, that in spite of
the deference he often shows to orthodox Christian doctrines, he is essentially
a secular thinker, whose religious views are subversive of those held by most
Europeans of his time. Perhaps he was
not an atheist, but I do think he was much more radical in his religious views
than recent writers on this topic have tended to suggest.[22]
My
working hypothesis, as will be clear from this outline of my argument, is that
if Hobbes said what he is alleged to have said, he was most likely referring to
the theological portions of Spinoza's work and not to its political
doctrines. Spinoza's work is first and
foremost a defense of freedom of thought and speech, and it's an interesting
question whether Hobbes might have been secretly sympathetic to that aspect of
Spinoza.[23] When Spinoza was asked about the differences
between Hobbes and himself, he focussed on somewhat different political
issues:
As far as politics is concerned, the
difference between Hobbes and me, which you ask about, consists in this: that I
always preserve natural right intact, and that I maintain that the supreme
magistrate in any state has no more right over his subjects than he has power
over them, which in the state of nature is always the case.[24]
Conceivably Hobbes saw the same difference and found
that difference attractive.[25] These difficult questions I leave for another
day.
Before
I undertake argument for my central theses, let me make it clear that I am not
claiming that Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise is consistently
a more radical work than Hobbes' Leviathan. There are issues on which Hobbes takes a more
radical position than Spinoza is willing to.
E.g., he deals much more explicitly with the doctrine of the trinity
than Spinoza ever does, and adopts an essentially unitarian position, which
provoked heated opposition from his contemporaries.[26] Spinoza has a couple of brief allusions to
the doctrine of the trinity in the TTP (III/21, §24) and in the Metaphysical
Thoughts (I/264, 271), but the furthest he is prepared to go in print
during his lifetime is to say that he does not understand the doctrines
certain churches maintain concerning Christ.
It appears from recently discovered correspondence that the penultimate
draft of the Metaphysical Thoughts treated the doctrine somewhat more
skeptically than the final version does.
Spinoza evidently allowed his friend Lodewijk Meyer to alter the text
when Meyer warned him that what he had said would lead to trouble with the theologians.[27]
Again,
in Leviathan Hobbes denies that man has an immaterial soul, independent
of the body, and by its own nature immortal.
Man's soul is simply the life of his body. The only hope of eternal life for man, according
to Hobbes, is that of a resurrection of the body at the day of judgment, after
which those who are found worthy will enjoy an eternal corporeal life,
apparently here on earth. Those not
found worthy will not spend eternity in hell, but after a period of physical
and spiritual torment will die again and remain dead for all eternity.[28]
Spinoza's doctrine of the eternity of the mind, on the other hand, does seem at
least to hold out the hope of something more like an orthodox doctrine of
immortality (E VP23); but like Hobbes (though not in the TTP), Spinoza too
would deny that there is an eternal punishment for the unworthy, interpreting
hell simply as domination by evil passions (I/88); moreover, it seems that the
eternity of the mind in Spinoza is not a doctrine of personal immortality.[29]
Hobbes'
antitrinitarianism and mortalism were both quite bold positions and in publicly
espousing them Hobbes showed more courage than we might have expected from the
man who boasted that he had been born the twin of fear (OL I, lxxxvi) and that
he was "the first of all that fled" when the Long Parliament
assembled in November 1640 (EW IV, 414).
I do not think his willingness to avow these doctrines, however, implies
anything about what he held on other issues.
The fact that Hobbes openly expressed "minority opinions, sure to
involve him in some controversy," is sometimes made an argument for his
sincerity, apparently on the theory that if Hobbes was prepared to accept the
consequences of openly stating some unpopular views, he could not have
intended to indirectly suggest others even more unpopular.[30] But this seems to me a complete non
sequitur.
An
author who holds unorthodox views must make some nice judgments about just how
far he can go without jeopardizing other interests he may have, particularly in
17th Century England.[31] Even in periods of relative toleration he is
at the mercy of a sudden shift in the political winds. Not only may he risk his personal safety, he
also risks becoming involved in long and tedious disputes, and giving his
opponents a weapon with which they can attack his other, less controversial
works. Milton, as we now know from De
doctrina christiana (probably completed, in all essentials, by 1660, but
not published until 1825), also held antitrinitarian and mortalist views. But in the opinion of one judicious student
of his work he "preserved a careful ambiguity" on such issues when he
published Paradise Lost in 1667 (Parker, Milton, II, 1057). He did plan to have De doctrina christiana
published in Holland after his death (1674), a plan which came to nothing when
his literary executor found that carrying out this assignment would block his
ambitions for political advancement.
Parker (I, 612) speculates that had the treatise been published in the
way Milton planned, "Paradise Lost would probably not have been
read for 150 years and more as the greatest religious poem in English,"
but might well have been dismissed as the work of "a minor poet of most
heretical opinions who tried to write a Christian epic." In view of the work's reception when it
finally was published, this seems entirely plausible.[32]
To
argue, as I shall, that Hobbes frequently writes ironically in Leviathan,
requires me to have some theory of irony.
This is a difficult topic, about which literary theorists have written
much, sometimes helpfully.[33] I shall not attempt a general theory, but
simply sketch a partial theory by first discussing a related rhetorical device,
which I call suggestion by disavowal, neatly illustrated in Anscombe's
pamphlet, "Mr. Truman's Degree."
Anscombe gives an account of Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in spite of the fact that he knew that the Japanese
had made two attempts to negotiate peace.
She grants that the decision to drop the bomb pretty certainly saved a
great many lives, given that the Allies were determined to insist on unconditional
surrender. That result could only be
achieved by an invasion of the island, which would have cost many lives on both
sides. In explaining the decision, she
writes:
I will not suggest, as some would
like to do, that there was an exultant itch to use the new weapons, but it
seems plausible to think that the consciousness of the possession of such
instruments had its effects on the manner in which the Japanese were offered
their `chance.'[34]
Now to write this is to suggest, at least in a
minimal sense, that there was an exultant itch to use the new weapons. In general, to write "I will not suggest
that p" is to call the reader's attention to a proposition which
might not otherwise have occurred to him.
But it also suggests that p in the somewhat stronger sense that
disavowing p implies, conversationally,[35]
that the reader might well regard p as a reasonable inference to draw
from what has been said up to that point.
Otherwise, the disavowal violates the communicative maxim that we
should avoid irrelevant prolixity. To
add, as Anscombe does, that "some people" would draw that
conclusion from the evidence is to give the reader the comfortable feeling
that he would not be alone if he did.
But this rhetorical strategy has the advantage that the author is not
required to defend the conclusion she disavows.
She has what President Kennedy was seeking in the Bay of Pigs invasion:
plausible deniability. I.e., if they say
we did it, we can deny it and the evidence will be unclear enough that many
people will believe us. Even those who
don't may still choose to leave us alone.[36]
I do
not mean to suggest that whenever an author writes something of the form
"I will not suggest that p," it is always his intention to
encourage his reader to believe the proposition he is disavowing. Earlier I disavowed the claim that Spinoza is
consistently more radical on religious matters than Hobbes is. I'm disavowing another claim now. In neither case am I practising any form of
indirect communication. How do you know
that? In oral communication my tone of
voice or facial expression might give important clues. In writing you must rely on other, generally
contextual evidence. One thing favoring
a direct reading of my disavowals is that in each case I went on to give
reasons against the propositions disavowed.
One thing counting against a direct reading of Miss Anscombe's is that
she does not. But we can reach a
reasonable level of confidence about these matters only by considering the
passage in a much larger context. If we
do decide that the author's intention in his disavowal was to suggest that the
proposition is credible, then we are dealing with a form of irony. So I shall preface my discussion of Hobbes
and Spinoza on the topics of prophecy, miracles and scripture with a look at
some of Hobbes' more general comments on religion in the first part of Leviathan,
which sets the tone for Parts III and IV.
3.
Religion
in general. One subsidiary, but recurrent, problem of the
first part of Leviathan is the question why people believe in
religion. Anticipating Hume, these
portions of L constitute a natural history of religion, and have no strict
parallel in Spinoza, though the preface to the TTP preserves their echo. Hobbes first addresses this question in L ii,
a chapter whose main subject is imagination.
Hobbes counts dreams as a form of imagination and, like Descartes, thinks
it can be difficult to distinguish dreaming from waking thoughts. Unlike Descartes,
he has a theory about the causes and the possible religious consequences of
this phenomenon. He thinks we are most
apt to confuse dreams with waking thoughts when we are fearful and our consciences
are troubled (¶7), citing the apparition Brutus reportedly saw the night before
the battle at Philippi, "which is commonly related by Historians as a
vision: but considering the circumstances, one may easily judge to have been
but a short dream." And indeed, one
may easily make the judgment that what historians commonly relate as a
vision was in fact a dream, provided the historians are pagans. This is a safe case for Hobbes.
But
as Hobbes develops this theme, he moves to ground which is not so safe, to the
judgment about human nature that it's not at all rare for people to take a
dream to be a vision, particularly if, in addition to being timorous, they are
also "supperstitious, possessed of fearful tales and alone in the
dark." In these circumstances not
only may they be deceived by "their own fancy onely," but also by
"the knavery of such persons, as make use of such superstitious fear, to
pass disguised in the night..."
From this difficulty of distinguishing dreams from visions
did arise the greatest part of the
Religion of the Gentiles in time past, that worshipped Satyres, Fawnes, Nymphs,
and the like,; and nowadayes the opinion that rude people have of Fayries,
Ghosts and Goblins; and of the power of Witches. (¶8, 92)
Hobbes denies that witches have any real power, though
he approves of their being punished.
Their belief that they have the power to do mischief, conjoined with
the intention to do it, is enough to justify their punishment. (cf. DH xiv,
12)
Hobbes
surely knows that the belief in witchcraft, widespread in his day, was not
peculiar to the rude (i.e., the uneducated or ignorant), and that it was
encouraged by the most natural reading of scripture, with its injunction not to
suffer a witch to live (Exodus 22:18) and its tales of women summoning up the
dead through the use of familiar spirits (1 Samuel 28:3-25). Even so educated a man as Sir Robert Filmer
believed in the reality of Biblical witchcraft.
When he came to have doubts about the trials going on in his own day, he
felt obliged to distinguish between Biblical witches and the poor victims of
the 17th Century witchhunts.[37] Hobbes acknowledges that God can make
unnatural apparitions, just as he can change the ordinary course of
nature. But, he says, it is "no
point of Christian faith" that God does this so often that men need to
fear such things any more than they need to fear a change in the ordinary
course of nature:
Evill men under pretext that God can
do anything, are so bold as to say anything when it serves their turn, though
they think it untrue; it is the part of a wise man, to believe them no further,
than right reason makes that which they say appear credible. (¶8, 93)
If we could rid men of their superstitious fear of
spirits, they would be less likely to be abused by "crafty ambitious
men," and would be better citizens.
We would have less civil unrest than we now have. Whereas Hobbes had begun by indicating that
it was Gentile (i.e., pagan) religion which was caused by timorous and
superstitious men's confusing dreams with visions (or by their being taken in
by knaves), by the end of the passage Hobbes is implying that much contemporary
religious belief in England is no better.
The
uses to which Hobbes put his discussion of imagination in L ii led one of his
best contemporary critics to some very acute observations on his method. E.g., Hobbes wrote in L ii, 9, that because
the schools were ignorant of the nature of the imagination and its causes,
they passed on much traditional nonsense about it. Among the teachings he criticized was their
doctrine that "Good thoughts are blown (inspired) into a man, by God; and
Evill thoughts by the Divell."
Clarendon, after commending Hobbes for the general orderliness and
clarity of his writing, noted that
it is some part of his Art, to
introduce, upon the sudden, instances and remarques, which are the more
grateful [i.e., agreeable], and make the more impression on his Reader, by the
unexpectedness of meeting them where somewhat else is talk'd of: for thereby he
disposes the fancy to be pleased with them in a more proper and important
place. No man would have imagin'd, that
in a Philosophical Discourse of Dreams, and Fayries, and Ghosts, and Goblins,
Exorcisms, Crosses and Holy-water, he would have taken occasion to have
reproved Job for saying that the inspiration of the Almighty giveth men
understanding, Job 32.8, which can be no good expression, if it be incongruity
to say, that good thoughts are inspired into a man by God...[38]
Of course Hobbes does not explicitly reprove Job. But what offended Clarendon was the
assimilation of incontestably orthodox doctrine to superstition, which he
plausibly took to be a way of gradually leading Hobbes' readers to undervalue
common notions of God's goodness and assistance, and to see in traditional
conceptions of religion and piety nothing but "the artifice and invention
of Churchmen, to advance their own pomp and worldly interest..." (p.
18) Clarendon, I suggest, was more
sensitive to the meaning of Hobbes' text than many 20th Century commentators
have been.[39] Perhaps those of us who live in a time when
it is permitted to think what you wish, and to say what you think, are not
well-equipped to read the works of writers from less happy times.
If
Hobbes were challenged to defend himself, he could, of course, reply that he
was criticizing only superstitious fear of spirits. So we need to look at what he says later
about the distinction between religion and superstition. This comes up first in L vi, again in a
context where we might not have expected to find Hobbes making an important
statement about religion.[40] The primary subject is the passions of the
soul, and for the most part the chapter is a catalogue of the various human
emotions, desire, love, hate, jealousy, and so on. Nevertheless, Hobbes finds room to offer the
following:
Feare of power invisible, feigned by
the mind, or imagined from tales publiquely allowed, [is] Religion; not
allowed, Superstition. And when the
power imagined, is truly such as we imagine, True Religion. (¶36, 124)
Perhaps there need be no offense in suggesting that
religion is a form of fear. In the third
appendix to the Latin L, where Hobbes is defending his espousal of certain
"paradoxes" which he concedes are found in each part of L (OL III,
559), he acknowledges that his definition of religion in L vi is one of them
and defends it by citing Ecclesiastes ("the fear of the Lord is the
beginning of wisdom") and the Psalms ("the fool has said in his
heart, there is no God").[41]
But
Hobbes' defense is hardly adequate. The
passage from Psalms is simply irrelevant.[42] The (mis)citation of Ecclesiastes is
relevant, but it is one thing to say that it is wise (or even the whole duty of
man) to fear the Lord, to feel a proper awe at his power, and another to reduce
religion to a certain kind of fear of invisible powers. A somewhat different sensibility, treating
religion in the context of a discussion of human emotions, might have stressed
the love of God, citing such texts as Deuteronomy 6:5 or Mark 12:5. More crucially, it surely does not bespeak
much genuine religiosity to suggest that the distinction between religion and
superstition depends on whether the state has authorized the tales causing
that fear. Given Hobbes' political
theory, and in particular his contention that the sovereign has absolute
authority over people's practice of religion, this is only consistent. But prima facie it has unwelcome
implications: e.g., that before Constantine authorized Christian worship in the
4th Century, Christianity was a form of superstition, or that it still is a
form of superstition in any contemporary state which does not permit Christian
doctrines to be propagated. Perhaps
the last sentence of the passage quoted makes everything all right, insofar as
it suggests that Christianity can claim to be the true religion if God's power
is as Christian doctrine represents it.
But, on the natural assumption that the true religion is a species of
religion, that sentence does not seem compatible with the relativism of the
preceding one.[43]
A
later attempt to distinguish between religion and superstition is even more
relativistic. At the end of L xi,
"On the Difference of Manners," a chapter whose main theme is again
human psychology, Hobbes derives belief in God from "curiosity, or love of
the knowledge of causes." This
leads us, when we see an effect, to inquire into its cause, and again into the
cause of that cause, and so on, but not ad infinitum.
Of
necessity [men] must come to this thought at last, that there is some cause,
whereof there is no former cause, but is eternall; which is it men call God.
So that it is impossible to make any profound enquiry into naturall causes,
without being enclined thereby to believe that there is one God Eternall. (¶25,
167; clause in bold omitted in Latin)
Hobbes goes on, of course, to insist, as is usual with
him, that we can have no idea of God "answerable to his nature," and
that, in appealing to God as the ultimate explanation of all other things, we
are like a man born blind, who comes to believe that there is such a thing as
fire, which causes the heat he feels, even though he cannot imagine what this
cause is like. So far there is nothing
here which an orthodox Christian need object to. Hobbes does not explain why the search for
causes must terminate in an eternal cause, but that is not unusual among
exponents of the causal argument. And
though Descartes had heatedly rejected Hobbes' claim that we can have no idea
of God, the difference between him and Hobbes on this point is partly
semantic. They agree on the substantive
point that we cannot really grasp the nature of God, and in this they are quite
traditional.
But
as the argument continues it has more disturbing elements. Hobbes does not think all men are led to
belief in God by curiosity. Some
"make little or no enquiry into the naturall causes of things." (¶26,
167) But these, in their ignorance of natural causes, will still fear that
there may be some power able to do them good or harm, and will be inclined to
imagine
severall kinds of Powers Invisible;
and to stand in awe of their own imaginations; and in time of distresse to
invoke them; as also in a time of an expected good success, to give them
thanks; making the creatures of their own fancy, their Gods. (L xi, 27, 168)
So curiosity is the origin of monotheism, fear of
invisible powers, the origin of anthropomorphic polytheism. Then Hobbes concludes this chapter by
commenting that
this Feare of things invisible, is
the naturall Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion; and in
them that worship, or feare that Power otherwise than they do, Superstition. (L
xi, 26, 168)
But this seems to cancel out the suggestion that only
polytheistic religion derives from fear.
And it makes the distinction between religion and superstition highly
speaker-relative. Religion is what fear
leads me to believe; if it makes you believe something different, what you
believe is superstition.
The
central discussion of religion in Part I occurs in L xii, and there is much
grist for the Straussian mill there.
Hobbes begins with an account of what he calls the natural seeds of
religion. He has already laid the
groundwork for much of what he says here in earlier chapters of L. All men have at least some inclination to be
inquisitive about the causes of things, and particularly of their own good and
evil fortune (¶2). They are also naturally
inclined to think that anything with a beginning must have had a cause (¶3). Often they are able to work out these causes
by observation, but the causes of good and evil fortune are generally
invisible; so in the cases that matter most they are forced to rely either on
their imaginations or on the authority of others, whom they take to be their
friends and wiser than themselves (¶4).[44] Their ignorance of the true causes of good
and evil fortune, combined with their belief that these things must have
causes, makes them extremely anxious about the future (¶5), fearful of what it
may bring and apt to imagine that some invisible power or agent is causing
what happens to them, whether it be good or evil. At this point Hobbes again makes a
distinction between monotheism and polytheism:
In which sense perhaps it was, that
some of the old Poets said, that the Gods were at first created by humane
Feare: which spoken of the Gods, (that is to say, of the many Gods of the
Gentiles) is very true. But the
acknowledging of one God Eternal, Infinite and Omnipotent, may more easily be
derived, from the desire men have to know the causes of natural bodies, and
their several vertues and operations; than from the feare of what was to befall
them in time to come. (¶6, 170)
This is an interesting passage in a number of
respects. First, Hobbes seems anxious to
disavow the suggestion that fear might be the cause of monotheistic religion,
as if this were discreditable to monotheism, though he had earlier defined all
religion as a form of fear. Second,
since Hobbes' God is admittedly one whose nature and actions we cannot
comprehend, it is hard to see how postulating him as a cause satisfies the
desire for knowledge.
As
Hobbes' argument develops, he rather suggests that it will not. In ¶7 Hobbes argues that, in conceiving the
invisible agents we postulate, our natural inclination is to think of them as
like the human soul. This does not imply
thinking of them as immaterial substances, since Hobbes rejects that notion as
unintelligible. But we do tend to think
of them as being as unlike gross, visible bodies as possible. How, then, can we have any idea how they
bring about the effects they cause? The
only knowledge of causation most men have is by observation and recollection of
past sequences (¶8). If this is the only
knowledge of causation we have, then there will be a problem about postulating
an invisible cause, whether the invisible cause is one or many. Hobbes is not a Humean about causation. He clearly thinks mere observation of
constant conjunctions is a second best, true knowledge of causation requiring
us to see the connection between the antecedent and subsequent events
(¶8). But even the second best knowledge
of causation is not going to be available when the cause is invisible.
In
any case, thinking of these agents (or this agent) as being like men, we are
naturally inclined to deal with them as we would with men, to try to influence
their behavior by gifts, petitions, thanks, and so on. (¶9) But we can never know what to expect
from them; since they are invisible, communication is difficult. So we are apt to take a few casual events
(i.e., things happening by chance) as prognostics (i.e., predictive) of the
future. (¶10) Hobbes concludes his discussion
of the natural seeds of religion by giving the following summary:
And in these foure things, Opinion
of Ghosts [OL: fear of spirits], Ignorance of Second Causes, Devotion towards
what men fear, and Taking of things Casuall for Prognostics, consisteth the
Naturall seed of Religion... (¶11, 172)
Note that this list omits the desire to know the
causes of things, which had seemed previously to distinguish monotheism from
polytheism. Instead the suggestion is:
we infer invisible causes we cannot understand because we are ignorant of the
true causes, which are second (i.e., natural) causes.[45]
Hobbes
recognizes that what he calls the natural seeds of religion provide only the
most general explanation of people's religious belief. They explain why people have some belief in
some invisible power or agent, but they do not explain why people have the
rather specific religious practices they have, practices which vary so much
from one society to another "that those which are used by one man, are for
the most part ridiculous to another."[46] To explain that we would need to attend to the
different ways different kinds of men have cultivated the natural seeds of
religion. Hobbes distinguishes (¶12,
173) two kinds of men: those who "have nourished, and ordered [the
natural seeds of religion], according to their own invention," and those
who "have done it by Gods commandement, and direction." Both sorts of men have had, in a quite
ordinary sense of the term, political reasons for cultivating the seeds of
religion. Both have had "a purpose
to make those men that relyed on them, the more apt to Obedience, Lawes,
Peace, Charity and civill Society."
Where the politicians have been acting on their own initiative, Hobbes
calls it human politics; where they have been acting on God's instructions, he
calls it divine politics. Most
politicians- "all the founders of Commonwealths, and the Law-givers of the
Gentiles"- practice human politics, i.e., they make use of religion only
to teach subjects their duty to their earthly king; the founders of Judaism and
Christianity- "Abraham, Moses and our Blessed Saviour"- practice
divine politics, i.e., in addition to teaching civil obedience, they teach
those who have "yeelded themselves" to be subjects in the kingdom of
God the laws of that kingdom.
The
conclusion of this paragraph certainly sounds pious enough: the passage so
impressed Hood that he not only took the title of his book from it, he also
used the (Latin version of the)[47]
conclusion of the paragraph as his motto.
But he does not seem to have appreciated the extent to which Hobbes
assimilates the founders of Judaism and Christianity to the founders of the
gentile religions (cf. pp. 69-71).
Though Hobbes indeed distinguishes the former from the latter in that
they had a broader purpose and have been acting on the strength of a divine revelation,
it's still true that, according to Hobbes, even the founders of Judaism and
Christianity had political ends.[48] Bramhall may have exaggerated when he
commented that "humane and divine politics are but politics" (p.
466). Divine politics is not just
politics, if Abraham, Moses and Jesus were acting at God's direction. But it is still a kind of politics.
As
the argument of the chapter goes on, as Hobbes recounts the absurd things the
founders of gentile religions have induced their followers to believe
(¶¶13-16), and how the founders of those religions have accomplished this by
playing on human ignorance and credulity (¶¶17-19), and by persuading their
followers that they have been the beneficiaries of a divine revelation
(¶20), the reader might be led to wonder about the distinctiveness of Judaism
and Christianity. All
"formed Religion" is based on the multitude's faith that the founder
was not only wise, but the recipient of a supernatural revelation. If the tokens of that revelation come to be
suspected, the religion will be suspected also (¶24). This is one of the natural causes of decline
in religion. So if the subsequent
argument of L should develop grounds for doubting the tokens of the
Judaeo-Christian revelation, the reader might conclude that that religion too
was suspect.
4.
Prophecy. I turn now to
the first of the three topics which Hobbes and Spinoza both discuss,
prophecy. Hobbes conceives a prophet as
essentially an intermediary between God and man. Someone capable of predicting the future is
not necessarily a prophet. Many a false
prophet can do that:
there be many kinds, who gain in the
opinion of the common sort of men, a greater reputation of Prophecy, by one
casuall event that may bee but wrested to their purpose, than can be
lost again by never so many failings. (L xxxvi, 8, 458; phrase in bold omitted
in OL)
Hobbes, who was Bacon's secretary for a time, shows
himself a good Baconian here, in his sensitivity to the human tendency to focus
only on positive evidence, and neglect negative evidence, especially when
religious doctrines are in question.[49]
Although
the term "prophet" has many meanings, the most common, and most
important, is that a prophet is one to whom God speaks immediately, and who
communicates that message to man on God's behalf. (¶9) But to say that God
speaks immediately to his prophets is somewhat misleading. Hobbes takes it to be the doctrine of
scripture that in general when God speaks immediately to one of his prophets,
he does so in a vision or a dream, i.e., from
imaginations which they had in their
sleep, or in an extasie, which in every true prophet were supernaturall; but in
false Prophets were either naturall or feigned. (¶11, 461)[50]
So most prophetic communication with God involves a
medium the prophet himself might misunderstand.
The only exception to this rule was Moses, to whom God spoke face to
face, as a man speaks to his friend.
Hobbes can and does cite scriptural authority (Numbers 12:6-8; Exodus
33:11) that Moses was unique among the prophets in this respect.
As
this last passage implies, false prophets are not distinguished from true ones
by insincerity, any more than by an inability to make true predictions. A man may imagine, falsely, that God is
speaking to him in a vision, when this imagination has a natural cause and is
not merely feigned. But Hobbes tends to
emphasize the danger of deliberate deception:
There is need of [OL: natural]
Reason and Judgment to discern between naturall and supernaturall gifts, and
between naturall and supernaturall Visions, or Dreams. And consequently, men had need to be very
circumspect, and wary in obeying the voice of man, that pretending [i.e.,
claiming] himself to be a Prophet, requires us to obey God in that way, which he
in Gods name telleth us to be the way to happinesse. For he that pretends to teach men the way of
so great felicity, pretends to govern them; that is to say, to rule, and reign over
them; which is a thing that all men naturally desire, and is therefore
worthy to be suspected of Ambition and Imposture; and consequently, ought to be
examined and tryed by every man, before hee yeeld them obedience; unless he
have yeelded it to them already, in the institution of a Commonwealth. (¶19,
466; phrases in bold omitted in OL)
I.e., if the person who professes to tell you, in
God's name, the way to happiness is the sovereign, whom you have already
contracted to obey, there is no need to examine his claims to speak on God's
behalf. But otherwise you must, since
the incentives to imposture are so strong.
A prudent person will be mistrustful of most claims to speak for God.
Distinguishing
true from false prophets is as difficult as it is important. Though Hobbes' explicit position grants that
there are true prophets- Moses, who spoke to God face to face, and the other
prophets, whose dreams and visions were of supernatural origin- ordinarily
there are many more false prophets than true, as Hobbes illustrates with
citations from Scripture (¶19). He
refers repeatedly (L xxxii, 7, xxxvi, 19) to the story of Ahab (1 Kings 22),
who encountered 400 false prophets and only one true one, and Hobbes seems to
think that is about the usual ratio.
To say [God] hath spoken to him in a
dream is no more than to say he dreamed that God spake to him, which is not
of force to win beleef from any man that knows dreams are for the most part
naturall, and may proceed from former thoughts, and such dreams as that, from
selfe conceit, and foolish arrogance, and false opinion of a mans own godlinesse,
or other vertue, by which he thinks he hath merited the favour of extraordinary
Revelation. To say he hath seen a
Vision, or heard a Voice, is to say that he hath dreamed between sleeping and
waking; for in such manner a man doth many times naturally take his dream for a
vision, as not having well observed his own slumbering. To say he speaks by supernaturall
inspiration is to say he finds an ardent desire to speak, or some strong
opinion of himself, for which he can alledge no natural and sufficient reason.[51] So that though God Almighty can speak to a
man by Dreams, Visions, Voice and Inspiration, yet he obliges no man [OL: no
one is obliged] to believe he hath so done to him that pretends it, who, being
a man, may err, and, which is more [OL: worse], may lie. (L xxxii, 6, 411, but
following Molesworth's text in the last sentence, given incorrectly in
Macpherson)
Here, again, to impugn the authenticity of a
revelation is not necessarily to impugn the integrity of the person who claims
to be a prophet, much less the integrity of God.[52] But it is clear that a prudent person will be
skeptical of any claims to direct communication with God.
Hobbes
does not go so far as to say that we must reject all such claims. In L xxxvi he concludes that in the face of
conflicting claims to speak for God,
every man then [i.e., in the time of
the Old Testament] was, and now is bound to make use of his naturall reason, to
apply to prophecy those rules which God hath given us, to discern the true from
the false. (¶20, 467)
This is a paradoxical passage. It seems to give priority to reason over
revelation, since reason is supposed to judge the authenticity of a claimed
revelation. On the other hand, the rules
reason is to apply in making this judgment are rules God has given us, i.e.,
rules we owe to revelation itself. This
is clear from the continuation of the passage, where Hobbes cites scriptural
authority for the rules he gives. Hobbes'
solution to the problem of distinguishing true from false prophets, then, seems
to involve a vicious circle. Reason must
use rules derived from revelation to determine what is a true revelation, but
it cannot have confidence in those rules unless it can be confident that the
revelation from which they were derived was a true one, which presupposes that
it can distinguish true revelations from false ones independently of the
rules. Critics have often alleged that a
similar circularity infects Descartes' defense of reason in the Meditations,
and some would go so far as to suggest that the circularity is intended, and
intended to be seen as such. That seems
to me an entirely unreasonable interpretation of Descartes. It seems to me not at all unreasonable as an
interpretation of Hobbes, whose tone, after all, is quite different.
Hobbes
suggests various rules God has given us for making the distinction between the
true and the false prophet: in the Old Testament the true prophet's doctrine
must be consistent with that taught by the sovereign prophet Moses, and he
must have a miraculous power of foretelling what God would bring to pass; in
the New Testament there is only one mark of the true prophet; he must teach
that Jesus is the Christ, i.e., the Messiah. "Whosoever denied that
Article, he was a false Prophet, whatsoever miracles he might seem to work; and
he that taught it was a true Prophet." (L xxxvi, 20, 468) Note that the clause in bold, which is not in
the Latin, seems to make teaching that Jesus is the Christ a sufficient
condition of true prophecy, independently of any miracles, thereby apparently
contradicting other passages which make the ability to perform miracles a
necessary condition for prophecy (e.g., L xxxii, 7; EW IV, 330).
However
we resolve that contradiction, Hobbes' position so far seems to give us rules
only for determining who is a prophet in Scripture and to leave open the
question how we are to decide whether or not someone who claims now to
speak for God really is a prophet. When
Hobbes addresses that question in L (xxxii, 7, 412), his answer seems to be
that there are two criteria, each necessary and neither sufficient in itself:
the performance of miracles and not teaching any religion other than that
already established. It seems obvious
enough (though Hobbes does not draw this conclusion)[53]
that on these criteria someone who is a prophet in one country may not be a
prophet in another. It's also unclear
how a prophetic religion could have gotten started if this rule had been
applied to its first prophet.
But I
think the most important consequence of these criteria is that they make the
ability to perform miracles quite critical.[54] As we shall see when we discuss Hobbes'
doctrine on miracles, this has the effect of depriving us of prophecy as a
means of contemporary communication with God.
And when Bramhall pressed him to say whether he thought there really was
such a thing as prophecy in the world, Hobbes acknowledged this consequence of
his views, affirming that there were true prophets in scriptural times, but
denying that there had been any since the death of St. John the Evangelist (EW
IV, 324-27). It's a nice question why
God should have ceased to communicate with us in this way.
Many
of these themes recur in Spinoza's discussion of prophecy. Like Hobbes he conceives of the prophet as an
intermediary between God and man, a vehicle for the divine revelation. (III/15)
Like Hobbes he stresses the difficulty even the prophets had in knowing they
were receiving a revelation from God-not that they did not believe in God, but
that they required a sign in order to be sure that it was God who was speaking
to them. (III/30, cf. I/106) If the prophet himself requires a sign, those to
whom he communicates God's revelation will require a sign, except in those
cases where the prophet teaches nothing beyond what is already contained in the
law of Moses (III/32). But even with a
sign, the prophet's certainty is only moral and not mathematical. Like Hobbes Spinoza is fond of citing the
case of Ahab, using it to show that God may deceive men by sending them false
prophets. (III/31, citing 1 Kings 22:20-23)
Unlike
Hobbes Spinoza does not dwell on the ulterior motives men might have to
persuade their fellows that they were the bearers of a divine revelation. His main point about prophecy tends to
undermine the position even of the true prophets, a step Hobbes, for all his
skepticism, was not willing to take.
"Everyone has persuaded himself, by a certain strange rashness,
that the prophets knew everything." (III/35) But in fact they were ignorant of many things
and disagreed among themselves. Even the
most authoritative of the prophets, Moses, held false opinions about even the
most central of theological issues, the nature of God. He did not understand that God was
omniscient, or omnipresent, or that he directs human actions simply by his
decree. (III/38, §35, 40, §45) He teaches that God is merciful, gracious and
supremely jealous. (38, §36) It is not
clear that he teaches that God has created all things ex nihilo; in
particular it is not clear that he thinks of the other gods to whom he refers
as dependent on God. (39, §37) Moses is
not clearly a monotheist. This central
figure in the prophetic tradition has a very primitive conception of God. And other major prophets held views contrary
to his. Ezekiel's opinions were so
inconsistent with those of Moses that the rabbis almost excluded him from the
canon. (III/41, §49) His works might not have come down to us, had not
Chananias undertaken his defense. But
Chananias' defense of Ezekiel may have involved tampering with the text to make
it more acceptable. There are similar
problems about other prophets. (§§50-51)
For
Spinoza what is important about the prophets is not their theological beliefs,
which are often primitive, but their moral teachings. (III/37, §31; 31, §10) This is a radical
position, which, so far as I have been able to discover, Hobbes approaches only
in that curious passage in L viii (¶¶21-26, 140-146) in which he assimilates
prophecy and madness. This is one of
those unexpected digressions on religious topics scattered throughout Part I of
L, numerous examples of which I analysed in the previous section. Hobbes has been discussing the intellectual
virtues and their defects. Among the
latter he gives the greatest attention to madness, which he understands to be a
condition in which a person has an extraordinary and extravagant passion, often
due to the "evil constitution" of the bodily organs. (L viii, 16-17,
139) He notes that madness does not always express itself in extravagant
actions, citing those who believe themselves to be inspired as an example:
"if there were nothing else that bewrayed their madnesse; yet that very
arrogating such inspiration to themselves, is argument enough,"[55] a
judgment which prompted Bishop Bramhall to complain that Hobbes made "very
little difference between a prophet and a madman, and a demoniac."
(EW IV, 324)
In
his defense Hobbes contends that if he had assimilated the prophets to madmen
(which he denies), he would only have been following the opinion of the Jews,
who, "both under the Old Testament and under the New, took them [i.e.,
the prophets] to be all one with madmen and demoniacs." (EW
IV, 327) This summarizes- somewhat inaccurately and prejudicially to his own
case-a passage in L viii in which Hobbes had claimed that the Jews "called
mad-men prophets, or (according as they thought the spirits good or bad)
daemoniacks." (¶25) That is, the Jews interpreted madness as a
manifestation of possession by a spirit; if they thought the spirit a good one,
they called the madman a prophet; if they thought the spirit evil, they called
him a demoniac. In the reply to Bramhall
Hobbes professes to have proven this by many passages, both out of the Old Testament
and out of the New. But in fact, in the
relevant paragraph in L viii he cites only three passages, two from the New
Testament (Mark 3:21, John 10:20), and one from the Old (2 Kings 9:11). Only in the NT passages is the hypothesis of
possession by a spirit suggested (both times regarding Jesus); the OT passage
says merely that some of those around Jehu thought the unnamed prophet who came
to anoint him was mad.
The
approach to Spinoza comes not in anything I have described so far from this
passage, but in the way Hobbes treats the hypothesis of possession by a
demon. He does not think it strange that
the gentiles should have interpreted madness in terms of possession, since, as
he points out, they often ascribed "natural accidents" to demons. But he does think it strange that the Jews should
have adopted this theory, since none of the prophets of the OT claimed that the
spirit of God was literally in them when they prophesied. God did not speak in them, but to
them, through a dream or a vision. And
indeed, there seem to be only traces of a belief in evil spirits in the OT, and
very little evidence of a belief in possession by such spirits. This seems to be a relatively late
development in Jewish thought, though common by the time of the NT.[56] Hobbes explains it by appealing to a common
human failing:
the want of curiosity to search
naturall causes... For they that see any strange, and unusuall ability, or
defect in a mans mind; unless they see withal, from what cause it may probably
proceed, can hardly think it naturall; and if not naturall, they must needs
thinke it supernaturall; and then what can it be, but that either God, or the
Divell is in him? (¶25, 144)
But this explanation generates a problem for
Hobbes. It appears from the NT that even
Jesus believed in possession by evil spirits, insofar as he treated madmen as
if they were possessed. Hobbes cites no
particular text, but presumably he is thinking of stories like that of the
Gadarene swine (Matt. 8:28-34, Mark 5:1-20; Luke 8:26-39; cf. Matt. 12:22-32;
Mark 3:22-27; Luke 11:14-23). Hobbes
will not treat all belief in spirits as superstitious; he criticizes the
Sadducees as "coming very neere to direct atheisme" for their denial
that there were any spirits at all. But
he seems embarrassed by Jesus' apparent acceptance of the theory of
demon-possession:
Why then does our Saviour proceed in
the curing of them [i.e., madmen], as if they were possest; and not as if they
were mad? (¶26, 145)
Even if this belief is not to be dismissed as
superstitious, it will not do to explain Jesus' acceptance of it by a
"want of curiosity to search natural causes." Hobbes' solution implies that Jesus did not
really share the belief of his audience, but was merely accommodating himself
to his audience:
I can give no other kind of answer,
but that which is given to those that urge the Scripture in like manner against
the opinion of the motion of the Earth.
The Scripture was written to shew unto men the kingdome of God; and to
prepare their mindes to become his obedient subjects; leaving the world, and
the philosophy thereof, to the disputation of men, for the exercising of their
naturall reason.
And this is essentially the line Spinoza takes in TTP
xiii, though, of course, for him even that position involves some measure of
accommodation, since he does not take the notion of obedience to God quite
literally. To conceive of the power of
God as like that of a human king, only greater, is to conceive of God inadequately,
as the Ethics will explain (E IIP3S).
Hobbes
disavows the suggestion Bramhall found in his writing about prophecy, that
there is no such thing as prophecy in the world. Historically, at least, there were true
prophets, though now there aren't.
Unlike Spinoza, he never explicitly questions the authority of those
whom scripture recognized as true prophets.
And he might well have found Spinoza's open criticism of their
theological beliefs a bolder position than he dared defend. Most of the key elements in his explicit
position- e.g., his doctrine that false prophets may deceive us through their
ability to work miracles and make true predictions, his contention that God has
generally communicated with even his true prophets only in dreams and visions
which the prophet might easily have confused with purely natural events, even
his assimilation of prophecy to madness, offensive as it was to Bishop
Bramhall- are teachings for which Hobbes can plausibly claim scriptural
support.[57] So his explicit position is one which may not
appear unacceptably unorthodox. Indeed,
the epistemological problems he focussed on are sufficiently serious, and
sufficiently attested to in scripture, that some contemporary biblical scholars
have suggested that the leaders of the early Christian Church may have
deliberately suppressed a burgeoning prophetic movement because of the
difficulties they experienced in distinguishing between true and false
prophets.[58] By sticking close to scripture, and
restricting himself to an emphasis on some of its more awkward features, Hobbes
provided himself with a useful cover.
But why depart from Scripture, when even the prophets tell us, with
almost Cretan candor, that the [other] prophets prophesy lies in the name of
God and that we should not hearken unto them (Jeremiah 14:14, 23:16, cited by
Hobbes L xxxvi, 19, 467)?
5.
Miracles. Hobbes'
discussion of miracles (L xxxvii) begins with an informal definition, and then
spends some paragraphs working out a more precise account of what a miracle
is. Alluding to the etymology of the
term, Hobbes first notes that "miracle" signifies an admirable work
of God, and is therefore also called a wonder. (¶1, 469) So then the question is: what is it that
people wonder at? He suggests two
features of an event which are apt to cause wonder: (1) if it is strange, i.e.,
"such, as the like of it hath never, or very rarely been produced,"
and (2) if it is such that "when it is produced, we cannot imagine it to
have been done by natural means, but onely by the immediate hand of God."
(¶2, 470) In the next few paragraphs (3-5) Hobbes argues that each of these
conditions is necessary, and he seems at first to regard them as jointly
sufficient (cf. ¶3). But then he adds a
third condition: (3) if the event is "wrought for the procuring of credit
[OL: among the people] to Gods Messengers, Ministers, and Prophets, that
thereby men may know, they are called, sent and employed by God, and thereby
be the better inclined to obey them." (¶6, 471; clause in bold omitted
in Latin)
This
third condition goes back to a theme Hobbes had introduced in his first
paragraph, when he wrote that miracles are also called signs,
because they are for the most
part, done, for a signification of his commandement, in such occasions, as
without them, men are apt to doubt, (following their private natural
reasoning,) what he hath commanded, and what not... (my emphasis)
There is a slight inconsistency here. What Hobbes had originally proclaimed to be
only a common, but not universal, feature of miracles has now become an
essential feature. But Hobbes has an
interesting reason for insisting on this third feature. We do not, he says, regard such things as the
creation of the world and the destruction of all life in the flood as miracles
because they were not done to
procure credit to any Prophet, or other Minister of God... For how admirable
soever any work be, the Admiration consisteth not in that it could be done,
because men naturally beleeve the Almighty can do anything, but because he does
it at the Prayer, or Word of a man. (¶6, 471-72; sentence in bold omitted
in Latin)
If we take our belief in God's omnipotence seriously,
we should be surprised at nothing, except that God might act at the bidding of
man.
Hobbes'
final definition of a miracle, however, is not simply a summation of these
three conditions:
A Miracle, is a work of God,
(besides his operation by the way of Nature, ordained in the Creation,) done
for the making manifest to his elect, the mission of an extraordinary Minister
for their salvation. (¶7, 473)
It might be thought that the first two conditions have
dropped out here, though probably both strangeness and our inability to imagine
a natural cause are implied in the parenthetical clause. But the most interesting new development
lies in the reference to God's elect.
The purpose of miracles is not to persuade just any naturally skeptical
human that a particular person is a representative of God, but to
persuade those whom God has antecedently chosen for salvation. So it's not to be expected that everyone who
witnesses a miracle will be persuaded by it, and if some people are not, that
does not count against the work's being a miracle.
This
leads to familiar problems about falsifiability, but Hobbes has scriptural
justification for this claim. First (¶6,
472-73) he discusses what seems a fairly straightforward case. In Exodus 4:1, after God has instructed Moses
to gather together the people of Israel and lead them out of the land of Egypt,
Moses complains that the people will not believe that God has appeared to
him. God then teaches Moses how to
perform certain wonders, which do succeed in persuading the Israelites to
believe in him, though they do not persuade the Pharaoh, whose heart God has
hardened. So far so good.
Then
Hobbes turns to a problematic passage in Mark (6:1-6a), which tells of Jesus'
returning from his ministry to Nazareth, finding himself rejected, and saying
that a prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his
own kin, and in his own house. Mark then
reports that:
5a
He could do no mighty works there, 5b except that he laid his
hands upon a few sick people and healed them.
6a And he marveled because of their unbelief.[59]
(my emphasis)
Many commentators on scripture have found this passage
troublesome. For example, the Anchor
Bible calls 5a "the strongest statement in the gospels on the limitations
of Jesus, though it is mitigated slightly in the 2nd part of the verse
[5b]."[60] Erasmus found more comfort in the
qualification:
Wherefore Jesus, thoughe he were
almightye, and desirous to save as many as might be, yet could he not there
among his countreymen worke many miracles, for he was letted so to do by the
unbelefe of his acquayntaunce and kynneffolkes. For where as being among aliauntes [aliens],
he had easilye cured very many of al kyndes of dyseases, cast out dyvels, and
healed leapers, here in his owne countrey, he onely healeth a few sicke
folkes...[61]
Erasmus does not explain how someone who was almighty
could be prevented by the disbelief of his Nazarene audience from working
miracles.
Commentators
whose concern is to produce a harmony of the gospels generally note that the
parallel passage in Matthew reads differently:
13:58 And he did not do many
mighty works there because of their unbelief.[62] (my emphasis)
Calvin comments on this that
Mark says more emphatically that He
was not able to do any mighty work. But
they agree completely in substance: Christ's own fellow townsfolk by their
ungodliness prevented Him from performing more mighty works among them. He had already given them some taste; but
they deliberately deaden themselves so as not to perceive it... When the Lord
sees that His power is not received by us, He finally takes it away. And yet we complain that He does not give the
help which our unbelief drives far from us!
By saying that Christ was not able, Mark magnifies the guilt of those
who hindered His goodness. For
unbelievers do indeed (as far as in them lies) restrict God's hand by their
obstinacy. Not that God is overcome as
if He were the weaker, but because they will not allow His power to work.[63]
I hope I will be excused for not understanding
this. I would have thought that if the
unbelievers' not allowing his power to work explained their persistence in
unbelief, that would imply that their power was superior to his, at least with
respect to the issue at hand. But
perhaps my incomprehension just illustrates the maxim nisi credideritis, non
intelligetis.
In
any case, like Erasmus, Calvin goes on to note that, according to Mark, Jesus
did perform some miracles in Nazareth, concluding that God's power can overcome
our reluctance:
We learn from this that Christ's
goodness fought with their malice and emerged victorious. We experience the same thing with God every
day; for although he justly and necessarily restricts His power because it has
not an open entrance into us, yet we see that He does not fail to do us good
and makes a way where there is none. A
wonderful struggle! We try every method
of suppressing God's grace and keeping it from us, and yet it breaks through
triumphant and does its work in spite of our reluctance.
Ultimately, I think, this is incoherent. If God, in his omnipotence, can always
win the struggle, then it really is no contest.
The pious conclusion that, if God wishes, he can always triumph over our
reluctance, leaves us with no explanation for those occasions when our
obstinacy seems to triumph, except to postulate that on those occasions he
lacked the will.
Some
modern scholars have conjectured that Mark is reproducing an earlier narrative
(perhaps a hypothetical lost ms. known as Q, perhaps an oral tradition) and
that he (or a subsequent editor) deals with the awkwardness of 6:5a ("He
could do no mighty works there") by introducing the qualification of 6:5b
("except that he laid his hands upon a few sick people and healed
them"). Matthew, who used both Mark
and Q as sources, deals with it by changing the wording from "could
not" to "did not."[64] This approach reflects a critical attitude to
the texts which Hobbes and Spinoza are sometimes given credit for founding,[65]
but it does nothing to resolve the theological difficulties.
How
does Hobbes deal with these theological and exegetical issues? Here is what he says:
So also of our Saviour, it is
written, (Mat. 13.58) that he wrought not many Miracles in his own countrey,
because of their unbeleef and (in Marke 6.5) in stead of, he wrought not
many, it is, he could worke none.[66] It was not because he wanted power; which
to say, were blasphemy against God; nor that the end of Miracles was not to
convert incredulous men to Christ;[67]
for the end of all the Miracles of Moses, of Prophets, of our Saviour, and of
his Apostles was to adde men to the Church; but it was, because the end of
their Miracles, was to adde to the Church (not all men, but) such as should be
saved; that is to say, such as God had elected.[68] Seeing therefore our Saviour sent from his
Father, hee could not use his power in the conversion of those, whom his Father
had rejected. (¶6, 473)
So far we might have the following reactions: (1) it
is initially somewhat puzzling that Hobbes should introduce these texts,
because they do not obviously allude (as Exodus does) to the doctrine of
predestination; (2) though Hobbes makes them relevant by using that doctrine to
explain what must otherwise seem rather mysterious in them, viz., the fact that
the unbelief of the people of Nazareth was an obstacle to Jesus' performing
miracles there, still, the explanation Hobbes suggests is itself puzzling; we
are not to say (pace Mark) that Jesus literally could not perform
miracles in Nazareth, because to do so would be to blaspheme against God; what
we are supposed to say, instead, is that Jesus had the power to perform
miracles there in Nazareth, but could not use it because God had not
predestined those people for salvation.
The meaning seems to be that Jesus could not use his power to perform
miracles because God, by not choosing the people of Nazareth for salvation, had
already frustrated the end for which he had given his son that power. To this Clarendon objected that
it is irrational to think that all
the People of Nazareth, where our Saviour had vouchsafed to live and converse
about thirty years of his life, should be reprobated by God to everlasting
damnation. (p. 217)
Hobbes' explanation does seem to require that
assumption and it does seem an unpalatable assumption, particularly since the
people of Nazareth included members of Jesus' own family, including Mary. (3) Hobbes' explanation of the text also
seems to require a distinction between the father and the son which his
audience might have found uncomfortable, though I'm not aware that any of them
commented on it. Clarendon, however, did call attention to the fact that
Hobbes does not mention the exception Mark makes in 6:5b.
In
any case, Hobbes is not through with this passage. He goes on to reject an alternative reading:
They that expounding this place of
St. Marke, say that this word, Hee could not, is put for, He would
not, do it [OL: unnecessarily and] without example in the Greek language, (where
Would not, is put sometimes for Could not, in things inanimate,
that have no will; but Could not, for Would not, never,) and
thereby lay a stumbling block before weak Christians; as if Christ could doe
no Miracles, but amongst the credulous. [passage in bold not in OL]
This is puzzling in a number of respects. Who are the "they" who read could
not as would not and who thereby lay a stumbling block before weak
Christians? Perhaps he has in mind
Calvin, whose claim that Mark and Matthew "agree completely in
substance" might be thought to imply that could not and would
not are equivalent.[69] In any case, Hobbes is clearly claiming that
this kind of harmonization of the gospels distorts the meaning of the
text. These other commentators offer an
unnatural interpretation of the language, on the assumption that if the words
were taken in the most natural way, they would imply that Jesus' ability to
perform miracles depended on the credulity of his audience. The offensive assumption is projected onto
these other, unnamed commentators, and insofar as their position is officially
rejected, so their assumption is disavowed.
But
though traditional commentators clearly were embarrassed by the scriptural
suggestion that Jesus' powers might be limited, I have yet to find any of them
who took Mark to imply that Jesus' ability to perform miracles depended on the
credulity of his audience. That seems to
be a peculiarly Hobbesian contribution to the debate. And isn't Hobbes himself offering a reading
of the text which denies that could not means just what it seems
to? Is he then making the same
assumption as the anonymous commentators he is criticizing and thereby laying
a stumbling block before weak Christians?
Is he, in the act of disavowal, making that impious suggestion?
Certainly
a number of other passages in this chapter encourage skepticism about reports
of miracles and stress the ease with which impostors can take in the
credulous. For example, in ¶9 Hobbes
lays it down that no created spirit can perform a miracle. When someone like Moses seems to perform a
miracle, it is really God who is acting.
In the immediately following paragraphs he deals with an apparent
counterexample: in Exodus 7-8 the Egyptian magicians are represented as
matching (up to a point, at least) the miracles of Moses and Aaron. Hobbes might have replied to this by
suggesting that the magicians were endowed with special powers as part of God's
plan to harden the heart of Pharaoh, but instead he contends that their acts
were:
so far from supernaturall, as the
Impostors need not the study so much as of naturall causes, but the ordinary
ignorance, stupidity and superstition of mankind; those texts that seem to
countenance the power of Magick, Witchcraft, and Enchantment, must needs
have another sense, than at first sight they seem to bear... all the miracle
consisteth in this, that the Enchanter has deceived a man; which is no Miracle,
but a very easie matter to doe. (¶¶10-11, 474-75; passages in bold not
in OL)
Hobbes goes on to argue that the impostor's task is
made all the easier if he has more knowledge of natural causes than his
audience does. So an astronomer might
easily deceive people ignorant of astronomy by predicting an eclipse, or a ventriloquist
make people believe they had heard a voice from heaven. And if we take into account what a number of
men working together can do, there is no limit to what we can make people
believe: "For two [OL:
unprincipled] men conspiring, one to seem lame, the other to cure him with a
charme, will deceive many: but many conspiring, one to seem lame, another so to
cure him, and all the rest to bear witnesse; will deceive many more."
(¶12, 476)
In
all Hobbes' talk about people's tendency "to give too hasty beleefe to
pretended Miracles," nothing Hobbes says clearly implies that any miracle
of any generally accepted prophet was an imposture. He rejects only such works as those of the
Egyptian magicians and the witch of Endor. (xxxvi, 8, 458) He can, and does,
cite scriptural authority,[70]
warning us not to take the performance of miracles as a sure indicator of the
authenticity of a putative prophet's mission.
But in the end all he officially claims is that we must scrutinize all
professed miracles carefully to see whether or not they are really beyond the
natural powers of man, and that in the doubtful cases which remain we must
accept no claim offered in support of a religion other than that established
by "God's Lieutenant," who was originally Moses, and who is now the
head of the Church (L xxxvii, 13, 476-77).
Without denying that some miracles may have occurred in Biblical times,
Hobbes makes it clear that he does not think any occur now. (L xxxvii, 12, 477; xxxii, 9, 414; cf. DH
xiv, 4)
There
is (what I would take to be) a fairly obvious problem of circularity here: in the chapter on miracles we are to judge
the authenticity of a miracle by the authenticity of the doctrine it is used to
support, but in the chapter on prophecy we had to judge the prophet's claim to
be God's spokesman by his performance of miracles. If Hobbes is aware of this circularity, he
does not call attention to it. Perhaps
he just did not notice it. Perhaps, as
Strauss might have suggested, he leaves it to the reader to discover this for
himself.
Hobbes'
critique of miracles, like Hume's in the first Enquiry, is
epistemological. He does not deny that
miracles have occurred, he merely suggests that we ought not be too ready to
accept any particular miracle claim as valid.
Unlike Hume he does not have an a priori argument from the nature of
miracles to the inherent irrationality of accepting any testimony for any
miracle, and he does not define miracles in terms of a violation of the laws of
nature. Spinoza's critique anticipates
Hume's in bringing in the idea of a violation of the laws of nature, but is
more radical than either Hobbes' or Hume's in that it suggests that there is a
sense in which no miracle has ever occurred, because a true miracle is a
metaphysical impossibility.
Spinoza
begins his discussion of miracles (TTP vi),[71]
as Hobbes does, by talking about the popular understanding of the term and
relating it to etymology. What people
call miracles are events whose causes they do not understand, events they therefore
imagine happen outside the usual order of nature. What they don't understand, they think
wonderful. (§§1-4) They find it very flattering to imagine that the creator
holds them so dear that he would interrupt the course of nature so as to
arrange things for their advantage. (§§4-5) But this popular conception of a
miracle is based on an illicit distinction between the power of nature and the
power of God. (§§2-3) Whatever happens according to the laws of nature is an
expression of the power of nature, but it is equally, and by that very fact, an
expression of the power of God, for the laws of nature just are God's decrees
regarding nature. To think of them as
expressions of a power which nature has independently of God is to limit God's
power. If God were to act contrary to
these laws, he would act contrary to his own will, intellect and nature, which
is absurd. (§§7-13) If we understand by
a miracle an event which is, not merely contrary to our ordinary experience of
nature, but actually contrary to the laws of nature themselves, i.e., not
merely one which we, at a certain point in the development of human knowledge,
cannot understand, but unintelligible, in principle, by any laws of nature,
then there can be no miracles. (§§14-15)
So in
strictness of speech, it would seem, there can be no miracles and all previous
reports of miracles must have been mistaken.
Spinoza does not, as Hobbes does, dwell on the possibility of
deliberate deception by those who first claimed to perform the miracles. The suggestion is either that the first
audiences failed to grasp the true nature of what they were witnessing, failed
to understand the laws of nature by which the supposed miracle happened, or
else that in reporting the event, the authors of scripture used figurative
language to describe what they understood to be a perfectly natural event
(§§57-64), in order that their narrative might more effectively move men to
obedience. (§§49-50)
Nevertheless,
this is not Spinoza's final position.
Spinoza does, indeed, hold that if we understand miracles in the way so
far suggested, there are, and can be, no miracles. But he does not insist on that
definition. Instead he seems to prefer
as his official definition the following formula:
the term "miracle" cannot
be understood except in relation to men's opinions, and means nothing but a
work whose natural cause we cannot explain by the example of another customary
thing, or at least which cannot be so explained by the one who writes or
relates the miracle. (III/83-84, §13)
And of course, in this sense of the term, Spinoza will
concede that there are miracles.
Certainly events occur whose natural causes we cannot explain.
Much
of Spinoza's chapter on miracles is devoted to arguing, not that violations of
the laws of nature are impossible (though, of course, he does argue that), but
that, whether we define miracles as events contrary to the laws of nature, or
whether we define them in the way Spinoza suggests is preferable, they have no
religious significance, because we can derive no knowledge of God's essence,
existence, or providence from them.
Spinoza argues for this both from natural reason (§§16-29) and from
Scripture (§§30-38). The argument is too
complex to summarize here, but I should point out that in confirming his views
from Scripture Spinoza emphasizes the same passage Hobbes had, Deuteronomy
13:1-5, to show that even false prophets can perform miracles and that
"unless men are well protected by the true knowledge and love of God,
miracles can lead them to embrace false Gods as easily the True God."
(§31)
For
any reader who is not prepared to take the escape clause which Spinoza offers
him, and thinks miracles ought to be defined, not in terms of human ignorance,
but in terms of a violation of the laws of nature, Spinoza's position does deny
the occurrence of miracles. If he were
to accept Spinoza's rejection of miracles so understood, he would be obliged to
reject all scriptural miracles, even those of Moses and Jesus, and to say
that either the first reporters of those miracles misunderstood what they had
witnessed, or that we have misunderstood the nature of their reports. That in itself is a fairly radical position,
more radical than the position Hobbes takes.
But of course Spinoza's chapter on miracles was also one which raised
doubts about his pantheism. For his
identification of the power of God with the power of nature, and his consequent
claim that the better we understood nature, the better we would understand God,
did cause some of his first critics to question whether he had drawn a
sufficient distinction between God and nature.[72] I will not suggest that that was a step
Hobbes wished he could have taken.
6.
The
authority of Scripture. Hobbes himself links our three topics together
when he writes at the end of L xxxii (¶9, 414) that since miracles have ceased
to occur, we are now left without any certifiable living prophets, and must
rely on the scriptures to teach us our duty to God and man. Unfortunately his treatment of the authority
of scripture tends to undermine this source of knowledge of God also. The question of the authority of Scripture is
the subject of L xxxiii, and Hobbes treats it, in the first instance, as a
question of the authorship of Scripture.
By the end of the chapter, of course, Hobbes will concede, what he says
everyone believes, that God is "the first and original author" of
Scripture (¶21, 425). But initially the
question is "Who were the first (human) writers of the various books the
Christian churches now acknowledge as canonical, i.e., as providing the rules
of Christian life?" Hobbes begins,
notoriously, by questioning what Spinoza will say nearly everyone believes,[73]
that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, pointing out that there are passages in which
the writer uses expressions which would be natural only from someone writing at
some time after the events he is describing, as for example when the writer,
speaking of Moses, says that "no man knows the place of his burial to this
day." (Deuteronomy 34:6)
It
may seem puzzling to us that people could have believed that a work which
describes the death of Moses was written by the man whose death it describes,
but Hobbes' contemporaries had responses to that, which Hobbes anticipates:
"It were a strange interpretation, to say Moses spake of his own sepulcher
(though by prophecy), that it was not found to that day, wherein he was yet
living."[74] That is to say, even if Moses knew beforehand
that his burial place would not be found, this would not be a natural way for
him to express that knowledge. Again, it
will not do, says Hobbes, to suggest that only the last chapter of the
Pentateuch was written by another man, Moses having written the rest,[75]
for there are other passages, earlier in the Pentateuch, which also point to an
author writing at some remove from the events he is describing, such as
Genesis 12:6 or Numbers 21:14, where the writer cites a work earlier than his
own, the now lost Book of the Wars of the Lord.
Though
Hobbes is unequivocal in saying that Moses was not the author of the
Pentateuch, he does, to some extent, pull his punches. For example, he is equivocal on the question
how long after the death of Moses the five books of Moses were written. At first he says that though it is
"sufficiently evident" that they were written "after his
time," it is "not so manifest" how long afterward they were
written.[76] But he makes clear his belief that some
substantial period of time elapsed when he passes from discussing the
Pentateuch to discussing Joshua (in ¶6) by saying that that book "was also
written long after the time of Joshua..." (my emphasis; nothing
corresponds to also in the Latin).
Again,
Hobbes grants that although Moses did not "compile those books entirely,
and in the form we have them," he was, nevertheless, the author of everything
he is said in Scripture to have written.
This is a reference to Deuteronomy 31:9, where Moses is said to have
written the law, which he gave to the priests and elders, to be read in its
entirety to all the people of Israel every seven years. Here Hobbes identifies this "Volume of
the Law" with chapters 11-27 of Deuteronomy[77]
and contends that it is the same law "which having been lost, was long
time after[78] found
again by [the high priest] Hilkiah, and sent to King Josias, who causing it to
be read to the people, renewed the covenant between God and them." (¶5,
418, not in Latin)
In
identifying the book Hilkiah found with Deuteronomy, or some part of it,
Hobbes is embracing a tradition which goes back to Athanasius, Chrysostom, and
Jerome in the 4th Century A.D., and seems to be generally accepted now, though
contemporary biblical scholars would not identify any portion of Deuteronomy
with a work written by Moses himself, since he died in the mid-13th Century
B.C., whereas the current scholarly consensus dates the earliest part of
Deuteronomy to the 7th Century B.C., i.e., to the period when it was
purportedly found by Hilkiah and used by Josiah in his program of religious
reform. If Hobbes has doubts about the
authenticity of this discovery, he does not mention them. He cites 2 Kings 22:8, 23:1-3 as his source
for the story of the discovery, but does not note that 2 Chronicles 34 has a
different account of the relationship of the finding of the book to Josiah's
reform. Ac-cording to Kings, the reform
began when Hilkiah brought Josiah the newly discovered book of the law. According to Chronicles, the reform started
six years before the discovery of the book, i.e., the book, instead of
generating a reform movement, served the purposes of a reform movement already
under way. Though Hobbes makes no claims
to Hebrew scholarship, in general he seems to have a pretty good knowledge of
Scripture; so I presume he was aware of this inconsistency and chose not to
mention it. Later (¶20, 423) he will
discuss the possibility that our text of Scripture may have been corrupted by
pious fraud, but he does not raise that possibility here. Still later (xlii, 39, 548), he will ascribe
to Josiah the authoritative determination that the Volume of the Law was the
work of Moses. He will also contend that
this book was lost again in the time of the captivity and not recovered again
until after the captivity, by Ezra, this mainly on the basis of a passage in
the apocryphal 2 Esdras (14:21).
Hobbes
is bold in denying a belief about the authorship of the Pentateuch nearly
universally held by his contemporaries.
He is bold in suggesting that the bulk of the Pentateuch, at least, was
written much later than the events it describes, by an unknown author relying
in part on earlier histories, now lost, as the one part of the Pentateuch which
on his view does go back to Moses was nearly lost more than once. These things matter because of what they
suggest about the fragility of our links with the one prophet who, according
to Deuteronomy 34:10, spoke with God face to face.[79]
But
Spinoza is much bolder. For one thing,
he is more emphatic in his rejection of the usual view, characterizing it as a
prejudice (118/16, 22), which is not only without foundation, but completely
contrary to reason (124/4-5). Perhaps he
is emboldened to speak with more force because he has a wider range of evidence
at his disposal. At any rate, his
rejection of the Mosaic authorship (118/16-122/8) cites many more texts (nearly
two dozen, as compared with Hobbes' three), and cites evidence of a different
kind than Hobbes' does: not only does he point out many passages which suggest
an author writing about a time in the remote past, he also calls attention to
the frequency with which the author of the Pentateuch refers to Moses in the
third person. Some of the things the
author says about Moses it would be hard to imagine Moses saying about himself,
even if he were given, like Caesar, to describing his own actions as if they
were those of someone else: e.g., we read in Numbers 12:3 that Moses was the
humblest of all men. Presumably if this statement is true, it is precisely the
kind of thing Moses would not say of himself.
In any case, as Spinoza points out, the Pentateuch does not always
describe the actions of Moses in the third person. Sometimes (e.g., Deuteronomy 2:1, 17; 9:6) it
presents Moses as describing his own actions in the first person.
Unlike
Hobbes, Spinoza is unequivocal about the length of time which passed between
the death of Moses and the writing of the Pentateuch: it could only have been
written by someone who lived many generations later (multis post saeculis-
121/24). Like Hobbes, he will grant that
some portions of the Pentateuch may go back to Moses, but he thinks they
constitute only a very small part of the work.
He takes Exodus 24:4,7 to establish that Moses wrote a book called the
Book of the Covenant (122/17ff), but he argues that this book contains
"only a few things," viz. the laws recorded in Exodus from 20:22
through the end of ch. 23. The Book of
the Law of God referred to in Deuteronomy 31:9, which he takes to be a more
comprehensive and authoritative document (122/31-123/35), he claims has
perished (123/7), as had other works he ascribes to Moses, such as the Book of
the Wars of God (122/11-17). He does
grant that the author of the Pentateuch may have made some use of the Book of
the Law of God, inserting it in an orderly way in his own work
(123/19-20).
If
Spinoza's treatment of these matters is both more thorough and more forceful,
perhaps that is because he is the heir of a long tradition of Jewish
scholarship which had probed the text of the Old Testament in great
detail. In our time scholars have said
much about the influence of Isaac La Peyrère on Spinoza,[80]
but to judge by the internal evidence of the TTP itself, a more important
influence on Spinoza seems to have been Ibn Ezra, a 12th Century Jewish scholar
whom Spinoza speaks of frequently and with great respect. He was, Spinoza says, "a man who
possessed an independent mind and no slight learning," "the first of
all those whom I have read to take note of the prejudice" that Moses was
the author of the Pentateuch, a man who "did not dare to explain his
thought openly, but dared only to indicate the problem in rather obscure
terms." (118/20-24) For our
purposes, it is particularly interesting that Spinoza reads Ibn Ezra in a
Straussian fashion, as someone who saw the falsity of the common beliefs of his
time, but dared to attack them only through veiled hints which would be
understood by only some of his readers.
Spinoza begins his discussion of the authorship of the Pentateuch (TTP
viii) with an extended elaboration of various cryptic remarks in Ibn Ezra's
commentary on Deuteronomy.
Hobbes'
and Spinoza's denial of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch is the best
known of their heresies, but their critique of the authority of Scripture
extends far beyond that issue.
Immediately after dealing with the Pentateuch, each embarks on a
systematic discussion of the other books of the Old Testament and of the
evidence, in each case, that the books were written later, usually much later,
than the events they describe. It would
be tedious to follow them in detail through this process, since the evidence
tends to be of the same kind, tell-tale phrases which indicate the distance in
time between the author and the historical events, and the conclusion they
reach on the basis of this evidence would not now be controversial. But some features of this discussion are
worth our attention.
Both
our authors, for example, devote special attention to the book of Job. Hobbes (L xxxiii, 12) is primarily concerned
to argue two things: first, that although Job himself appears to have been an
historical figure,[81]
the book which bears his name is not an historical book, but a philosophical
treatise on the problem of the prosperity of the wicked and the suffering of
the good; and second, that its character is indicated by its literary style,
i.e., by the fact that the core of the book is conducted in verse, with a
preface and an epilogue in prose.
"Verse is no usual style of such as either are themselves in great
pain, as Job, or of such as come to comfort them, as his friends; but in
philosophy, especially moral philosophy, in ancient time frequent." Hobbes
seems to take the prose portions of Job to be a later addition,[82]
reversing the judgment some modern scholars would make: that the poet of the
central portions was elaborating in his own fashion on a tale which had been
handed down in the oral or written tradition.[83]
Hobbes
does not use this occasion to deal with any of the philosophical issues raised
by this book. But he had dealt earlier
(xxxi, 6, 398) with the problem of the prosperity of the wicked and the
suffering of the good, a difficulty, he had noted, which "hath shaken the
faith, not only of the vulgar, but also of philosophers, and which is more, of
the saints, concerning divine providence." There he had appealed to the
book of Job in support of his view that the innocence of the good is irrelevant
to their suffering, that God's irresistible power justifies whatever he might
do to his creatures. Here he does not
ask whether this very plausible reading of the poetic portions of Job is
consistent with the theology of the prose portions, or indeed, whether it is
suitable for reassuring believers about God's providence, nor does he call
attention (as he will do later)[84]
to Job's commitment (in chapter 14) to man's mortality, though he might have
used this to show the lack of Old Testament support for one popular solution to
the problem of evil.
Spinoza
is less cautious. He begins (144/10) by
noting the controversies which have existed about this book: some have thought that Moses wrote it and
that the whole story is only a parable; others have thought that Job was an
historical character; of the latter some have thought Job was a Jew, others
that he was a gentile, and that this account of his life was translated into
Hebrew from another language. This last
is the opinion of Ibn Ezra, which Spinoza himself favors, though he wishes Ibn
Ezra had shown it with greater clarity, for then "we could infer that even
the gentiles had sacred books." (144/19-20) But though Spinoza professes to leave the
matter in doubt, he goes on to provide reasons for accepting Ibn Ezra's
opinion: he conjectures that Job was a
gentile, and a man of great strength of character, whose fortunes were first
very favorable, then very unfavorable, and finally, very favorable again. Job's story prompted many people to reflect
on God's providence, among them the author of the dialogue which is the core of
the book.
Here
Spinoza agrees with Hobbes that the style (at least of the poetic parts of the
book) is not that of one suffering wretchedly in the ashes, but that of one
meditating peacefully in his study. But
in supporting Ibn Ezra, he goes further than Hobbes had, pointing out that the
style of the poetry is gentile in character: "the father of the gods twice
calls a council and Momus [i.e., the evil spirit of blame and mockery in Greek
mythology], here called Satan, criticises what God says with the greatest
freedom, etc." (144/30-32) Having introduced what must have seemed to him
a dangerous idea, Spinoza then backs off:
"But these are only conjectures, and are not sufficiently
solid. I pass to the book of
Daniel..." Nevertheless, he has
made his point: the theology of the narrative, at least in its prose portion,
is polytheistic and foreign to the later Hebrew tradition.[85] It is paradoxical that such a work should
have been accepted into the canon, but it is also very suggestive about the
judgment of the people who made these decisions.
Spinoza
does not question that judgment here, but he has already done so earlier, in
quite forceful terms. Commenting on the
two books of Chronicles, that he makes no decision about their author,
authority, utility and doctrine, he nevertheless adds:
I cannot sufficiently wonder why
these books have been received among the sacred by those who deleted from the
canon the books of Wisdom, Tobit, and the others which are called
apocrypha. Still, it is not my intention
to lessen their authority, but since everyone has accepted them, I too leave them
as they are. (141/26-30)
In spite of this disclaimer, however, by the time he
has reached the next page, he is at it again.
Noting that the Proverbs of Solomon were collected at the same time as
the Psalms were (i.e., in the post-exilic period), or at the earliest, in the
time of King Josiah, Spinoza observes that he
cannot pass over in silence the
audacity of those Rabbis who wanted to exclude this book, along with
Ecclesiastes, from the canon of the sacred books, and to keep it under guard,
with others which we are now lacking.
And they would simply have done this, if they had not found certain
passages where the law of Moses is commended.
It is, indeed, deplorable that sacred matters, matters of such great
importance, depended on the choice of these men. Still, I am grateful to them for being
willing to share even these books with us, though I cannot help wondering
whether they have handed them down to us in good faith. But I do not want to subject this matter to a
strict examination, so I pass on to the books of the prophets... (142/6-15)
Spinoza can pull his punches too, as he does here by
raising an issue and then failing to pursue it.
I suspect he also tried to lessen the possible offense of this passage
somewhat, for members of his predominantly Christian audience, by limiting his
criticism to certain unnamed rabbis.[86] But this is still pretty strong
language. Those who established the
canon included books there is no good reason to have included, excluded books
which deserved inclusion or whose merits we cannot judge because they have not
come down to us, came close to excluding others which deserved inclusion, and
may have corrupted the texts of the ones they grudgingly handed down.
Hobbes
will not go nearly so far as that in raising doubts about the selection of the
canon, but what he does say illustrates very nicely the strategy of suggestion
by disavowal. He points out (L xxxiii,
20, 423) that the first collection of the books of both the Old and the New
Testaments was supposed to have been made by Clement, Peter's successor
as bishop of Rome. But Hobbes stresses
that we don't actually know that Clement made this collection-"by
many questioned"- and that the first collection we do know about was made
by the Council of Laodicea, some three hundred years after the time at which we
might presume Clement to have been active.[87] By this time
though ambition had so far prevailed
on the great doctors of the Church, as no more to esteem emperors, though
Christian, for the shepherds of the people, but for sheep, and emperors not
Christian, for wolves, and endeavored to pass their doctrine, not for counsel and
information, as preachers, but for laws, as absolute governors, and
thought such frauds as tended to make the people the more obedient to Christian
doctrine, to be pious,[88]
yet I am persuaded they did not therefore falsify the Scriptures, though the
copies of the books of the New Testament were in the hands only of the
ecclesiastics,[89] because
if they had had an intention so to do, they would surely have made them more
favorable to their power over Christian princes, and civil sovereignty, than
they are.[90] I see not therefore any reason to doubt,[91]
but that the Old and the New Testament, as we have them now, are the true
registers of those things which were done and said by the prophets and apostles
[OL: and the other writers[92]
of Sacred Scripture]. (¶20, 423-24; phrases in bold not in Latin)
I have seen the last sentence of this passage quoted
separately from the surrounding context, in support of the judgment that
although Hobbes
displayed a certain degree of
independence [on literary and historical matters] when he expressed skepticism
over the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch in its present form... on the
whole he was traditionally conservative. (Samuel Terrien, Interpreter's
Bible, I, 129)
But before we are reassured by Hobbes' disavowal of
the conclusions one might naturally draw from what he has previously said, we
need to ask whether he has given us a sufficient reason for not drawing
them.
Hobbes
has been arguing, not merely that Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch,
but also that each of the books of the Bible was written some time after the
events it described, usually long afterward, and often by writers who depended
on other sources now lost to us, that some of the most important of the
surviving books of the Old Testament were at various times lost and rediscovered
by priests, long after their original composition, that the priests who had the
books of the New Testament under their control would have had no scruples about
altering the text, and that they had the opportunity to do so. Are we really to conclude that they did not
do so merely because we find things in the scriptures not congenial to their
power? Is deliberate alteration of the
text the only way error could have crept in?
Might not the descriptions of miracles, for example, have given a
misleading account of what happened because the reporters did not understand
the natural causes of those events?
Would the conclusion that the New Testament is a true register of the
deeds and sayings of Jesus and the apostles really be consistent with the
assumption earlier in the passage that the priests who had control over the
text believed fraud to be pious if it made people more obedient to Christian
doctrine? Why ascribe such a belief to
them if there is no reason to believe that sometimes they acted on it? Suppose the priests who gathered the books of
the New Testament into a canon did not falsify the texts that were handed down
to them. Is that a sufficient guarantee
of the integrity of the text of both the Old and the New Testament?
Hobbes
concludes his discussion of the authority of Scripture (L xxxiii, 21, 425) by
noting that while everyone- or at least every true Christian- believes
Scripture to be the word of God, no one can know this except "those
to whom God himself hath revealed it supernaturally." If it should be asked why those of us who are
not the beneficiaries of a special revelation do nevertheless believe it, Hobbes'
answer may be disappointing to those who have the belief, yet seek reasons for
it: some are moved by one reason, others by another; there is no general
answer.[93] The question we should be asking is: "By
whose authority are the Scriptures made law?" And Hobbes' answer to this will come as no
surprise to those who are familiar with his political philosophy proper. It is the civil sovereign who must decide for
us that Scripture is, or which Scriptures are, the word of God. For all the doubts Hobbes may have raised
about the accuracy of the text his political community accepted, he submits
himself to the authority of its rulers in deciding what God's revelation to man
actually consisted in.
Spinoza
concludes his discussion of the authority of Scripture by acknowledging quite
frankly that he has written things which to many will seem blasphemous:
Those who consider the Bible, just
as it is, to be like a letter God has sent down from heaven to man, will no
doubt cry out that I have committed a sin against the Holy Ghost, in that I
have maintained that the word of God is full of faults, mutilated, corrupted,
and inconsistent, that we have only fragments of it, and that the written text
of the covenant God entered into with the Jews has perished. (158/21-27)
This conclusion is certainly much bolder than the
conservative one which is Hobbes' official position. After stating it, Spinoza goes on to argue
that the critics should not have this reaction.
He has not claimed that Scripture is everywhere faulty and falsified,
or that it should have no authority. (159/27-31) Insofar as it deals with the
things which are truly necessary for salvation, i.e., with the divine law, it
could not have been corrupted. (160/7-8)
But Spinoza's conception of what is necessary for salvation is minimal,[94]
compared to that of many of the religious of his day: the heart of the divine
law is that we should love God above all else and our neighbors as ourselves.
(165/11-13)
I
close this section by calling attention to the reaction to the TTP of one of
Spinoza's other great contemporaries.
Leibniz was most distressed by Spinoza's work, which he saw as posing a
serious threat to Christianity, and as a development of seeds Hobbes had sown
in Leviathan. The following is an
excerpt from a letter to his former teacher, Jacob Thomasius:
I have recently seen a pamphlet from
Leipzig, doubtless yours, in which you treated according to its deserts an
intolerably unrestrained [intolerabiliter licentiosum] book on the liberty
of philosophizing [i.e., Spinoza's TTP].
The author seems to follow not only Hobbes' politics, but also his
religion, which he has outlined so adequately in his Leviathan, a work
monstrous even in what its title suggests.
For Hobbes, in a whole chapter of Leviathan, has also sown the
seeds of that very smart [bellissima] critique which this bold man [homo
audax] carries out against sacred scripture.[95]
It's striking, for our purposes, that, with all the
similarities there are between Hobbes' Leviathan and Spinoza's TTP,
Leibniz should focus particularly on Hobbes' discussion "Of the Number,
Antiquity, Scope, Authority, and Interpreters of the Books of Holy
Scripture" as sewing the seeds of Spinoza's bolder biblical criticism.
7.
Why
does Leibniz think the title of Hobbes' work is monstrous in what it
suggests? The Biblical Leviathan appears
to be a mythological sea monster whose power is greater than that of anything
else on earth, "king over all the sons of pride," a Promethean rebel
against God, whom God, in his omnipotence, crushes as easily as he might a
plaything.[96] Hobbes is clearly aware of this symbolism,
since he alludes to it in L xxviii, 27, 362.
Perhaps his choice of a title for his work signifies his own rebellion
against the Biblical God.[97] But, it may be said, even if your argument up
to this point is correct, even if the thrust and intent of L is to undermine
the God of revelation, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, may it not still be
the case that Hobbes believes in the God of the philosophers? Perhaps Hobbes, if not quite a sincere
Christian, is nevertheless a Deist. He
does, after all, regularly present arguments for the existence of God, and
sometimes he suggests that these arguments may be demonstrative. Is there a compelling reason not to regard
those professions of belief as perfectly sincere?
Given
the temper of recent English-language discussions of Hobbes' religious views, I
would consider a concession such as I have just described a major
accomplishment. But perhaps we can
justify a conclusion more favorable to Strauss' reading of Hobbes, i.e.,
perhaps we can justify agreeing with the later rather than the earlier
Strauss. Is Hobbes an atheist after all?
Hobbes'
earliest argument for the existence of God comes in the Elements of Law,
a work written in 1640 and circulated privately at that time, though not
formally published until 1650, apparently without Hobbes' participation, from
one of the privately circulating copies.
There (I, xi, 2) Hobbes offers us a form of the causal argument, like
the one we find in L xi-xii. The things
we take to be the effects of natural causes always presuppose the prior
existence of some thing possessing the power to produce them. If that thing is not itself eternal, it must
in turn be caused by something before it, and so on, until we come to an
eternal cause, "the first power of all powers, and first cause of all
causes... which all men call by the name of God." But though we can know by natural reason that
God is, we cannot know what he is.
When we say something presumptively about God's nature, e.g., that he is
incomprehensible, infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, just, etc., we are really
saying something about ourselves, either that we are incapable of grasping his
nature or that we wish to honor him as much as possible. As we have seen in §3, Hobbes takes
essentially the same line in 1651 (L xi, 25, 167; xii, 6-7, 169-71; xxxi,
14-28, 401-403), though the first of these passages contains a brief suggestion
of the argument from design, the significance of which has been debated by the
commentators.[98]
In
the first major philosophical work Hobbes published, De cive (1642) he
offers no arguments for the existence of God, but does, in a number of places
(ii, 21; xiv, 19; xv, 14), proclaim that man can know God's existence by
natural reason, presumably by the causal argument (cf. DCv xv, 14, which
defines "God," nominally, as the cause of the world). He also repeats his earlier position about
our knowledge of God's nature. In a note
added to the second edition (1647, xiv, 19), he disavows the claim that all
men are capable of knowing the existence of God by natural reason, comparing
this bit of natural knowledge with Archimedes' knowledge of the proportion a
circle bears to a square. Those who
cannot or will not take pains to reason correctly cannot know this. The comparison suggests that Hobbes may
regard knowledge of God as demonstrative, but this is the only passage I know
which does.
Hepburn,
though he concludes in the end that Hobbes is sincere in his professions of
theism, finds his use of the causal argument "not well presented or well
defended," noting that Hobbes fails to invoke the standard Thomistic
distinction between an infinite regress of causes in time (which Thomas would
concede not to be impossible) and an infinite regress of causes operating at
the same time (which is supposed to be impossible). I agree that the arguments are not well
presented. Hepburn also questions the
significance of a theism which insists on God's existence, while denying that
we can know anything of God's nature. But since this is quite a
traditional view (cf. Geach 151, Glover 159), I would not insist on that
difficulty here.[99]
The
problem which seems to me truly important is to know what we are to make of
those passages in which Hobbes denies that we can know God's existence by
natural reason. Hepburn considers this
primarily in connection with DCr xxvi, 1, asking whether Hobbes has not there
completely undermined his use of the causal argument. But there are other troublesome passages in
DCr and others still more troublesome in another work whose existence was not
generally known when Hepburn wrote.
Consider
DCr i, 8, where Hobbes defines philosophy, which he had earlier identified with
natural reason (DCr i, 1), as the study of every body which can be generated or
which can be understood to have some property.
Hobbes is quite explicit that philosophy excludes theology, understood
as a doctrine concerning the nature and attributes of God, who is eternal,
incapable of generation, and incomprehensible.
So far this may seem compatible with earlier works, insofar as it does
not explicitly exclude from philosophy knowledge of the existence of God, only
knowledge of his nature. But it is hard
to see why the exclusion of theology from philosophy should not be extended to
the question of God's existence. If the
only things natural reason can deal with are those which can be generated or
have some property we can understand, then natural reason can no more deal with
God's existence than it can with his essence.
Again,
in DCr viii, 20, Hobbes argues that we must not understand the generation of a
body as involving the body's coming to be out of something which is not a body,
or the destruction of a body as involving something which is not a body coming
to be from something which is:
Even if we can hypothesize that a
point grows into a huge mass, which again contracts itself into a point, this
is to imagine that something is made from nothing and nothing from
something. But the mind cannot grasp how
this can happen in nature. Philosophers,
therefore, who are not permitted to depart from natural reason [EW: who tie themselves
to natural reason], suppose that a body cannot be generated or perish, but only
appear to us differently at different times... (OL I, 103)
If natural reason must suppose that in the final
analysis bodies are neither generated or destroyed, then it seems that the
position of natural reason is that the physical world is eternal.
In
these two earlier passages from DCr Hobbes seems to set himself inexorably on
the path to a fideism which is made explicit in DCr xxvi, 1. There he argues that if the world had
a beginning, this would raise questions about what cause made it and what
matter it was made from; and new questions would arise about that cause and
that matter, until at last one arrived at some eternal cause, whether one or
many. And if we could know as
much as we could ask, then those who claim to comprehend the whole of
philosophy would have to determine all these things. But in fact, a finite inquirer cannot know
the infinite. If a person sets out to
trace the causes of causes, she will not be able to proceed to eternity, but
must, at some point, stop, not because she knows she can go no further, but
simply because she is exhausted. So
questions about the magnitude and origin of the world are not to be determined
by philosophers, but by those to whom God, through the civil authorities, has
entrusted the regulation of his worship, i.e., the authorized ministers of
religion:
So I purposely pass over questions
concerning the infinite and eternal, content with that doctrine concerning the
magnitude and origin of the world which holy Scriptures have urged [EW: which I
have been persuaded to by the holy Scriptures], and the fame of the miracles
which confirms them, and the custom of my country, and the respect owed to the
laws. I proceed to other things which it
is not wrong to debate. (OL I, 337)
In the end rational theology fails and, to the extent
that our religious belief is not conformity to custom and law, we must depend
on revelation, confirmed by famous miracles- as if the credibility of the
Judaeo-Christian prophets depended on their having better press agents than
those of other faiths.
It
may be objected that DCr xxvi, 1, challenges only the belief that the world had
a beginning in time, and not the belief that the world depends on God as a
first cause in the order of simultaneous causes. And it is a perfectly orthodox opinion,
endorsed by no less an authority than Aquinas, that natural reason cannot prove
that the world had a beginning in time, though it can prove that God is a first
cause. But this is to impute to Hobbes a
distinction which, as Hepburn observed, he nowhere deploys. Moreover, his rejection here of infinite
regress arguments seems to apply to any kind of appeal to the impossibility of
an infinite regress, and not merely to temporal regresses: however we break off
the regress, it will be because of fatigue, not because we know we can go no
further.
The
passage in question is one Wallis found offensive, charging Hobbes with
implicit atheism for holding the following views:
1.
that besides the creation of the world, there is no argument to prove a
deity;
2.
that it cannot be evinced by any argument that the world had a
beginning; and,
3.
that whether it had or no, is to be decided by the magistrate's
authority. (EW IV, 427)
The problem, I take it, is this: on Wallis' reading of
Hobbes, if we can't prove by natural reason that the world had a beginning, we
can't prove by natural reason that God exists (in virtue of 1); but we can't
prove by natural reason that the world had a beginning (by 2); therefore, we
can't prove by natural reason that God exists.
That, of course, is hardly atheism, since it is compatible with fideism,
the view that belief in God is a matter of faith, not reason.
When
Hobbes replies to Wallis (in his posthumously published Considerations upon
the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners, and Religion of Thomas Hobbes), he does
not invoke the Thomistic distinction between a first cause in time and a first
cause in the series of simultaneous causes.
Even those disposed to regard Hobbes as a sincere theist have found his
response to this objection very curious, surprisingly "casual" for
someone who is "normally an efficient enough controversialist." (K. C. Brown, p. 344). I think they haven't properly analyzed its
strangeness. Speaking of himself in the
third person, Hobbes writes:
That it may be decided by the
Scriptures, he never denied; therefore in that also you slander him. And as for arguments from natural reason,
neither you, nor any other, have hitherto brought any, except the creation,
that has not made it more doubtful to many men that it was before. (EW
IV, 427-28, my emphasis)
Then he quotes from DCr xxvi, 1 - or rather
paraphrases, omitting, for example, the reference to the fame of the miracles-
commenting at the end that what he had said there was not "ill said,"
and repeating the claim that Wallis is slandering him.
The
references of the pronouns I've emphasized in this quote are not immediately
obvious, though a little thought seems enough to work them out. Presumably the first "it" refers to
the creation of the world. That fits the
context of DCr xxvi, 1, and in any case, it would hardly do to let the
existence of God be decided by Scripture, since our ground for believing in
Scripture is that it is the word of God.
Presumably the second "it" refers to the existence of God, not
the creation, since Hobbes allows that the creation is a good argument for it,
indeed, the only good argument for it.
But if that's right, then Hobbes' second sentence explicitly concedes
Wallis' first point. And if Wallis, in
his second point, means by "argument," an argument from natural
reason, Hobbes' first sentence seems to concede that point also. Since Wallis needs only his first two points
to drive Hobbes into a skeptical view of what natural reason can know about the
existence of God, his commitment to fideism seems complete, in spite of a
superficial suggestion that the causal argument might give natural reason
grounds for belief in God.
Now
someone might say "this is no reason to accuse Hobbes of atheism; he is
not undermining his earlier arguments; he simply changed his mind; in his
earlier works (EL, DCv, L) he believed that natural reason could demonstrate
the existence of God; in his later works (DCr, "Considerations") he
became skeptical of the soundness of that argument and shifted to a fideistic
form of theism; but fideism is a position many Christians have held quite
sincerely; there is no reason to suppose that Hobbes is not perfectly sincere
when he proclaims himself a Christian, whether because of arguments from natural
theology or on faith."
To
this objection I have two replies: 1) in effect, the objection withdraws the
concession I imagined to have been made at the beginning of this section;
someone can say this only if he does not find the main argument of this paper
convincing, only if he still thinks, in spite of everything, that Hobbes
believed in scripture as a revelation from God; 2) the objection assumes a
simple developmental picture undermined by the recent discovery of a previously
unpublished Hobbesian work, Thomas White's De Mundo Examined, a
work which has not yet been much discussed by English-language writers on
Hobbes.[100]
There
seems to be no doubt that this work is by Hobbes and no doubt about the period
from which it dates: late 1642 to early 1643. (See Jones, pp. 2-5.) What's most interesting about the AntiWhite
(as people are coming to call this work for short) is that it adopts a very
strongly fideistic position. White had
claimed to demonstrate the existence of God in the Scholastic-Aristotelian
manner, positing God as a necessary first cause to explain the existence of
motion in the world. Hobbes rejects this
as unphilosophical and anti-Christian.
According to him, the possibility of demonstrating a truth depends on
the possibility of defining the terms in such a way that the meaning of the
predicate includes that of the subject, as the meaning of "animal"
includes the meaning of "man."
This entails that all demonstrable truth must be hypothetical, and
excludes the possibility of demonstrating God's existence. Nor can we define "body" in such a
way as to show that bodies are created or "the incorporeal" in such a
way as to show that it has existed forever. (xxvi, 2) In a remark highly
reminiscent of the reply to Wallis, he contends that those who have claimed to
demonstrate the existence of God, the creation of the world, or the immortality
of the soul
have only led weak men (such is the
nature of the masses) to consider these things false, because the people who
wished them to be true could not show that they were. (xxvi, 5)
He offers this as a reason why rulers should not
permit their subjects to debate any article of faith. To do so would be to endanger the belief of
"countless other Christians."
Not
only does Christianity require belief in things which cannot be proven, but
those who follow their natural reason where it leads will be led away from
Christianity:
The philosopher is indeed free to
enquire into the nature and cause of motion, but... as the investigation
proceeds he will stumble upon a proposition that is now held by the Christian
faith and that seems to contradict a conclusion he has established earlier.
(xxvi, 7)
Of course, the contradiction is only apparent. The philosopher's proper conclusion is that
he has not understood the doctrines of Christianity. Similarly,
almost inevitably, those who subject
to their own metaphysical speculations divine matters beyond our understanding
come at every step in conflict with the Christian faith. (xxviii, 3)
The fideism of the AntiWhite approaches that of
Tertullian. Not credo quia absurdum
est, but credo quamvis absurdum videatur.
What
are we to make of this? In the same year
he was writing the AntiWhite Hobbes had published DCv, with its claim
that we can know the existence of God by natural reason (and its absence of any
argument to support that claim). A few
years later he would repeat that claim (and that absence) when he published the
second edition of DCv. A few years
earlier he had actually presented (but not published) a causal argument for
God's existence in EL. He would repeat
that argument some years later in L, this time for publication. Is the AntiWhite a temporary
aberration from these ventures into natural theology, to which Hobbes for some
reason returned in DCr and "Considerations"?
I
think not. I suggest that the AntiWhite
is rather an experiment[101]
with a certain kind of position, an attempt to work out what sort of position
on natural religion it would be best for him to take when he decided to discuss
those issues in public. I suggest that
one reason he did not publish the AntiWhite is that he was not really
comfortable with that position. It is
contrary to a deeply rooted attitude toward reason, exemplified in the famous
remark that men set themselves against reason, as often as reason is against
them (L xi, 21, 166; EL I, Ep Ded). The
strong fideism of the AntiWhite also has tactical disadvantages. It brings him dangerously close to the
doctrine of a double truth. But those
who advocate that there is one truth in philosophy and a contradictory truth in
theology have always been more than a little suspicious, as Hobbes will
acknowledge in L when he argues that men cannot have a revelation of anything
against natural reason, and that enjoining a belief in contradictories takes
away the reputation of wisdom and is a cause of the decline of religion (xii,
25, 179; cf. DH xiv, 13).
We
can see a similar pattern in Hobbes' cautious handling of the delicate question
of God's materiality. Hobbes appears to
have been a materialist even in his earliest philosophical works, though the
work generally thought to be earliest is not explicit on the subject.[102] The unpublished EL (1640) is pretty
explicit: a spirit, such as an angel, is
simply a natural body so subtle that it does not affect our senses; to talk of
a supernatural spirit, understanding by that a non-extended substance, is to
contradict yourself; when we say that God is a spirit we are only signifying
our reverent desire to "abstract from him all corporeal grossness."
(I, xi, 4) This does not say, in so many words, that God is a subtle corporeal
substance, but I think it implies that.
Hobbes is at pains to point out that, though Scripture acknowledges the
existence of spirits, it nowhere says they are incorporeal (I, xi, 5). In a lost letter to Descartes, dating from
January 1641, Hobbes appears to have said quite explicitly that both God and
the soul are corporeal. (Cf. Brandt, pp. 93, 111, referring to OL V, 278-79.)
Nevertheless,
when Hobbes first publishes on this topic, he is very tentative about his
materialism. In the Third Objections
to Descartes' Meditations, which Descartes received in the same month as
the lost letter, apparently without knowing the identity of the author in
either case (AT III, 287, 293), Hobbes writes that, for all Descartes has
proven in the Second Meditation,
it may be that the thinking
thing is the subject of the mind, reason, or the intellect, and therefore,
something corporeal. The contrary of
this is assumed, not proven. (AT VII,
173, my emphasis)
Indeed, Hobbes says, it seems to follow from
the fact that we cannot conceive any act without its subject,
that the thinking thing is
something corporeal. For the subjects of
all acts seem to be understood only as something corporeal or material.
(ibid., my emphasis)
A bit later Hobbes rejects the notion that we can have
an idea of an angel, partly on the ground that an angel is an immaterial
substance:
When someone thinks of an angel,
what comes to mind is sometimes the image of a flame, sometimes [the image] of
a handsome winged boy; I seem to myself to be certain, regarding this image,
that it has no likeness to an angel, and therefore, is not an idea of an
angel. But believing [credens]
that there are certain invisible and immaterial creatures, ministering to God,
we give [imponimus] the name angel to the thing we believe in or suppose
[rei creditae vel suppositae], though the idea by which I imagine [imaginor]
an angel has been composed of the ideas of visible things. (AT VII, 179-80)
This passage is grammatically awkward. Credens ought really to be plural (credentes),
to agree with imponimus. Since it
isn't, some translators (Anscombe and Geach, Cottingham) have rendered this
passage as a clear affirmation of a belief in immaterial substances: I
believe, Hobbes is made to say, that there are invisible and immaterial
creatures. Other translators
(Clerselier, Haldane and Ross) render it as I have, with the implication that
it is those of us who have given the name "angel" to these creatures
who believe them to be immaterial. On
this reading, Hobbes does not explicitly subscribe to the belief, though he
certainly does not disassociate himself from it.
The Third
Objections do not pronounce on the question whether God is a material
substance, though they rather suggest that he is not. In the passage just cited, Hobbes goes on to
say that the case of God is the same as that of angels and that we have no
image or idea of God. If I have
construed his discussion of angels correctly, we can supply the following
argument for this: we could not have an image of God, since images are composed
of the ideas of visible things, and God, as an immaterial thing, is not
visible. But Hobbes only suggests this
reasoning. He does not present it. And nothing he says subsequently in the Third
Objections directly addresses the issue of God's immateriality.
In
the AntiWhite Hobbes' fideism supports an admission that there are
immaterial substances. We cannot know by
natural reason whether or not any substances are incorporeal. Therefore, we must accept what God has
revealed supernaturally in Scripture, viz. that there are incorporeal
substances. (This is quite contrary to
Hobbes' usual insistence that there is no scriptural support for the existence
of incorporeal substances.) People who
want to discuss this should not do so, since discussion of such difficult
matters tends only to weaken the Christian faith, rather than confirm it. "It is natural for many to consider as
false what someone tries to prove true, but cannot." (iv, 3, p. 54 in
Jones; cf. xxxi, 2, p. 391)
The Leviathan
certainly suggests that if God exists, he must be material, but, so far as I
can discover, Hobbes refrains from saying that explicitly until the Latin L. In the English L Hobbes does say that the
expression "incorporeal substance" is self-contradictory and hence
meaningless (iv, 21, 108; cf. xxxiv, 2).
In L xii, 7, he gives this as a reason for not defining God as an
incorporeal substance. Better simply to
confess that God is incomprehensible.
But if we do apply this term to God, we should not do so dogmatically,
but "piously, to honour him with attributes, of significations, as remote
as [we] can from the grossnesse of bodies visible."
In
the Latin L Hobbes added three appendices which have no analogues in the
English L, each written in the form of a dialogue between two characters,
designated only as "A" and "B." In each case it seems fairly clear that B
speaks for Hobbes, though when he speaks about Hobbes (e.g., in the
third dialogue), he does so in the third person. The first dialogue deals with the
interpretation of the Nicene Creed, the second with the law on heresy
(essentially anticipating the argument of the posthumously published work on
heresy in EW IV, 387-408), and the third with "certain objections against Leviathan."
In these dialogues, which have not received much attention, at least from
English language scholars, Hobbes makes explicit for the first time in a
published work his doctrine that God is material.
In
the first appendix Hobbes acknowledges that, if someone did hold that God was
material, that would be contrary to articles definitive of the Anglican
faith. Hobbes' interlocutor, A, has been
expounding his concepts of body, the incorporeal and spirit. By body he understands something really
existing in itself, and having some magnitude.
The appearances (phantasmata) he might see in a mirror or a dream
he would not class as bodies because of their tendency to vanish mysteriously. They are not something independent, but
merely the effects of other things on our sense organs. They are incorporeal. Spirits, like the air and the wind, which can
be seen or touched, are very subtle bodies.
He has not been able to conceive any nature intermediate between a body
and a spirit or between a spirit and an appearance. "Therefore, we must inquire whether the
terms incorporeal substance, or immaterial substance, or separate
essences are found in holy Scripture."
To this Hobbes replies:
B:
Those terms are not in holy Scripture.
But in the first of the 39 articles of religion, published by the
Anglican Church in 1562, it is said expressly that God is without a body and
without parts. Therefore, it must
not be denied. Indeed, the punishment
established for those who deny it is excommunication.
A:
It will not be denied.
Nevertheless, in the 20th article it is said that the Church must enjoin
nothing as necessary to be believed which cannot be deduced from holy Scripture. But would that it had been deduced! For I do not yet know in what sense something
which is not a body can be said to be the greatest or great. (OL III, 537-38)
If A means by his first statement that the
incorporeality of God will not be denied in this work, he is a poor
prophet. Within 25 pages Hobbes will
deny-or more precisely, permit a character in a dialogue to deny on his behalf-
that God is without a body.
In
the third dialogue, A reproduces various objections to which B replies. Here is the pertinent exchange:
A.
In Chapter 4... he denies that there are any incorporeal
substances. What is this but either to
deny that God exists or to affirm that God is a body?
B.
Indeed, he affirms that God is a body.
But before him, Tertullian affirmed the same thing... (OL III, 561)
And Hobbes goes on to cite, not very exactly, passages
from Tertullian to support this claim (De carne Christi xi and Adversus
Praxean vii. See Tricaud's
annotation.)
Perhaps
because these passages were buried in a Latin translation which not many
scholars have read, the best known Hobbesian acknowledgment of God's
materiality occurs in the reply to Bramhall, written in the same year the Latin
L was published, but not itself published until after Hobbes' death (cf. EW IV,
307, 313). This work was accompanied by
Hobbes' essay on the history of the law regarding heresy, in which Hobbes
defended the orthodoxy of Tertullian's materialism. No divines say that his position is
heretical. (EW IV, 398) But of course in the first appendix to the Latin L he
had made it clear that this doctrine was contrary to that of the Church he is
supposed to have liked best of all.
I
cannot think that Hobbes' caution about openly proclaiming God to be material-
a step he first took at the age of 80, in a work published not only in Latin
but in a foreign land- reflects any real indecision on his part, any more than
I can think the fideistic affirmation of the existence of incorporeal
substances in the AntiWhite represents his real, if temporary view. Rather I think Hobbes flirted with
immaterialism in the AntiWhite (and the Third Objections) for the
same reason he flirted with extreme fideism there. He was looking for a position which would
provide him with a safe enough cover.
Hobbes
is reluctant to affirm his materialism about God openly because he knows it is
theologically very problematic. Consider
the following line of argument:
1.
God is corporeal. (OL III, 561)
2.
The universe is the aggregate of all bodies. (L xxxiv, 2)
3.
Therefore, God is identical either with the whole of the universe or
with a part of it. (an inference from (1) and (2) but accepted by Hobbes at EW
IV, 349)
4.
To hold that God is identical with the whole of the universe is
equivalent to atheism, since it denies that the universe has a cause. (L xxxi,
15, 401; DCv xv, 14)
5.
If God is identical with a part of the universe, he is finite, since no
part of any whole can be infinite. (AntiWhite ii, 2)
6.
To hold that God is finite is equivalent to atheism, since God, by definition,
is infinite. (L xxxi, 18, 402)
7.
Therefore, to affirm (3) is to embrace atheism.[103]
Hobbes never puts all these pieces together in one
place, but each of them does seem to represent something he holds, and the
argument does not appear to be so abstruse that he could not have seen where
(3), in conjunction with his other assumptions, leads. Just conceivably he might have expected some
of his readers to draw the same conclusion.
Perhaps
some of the assumptions of this argument are questionable, e.g., the assumption
in (5) that no part of any whole can be infinite. Surely, we would now say, the set of even
integers is a part of the set of integers and yet is infinite. But was this clear to Hobbes? What step in this argument is he
supposed to reject and why? Even if we
give up the assumption that every part of every whole is finite, isn't there
something uncomfortable about representing God as one material object among
others? Perhaps Hobbes' negative
theology saves him from being driven from materialism to atheism, but at this
point that seems a dubious expedient.
I
conclude that Hobbes' periodic experiments with various degrees of fideism
suggest that he was not very serious about the reason-based arguments for God's
existence which he sometimes advanced, that they were a convenient cover,
rather than a doctrine he was committed to.
Similarly, I take his sustained attack on revelation- its vehicle
(prophecy), its signs (miracles) and its record (scripture)- to indicate that
he was not very serious about believing in God on the basis of revelation. So it seems to me rather likely that he was
an atheist, at least with respect to the personal God of the Judaeo-Christian
tradition. But if someone were to insist
that we'll never really know what Hobbes' religious beliefs were, I would
cheerfully concede the point.
* *
*
In Censorship
and Interpretation Annabel Patterson comments that late modern criticism
has not
paid enough attention to the
interpretive status of introductory materials in early modern texts. All too often given over to the province of
bibliographers, or even omitted from standard editions, dedications, engraved
title pages, commendatory poems and epigraphs are lost to sight. Yet often their function is to alert the
reader to his special responsibilities. (p. 48)
Happily Molesworth's and Macpherson's editions of L do
preserve its wonderful engraved title page, and commentators have not neglected
its striking symbolism.[104] The figure of the mortal God, Leviathan, dominates;
this greatest power on earth, as the quotation from Job reminds us, unites both
church and state, putting an end to their conflicts.
But
there is an aspect of the introductory material which I think has not received
sufficient attention. In the Epistle
Dedicatory to Francis Godolphin Hobbes writes:
Me thinks the endeavour to advance
the Civill Power, should not by the Civill Power be condemned; nor private men,
by reprehending it, declare they think that power too great. Besides, I speak not of the men, but (in the
abstract) of the Seat of Power... offending none, I think, but those without,
or such within (if there be any such) as favour them. (pp. 75-76)
This is not a transparent passage, but perhaps the
Latin version makes Hobbes' meaning somewhat clearer: he favors maximizing the
civil power, whoever the possessor of that power may be, and he will offend
only those who lack power. But what is
most interesting is the acknowledgement he gives of the potential offensiveness
of his religious views:
That which perhaps may most offend,
are certain texts of Holy Scripture, alledged by me to other purpose than
ordinarily they use to be by others.
Hobbes goes on to plead in his defense that he risks
this offense "with due submission" and only because it is necessary
for his purpose, which is to diminish the authority of those who would
challenge the civil power (sc. on religious grounds). But the reader has been warned to expect an
unconventional, indeed, an offensive reading of scripture, and he should not
be surprised if he finds it an attack on Christian dogma.
What
are we suggesting about Hobbes' character and purposes if his arguments for
theism and his proclamations of adherence to Christianity are not sincere? Can we really, coherently, suppose that
Hobbes had the intentions I have ascribed to him? Is it consistent to maintain that Hobbes
wanted (a) to undermine the religion of his day, (b) to shelter himself against
persecution for disbelief by falsely giving the impression that he was a believer,
and (c) to appeal to the religious beliefs of his readers to support his
political conclusions? (Cf. Grover, pp. 146-47) I think it is.
On my
account Leviathan is intended to be an ambiguous work, to be read by
different people in different ways, as all displays of irony are apt to
be. Euthyphro does not appreciate the
irony of Socrates because he is firmly convinced of his own religious
knowledge. Booth reminds us that some
early readers of Swift's Modest Proposal failed to appreciate the savage
irony of that work. Hobbes' attack on
official religion is a sufficiently subtle one that many readers will miss
it. A person convinced beyond any doubt,
for example, that scripture is a substantially accurate record of the acts and
sayings of the prophets and apostles may not examine too closely an argument
which professes to have that conclusion.
He may accept the disavowal and miss the suggestion. Someone, on the other hand, who is already
inclined to doubt may find her doubt fortified.
"Gradually the ordinary people are enlightened," as Hobbes
says in De homine (xiv, 13). Such
a reader may sense that the argument does not support the conclusion and be led
to reexamine the argument, asking herself what is a reasonable conclusion to
draw from those premises. The first
reader, when he finds conventional religious assumptions used to support
political conclusions, may be moved to accept those conclusions. The second reader, finding that she cannot
accept the religious argument for those conclusions, may yet be persuaded by
the secular argument. At the very least,
she will be innoculated against religious arguments leading her to rebel
against the state on the ground that she has a higher duty to God than to man. A third reader, a censor, say, who may well
be sensitive to the subversive implications of the work,[105]
may still resolve to let it pass, on the ground that not enough people will
discount the disclaimers to cause serious trouble, and that attempting to
suppress such a work may be more harmful in the long run than allowing it to go
unpunished.
Some
writers suggest that to read Hobbes this way is to impugn his character. Here is Peter Geach at his rhetorical best:
A learned man in the United States
recently published a book arguing that Descartes put in all that transparently
fallacious argumentation about God and the soul in order to fool the priests:
really he was an atheistic materialist, and a study of his writings shows
this. This thesis is less likely to
become fashionable than the thesis of Hobbes's atheism, because many academics
know intelligent Catholics, whereas few are acquainted with intelligent
Socinians; but it is not a whit less plausible; indeed it is slightly more so,
in that Descartes might impress some people as a shifty character, whereas this
is a ludicrously inept epithet for Hobbes. (op. cit., p. 556)
Pointing out that Hobbes was not a shifty character is
relevant to the question whether a Straussian reading of him is tenable if, but
only if, we assume that only a shifty character would write in the way
Straussians allege that Hobbes wrote, i.e., with deliberate ambiguity,
intending to suggest doubts about religion to his more skeptically inclined
readers, while attempting to persuade the less skeptical that his position is
not so far beyond the bounds of orthodoxy as to require punishment. If Geach takes what he says to be relevant to
the issue at hand, he must be tacitly making that assumption. But I think it an entirely unwarranted
assumption. As Leslie Stephen observed
in a similar context, if there is any moral fault to be found in these
situations, it lies "with those who made plain-speaking dangerous."[106]
To
make Geach's assumption is to fail to appreciate the moral position of someone
who holds minority opinions in a repressive culture and who believes that he
ought, somehow, to try to change the dominant view.[107]
Earlier in this paper I gave an account of the complex situation with respect
to religious toleration in the Protestant England of Hobbes' time. But we should also remember that Hobbes was
living in Catholic France when he wrote and published Leviathan, that
his complete works had already been put on the Index librorum prohibitorum
in 1649,[108]
presumably because of the much milder De cive, and that Hobbes' own
official explanation of his return to England after Leviathan was
published was that he feared persecution by the Roman Catholic clergy in France
(OL I, xvii). If criticizing the
generally accepted religion is dangerous, then those who hold unorthodox views
must either keep silent, or find some some covert way of conveying their
message, or speak plainly and take the consequences. Hobbes himself was not unwilling to ascribe
dissimulation to Aristotle, without any imputation of moral fault. At the end of an attack on the doctrine of
separated essences, Hobbes writes:
it may be [Aristotle] knew [this
doctrine] to be false philosophy; but writ it as a thing consonant to, and
corroborative of their religion; and fearing the fate of Socrates. (L xlvi, 18,
692)
If the argument of this paper is correct, Hobbes
himself certainly had reason to fear the fate of Socrates.
[1] From Hobbes e Spinoza, ed. by Emilia
Giancotti, Naples: Bibliopolis. I am
indebted to a number of people for criticisms and comments on various drafts of
this article: Jeffrey Barnouw, Martin Bertman, Heather Blair, Charles Chastain,
Alan Donagan, Mike Dunn, Paul Eisenberg, Peter Geach, Shelly Kagan, Michael
Lieb, Al Martinich and François Tricaud, to name only those who are at present
most prominent in my memory. I have also
profited from reading the Ph.D. thesis of Paul Bagley.
[2] Brief Lives, chiefly of contemporaries,
set down by John Aubrey, between the years 1669 and 1696, ed. from the
author's mss. by Andrew Clark, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898, vol. I, p.
357. But Clark reads "he had cut
through me a bar's length." After
examining Aubrey's ms., V. de S. Pinto proposed substituting "outthrowne"
(in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement of 15 September 1950, p.
581). On Pinto's reading, the reference
is to "the old game of throwing the bar," a trial of strength in
which players contended to see which one could throw the bar the farthest.
[3] Strauss does not always claim that Hobbes was
an atheist. In Spinoza's Critique of
Religion, he writes: "From an agnosticism such as that of Hobbes, it
is only a step to atheism, a step which this philosopher himself however never
took." (New York: Schocken Books, 1965, p. 101, English trans. of Die
Religionskritik Spinozas, Berlin 1930.)
The Hobbes of Strauss' Political Philosophy of Hobbes (U of
Chicago P, 1963, but first published in 1936) is at no point a believing
Christian (p. 74), though he is somewhat sympathetic to natural religion (p.
76), acknowledging at all times that we can at least have knowledge of the
existence of a first cause. The Hobbes
of Strauss' Natural Right and History (University of Chicago Press,
1950, pp. 198-99) evidently is an atheist, though not demonstrably so. The Hobbes of "On the Basis of Hobbes's
Political Philosophy" (first published in French in Critique, 1954;
published in English in What is Political Philosophy?, NY: Free Press,
1959) is an atheist, and demonstrably so.
Strauss does not discuss the passage from Aubrey in any of the above
works, though he refers to it as one he likes to quote in "The Mutual
Influence of Theology and Philosophy," The Independent Journal of
Philosophy 3(1979): 111-118 (the English original of a lecture first
published in Hebrew in Iyyun 5(1954):110-126).
[4] See W. Glover, "God and Thomas
Hobbes," Church History 1960 (references to the reprint in Hobbes
Studies, ed. by K. C. Brown, Blackwell, 1965); K. C. Brown, "Hobbes's
Grounds for Belief in a Deity," Philosophy 37(1962): 336-344; M. M.
Goldsmith, Hobbes's Science of Politics, Columbia UP, 1966, pp.
250-51; J. G. A. Pocock, "Time,
History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes," in Politics,
Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History, New York:
Atheneum, 1971; H. Schneider, "The Piety of Hobbes," and P. Johnson,
"Hobbes's Anglican Doctrine of Salvation," both in R. Ross, H.
Schneider and T. Waldman (eds.), Thomas Hobbes and his Time, Minnesota
UP, 1974; P. Geach, "The Religion of Thomas Hobbes," Religious
Studies, 17(1981): 549-58; and Arrigo Pacchi, "Hobbes and the Problem
of God" (in G. A. J. Rogers and Alan Ryan, Perspectives on Thomas
Hobbes, Oxford: Clarendon P, 1988).
Perhaps Ronald Hepburn's "Hobbes on the Knowledge of God" (in
Maurice Cranston and Richard Peters, Hobbes and Rousseau, Anchor, 1972)
belongs in this list, though I find his support for Hobbes' theism rather
equivocal.
A number of writers since Strauss have
held interpretations of Hobbes' theory of obligation which prima facie
presupposed the sincerity of his professions of theism, but they have generally
not treated that issue as one requiring much argument. See A. E. Taylor,
"The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes," Philosophy 13(1938): 406-24;
H. Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1957; and F. C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. Their
critics have often granted the sincerity of the theism (if only for the sake of
argument), while denying its relevance.
Cf., e.g., D. Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1969, pp. 69-71, 179-80, 204-6; J. Hampton, Hobbes and the
Social Contract Tradition, Cambridge UP, 1986, pp. 94-96; G. Kavka, Hobbesian
Moral and Political Theory, Princeton UP, 1986, pp. 361-63.
French scholarship, at least as
represented by Raymond Polin (Hobbes, Dieu et les hommes, Paris: PUF,
1981; Politique et philosophie chez Thomas Hobbes, Paris: Vrin, 1977)
has been more sympathetic to a Straussian view.
[5] DCv xv, 14; L xxxi, 15, 401. Since we are presently in transition between
the Molesworth edition and the Clarendon edition of Hobbes' works, I adopt a
system of reference intended to lead the reader to the right passage no matter
what edition he is using. For The
Elements of Law (abbr. EL) references are to part, chapter and section, and
follow Tönnies' text (Frank Cass, 2nd ed., 1969). References to De cive
(abbr. DCv), De corpore (abbr. DCr) and De homine (abbr. DH) are
to chapter and section number. For Leviathan
(abbr. L) lower case roman numerals refer to chapters, the first arabic to the
paragraph numbers in the Macpherson edition (Penguin 1968), which almost
invariably correspond to those in Molesworth and other commonly used editions,
and the second to the page number in Macpherson. Where the context makes it clear which
chapter of L I am referring to, I simply give ¶ and page numbers.
[6] One minor reason for Hood's skepticism about
the accuracy of Aubrey's report is apparently what he calls the odd phrasing of
the remark, but I take it that Pinto's emendation removes this difficulty.
[7] See, for example, G. E. M. Anscombe,
"Modern Moral Philosophy," originally published in Philosophy
(1958), and more recently reprinted in her Collected Philosophical Papers,
v. 3, U Minnesota P, 1981. Interesting
here is David Gauthier, "Why Ought One Obey God? Reflections on Hobbes and
Locke," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7(1977): 425-446.
[8] At least if we restrict ourselves to those
major figures around whom surveys of the history of philosophy are
constructed. But see Richard Tuck, Natural
Rights Theories, Cambridge UP, 1981, p. 76.
[9] Anscombe, of course, would deny that it does,
citing the example of Aristotle. It is
symptomatic of what she would see as a misconception of moral philosophy that
most interpreters of Hobbes who have denied that he understood his laws of
nature as obligatory have also denied that Hobbes, strictly speaking, had a
moral philosophy.
[10] L xv, 41, 216-7. The Latin version of this would be
translated: "These dictates of reason have obtained the name of laws, but
are so called improperly. For they are
only theorems concerning the things which conduce to men's conservation. But law, properly so called, is the word of
one who commands, either orally or in writing, so that all who are bound to
obey know it is his word." (OL iii, 122) Note that this does not suggest
that we may properly view the laws of nature as laws by conceiving of them as
laws of God. That implication is present
in the parallel passages in EL (I, xvii, 12) and DCv (iii, 33, both English and
Latin).
If, as I think, Spinoza knew Hobbes from
L, and not only from DCv, he must have read L either in the Dutch translation
published in 1667 or (more likely) the Latin translation published in
1668. Wernham's inability to find
internal evidence of Spinoza's reading L (Spinoza, The Political Works,
Oxford: Clarendon P, 1965, p. 47) comes, perhaps, from his
neglecting the theological
portions of L and the TTP. That seems a
sufficient reason for the student of Spinoza to attend carefully to the
differences between the English and Latin versions.
But these differences should also interest
the student of Hobbes, since they raise questions about the evolution of
Hobbes' thought, or at least about how, at different times, he wanted his
thought to be presented. The best
discussion of these issues is in François Tricaud's French translation, which
systematically takes account of the variations (Léviathan, Paris: Sirey,
3rd printing, 1983). Tricaud concludes
(p. xxvi) that much of the Latin L was written in 1648-49, prior to the English
L, though, of course, some parts, which have no analogue in the English, would
have been written much later (p. xxi).
One argument for this is the tendency of the English L to be fuller at
the end of a paragraph (p. xxiii), a pattern exemplified in the passage quoted
here. Tricaud takes this tendency as
evidence that the English version is expanding on an earlier Latin version. But even if one thinks that the Latin version
is contracting an earlier English version, as Raymond Polin does in connection
with this passage (see Hobbes, Dieu et les hommes, p. 44), the
variations are interesting.
[11] I, 353.
Samuel Mintz (The Hunting of Leviathan, Cambridge UP, 1962, p.
19) cites another contemporary source, Southwell, as reporting that Hobbes
"died in all the forms of a good Christian." Oakeshott says, in the
introduction to his edition of Leviathan (Blackwell, 1947, p. lxiv) that
Hobbes "died in mortal fear of hell-fire." I do not know what his evidence is for that
claim. Aubrey (I, 363) reports that the
last two lines of Hobbes' verse autobiography originally read:
Octoginta
annos complevi jam quatuorque
Et prope stans dictat Mors mihi, Ne metue.
(The version in Molesworth, OL I,
xcix, differs, apparently because Dr. Blackburne altered the lines to improve
the meter.) So at a fairly late stage,
Hobbes thought death not to be
feared. In L xxxviii (6-15, 485-490) he seems to want
to take Scriptural talk of hell-fire metaphorically.
[12] The Rump had repealed the recusancy acts in
September 1650. See S. R. Gardiner, History
of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649-1656, New York: AMS Press, 1965,
II, 3.
[13] Elsewhere (II, 221) Aubrey relates the
following story: "Hobbes saw a
divine coming to administer the last rites to the dying Selden. Sayd Hobbes: `What, will you that have wrote
like a man, now dye like a woman?' So
the minister was not let in."
[14] See, for example, William Riley Parker's
biography, Milton, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968, vol. I, pp. 530-31.
[15] See the accounts in George Croom Robertson's Hobbes
(London: Blackwood, 1886, pp. 193-97) and Leslie Stephen's Hobbes
(London: Macmillan, 1904, pp. 59-60).
[16] EW IV, 407.
Hobbes also treats the law of heresy in his Dialogue between a
Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, passim, but see
particularly EW VI, 110.
[17] See, for example, W. K. Jordan, The
Development of Religious Toleration in England, from the convention of the Long
Parliament to the Restoration, 1640-1660, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1938. Also helpful is Charles Firth, Oliver
Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England, London: OUP, 1952.
[18] In addition to Jordan, see also John M.
Robertson, A Short History of Freethought, London: Watts, 1915, vol.
II, p. 76, and J. B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought, New York:
Holt, 1913, p. 86. According to Bury,
there were no executions under this legislation.
[19] Geach has emphasized strongly Hobbes'
affinities with the Socinian doctrine, as part of his argument for Hobbes'
sincerity. Ironically, the first modern
scholar to call attention to these affinities was Strauss (1936), p. 76. Strauss credits Leibniz with recognizing the
connection.
[20] See Arnold Rogow's assessment of Aubrey in
the preface to his recent biography (Thomas Hobbes, radical in the service
of reaction, W. W. Norton, 1986, pp. 10-11). Clark's annotations to his edition of
Aubrey's life of Hobbes also call attention to errors. On the other hand, Jean Bernhardt, though he
recognizes that Aubrey is "un amateur d'anecdotes, qui sait dramatiser,
mettre en scène," also thinks he is substantially faithful when he reports
something he has gotten directly from Hobbes (Court traité des premiers
principes, Paris: PUF, 1988, pp. 62-3).
[21] So far as I can find, only Glover raises this
question (p. 166). But his only answer
to it is the negative one mentioned in the text: that it is extremely unlikely
Hobbes was implying an approval of Spinoza's pantheism. He does not ask what else Hobbes might have
meant.
[22] So of recent writers on the subject of
Hobbes' religious views, the one with whom I am most sympathetic is David Johnston. See his The Rhetoric of Leviathan,
Princeton UP, 1986, passim, but particularly p. 181.
[23] On the usual reading of Hobbes on toleration,
this might not even seem a question worth considering, but see Alan Ryan,
"Hobbes, Toleration and the Inner Life," in David Miller and Larry
Siedentop (eds.), The Nature of Political Theory, Oxford UP, 1982, and
"A More Tolerant Hobbes?" in Susan Mendus (ed.), Justifying
Toleration, Cambridge UP, 1988.
[24] Letter 50, IV/238-39. References to Spinoza are to volume, page,
and sometimes line numbers of the Gebhardt edition. Sometimes for the TTP I will also use the
section numbers of the Bruder edition.
[25] Again, this would require an unconventional,
but not unprecedented reading of Hobbes.
Cf. Hampton on Hobbes' "fallback position," pp. 220-55.
[26] Hobbes does not explicitly deny the doctrine
of the trinity, but accepts it subject to an interpretation his more
conservative contemporaries found appalling:
it involves only the claim that God has been represented on earth by
Moses (and the high priests) in the Old Testament, by Jesus in the New
Testament, and by his apostles (and their successors) thereafter. Otherwise, he suggests, there is no
scriptural support for the doctrine.
Cf. L xli, 9, xlii, 3,
520-22. The boldness of this
interpretation may be measured by the wrath it aroused in Bramhall, who
wrote: "What is to become of the
great adorable mystery of the blessed undivided Trinity? It is shrunk into nothing..." See John
Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes and The Catching of Leviathan,
London: John Crook, 1658, p. 474.
Bramhall's criticism on this issue (seconded by the Bishop of Durham)
prompted a rare retraction and significant alterations in the Latin L. Cf. EW IV, 314-18, and OL III, 357-58 (where
two whole
paragraphs of the English L are
omitted, xli, 9, and xlii, 3) and 563-64.
[27] Cf. The
Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. by Edwin Curley, Princeton UP, vol. I, p.
206. Spinoza is prepared to go further
in his correspondence. When Oldenburg
heard that Spinoza was thinking of publishing the Ethics he wrote to him
asking him not to include in it anything which might undermine in any way the
practice of religious virtue (Letter 62, IV/273). In reply Spinoza asked what opinions he held
which Oldenburg thought might have this effect, and in particular, what
passages in the TTP had caused the learned to have misgivings (Letter 68,
IV/299). Oldenburg's reply mentioned,
among other things, a suspicion people held that Spinoza was concealing his
opinion concerning the doctrines that Jesus Christ is the redeemer of the
world, sole mediator between God and man, God incarnate, whose death was a
satisfaction for our sins (Letter 71, IV/304).
In Letter 73 (IV/308-9) Spinoza responded by saying he had stated his
opinion about Christ openly in the TTP: that it is not necessary for salvation
to know him according to the flesh, but that it is necessary to know "the
eternal son of God, i.e., God's eternal wisdom, which has manifested itself in
all things, but most in the human mind, and most of all in Christ
Jesus." God's wisdom alone teaches
what is true and false, good and evil.
"As for what certain churches add to this, that God took on a human
nature, I warned expressly that I do not know what they mean. Indeed, to confess the truth, they seem to me
to speak no less absurdly than if someone were to say that a circle had taken
on the nature of a square." This
last sentence goes further than anything Spinoza said in print during his lifetime,
though I assume he expected this letter to be published after his death.
[28] L xxxviii.
On the decay of belief in hell, with particular attention to the need
for covert discourse on this topic, see D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell,
17th Century discussions of eternal torment, U Chicago P, 1964.
[31] Cf. John Toland: "Such is the deplorable condition of our
age, that a man dares not openly and directly own what he thinks of divine
matters, tho it be never so true and beneficial, if it but very slightly
differs from what is receiv'd by any party, or that is establish'd by law; but
he is either forc'd to keep perpetual silence, or to propose his sentiments to
the world by way of paradox under a borrow'd or fictitious name." Christianity
Not Mysterious, London, 1696, pp. iv-v.
For a more extended treatment of this theme see Toland's Tetradymus,
London, 1720, esp. Pt. II, "Clidophorus, or of the exoteric and esoteric
philosophy..." Annabel Patterson's Censhorship
and Interpretation, the conditions of writing and reading in early modern
England (U Wisconsin P, 1984) is a very interesting exploration of the ways
writers and readers dealt with censorship in England from the mid-16th Century
to the end of the 17th by developing an elaborate "hermeneutics of
censorship." Patterson's focus is
on the censorship of literary works for political reasons, rather than
philosophical works for religious reasons.
[32] For the initial reaction to De doctrina,
see Maurice Kelley, This Great Argument, A Study of Milton's De Doctrina
Christiana as a Gloss upon Paradise Lost, Princeton UP, 1941,
pp. 3-5.
[33] See, for example, Wayne Booth's A Rhetoric
of Irony, U Chicago P, 1974, or D. C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony,
Methuen, 1969.
[35] Cf. H. P. Grice, "Logic and
Conversation," which appeared originally in Davidson and Harman's The
Logic of Grammar (Dickinson, 1975), and has subsequently been reprinted,
with helpful analysis, in Robert Fogelin's Understanding Arguments
(Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982). Fogelin
explicitly mentions the "I am not suggesting that p" move on
p. 64. I take it that the scare-quotes
around "chance" confirm my feeling that this passage is ironic. Patterson formulates the following as a
principle of interpretation for the literature she deals with:
"Disclaimers of topical intention are not to be trusted, and are more
likely to be entry codes to precisely that kind of reading they protest
against." (p. 57)
[36] Patterson argues that often censors in the
early modern period were prepared to tolerate a certain amount of writing which
would otherwise have been censorable, provided the author expressed his
heretical thoughts obliquely: "there were conventions both sides accepted
as to how far a writer could go in explicit address to the contentious issues
of his day, how he could encode his opinions so that nobody would be required
to make an example of him." (p. 11)
[37] See Sir Robert Filmer, An Advertisement to
the Jury-men of England touching witches, together with the difference between
an English and a Hebrew witch, London, 1653.
[38] Edward (Hyde, 1st) Earl of Clarendon, A
Brief View and Survey of the dangerous and pernicious Errors to Church and
State, In Mr Hobbes's Book Entitled Leviathan, Oxford, 1676, 16-17.
[39] It's striking that Hood's account of Hobbes'
psychology (Divine Politics, ch. 5) has no analysis of the chapter on
imagination.
[40] So Hood's brief chapter on Hobbes on religion
(Divine Politics, ch. 6) contains no discussion of this passage.
[41] OL III, 563.
It seems, however, that Molesworth's text is not to be trusted at this
point. The specific scriptural citations
Molesworth gives in the text (Ecclesiasticus 1:16 and Psalms 13:1) are not
present in the 1670 edition of the Latin L and apparently represent
Molesworth's own conjectures. The first
assumes that when Hobbes said Ecclesiastes, he meant Ecclesiasticus. But it seems more likely (as Prof. Tricaud
suggests in correspondence) that Hobbes is citing scripture from memory,
thinking that Ecclesiastes is the source of this familiar saying, when it would
have been more appropriate to cite Proverbs 1:7, 9:10, Ps. 111:10, or Job
28:28.
[42] More apt would have been Ecclesiastes 12:13
(the whole duty of man is to fear God and keep his commandments) or Philippians
2:12 (work out your own salvation with fear and trembling).
[43] Alexander Ross showed himself a good critic
of Hobbes when he asked, in connection with this passage: "What will he say of the Gentiles, among
them tales were publicly allowed, were they therefore religious and not
superstitious?" (Leviathan Drawn
out with a Hook,London, 1653, p. 10) Mintz criticizes another contemporary
of Hobbes for unscrupulously omitting the last sentence of L vi, 36 (The
Hunting of Leviathan, p. 41). But
Ross shrewdly raises a difficulty about that: "If the power be invisible,
how can it be imagined, seeing (as he saith before) imagination is only of
things perceived by the sense, and it is so called from the image made in
seeing."
[44] The Latin does imply that men will often be
ignorant of the true causes of good and evil fortune, but does not explain this
ignorance by appealing to the invisibility of those causes.
[45] Bramhall found this passage offensive: "What is now become of that dictate or
precept of reason, concerning prayers, thanksgivings, oblations, sacrifices, if
uncertain opinions, ignorance, fear, mistakes, the conscience of our own
weaknesse, and the admiration of natural events be the only seeds of
religion?" (466-67) Hobbes' reply (EW IV, 291-95) seems to me evasive.
[46] ¶11, 172-73.
OL III, 89: that those which are
approved by law in one state are derided in another.
[47] In this case the Latin L is more congenial to
his reading. Its version of the last three sentences of ¶12 would be
translated: "the religion of the
former is a part of politics; the politics of the latter is a part of religion
and contains such precepts as are suitable to those who are admitted into the
city of God. The religions of the former
were founded by the lawgivers of the gentiles; the religion of the latter, by
Abraham, Moses, and Jesus Christ, who taught us the laws of the kingdom of
heaven." Normally Hood finds the
English version more authoritative (pp. 54-6).
[48] This is as true in the Latin as in the
English: "the purpose of each was to render their initiates more obedient
to themselves." When Hood
paraphrases this sentence he omits the sibi and gives the impression
that the sentence applies only to Gentile legislators.
[49] Cf. the Novum organum xlvi: "And therefore it was a good answer that
was made by one who, when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of
those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him
say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods- "Aye,"
asked he again, "but where are they painted that were drowned after their
vows?" And such is the way of all
superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the
like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where
they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happen much oftener,
neglect and pass them by."
[50] The quoted passage expands a phrase in the
Latin which would be translated simply: "supernatural phantasms."
(OL III, 306)
[51] In the Latin the passage in bold would be
translated: "But no one will receive another's dreams as the word of God,
especially if he knows that for the most part dreams are natural and can
proceed from the arrogance and pride of the dreamer. He who says that he has seen a vision from
God or heard a voice will be thought to have dreamed. For dreams often and easily deceive vain and
inexperienced men. He who says that God
has supernaturally inspired him with some new doctrine will be understood by
the wise to be raving from admiration of his own cleverness." (OL III,
266)
[52] Cf. L vii, 7: "If Livy say the
Gods made once a cow speak, and we believe it not; wee distrust not God
therein, but Livy." The
section from which this comes (L vii, 5-7) is an interesting further example of
the phenomenon analysed in §3: the interjection of discussions of religion
where they might not have been expected.
Although Hobbes chooses to focus his skepticism on a pagan historian,
the example might remind readers of Balaam's ass (Numbers 22:22-35).
[53] Bramhall did, objecting (inter alia) that
"two Prophets prophesying the same thing at the same time, in the
dominions of two different Princes, the one shall be a true Prophet, the other
a false." (p. 476) Hobbes' reply
blatantly evades the issue: "This consequence is not good: for seeing they
teach different doctrines, they cannot both confirm their doctrine with
miracles." (EW IV, 328)
[54] In DH xiv, 12, Hobbes will compare those who pretend
to be prophets without performing miracles to astrologers, who pretend to a
science they do not have in order to steal money from foolish people.
[55] OL III, 60:
"Even if there were nothing else which indicated madness of this
kind, still to me the very arrogation of divine inspiration itself is a great
indicator of their madness."
[56] See James Efird's article on demons in Harper's
Bible Dictionary. However, 1 Samuel
18:10-11 is evidence of some OT belief in demon possession. This passage is interesting in other
respects: the King James version translates the verb naba' so as to make
Saul prophesy under the influence of the evil spirit from God; more
modern translations (e.g., the RSV, the Soncino Bible) say that Saul raved. The Soncino commentator acknowledges as the
literal meaning: "played the prophet," suggesting that Saul displayed
"the manifestations of physical excitement which were associated with the
ecstatic frenzies of the prophetic bands."
[57] Cf. Deuteronomy 13:1-5, cited repeatedly by
both Hobbes (L xxxii, 7; xxxvi, ¶¶11,19,20, pp. 461, 466, 467) and Spinoza
(III/31, 87, 96), Matthew 24:24 (cited in L xxxii, 7; TTP III/31, 69), Numbers
12:6-8 (cited in L xxxvi, 11; TTP III/20).
[59] kai 'ouk 'edunato 'ekei 'oudemian dunamin
poiesai, 'eime 'oligois 'arrostois 'epitheis tas xeiras 'etherapeusen. kai 'ethaumazen dia ten 'apistian 'auton.
[61] Desiderius Erasmus, The first Tome or
Volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the Newe Testamente, Delmar, NY:
Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975, orig. ed., 1548.
[62] I cite the RSV. Other translations generally agree, an
interesting exception being that by W. F. Albright and C. J. Mann,
Doubleday/Anchor, 1971: "And
because of their unbelief he was unable to perform many acts of power
there." The Greek is: kai 'ouk
'epoiesen 'ekei dunameis pollas dia ten 'apistian 'auton. This translation produces the harmony some
commentators have sought, but Albright and Mann do not argue for it and I do
not know how they arrived at it.
[63] Jean Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels,
Matthew, Mark and Luke, ed. by David and Thomas Torrance, tr. by T. H. L.
Parker, Eerdmans, 1972, vol. II, p. 136.
The tradition of writing harmonies of the gospels goes back to
Augustine, whose object was to reply to skeptics bent on discrediting the
gospels as history by pointing out their inconsistencies. Cf. Aurelius Augustinus, The Harmony of
the Evangelists, in Works, ed. by Marcus Dods, Edinburgh, 1873, vol.
8, pp. 148-49. Though Augustine comments
on the passages in question here, he does not acknowledge the prima facie inconsistency
Calvin seeks to remove.
[64] See The Interpreter's Bible, Abingdon
Press, 1951, VII, 61-65, 729. But there
appears to be no universally accepted solution to the problem of the
relationship of the synoptic gospels to each other. So Mann (in the Anchor Mark) denies
that Matthew depends on Mark, arguing (what Augustine had argued long ago) that
Mark depends on Matthew.
[67] OL: "Far
be it from us to think that he lacked the power, or that the end of miracles
was not to convert the incredulous."
[69] Or perhaps not. Hobbes' Anglican contemporary, John
Lightfoot, seems to assume a similar equivalence: "therefore, he did not
many great works there, because of their unbelief, which Mark uttereth, `he
could do no mighty works there,' ver. 5: which meaneth not any want of power,
but it relateth to his will, and to the rule by which he went in doing his
works." The Harmony, Chronicle and Order of the New Testament, in Works,
ed. by John Rogers Pitman, London, 1822, vol. 3, p. 89. This work was first published in 1655, four
years after the publication of L, so presumably Lightfoot was not the target of
Hobbes' criticism here, but this illustrates the kind of thing Hobbes might
have heard in sermons.
[70] Deut. 13:1-5 again, L xxxvii, 13, 476. Hobbes also cites Deut. 18:21-22, which is
somewhat puzzling, since it seems to make true prediction the criterion for
distinguishing between true and false prophets, a position Hobbes had earlier
rejected.
[71] I have discussed this topic more fully, and
defended Spinoza's position on miracles, in an article which appeared in the Proceedings
of the First Italian Congress on Spinoza, ed. by Emilia Giancotti, Naples:
Bibliopolis, 1985. But the position I
take here is slightly different.
[72] See, for example, the correspondance between
Oldenburg and Spinoza relative to the TTP, Letters 68, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78,
and 79.
[73] 118/18.
Whom does Spinoza have in mind as exceptions here? He had a copy of Isaac La Peyrère's Praeadamitae
(1655) in his library when he died and probably was familiar with its denial of
the Mosaic authorship during the period when he wrote the TTP. See Catalogus van de bibliotheek der
Vereniging het Spinozahuis, Brill, 1965, and Richard Popkin's Isaac La
Peyrère, Brill. Our list of his
library has no mention of the Dutch translation of Leviathan published
in Amsterdam in 1667, or the Latin translation published there in 1668, though
I find it difficult to believe he was not familiar with that work. But for reasons indicated below, I think
Spinoza may have been thinking more of Ibn Ezra.
[74] The Latin expresses this sentiment somewhat
more sharply, dismissing the opponents' view as ineptum, i.e., foolish
or silly, not merely as strange (OL III, 271).
[77] The Latin is clearer than the English about
just what chapters Hobbes is referring to. The English leaves some doubt as to
whether ch. 27 is included. The selection of just these chapters of Deuteronomy
as the "Volume of the Law" (Hobbes' expression) referred to in
Deuteronomy 31:9 seems highly arbitrary, since it makes the Volume of the Law
begin in the middle of what Deuteronomy reports as a continuous speech,
beginning in 5:1. Modern scholarship
treats chs. 5-26 and 28 as a unit, with ch. 27, which interrupts the direct
address of Moses with a third person narrative, regarded as a misplaced
editorial supplement. See The
Interpreter's Bible, Nashville: Abingdon P, 1981, II, 314-318. When Hobbes returns to this topic in L xlii,
39, 548, he identifies Moses' writing with Deuteronomy 12-26.
[78] In L xxxiii Hobbes is no more precise than
that about how long the Volume of the Law was lost. When he returns to this topic in L xlii, 40,
548-49, he conjectures (on the basis of 1 Kings 14:26) that it was lost in the
time of Rehoboam, which would imply that it was lost for about three centuries
before its discovery by Hilkiah.
[79] Cf. Pocock (pp. 165-66): "This system of authority constituted by
faith differs from the system of authority constituted in the erection of the
civil sovereign in that historicity is of its essence; it rests upon the
transmission of words through time, words which constantly reiterate statements
about previous utterances of the same words; and the individual believer becomes
involved in this history as he validates and perpetuates it through
faith." Similarly, on p. 184.
[80] Notably Popkin, op. cit. and in the History
of Skepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, chh. 11-12. Popkin acknowledges that Spinoza's teacher,
Menasseh ben Israel, published a work in 1632, The Conciliator, which
dealt extensively with various prima facie contradictory passages in Scripture
and attempted to reconcile them in ways which would not cast doubt on the Bible
itself. So it seems fair to infer that
Spinoza had been exposed to this sort of controversy long before he ever heard
of La Peyrère, whose work was only published the year before Spinoza was
expelled from the Synagogue.
[81] A supposition for which Hobbes apparently
thinks he has sufficient evidence in Ezekiel 14:14 and James 5:11.
[83] Cf. The Interpreter's Bible III, 888,
pointing out the advantages of separating the prose narrative from the
verse: "the theological message of
the poet is free from the implications of the tale, such as divine pride in
man's integrity or the idea of a God who allows human suffering for the purpose
of winning a heavenly wager; and more particularly, it does not make the poet
responsible for the fabulous ending with its double portion of sheep, camels,
oxen and she-asses." See also Marvin Pope, Job, Anchor, 1965, esp.
pp. xxi-xxviii. There are, however, some
who would defend the unity of the work (e.g., Gerald Janzen, in the Harper
Bible Dictionary, pp. 492-94).
[84] L xxxviii, 4, 483. Hobbes does not represent Job as denying
immortality altogether, nor does he himself adopt that position. His position is that, though man's soul is
not "in its own nature" eternal, as it might be if it were
immaterial, man can hope for immortality through the resurrection of the body
at the last judgment. The interpretation
by which he finds evidence for that view in Job seems very dubious.
[85] The idea that Job shows the influence of
gentile religious and philosophical traditions is still current (see The
Interpreter's Bible, III, 878-84; Anchor Job, pp. xxxiv-xxxvii,
l-lxvi), though the annotation of this passage in Benedetto Spinoza, Trattato
teologico-politico, trad. e comm. di Antonio Droetto ed Emilia Giancotti
Boscherini, Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1984, would suggest that it is not universally
accepted. I speak of polytheism as being
foreign to the later Hebrew tradition because of the doubts Spinoza raises
about the earlier tradition in TTP ii (cf. 37/31-33; and 38/21-39/26).
[86] Another instance of this, perhaps, occurs in
134/25 where, commenting on the attempts of the commentators to reconcile the
inconsistent chronologies in the historical works, Spinoza writes: "Rabini
namque plane delirant"- "For the rabbis are completely mad," as
I would translate it.
I take it that Spinoza is also displaying
deference to Christian sensibilities when he excuses himself from examining the
books of the New Testament in the same way as he has the Old, on the grounds
that he lacks the linguistic skills and that he has heard a report (audio)
that the job has already been done by men more competent than he is. Cf. 150/30-33. Hobbes, too, is much less critical of the
New Testament than the Old (xxxiii, 20, 422), denying that there is any
substantial temporal gap between the writing and the events related, and
focussing instead on the issue of the collection of the works of Jesus'
disciples into a canon.
[87] 64 A.D. being the traditional date of Peter's
death. I might note that the Latin L is
considerably less skeptical about Clement's role than the English at this point
(cf. OL III, 276). Later (L xlii, 48,
554), in a passage which is paralleled in the Latin (OL III, 385),
Hobbes will give reasons for questioning the traditional account of Clement's
collection, suggesting that the record may have been falsified.
[89] OL: "yet I am not led to believe that
they corrupted the copies of the New Testament, which at that time existed
almost entirely in their hands."
[93] Elsewhere (L vii, 7, 133; xliii, 8, 614)
Hobbes suggests that there is a general answer: that we trust our teachers,
i.e., the members of the clergy. But
this is very hard to square with the anticlericalism Aubrey reports, and which
we have seen manifested throughout L.
[94] Hobbes shows a similar minimalist tendency
(in L xliii and elsewhere) requiring basically obedience to the civil law and
faith that Jesus is the Christ.
[95] Leibniz writes in the very year in which the
TTP appeared (23 September 1670, Akademie edition, II, i, 66) and he does not
yet know Spinoza's identity. I discuss
Leibniz's reaction to the TTP in detail in "Homo Audax: Leibniz,
Oldenburg and the TTP," forthcoming in Studia Leibnitiana.
[96] See Jeremiah Unterman's entry on
"Leviathan," in Harper's Bible Dictionary, relying principally
on Ps. 74:13-14, Job 3:8, 26:5-13, 41:1-34, and Isaiah 26:20-21:13.
[97] I owe this nice suggestion to Al Martinich,
who makes it in personal correspondence regarding an earlier draft of this
paper, but who nevertheless disagrees radically with my reading of Leviathan.
[98] K.C. Brown used it, along with two passages
from later works (DH i, 4; Decameron physiologicum x, EW VII, 176-77),
to argue that Hobbes did not sharply distinguish the causal argument from the
teleological argument, and made this a key element in his defense of the
sincerity of Hobbes' professions of theism.
In reply, Hepburn argued persuasively that Brown had exaggerated the
importance of teleological considerations in Hobbes. Hepburn might also have cited L xxxi, 13,
401, according to which God has no ends (cf. the Spinozistic DCv xv, 14).
[99] I cannot, however, recall commentators noting
the following difficulty. In EL I, xi,
11, Hobbes defines love as being delighted in the image or conception of the
thing loved. Since Hobbes holds that we
can have no image or conception of God, he is obliged to give the notion of
love of God a somewhat odd interpretation: "to love God therefore, in the
Scripture, is to obey his commandments and to love one another." Cf. DH xiv, 2, where a similar conclusion is
reached on different grounds.
[100] This work was first published in 1972, by Jean
Jacquot and Harold Whitmore Jones (eds.), under the title Thomas Hobbes:
Critique du De Mundo de Thomas White (Paris: Vrin and CNRS), from a
ms. discovered in the Bibliothèque nationale, and then in 1976, in an English
translation by Jones, under the title given in the text, by Bradford UP,
London. The only work I know which
discusses its bearing on the themes of this paper is the article by Pacchi
cited in n.4.
It
may also count against the simple developmental view assumed in the objection
that Hobbes seems to let natural theology back in, in DH xiv, 3.
[101] Also experimental, I think, is Hobbes' way of
dealing with the problem of evil in the AntiWhite. Cf. xxxviii, 2, with Hobbes' treatment of the
book of Job in L.
[102] See Frithiof Brandt, Thomas Hobbes'
Mechanical Conception of Nature, Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard, 1927,
pp. 16-17) on Hobbes' doctrine in the so-called Little Treatise (i.e.,
the work Tönnies printed as an appendix to EL, under the title A Short Tract
on First Principles, and dated as possibly going back to 1630).
[103] This line of reasoning is suggested by
Strauss, in "On the Basis of Hobbes's Political Philosophy." Goldsmith undertakes to rebut it in Hobbes's
Science of Politics. (See the
citations in n.3) But since the steps
are not well laid out either in Strauss or in Goldsmith, neither is very
convincing.
[105] In Persecution and the Art of Writing
(Chicago: U Chicago P, 1988, but originally published by the Free Press in
1952), Strauss contends that "a careful writer of normal intelligence is
more intelligent than the most intelligent censor." This may suggest an unwarranted assumption that
censors are generally not very perceptive.
But Strauss does not need to assume that.
[106] History of English Thought in the
Eighteenth Century, New York: Peter Smith, 1949, I, 105. It's hard, in any case, to see why the
conduct I attribute to Hobbes is any shiftier than the "snakish
cunning" Geach admires in Joan of Arc.
Cf. his The Virtues, Cambridge UP, p. 115.
[107] Perhaps it is too much to expect sympathetic
understanding of authors holding really radical religious opinions from someone
capable of writing that "we dare not accept a tolerant attitude towards
errors concerning the Divine Nature, because we are in no position to judge
what level of error will entail that a man's worship is wholly
misdirected." (Geach, God and the Soul, Schocken, 1969, p.
115) On Geach's behalf it should be noted
that he does not appear to think this position justifies the activities of the
Inquisition, but only non-coercive efforts to convert those who are not
worshipping the right God.
[108] Not, of course, that this is any very great
distinction. Most of the major figures
of the early modern period- Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Malebranche,
Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau and Kant- had some or all of their works placed
on the Index. The only major figure to escape
this fate seems to have been Leibniz.