Hobbes: Philosophy of Religion

Because Hobbes is understood to be a proto-liberal thinker, a great deal hinges on how we understand his writings. Does he contribute to the development of a purely secular political self-understanding, as many liberals today claim? And, by extension, does that mean that liberal thought today best stands on a purely secular foundation? What, then, should we make of the extensive theological speculation throughout his Leviathan ? Here, I argue that to reconcile the seemingly purely secular claims in Leviathan with (...) the obviously religious claims found there we must move beyond reading him in terms of what I here call 'the fable of liberalism', and comprehend Leviathan as a whole in terms of Reformation era debates between Protestants and Roman Catholics about the limits and purview of reason. Understood in that way we see his claims about 'reason' in a new and important light. Rather than being an inevitable development that comes to supercede honour and glory, as the fable of liberalism suggests, 'reason' is seen to have an historically contingent character, whose parameters are established by wagers about the meaning of religious experience. (shrink)

O texto pretende pesquisar diferentes concepções de Deus, na obra de Thomas Hobbes. Em particular, propõe-se pensar, desde uma leitura materialista, o entrecruzamento entre a corporeidade e a nomeação de uma política cristã, cujo cumprimento só seria possível num reino futuro na terra, o "reino de Deus" para vir. Essa escatologia hobbesiana define uma determinada posição cética contra a teologia, que, dado o Deus incognoscível, é vinculada a uma função específica da linguagem, o papel da honra, e a essas palavras (...) e proposições que -para cada sujeito, em primeiro lugar, e numa sociedade dada, mais tarde- são inerentes a ela. (shrink)

Prior to 1651, Hobbes was agnostic about the existence of God. Hobbes argued that God’s existence could neither be demonstrated nor proved, so that those who reason about God’s existence will systematically vacillate, sometimes thinking God exists, sometimes not, which for Hobbes is to say they will doubt God’s existence. Because this vacillation or doubt is inherent to the subject, reasoners like himself will judge that settling on one belief rather than another is epistemically unjustified. Hobbes’s agnosticism becomes apparent once (...) we attend to his distinctions between the propositional attitudes one might adopt towards theological claims, including supposing, thinking, having faith and knowing. (shrink)

In G. K. Chesterton's story The Doom of the Darnaways, Lord Darnaway put on the spines of dummy books in his library such empty designations as The Snakes of Ireland and The Religion of Frederick the Great : I too might appear to have chosen a non-subject for this paper. My coming to the contrary conclusion was the unwitting work of the man whom Balliol College employed to give us tutorials in political philosophy. I soon noticed that his interpretation of (...) Hobbes seemed to be based on a few chapters of Leviathan ; desiring to get material for probing questions, and allured by Hobbes's style, I quickly devoured the whole of Leviathan. This reading left me with an abiding respect for the moral and political philosophy of Hobbes; his religious views, at this time, I found curious rather than impressive, but already I had no doubt that they were not mere hollow professions thinly cloaking an immoralist atheism, but were considered opinions sincerely held. (shrink)

Most critiques of modernity rest on an inadequate understanding of its complexity. Modernity should be seen in terms of the question that guides modern thought. 77ns is the question of divine omnipotence that arises out of the nominalist destruction of Scholasticism. Humanism, Reformation Christianity, empiricsim, and rationalism are different responses to this question.

hobbes’s views on the existence and nature of God have occasioned much controversy.1 He has been interpreted as holding positions ranging from sincere, if unconventional, Calvinism to out-and-out atheism.2 Of particular interest has been Hobbes’s apparent endorsement of a version of the cosmological argument. Take the following, for example:For he that from any effect he seeth come to pass should reason to the next and immediate cause thereof, and from thence to the cause of that cause, and plunge himself profoundly (...) into the pursuit of causes, shall at last come to this: that there must be one first mover, that is, a first and eternal cause of all things, which is that... (shrink)

This article argues that there is much more continuity in Hobbes’s thinking on the church and religion than critics have recognized. I consider three issues which have been taken as prime illustrations of Hobbes’s alleged ‘new departure’ in the Leviathan: the nature and fate of the soul; the character of magic and revelation; and church-state relations. I show that in particular Richard Tuck’s interpretation of Hobbes’s intellecual development is mistaken. There is no ‘fundamental reversal’ or ‘new direction’ in Hobbes’s position, (...) but rather a development and an extension of a line of thinking which is already clearly visible in the earlier works. (shrink)

As well as being considered the greatest English political philosopher, Hobbes has traditionally been thought of as a purely secular thinker, highly critical of all religion. In this provocative new study, Professor Martinich argues that conventional wisdom has been misled. In fact, he shows that religious concerns pervade Leviathan and that Hobbes was really intent on providing a rational defense of the Calvinistic Church of England that flourished under the reign of James I. Professor Martinich presents a close reading of (...) Leviathan in which he shows that, for Hobbes, Christian doctrine is not politically destabilizing and is consistent with modern science. (shrink)

S. A. Lloyd proposes a radically new interpretation of Hobbes's Leviathan that shows transcendent interests - interests that override the fear of death - to be crucial to both Hobbes's analysis of social disorder and his proposed remedy to it. Most previous commentators in the analytic philosophical tradition have argued that Hobbes thought that credible threats of physical force could be sufficient to deter people from political insurrection. Professor Lloyd convincingly shows that because Hobbes took the transcendence of religious and (...) moral interests seriously, he never believed that mere physical force could ensure social order. Lloyd's interpretation demonstrates the ineliminability of that half of Leviathan devoted to religion, and attributes to Hobbes a much more plausible conception of human nature than the narrow psychological egoism traditionally attributed to Hobbes. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes argues that the fear of violent death is the most reliable passion on which to found political society. His role in shaping the contemporary view of religion and honor in the West is pivotal, yet his ideas are famously riddled with contradictions. In this breakthrough study, McClure finds evidence that Hobbes' apparent inconsistencies are intentional, part of a sophisticated rhetorical strategy meant to make man more afraid of death than he naturally is. Hobbes subtly undermined two of the (...) most powerful manifestations of man's desire for immortality: the religious belief in an afterlife and the secular desire for eternal fame through honor. McClure argues that Hobbes purposefully stirred up controversy, provoking his adversaries into attacking him and unwittingly spreading his message. This study will appeal to scholars of Hobbes, political theorists, historians of early modern political thought and anyone interested in the genesis of modern Western attitudes toward mortality. (shrink)

Reformation commentators were well aware of the allegorical referents for Leviathan and Behemoth in the book of Job, representing the powerful states of Ancient Egypt and Assyria, but played them down. Hobbes did not.

Leo Strauss’s _The Political Philosophy of Hobbes_ deservedly ranks among his most widely acclaimed works. In it Strauss argues that the basis for Hobbes’s natural and political science is his interest in “self-knowledge of man as he really is.” The writings collected in this book, each written prior to that classic volume, complement that account. Thus at long last, this book allows us to have a complete picture of Strauss’s interpretation of Hobbes, the thinker pivotal to the fundamental theme of (...) his life’s work: the conflicting demands of philosophy and revelation, or as he termed it, “the theologico-political problem.” It is no exaggeration to say that Strauss’s work on Hobbes’s critique of religion is essential to his analysis of Hobbes’s political philosophy, and vice versa. This volume will spark new interest in Hobbes’s explication of the Bible and in his understanding of religion by revealing previously neglected dimensions and motives of Hobbes’s “theology.” At the same time, scholars interested in the intellectual development of Leo Strauss will find in these writings the missing link, as it were, between his two early books,_ __Spinoza’s Critique of Religion_ and _The Political Philosophy of Hobbes_. In addition, this volume makes available for the first time in English a letter, a book outline, an extended review, an engagement with legal positivism, and an account of Strauss’s work on Hobbes by Heinrich Meier, all of which shed light on Strauss’s concerns and his approach to Hobbes in particular, as well as to modern political thought and life. (shrink)

Do human beings ever act freely, and if so what does freedom mean? Is everything that happens antecedently caused, and if so how is freedom possible? Is it right, even for God, to punish people for things that they cannot help doing? This volume presents the famous seventeenth-century controversy in which Thomas Hobbes and John Bramhall debate these questions and others. The complete texts of their initial contributions to the debate are included, together with selections from their subsequent replies to (...) one another and from other works of Hobbes, in a collection that offers an illuminating commentary on issues still of concern to philosophers today. The volume is completed by a historical and philosophical introduction that explains the context in which the debate took place. (shrink)

The argument laid out in this book discusses and interprets the work of Hobbes in relation to religion. It compares a traditional interpretation of Hobbes where Hobbes’ use of conventional terminology when talking about natural law is seen as ironic or merely convenient despite an atheist viewpoint, with the view that Hobbes’ morality is truly traditional and Christian. The book considers other thinkers of the age in tandem with Hobbes and discusses in detail his theology inspired by corporeal mechanics. The (...) position is that there are significant senses in which Hobbes can be said to be a traditional natural law theorist. (shrink)

Does the toleration of liberal democratic society mean that religious faiths are left substantively intact, so long as they respect the rights of others? Or do liberal principles presuppose a deeper transformation of religion? Does life in democratic society itself transform religion? In Making Religion Safe for Democracy, J. Judd Owen explores these questions by tracing a neglected strand of Enlightenment political thought that presents a surprisingly unified reinterpretation of Christianity by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson. Owen then (...) turns to Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of the effects of democracy on religion in the early United States. Tocqueville finds a religion transformed by democracy in a way that bears a striking resemblance to what the Enlightenment thinkers sought, while offering a fundamentally different interpretation of what is at stake in that transformation. Making Religion Safe for Democracy offers a novel framework for understanding the ambiguous status of religion in modern democratic society. (shrink)

(NB Published in translation as“Hobbes’ theorie der Zivilreligion”, in Dirk Bantl, Rolf Geiger, Stephan Herzberg, eds, Philosophie, Politik und Religion: Klassische Modelle von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. The Hague: de Gruyter, 2013, pp. 117-132. ABSTRACT: Hobbes's Epicureanism was a house of many mansions. Under the banners of antiquity he could flag modern positions on religion that if openly presented as such would have made him liable to charges of heresy or blasphemy, given the censorship of the modern state. But (...) Hobbes's Epicureanism was also serious and there are important continuities, doctrinal and political, between ancient and modern Epicureanism. (shrink)

This dissertation discusses the work of Thomas Hobbes, and has two main themes. The first is Hobbes's materialism, and the second is Hobbes's relationships to other philosophers, in particular his place in the mechanist movement that is said to have replaced Aristotelianism as the dominant philosophy in the seventeenth century. -/- I argue that Hobbes does not, for most of his career, believe the general materialist view that bodies are the only substances. He believes, rather, that ideas, which are our (...) main mechanism for thinking about the world, allow us to understand many bodies, but not to understand every thing we recognize to exist. The incomprehensible things include God---and, early in Hobbes's career, the human mind. Discussing materialism and our knowledge of God leads me to engage with the debate over Hobbes's alleged atheism. I argue that the evidence for Hobbes's atheism is weak at best. Hobbes is a sincere theist, though his view is sometimes unusual. -/- My discussion of Hobbes's relationships to other philosophers has three parts. In chapter five I argue that Hobbes's views about method are in important ways similar to Zabarella's. In chapter six I look at Hobbes's rejection of the view, held by some scholastic Aristotelians, that accidents can sometimes exist without inhering in substances. Thus we see two sides of Hobbes's interaction with the Aristotelian tradition. Sometimes that interaction is just rejection, but at other times Hobbes takes over views from that tradition. Then in chapter seven I consider whether, and in what sense, Hobbes is a mechanist. I argue that the narrative of mechanism and Aristotelianism is a less powerful explanation than it has seemed to some to be, because it is hard to see what mechanists have in common. (shrink)

Peter Geach supports his case that the religion of Thomas Hobbes was both genuine and a version of Socinianism principally by comparing the theological and scriptural sections of Leviathan with the main doctrines of Socinianism and its latter-day developments in Unitarianism and Christadelphianism. He pays particular attention to comparisons with the Racovian Catechism, the theological writings of Joseph Priestley and the Christadelphian document Christendom Astray by Robert Roberts.

How did Thomas Hobbes and John Milton understand the relation between religiously based conflict and the sovereign state? Milton's thought is an ideal counterpoint to Hobbes's understanding of religious strife as a threat to the peace and comfortable self preservation of the members of society. Little scholarly work has been devoted to comparing the two thinkers. Historically, they reflected on the same events of the day in 17th century England, notably the civil war. Philosophically, their theories ran counter to each (...) other. This thesis compares various aspects of the ideas of Milton and Hobbes with respect to religious strife and the foundations of the sovereign state. I argue that their theories represent two competing strains of modern political fit. Milton advocated resistance to political authority on the pretext of religious liberty. His political thought is an eloquent and comprehensive expression of revolutionary Protestantism, in a form which is both deeply religious and republican. Hobbes, on the other hand, sought to neutralise the potential harm posed by such religious justifications of revolution, through a new political science which set out the conditions for peaceful and commodious living. The treatment of the two thinkers is three-fold. First, their contrasting accounts of pride underlay radically opposing conceptions of the proper relations between subject, sovereign, and God. Second, Milton's interpretation of classical and Biblical views on kingship provide a theo-historical framework of his resistance to the monarchy and Long Parliament during the English civil war, culminating in his proposal for a "free commonwealth." In contrast, Hobbes advanced a doctrine of the rights and duties of sovereignty which is both less edifying and more democratic than Milton's religious republicanism. Third, their divergent conceptions of liberty in relation to law---Miltonian free will as opposed to Hobbesian regulated from---are linked to their illuminating stands on ecclesiastical authority: Milton's Protestant justification for separating church and state, and Hobbes's advocacy of the state regulation of religion alongside toleration of inward belief. (shrink)

Title in English : Hobbes and the almightiness of god -/- Although they have been ignored for a long time, the texts devoted by hobbes to theology are an important part of his work. Those texts, that give a predominant part to the divine attribute of omnipotency, don't belong however to the main ockhamist stream of the theology of almightiness. Indeed, when he links almightiness and neccessity, hobbes is nearer to abelard than to ockham. Hobbes'reflection on the almightiness of god (...) conditions directly his moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

La perspectiva teológica-política es una posibilidad de abordar la propuesta teórica de Thomas Hobbes. Este enfoque consiste, sintéticamente, en sostener que conceptos claves de la política se comprenden desde conceptos teológicos. Este punto de vista, creemos, brinda una nueva dimensión de los escritos del filósofo inglés y, también, pone en discusión el concepto de secularización moderna. Por otro lado, no es arriesgado sostener que las reflexiones del apóstol Pablo en su Carta a los Romanos vierten innumerables nociones teológicas que han (...) contribuido a conformar una manera muy relevante de estructurar el cristianismo. Por eso, la lectura hobbesiana que en este trabajo se propone de dicha Carta intentará identificar formas y conceptos teológicos paulinos que contribuyan a una adecuada comprensión de formas y conceptos políticos hobbesianos.The theological-political view is a possibility of dealing with Thomas Hobbes’s theoretical proposal. This approach consists, synthetically, of holding that key political concepts are understood by means of theological concepts. This viewpoint, we believe, brings a new dimension to the works of the English philosopher, and also questions the concept of modern secularization. On the other hand, it is not risky to maintain that the Apostle Paul Letter to the Romans delivers a number of theological notions that have contributed to conform a very relevant mean of structuring Christianism. That is why the Hobbesian reading of Paul’s Letter to the Romans which is proposed in this article will attempt to identify Paul’s theological forms and concepts that will contribute to an adequate understanding of Hobbes’s forms and political concepts. (shrink)

El artículo presenta la Biblia como un texto político; más aún, como un paradigma del contractualismo moderno. El estudio se basa en la visión judía de la obra de Daniel J. Elazar, quien plantea que la Biblia es un libro de muchas facetas, una de ellas la política, hecho muchas veces ignorado por la filosofía. Elazar define el pacto político-religioso de los judíos con Dios como federalismo y lo compara con el contractualismo moderno, concluyendo que federalismo no es contractualismo, llevando (...) a cabo una crítica a Hobbes como paradigma de este modelo y una crítica a la época posmoderna en la que el mercado es el único modelo para entender las relaciones sociales.The article presents the Bible as a political text, moreover as a paradigm of modern contractualism. The study is based on the Jewish view of the work of Daniel J. Elazar who holds that the Bible is a may-faceted work, one of them being the political one, a fact ignored many times by philosophy. Elazar defines the political-religious pact of the Jews with God as federalism and compared it with modern contractualism. Reaching the conclusion that federalism is not contractualism, critizing Hobbes as a paradigm of this model and the posmodern time in which the market place is the only model to understand social relationships. (shrink)

Hobbes's Leviathan cannot fully save men from the state of nature unless some sense of transcendence is taken into account as an antidote to the fear of death. To supply this transcendence Hobbes retains the Bible, from which he extracts an antidote for politically dangerous human anxieties in order to complete his plan for peace. Holding death at bay through political arrangements is not enough; human beings need a further sense of overcoming--a means of meeting death when it can no (...) longer be thwarted--lest the finality of death be too overwhelming and they seek another foundation than the one based in natural reason which Hobbes has outlined in the explicitly political first half of Leviathan. Though the fear of violent death is the foundation of Hobbes's civil association, the general fact of death remains the threat to political peace and stability. For Hobbes, the fact of natural death is always breeding imaginations in the minds of human beings concerning the ends of their individual lives and creating a susceptibility in them to questions concerning whom they ought to obey. The politically subversive comforts human beings find in imaginings of the supernatural to which their fear of death leads them, are the little sins against the laws of natural reason that lead to anarchy. A religious, transcendent account of the world must be brought in to channel these imaginings if civil association is to be safe. The Bible is such an account, but it also represents a world that is not friendly to independent natural reason and, as such, poses a threat to peace. Hobbes's response to this threat is to reinterpret the Bible to take from it its capacity to divide human loyalties; he transforms it into the substantiation for a new theology that coverts the natural right of self-preservation into divine law. By this reinterpretation Hobbes reassures human beings across the entire range of their fears while instructing them that the divine will is that their loyalties must finally lie in this world. (shrink)