Hobbes's Philosophy of Religion 0192871323, 9780192871329

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Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion

Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion THOMAS HOLDEN

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Thomas Holden 2023 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2023 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948022 ISBN 978–0–19–287132–9 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871329.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

To Bron and Arun

Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations

ix xi

1. Introduction

1

2. The Language of Natural Religion

8

3. Cosmological and Teleological Reasoning

39

4. Talking and Thinking about an Inconceivable God

60

5. Love and Fear of an Inconceivable God

82

6. Sin, Necessity, and God’s Moral Attributes

103

7. Conventional Religion and Revealed Religion

133

8. Definitions of Religion

159

9. Inward and Outward Atheism

173

10. Consequences and Reception

194

Bibliography Index

209 219

Acknowledgements This book reproduces material from the following papers: “Hobbes’s First Cause,” The Journal of the History of Philosophy 52 (2015), 647–667, “Hobbes on the Authority of Scripture,” in Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 8 (2018), 68–95, “Hume on Religious Language and the Attributes of God,” in Angela Coventry and Alex Sager, eds., The Humean Mind (Routledge, 2019), 182–192, and “Hobbes on Love and Fear of God,” in Robin Douglass and Johan Olsthoorn, eds., The Cambridge Critical Guide to Hobbes’s On the Citizen (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 161–179. I thank the editors and publishers for permission to reprint. I am grateful to friends and colleagues who have provided feedback and comments on various parts of this project, including Michael Augustin, Simon Blackburn, Miren Boehm, Robin Douglass, Sean Greenberg, Emily Kelahan, Sharon Lloyd, Al Martinich, Robert McIntyre, Johan Olsthoorn, Jacqueline Taylor, Saul Traiger, Rico Vitz, Kenneth Winkler, Timothy Yenter, and Ethan Yu. I would also like to thank audiences at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Mississippi, the University of San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and at the 2018 Conference of the European Hobbes Society for their comments, as well as two anonymous referees for Oxford University Press for their exceptionally detailed and perceptive remarks on the manuscript. Above all, I am grateful to my wife Priya Jaikumar and our daughter Meha, without whose support and encouragement the whole project would have been perfectly unimaginable.

Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used for Hobbes’s works: AB

AW

AWDPG

B C DCi

DCo

DH

DP EL

HE

An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall, late Bishop of Derry; called the Catching of the Leviathan. Together With an Historical Narration on Heresie (London: 1682), reference by page number Thomas White’s De Mundo Examined (i.e., Anti-White, also known as De Motu), tr. Harold Whitmore Jones (London: Bradford University Press, 1976), reference by chapter and section number. Where noted, I give my own variant translation from the original Latin text presented in Critique du De Mundo De Thomas White, ed. Jean Jacquot and Harold Whitmore Jones (Paris: J. Vrin, 1973) “Answer to William D’Avenant’s Preface before Gondibert,” in William D’Avenant, A discourse upon Gondibert an heroick poem, written by Sr. William D’Avenant; with an answer to it, by Mr. Hobbs (Paris: 1650), 119–145, reference by page number Behemoth, or, the Long Parliament, ed. Paul Seaward (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), reference by page number Mr. Hobbes Considered in his Loyalty, Religion, Reputation, and Manners (London: 1662), reference by page number On the Citizen (i.e., De Cive), ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), reference by chapter and section number De Corpore, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longsmans, 1839–1845), i. 1–532, reference by chapter and section number De Homine selections in Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen, tr. Charles T. Wood, T. S. K. Craig, and Bernard Gert, ed. Bernard Gert (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1972), 33–106, reference by chapter and section number; where noted I refer to the original Latin presented in Elementorum Philosophiae Sectio Secunda De Homine (London: Andrew Crook, 1658) Decameron physiologicum, or, Ten dialogues of natural philosophy (London: 1678), reference by page number Human Nature and De Corpore Politico (i.e., The Elements of Law), ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1–108, reference by chapter and section number Historia Ecclesiastica: Critical edition, including text, translation, introduction, commentary and notes, tr. and ed., Patricia Springborg, Patricia Stablein, and Paul Wilson (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), 301–607, reference by line of poem, then page number

xii



HNCH L

LHT

OLN

QLNC

SL SPP TSO

An Historical Narration concerning Heresie, and the Punishment thereof (London: 1680) Leviathan: The English and Latin Texts, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), reference by chapter and paragraph number, then page number; “Latin variant” indicates a significant change made in the 1668 Latin edition of the text, following Malcolm’s translations in this edition “On the Life and History of Thucydides” and other front matter in Thucydides, Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre written by Thucydides the sonne of Olorus. Interpreted with faith and diligence immediately out of the Greek by Thomas Hobbes, tr. Thomas Hobbes (London: 1629), i–xvii, reference by page number Of Libertie and Necessitie; A Treatise, Wherein all Controversie concerrning the Presdestination, Election, Free-will, Grace, Merits, Reprobation, &c. is fully decided and cleared, in answer to a Treatise written by the Bishop of Londonderry, on the same subject (London: 1654), reference by page number The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, Clearly Stated and Debated Between Dr. Bramhall Bishop of Derry, And Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London: 1656), reference by page number Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics [1656], in Hobbes, English Works, vii. 181–356, reference by page number Seven Philosophical Problems [1682], in Hobbes, English Works, vii. 1–68, reference by page number “Third Set of Objections” [1641], in René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and trans. John Cottingham, Anthony Kenny, Dugald Murdoch, and Robert Stoothoff, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ii. 121–137, reference by page number

1 Introduction Hobbes wrote more on philosophical issues in and around religion than any other major figure in early modern philosophy. Reckoning the matter conservatively, the various systematic presentations of his thought comprehend twenty-three chapters wholly devoted to religious topics, and another half-dozen chapters that consider religious issues in some significant way. To these we can add occasional pieces and exchanges with philosophers such as Descartes, White, Bramhall, and Wallis in which Hobbes considers issues in the philosophy of religion at length. And in addition to the prose works, we even have a historical account of the influence of philosophy on theology and heresy in 2,200 lines of iambic pentameter. Hobbes’s theorizing about religion is original, unconventional, and remarkably provocative for a seventeenth-century writer. By universal consent, his philosophical writings on religion constitute a significant episode in the modern history of religion and irreligion. But there agreement breaks down. Despite the hundreds of pages of exposition and elaboration that Hobbes left us, commentators have not been able to reach a consensus even in broad terms on the message and central doctrines of his philosophy of religion. Consider just the basic question of Hobbes’s own religious identity. On the one hand, various scholars read him as a sincere theist and a Christian, albeit an unconventional one committed to radical innovations in religious metaphysics, church governance, and the interpretation of scripture.¹ On the other hand, various other scholars read him as an atheist who hides his godless philosophy behind an outward show of natural and Christian piety.² Besides these two main interpretive camps, other positions are

¹ Prominent Christian readings include J. G. A. Pocock, “Time, History, and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” in Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1971; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 148–201, F. C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes: An Interpretation of Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and “On the Proper Interpretation of Hobbes’s Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 34 (1996), 273–283, S. A. Lloyd, Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992), 346, 369–370, and Robert Arp, “The ‘Quinque Viae’ of Thomas Hobbes,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 16 (1999), 367–394. ² Prominent atheistic readings include R. Polin, Hobbes, Dieu, et les hommes (Paris: 1981), David Berman, A History of Atheism: From Hobbes to Russell (London: Routledge, 1988), 64–67, Edwin Curley, “ ‘I durst not write so boldly,’ or, How to Read Hobbes’ Theological-Political Treatise,” in Daniela Bostrenghi, ed., Hobbes e Spinoza, Scienza e politica (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992), 497–593, Douglas Jesseph, “Hobbes’s Atheism,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26 (2002), 140–166, Patricia

Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion. Thomas Holden, Oxford University Press. © Thomas Holden 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871329.003.0001

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also staked out. Perhaps Hobbes is a kind of Socinian. Perhaps he doubts the claims of scripture and revelation, but sincerely accepts the reality of a remote cosmological divinity or designing intelligence. Perhaps he regards Christian scripture as fallible and uncertain (or worse), but allows the existence of a lawgiving world-sovereign who dictates moral principles through our natural human reason. Perhaps he is a Stoic, or a proto-panentheist whose fluid divinity interpenetrates the creation and moves it hydraulically.³ Faced with this range of interpretive hypotheses after three and a half centuries of commentary, one might wonder if Hobbes’s various remarks on religious topics present any clear, stable, and self-consistent position at all. If these various readings can each present some semblance of plausibility, then the suspicion might be that Hobbes simply says different things in different places, contradicting himself in significant ways across time or even within the one work. And indeed there are points of Hobbes’s treatment of natural and revealed religion that can present the appearance of self-contradiction. Consider some well-known cases, each of which I will be examining in the course of this essay. Hobbes tells us that human reason can establish the existence of a first cause of all; but he also tells us that human reason cannot rule out an infinite regress of causes with no original starting place. Hobbes tells us that God is a corporeal body, and that the world is the system of all bodies; but also that God is no part of the world. He tells us that God is the predetermining cause of all human actions; but rejects any assertion that God is the author of our sins. He tells us that God commands us to obey the laws of nature, and that all commands are expressions of the desire of the commander; but also that God has no desires. He tells us that he professes Christianity and that we owe greater allegiance to God than to our earthly sovereign; but he also tells us to explicitly renounce Christ if the sovereign so orders.

Springborg, “Hobbes’s Challenge to Descartes, Bramhall and Boyle: A Corporeal Deity,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20 (2012), 903–934, and Paul Cooke, Hobbes and Christianity (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996). ³ For the Socinian Hobbes, see Peter Geach, “The Religion of Thomas Hobbes.” Religious Studies 17 (1981), 549–558. For Hobbes as some kind of deist or attenuated deist, see Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 80 and “The ‘Christian Atheism’ of Thomas Hobbes,” in Michael Hunter and David Wootton, ed., Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 111–130: 128, Anthony Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers (London: Duckworth, 1982), 158, K. C. Brown, “Hobbes’s Grounds for Belief in a Deity,” Philosophy 37 (1962), 336–344, and Alan Cromartie, “The God of Thomas Hobbes,” The Historical Journal 51 (2008), 857–879: 869–870. For readings that emphasize God’s role as a moral lawgiver, see A. E. Taylor, “The Ethical Doctrine of Thomas Hobbes,” Philosophy 13 (1938), 406–424: 418–420 and Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957) 98–100. For the interpretation of Hobbes’s God as a hydraulically active corporeal fluid, see Geoffrey Gorham, “The Theological Foundations of Hobbesian Physics: A Defense of Corporeal God,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (2013), 240–261 and “Mixing Bodily Fluids: Hobbes’s Stoic God,” Sophia 53 (2014), 33–49; and see also Dominique Weber, Hobbes et le Corps de Dieu (Paris: Vrin, 2009), 79–97.

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Commentators who favor an atheistic or otherwise irreligious reading of Hobbes typically regard these and other apparent contradictions as evidence of a gap between his underlying convictions and the surface pieties of his texts. Perhaps the anomalies show how insouciant Hobbes can be when tossing out conventional-sounding religious statements, suggesting that such remarks are just a piecemeal and ad hoc performance, giving cover as needed, but without any abiding concern for consistency or systematicity. Perhaps such contradictions simply reveal the tension between an exoteric official philosophy, however carefully handled and presented, and an esoteric irreligious system discernible by the careful reader. Or perhaps Hobbes positively intends to advance an account of the divine nature and actions that is pregnant with absurdity, so that a philosophical cognoscenti will be able to read between the lines and understand that his theology is actually a kind of burlesque. But even commentators who read Hobbes as a sincere theist and a Christian have allowed that some of the apparent contradictions in his texts are real. Perhaps they show an evolution in his thinking over time, or reveal certain manuscripts to be composed in a spirit of hypothetical philosophical experimentation that contrasts with the settled doctrine of the major treatises. Or perhaps they show that, while Hobbes’s commitment to the basic essentials of Christianity is secure, he is prepared to trim and adjust his pronouncements about doctrinal specifics with changes in the political wind. In this book I will be arguing that Hobbes’s religious system is stable and coherent across all the relevant works, and that it is hiding in plain sight. Both the main theses of his philosophy of religion and his own religious position are clear and consistent throughout. His presentation of the fundamental points is not only forthright but expansive in the major treatises addressing religious topics. And his overall handling of religion is remarkable not for any supposed incoherence or piecemeal patchworking, but for its dogged consistency and fixedness, both over time and across its diverse presentations in different polemical and rhetorical contexts. The various appearances of contradiction mentioned above are merely superficial, each melting away once his account is properly understood. The key to Hobbes’s treatment of religion is his theory of religious language. According to that theory, the proper function of talk about the attributes and actions of God—excepting just one basic assertion that I will address in a moment—is not to affirm truths, state facts, or describe anything. Instead, this kind of talk is properly only a way of expressing non-descriptive attitudes of honor, veneration, humility, and awe before the overwhelmingly powerful but otherwise incomprehensible cause of the humanly comprehensible world. What we say about this indecipherable being’s attributes and actions is not properly intended to disclose its actual character or behavior, but only as a way of showing how much we honor it. While such talk does not aim at truth, it is nevertheless fit and proper, a laudable and rational expression of reverence before the aweinspiring power of the great cause. Hobbes is clear that this account of the proper

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function of religious discourse applies not just to ordinary worshippers’ pre-philosophical devotional language, but also to the speech and writing of philosophers and theologians, his own words included. In his hands, theology is pageantry not descriptive science, a court masque not an anatomy of the divine nature. If we are speaking as we ought, it is a performative act of homage, not a system of metaphysical claims and the elaboration of their descriptive and truthapt consequences. And once we appreciate Hobbes’s non-descriptivist, purely honorific theory of religious language, we will be able to see that the blunt question of whether he is a theist or an atheist (or a deist, a pantheist, or a panentheist) is too crude to permit a direct answer. Or, at least: any unqualified answer to that question is likely to mislead, insofar as it is usually asked in the context of just the sort of descriptivist and truth-apt understanding of religious speech that Hobbes is at pains to reject. At the same time, one can see how commentators who read Hobbes’s treatment of the divine attributes and actions without sufficient attention to the theory of religious language framing that treatment could all too easily encounter statements that might appear to confirm Hobbes’s ‘theism’ on the one hand, or his ‘atheism’ on the other. Here in brief is how I understand the basic ontological and linguistic commitments that control Hobbes’s treatment of religious topics. Hobbes admits just one literally intended, truth-apt claim about the being, attributes, and actions of the deity: that there is a cause of enormous power behind the humanly comprehensible universe. As Hobbes sees it, this ontological commitment is rationally mandated. Natural human reason dictates that there must be some such being as cause of the great system of nature, at least as far as humans can comprehend that system in thought and imagination—a being of transcendent power, sufficient to utterly overwhelm all human capacity. But this thesis is small beer by the standards of traditional natural theology. A theist, a deist, and a certain sort of atheist might equally well accept it, however much the atheist might balk at Hobbes’s insistence that we apply labels such as ‘God’ and ‘the deity’ to the posited great cause. While restrained in his ontological commitments, Hobbes is free in his promotion of religious discourse. He endorses an elaborate system of assertions about God’s attributes and actions—affirming God’s justice, wisdom, infinitude, partlessness, eternality, and so on, and remarking on the character of the deity’s actions and their relation to right conduct and sin. However, none of this talk is intended as a truth-apt description of God or his behavior. Rather, as Hobbes sees it, talk about God’s attributes and actions is not (or at least ought not to be) an attempt to describe the great cause, but simply a speech act that displays our reverence and awe before this surpassingly powerful being as best we can, using words not for their usual descriptive content but only for their connotations of honor. The language of natural religion—i.e., our talk about the divine attributes and actions insofar as it is licensed by natural human reason alone—is constituted by the kinds of words that are universally recognizable as signs of honor,

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independently of any culturally specific conventions or scriptural tradition. This vocabulary comprehends the familiar array of metaphysical and anthropomorphic perfections—eternality, infinitude, wisdom, goodness, and so on—and in this way Hobbes presents us with a linguistic simulacrum of the traditional theistic God woven out of honorifics. The basis of this construct is the overwhelmingly powerful but otherwise quite incomprehensible cause of the great frame of nature. But beyond that, the panoply of anthropomorphic and metaphysical perfections attributed to the great cause is simply a recitation of the words used in our language to signal reverence and a desire to honor—a liturgy of honorifics, mandated by reason and natural piety, but without descriptive import. A similar story carries over to the language of revealed religion, though here we are no longer dealing with natural signs of honor, but rather with ways of showing honor to God that depend on cultural tradition and conventionally determined forms. Nevertheless, the proper and controlling function of our talk about the prophetically or scripturally revealed attributes and actions of God is again to demonstrate an attitude of reverence toward the great cause. Not just the broad strokes of theistic discourse but also the precise vocabularies of historical religious traditions as taught in school, church, temple, and mosque—including not just prayers and liturgies but also catechisms, creeds, articles of faith, doctrines, and assertions about sacred history—properly serve to express our veneration of the great cause of nature, and only incidentally, if at all, to convey truth-apt belief. As I will argue, given Hobbes’s epistemology of human testimony and his scruples about the transmission of texts, it is not in the least likely that he regards Christian scripture as an authentic revelation from God. But in an important sense the question is moot. Hobbes holds that we are rationally required to express reverence for the great cause by speaking in conformity with the local devotional practices, whatever those practices are, and whatever one’s own private beliefs about scripture and revelation may be. Regardless of whether he privately believes in the divine authenticity of Christian scripture, Hobbes holds that reason and proper piety require all seventeenth-century English subjects to participate publicly in the ceremonial forms and scriptural practices of the contemporary Anglo-Protestant religion. Likewise, any English philosopher who hopes to shape political or philosophical opinion must speak in accordance with that devotional framework. There is no hypocrisy here, or so I will argue. Hobbes never says that he believes in Christian scripture, but only that he accepts it as providing the proper framework for religious practice in a Christian commonwealth, which, as he explains, is quite a different thing. Nor is this outward Christian conformity merely a kind of faux-pious acting along. Rather, for Hobbes, the AngloProtestant religion, however conventional and arbitrary in its specific practices, is the appropriate medium for a seventeenth-century English subject such as himself to express a perfectly rational and sincere veneration of the great cause behind nature.

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My interpretation of Hobbes’s philosophy of religion therefore pays particular attention to his transvaluation of religious language. I do not say that Hobbes’s purely honorific theory of religious discourse goes unnoticed by other commentators. That would hardly be possible: the honorific theory is there on the page affirmatively in black and white.⁴ But I do say that its consequences have not been sufficiently appreciated, and that the theory itself deserves closer attention, both as the code to Hobbes’s overall discussion of religious topics, and as his most significant contribution to the philosophy of religion. I offer three observations here by way of a promissory note. First of all, although numerous scholars acknowledge Hobbes’s honorific approach to religious language in the abstract, it is very common for such commentators to neglect the point, or perhaps to assume that Hobbes did not intend it to apply, when they examine his treatment of this or that divine attribute or action in the concrete. We shall be seeing a number of specific cases in the course of this study. The thought might be that while Hobbes may regard many statements about God as properly just honorific— as, for instance, when we speak of God ‘seeing’ this or ‘hearing’ that—nevertheless he must have regarded certain other statements as properly truth-apt descriptions of fact—perhaps, for instance, the statement that God commands us to obey the laws of nature, or that God is just, or eternal, or the first cause of all causes. I argue the contrary. Hobbes means what he says about religious discourse. Marshalling evidence both from his general account of religious language and from his specific handling of particular divine attributes and actions in medias res, I show that all of these ascriptions are intended merely as honorific titles. Second, the radical expressivism of Hobbes’s philosophy of religious language is not well understood in the literature; nor have commentators appreciated Hobbes’s originality in advancing such a theory. (Expressivism about some area of discourse is the view that that area of discourse serves only to express certain non-descriptive attitudes or states of mind, notwithstanding any superficially descriptive grammatical appearance to the contrary.) Instead, leading commentators on both sides of the theistic and atheistic interpretive divide continue to present his remarks about

⁴ Commentary showing the most consistent appreciation Hobbes’s honorific treatment of religious language includes Richard Tuck’s seminal studies “The ‘Christian Atheism’ of Thomas Hobbes,” 114–116, 128–129, and “The civil religion of Thomas Hobbes,” in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner, ed., Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 120–138: 122–123. More recent commentary in this same tradition includes Cees Leijenhorst, “Hobbes, Heresy, and Corporeal Deity,” in John Brooke and Ian Maclean, ed., Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 193–222: 198–204, Jeremy Waldron, “Hobbes on Public Worship,” in Melissa Williams and Jeremy Waldron, ed., NOMOS 48: Toleration and its Limits (2008), 31–53: 35–36, Arash Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Agnostic Theology before Leviathan,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (2017), 714–737: 715–718, and Alan Cromartie, “The God of Thomas Hobbes,” The Historical Journal 51 (2008), 857–879: 871–873, 879 (but see also 869–870 for a literal-minded, descriptivist reading of Hobbes’s talk about God as a principle of mind or intelligence that is out of line with Cromartie’s usual approach). My own interpretation in this book develops and defends this honorific line of reading.

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religious speech as simply a seventeenth-century iteration of the medieval tradition of negative theology, or, alternatively, as a variation on the Thomistic analogical theory of religious language. These categorizations miss the mark. I will show that Hobbes’s expressivist theory is significantly more subversive of traditional theology than such comfortably familiar assimilations allow. Third, while it is widely appreciated that Hobbes treats the language of natural religion as serving some sort of honorific function, commentators have failed to see that his underlying theory of religious practice as the performative display of signs of honor also extends to revealed religion. I make the case for this more comprehensive interpretation. My proposal is that Hobbes regards revealed religion in general and the Anglo-Protestant religion of seventeenth-century England in particular as a conventional system of human practices expressing honor toward God. While a matter of arbitrary human convention, such systems are authoritative for members of their communities both for political and for pre-political, distinctively religious reasons. It has become a custom in the twenty-first century to preface works in the history of philosophy with a methodological or meta-methodological manifesto statement, and oftentimes one composed under the sign of Mars. I will spare the reader my own Grand Remonstrance. Here I note only that, while I aim to understand Hobbes’s writings in their seventeenth-century political, religious, and intellectual context, I also look at his arguments as arguments, and consider their place within the realm of reasons as well as the realm of causes. But while I inquire about the implications, presuppositions, and plausibility of Hobbes’s reasoning, the goal throughout remains one of immanent critique, the measurement and rational understanding of Hobbes’s philosophy on its own terms. As for my working assumption that Hobbes’s writings on religion present a stable and coherent system, such that one can responsibly employ one text to inform the interpretation of another: this is of course a defeasible hypothesis, though one that earns it keep with the systematic philosophy that unfolds. Proper attention to Hobbes’s theory of language reveals a philosophy of religion that remains consistent across all the personal, political, and religious upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century. When viewed in the light of my interpretive argument, even Hobbes’s own weathervane conformism through the revolutions of Laudianism, Independency, and the Anglican Restoration can be seen as the principled outward expression of a fixed underlying position—namely, the position that human communities authoritatively determine conventional forms of worship that properly supplement the universally honorific practices of natural religion. For the reader who desires a short cut: the essential core of my interpretive argument can be gleaned from Chapter 2 (on the language of natural religion), Chapter 7 (on revealed religion, conventional religion, and the religion of the state), and the survey view from the Devil’s Mountain in Chapter 10.

2 The Language of Natural Religion In this chapter I examine Hobbes’s account of the language of natural religion— i.e., his account of our talk about the divine attributes and actions so far as that talk is licensed purely by our natural human reason, independently of culturally specific conventions or supernatural revelation. As Hobbes sees it, natural human reason sanctions only a very limited form of descriptive and truth-apt talk about the deity. When speaking in descriptive and truth-apt terms, we can say only that there is a cause of surpassing power behind the humanly comprehensible universe. Beyond this our understanding of this indecipherable being gives out, and with it our sanction for descriptive speech. At the same time, natural human reason requires us to express an appropriate reverence before the great cause—which means, among the rest, giving it titles and attributive names that are natural (i.e., convention-independent, universally recognizable) signs of a will to honor. In this way we properly ascribe anthropomorphic and metaphysical perfections to the great cause, and thereby employ the entire vocabulary of theism. But if we are speaking as reason dictates, our words will not be meant to delineate the actual attributes and actions of this incomprehensible being, but only to express a nondescriptive attitude of honor toward it.¹ In Sections 2.1 through 2.4 I make the case for this expressivist interpretation of Hobbes’s account of the language of natural religion. I argue that Hobbes’s expressivist treatment of religious language is a new development in the philosophy of religion, and that it differs in important ways both from negative theology and from the doctrine of analogy, popular approaches to religious language with which his theory is sometimes confounded. I also address the question of whether Hobbes regards his expressivist account of the proper function of religious language as prescribing a change in ordinary, pre-philosophical ways of talking about God, or whether he sees it as capturing the way that God-talk already works in ordinary, pre-philosophical practice. In Section 2.5 I consider the charge that in emptying talk about the great cause’s attributes and actions of descriptive content, Hobbes’s treatment of religious language amounts to a kind of atheism by implication. Hobbes at least did not accept the purported implication, and mounts a provocative defense of the merits of theological expressivism as against the

¹ Various commentators have emphasized that Hobbes regards the language of natural religion as properly honorific rather than descriptive in function. For a survey of this literature see Chapter 1, note 4.

Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion. Thomas Holden, Oxford University Press. © Thomas Holden 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871329.003.0002

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descriptivism and realism of his critics. In Section 2.6, I consider how we might best categorize Hobbes’s religious position, given that his expressivist treatment of religious discourse tends to destabilize the traditional classificatory distinctions between theism, atheism, and deism.

2.1 Talk about the Divine Attributes and Actions: The Expressivist Interpretation Hobbes’s account of talk about the attributes and actions of God is consistent across all of his works addressing natural religion, including The Elements of Law (first circulated in manuscript in 1640), Anti-White (composed in 1642–3), De Cive (1642), Of Libertie and Necessitie (first circulated in manuscript in 1645), the English and the Latin Leviathan (1651, 1668), and The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656). It is also reaffirmed in a pamphlet responding to theologically charged criticism, Mr. Hobbes Considered in his Loyalty, Religion, Reputation, and Manners (1662) and illuminates An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall (composed in 1668, published posthumously in 1682). According to Hobbes, we are rationally required to posit a being of overwhelming power as the cause of the humanly comprehensible universe, the surpassingly potent being “which is it men call God” (L 11.25: 160).² But beyond this, reason approves no further descriptive, truth-apt claims about the nature of this great cause. We can understand that this divinity exists, and appreciate that it must possess the awesome power required to produce the great frame of nature. But its intrinsic character is entirely beyond us: human reason and “the Principles of Natural Science . . . are so farre from teaching us anything of Gods nature, as they cannot teach us our own nature, nor the nature of the smallest creature living” (L 31.33: 568). We simply have no evidence to support specific claims about the nature of God, but only the abstract rational conclusion that the humanly comprehensible world must have been produced by some cause of sufficient power. Moreover, quite apart from the issue of evidence, the human mind is unable to frame the appropriate conceptions for such speculation. All human thoughts or ‘conceptions’ are after-images of sensory experience, and we have no sensory experience and hence no conceptions corresponding to the nature of this “inconceivable” (AW 35.16, EL 11.2, 11.11, TSO 127, L 11.25: 160, AB 18) and “incomprehensible” being (AW 27.1, 27.4, EL 11.2, L 3.12: 46, AB 18).³ Thus, if we

² I examine Hobbes’s argument for the existence of a great cause behind the humanly comprehensible universe in Chapter 3. ³ I examine Hobbes’s treatment of the incomprehensibility and inconceivability of the deity in Chapter 4.

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 ’    

would speak only with the imprimatur of natural human reason, we ought not say anything descriptive or truth-apt about the nature of God. So Hobbes has his negative thesis that we ought not to speak in descriptive, truth-apt terms about the divine nature. But nor should we fall silent. Hobbes also endorses the positive thesis that we ought rationally to speak of the divine nature in honor-expressing terms, using words that put our own reverence, awe, and humility before this great cause on outward display. Given the overwhelming power of the great cause, reason demands that we show honor toward it in words and actions. It follows, in Hobbes’s account, that discourse about the divine attributes and actions is not, or at least ought not to be, literal, descriptive, or truth-apt, but rather simply an expression of our veneration (always excepting the fundamental descriptive assertion that this being is the surpassingly powerful cause of the humanly comprehensible universe). It is, or ought to be, an act of obeisance, one that displays our awe and admiration as best we can in words employed purely their honorific force. Consider two representative passages from Leviathan: [T]he nature of God is incomprehensible; that is to say, we understand nothing of what he is, but only that he is; and therefore the Attributes we give him, are not to tell one another, what he is, nor to signifie our opinion of his Nature, but our desire to honor him with such names as we conceive most honorable amongst our selves. (L 34.4: 614) Hee that will attribute to God, nothing but what is warranted by naturall Reason, must either use such Negative Attributes, as Infinite, Eternall, Incomprehensible; or Superlatives, as Most High, most Great, and the like; or Indefinite, as Good, Just, Holy, Creator; and in such sense, as if he meant not to declare what he is, (for that were to circumscribe him within the limits of our Fancy,) but how much wee admire him, and how ready we would be to obey him; which is a signe of Humility, and of a Will to honour him as much as we can. (L 31.28: 566; compare also AW 27.8, DCi 15.14, C 31–32)

Hobbes allows just two exceptions, telling us that natural human reason permits “but one Name to signifie our Conception of [the divine] Nature, and that is,  : and but one Name of his Relation to us, and that is God; in which is contained Father, King, and Lord” (L 31.28: 566; compare DCi 15.14). These two names comprehend all that can be said literally of the great cause: “ ,” registering its existence; and “God . . . contain[ing] Father, King, and Lord,” its relation to us as a surpassingly powerful creative force and hence a being worthy of reverence. But nothing else we say about the divine attributes is properly an attempt “to declare what he is” or “to signifie our opinion of his Nature.” If we are speaking as we ought, our talk about the divine attributes serves not to pronounce on the actual

    

11

character of this incomprehensible being—to claim, for instance, that God is literally good, wise, partless, or eternal. Rather it displays “our desire to honour him” with words that are employed not for their usual descriptive content, but for their customary associations of praise and panegyric. “In the attributes which we give to God,” as Hobbes puts it in the Latin Leviathan, “we are not to consider the definition of the words, but what intention to honor they signify” (L 31.33: 569–570 Latin variant). The most vivid statement of the theory appears in Anti-White, in a passage that particularly emphasizes the dangers of treating talk about the divine attributes as descriptive in function: In truth, while I hold that the nature of God is inconceivable, and that propositions are a kind of language by which we express our conceptions of the natures of things, I incline to the view that no proposition about the nature of God can be true save this one: God exists; and that no title correctly describes God other than the word being [ens]. Everything else, I say, pertains not to the explanation of philosophical truth, but to proclaiming the states of mind that govern our wish to praise, magnify, and honor God. Hence the expressions ‘God sees, understands, wishes, acts, brings to pass’ and the like, which mean nothing to us except motion, do not display the Divine Nature, but our own piety who desire to ascribe to Him the names most worthy of honor among us. Therefore they are rather oblations than propositions, and these names, if we were to apply them to God as we understand them, would be called blasphemies and sins against God’s ordinance (which forbids us to take His name in vain) rather than true propositions. . . . [T]he words under discussion are not the propositions of people philosophizing but the actions of those who pay homage. (AW 35.16, last three emphases mine)⁴

Talk about the divine nature should not be understood as an attempt to convey “philosophical truth” but a proclamation of “our wish to praise, magnify, and honor.” It is an offering of so many “oblations,” so many acts of homage before God. The passage confirms both that Hobbes regards this superficially descriptive part of our language as having a non-descriptive function, and also that he rejects any descriptivist construal of this kind of speech that would take the superficial appearances at face value. Hobbes’s treatment of talk about the divine attributes is therefore a form of expressivism, where expressivism about a domain of discourse is the view that that domain of discourse serves not to describe anything (notwithstanding any superficial grammatical appearances to the contrary), but simply to express some kind

⁴ Slightly adapted from Jones.

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 ’    

of non-descriptive attitude or state of mind. In the case of Hobbes’s theory, the particular non-descriptive attitude or state of mind that is expressed is a species of desire or an act of will (where acts of will, in Hobbes’s analysis, are just desires that trump other competing desires and therefore lead to action (EL 12.1, L 6.53: 92)). We see this expression of desire in each of the passages quoted above, in which talk about God’s attributes signifies variously “our desire to honour him,” “a Will to honour him as much as we can,” “an intention to honor” the deity, and a “wish to praise, magnify, and honor God” (L 34.4: 614, 31.33: 569–570 Latin variant, 31.28: 566, AW 35.16, emphases added). Several other texts confirm this specification. Talk about the divine attributes is properly “a signe of the Will to Honour God.” It should “signifie nothing but an intention and endeavour to praise and magnifie as much as we can.” God’s “Attributes cannot signifie what he is, but ought to signifie our desire to honour him, with the best Appellations we can think on” (L 31.18: 564, QLNC 5, L 46.23: 1086, emphases added).⁵ So, on Hobbes’s account, our talk about the divine attributes properly signifies our desire to honor God—which is to say, a certain kind of passion, endeavor, or act of will (EL 7.2, L 6.1–2: 78): a conative and motivational state rather than a belief, with a worldto-mind direction of fit rather than mind-to-world.⁶ ⁵ Likewise in other texts: “in the Attributes which we give to God, we are . . . to consider the . . . signification of Pious Intention, to do him the greatest Honour we are able.” “Anyone . . . who wishes to attribute to God only those names that reason directs,” can only use such names “to confess our admiration and obedience, which is a sign of humility and a disposition to give as much honour as one can.” “The most general precept of reason about external actions for the worship of God (as about attributes) is that they should be signs of a disposition to honour” (L 31.33: 568, DCi 15.14, 15.15, emphases added except for on ‘external actions’ and ‘attributes’). The only texts that do not explicitly mention a desire to honor God (or some synonym thereof) in this context are EL 11.3, OLN 36, and C 3, in which our talk about God’s attributes signifies respectively “either our incapacity or our reverence” or our “honour and esteem” (where this is identified with our “think[ing] as highly of [God’s] power as we can”), or simply displays “signs of Honour.” But plausibly these are just abbreviated statements of the theory, a form of shorthand where Hobbes does not bother to spell out the full requirement that talk about God’s attributes ought properly to express a desire to honor God. ⁶ I emphasize this point since there is also a descriptive and truth-apt belief lurking in the background. In addition to the desire to honor someone or something with outward words and actions, Hobbes also identifies a mental attitude that he calls ‘honor’ (‘honor’ now being used as a noun rather than a verb), which he equates simply with the belief that the person or object under consideration has greater power than oneself (EL 8.5, 11.12, OLN 36, L 10.48: 142 and see Chapter 5, Section 5.5 for a fuller account of Hobbes’s anatomy of honor). Moreover, since the sign-signified relation is for Hobbes simply a matter of reliable correlation (as when dark clouds ‘signify’ rain (EL 4.9, see also DCo 2.2, L 3.8: 44)), it follows that the words that we employ in order to signify our desire to honor God (i.e., our desire to demonstrate respect and reverence for God, to do him homage and obeisance) will typically also signify this underlying belief as well. In this way, honorific talk about God will typically indicate not merely that the speaker desires to honor God, but also that the speaker has the belief that God exists and possesses greater power than the speaker. However, as the various passages quoted above already make plain, Hobbes’s view is that utterances about God’s attributes are properly used simply with the intention of signifying our desire to honor God, even if those utterances might also (accidentally and incidentally) signify the fact that we have the relevant belief. Compare the utterance “I’d like a coffee” spoken to a waiter, which would typically be used simply as a way of signifying one’s desire for a coffee and to issue a request. But the self-same utterance will typically also signify (in Hobbes’s permissive sense of ‘signify’) the speaker’s belief that

    

13

Of course, the words that we use to talk about the divine attributes (such as ‘just,’ ‘wise,’ ‘eternal’) and actions (God ‘sees,’ ‘understands,’ ‘wishes,’ ‘commands’) do have a descriptive function when used in ordinary, non-theological contexts. But Hobbes disclaims any residue of this ordinary descriptive meaning—any “signif[ation] [of] our opinion of his Nature” (L 34.4: 614)—when applying these words to God. Moreover, Hobbes is clear that, if we are speaking as we ought, the language of the divine attributes will not only fail to convey any beliefs about the nature of God, but also fail to convey any truths, or any claim capable of truth or falsehood. Thus in The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance he writes that “where [the attributes we ascribe to God] are given for honour onely, and signifie nothing but an intention and endeavour to praise and magnifie as much as we can,” they are simply so many “Oblations . . . which signifie not true nor false, or any opinion of our brain, but the reverence and devotion of our hearts; and therefore they are no sufficient præmises to inferre Truth, or convince Falsehood” (QLNC 5). Description, factual belief, and truth-apt assertion are all off the table, leaving only the expression of some non-descriptive attitude of reverence, awe, admiration, or humility. Although Berkeley is often credited with pioneering the first expressivist treatment of religious language in Alciphron (1732), Hobbes had a theory of this sort worked out in detail by the 1640s.⁷ So Hobbes’s theory eviscerates talk about the divine attributes of descriptive content, at least insofar as that talk is licensed by natural human reason. It thereby dissolves a central part the traditional program of descriptive natural theology. The project of reasoning out the metaphysical implications of the various divine attributes and of puzzling over their apparent inconsistencies is misconceived, for these attributes are not something that reason discovers or detects in reality, but simply titles that we confer upon the deity for their honorific value. Granted, there may be a kind of soft associationistic logic to these attributes of honor, as the employment of one honorific title may properly lead us to use or avoid others in virtue of the associations these words have in their regular, non-theological usage: if it is appropriate to call God ‘infinite’ in order to express our reverence as best we can, then perhaps we should not call him ‘figured,’ since when these words are used in ordinary, non-theological contexts, whatever has figure is finite, and the waiter has coffee available. Nevertheless, that belief, while plausibly inferable from the words spoken (and hence, in the modern jargon, conversationally implied), does not plausibly contribute to the meaning or the intended signification of the utterance. ⁷ For discussion of Berkeley on this topic, see David Berman, George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 144–148, and Anthony Flew, “Was Berkeley a precursor of Wittgenstein?” in David Berman, ed., George Berkeley: Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher in Focus (London: Routledge, 1993), 214–226. Notice that while Berkeley invokes a version of expressivism to explain what believers are doing when they talk about the operation of grace and other religious mysteries, he also very explicit that at least some of our talk about the divine attributes ought to be descriptive in function, on pain of leaving us with no intelligible conception of God at all (George Berkeley, Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732/1752) dialogue 4 sections 17–21, in The Works of George Berkeley, ed. T. E. Jessop, 9 vols. (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1948–57), iii., 163–170).

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 ’    

employment of the former word may naturally bring the latter to mind.⁸ But the controlling norm here is simply that our words function as signs of our will to honor. It would be foolish to expect this kind of talk to exhibit a perfect internal consistency, and completely wrong-headed to go hunting for every subtle implication of the words that we latch onto when lauding an indescribable God. Even outright ‘contradictions’ among the attributes of honor need not always concern us, for language that honors in one context may not always honor in another: there may be occasions where it honors God to say that he is the author of every human deed, and occasions where it honors him to say that he is not the author of our sins (AW 35.16); occasions where it honors God to ascribe kinds of motion to him, and occasions where it honors God to say he does not move (AW 35.16; L 31.27: 566; contrast AW 27.8; L 31.23: 566); occasions where it honors God to say that he is incorporeal, and occasions (when the question of God’s existence is at stake) where it is more fit to say that he is corporeal (EL 11.4: L 12.7: 168; L 46.15: 1078; contrast L App. 3.6: 1228–1231, C 32–33). Hobbes is quite clear about these devastating consequences for the traditional program of descriptivist, literal-minded natural theology. He can adopt a tone of pious indignation when complaining about “men [who] out of the Principles of naturall Reason, dispute of the Attributes of God,” failing to understand that “in the Attributes which we give to God, we are not to consider the signification of Philosophicall truth; but the signification of Pious Intention, to do him the greatest Honour we are able.” These impertinent speculators produce “volumes of disputation about the Nature of God, that . . . are nothing else but inconsiderate, and vain abuses of his Sacred Name” (L 31.33: 568; see also DCi 15.15; QLNC 334). But more commonly Hobbes simply mocks philosophers who take the superficially descriptive appearance of pious speech at face value and tie themselves in knots trying to avoid the theological absurdities that inevitably result. Paradoxes to do with spiritual motion, divine foreordination, divine eternity, and the simultaneous existence of one body in many places are but a small part of the Incongruities [scholastic theologians] are forced to, from their disputing Philosophically, in stead of admiring, and adoring of the Divine and Incomprehensible Nature; whose Attributes cannot signifie what he is, but ought to signifie our desire to honour him, with the best Appellations we can think on. But they that venture to reason of his Nature, from these Attributes of Honour, losing their understanding in the very first attempt, fall from one ⁸ “[I]n those things that signifie Greatnesse and Power; to say he is Finite, is not to Honour him: For it is not a signe of the Will to Honour God to attribute to him lesse than we can; . . . / Therefore to attribute Figure to him, is not Honour; for all Figure is Finite” (L 31.18–19: 564). Notice that while Hobbes allows an inference from one attribute (infinitude) to the other (lack of figure), his explicit concern is not the descriptive accuracy of our talk about these attributes, but whether or not that talk gives the deity due honor.

    

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Inconvenience into another, without end, and without number; in the same manner, as when a man ignorant of the Ceremonies of Court, coming into the presence of a greater Person than he is used to speak to, and stumbling at his entrance, to save himself from falling, lets slip his Cloake; to recover his cloak, lets fall his Hat; and with one disorder after another, discovers his astonishment and rusticity. (L 46.23: 1086)

This slapstick scene of rustic embarrassment is a nicely chosen image, for the descriptivist natural theologian not only commits a philosophical error in misunderstanding the purpose of a certain kind of speech, but is also involved in a calamitous failure of etiquette as one gaucherie cascades into another with each successive claim and corollary about God’s true nature. Literal-minded speculation about the divine attributes is feckless and pretentious, but also obliviously illmannered, at once mortifying and ludicrous.

2.2 Rival Interpretations Hobbes’s embargo on any descriptivist interpretation of the divine attributes is then plain enough. But it is not always properly appreciated in the literature.⁹ Even when a commentator does acknowledge Hobbes’s honorific approach talk about the divine attributes in one place, that is not always a sure guarantee that he or she will not fall back into a literal-minded interpretation in another. It is not uncommon to find commentators who maintain that Hobbes accepts the existence of some sort of God, and then take it as incumbent on themselves to wrestle out a coherent picture of Hobbes’s deity that would reconcile the apparently inconsistent attributes of corporeality, partlessness, locationlessness, infinitude, and the rest—presenting us, perhaps, with an account of God as some sort of rarefied and all-pervasive fluid, or a form of Stoic deus sive natura, or some other physico-theological exotica.¹⁰ By the same token, there are also commentators who maintain that Hobbes rejects the existence of God, and argue that he intentionally presented us with an inconsistent set of divine attributes in order to signal his atheism to an elite readership capable of detecting this sort of conspiratorial messaging.¹¹ But neither of these kinds of reading takes proper ⁹ See Chapter 1, note 4 for some significant exceptions. ¹⁰ A. Lupoli, “Fluidismo e Corporeal Deity nella filosofia naturale di Thomas Hobbes: a proposito dell’Hobbesiano Dio delle Cause,” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 54 (1999), 573–609, Dominique Weber, Hobbes et le Corps de Dieu (Paris: Vrin, 2009), 79–97, Geoffrey Gorham, “Mixing Bodily Fluids: Hobbes’s Stoic God,” Sophia 53 (2014), 33–49 and “The Theological Foundations of Hobbesian Physics: A Defense of Corporeal God,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (2013), 240–261. ¹¹ Douglas Jesseph, “Hobbes’s Atheism,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26 (2002), ed. Peter French, 140–166: 142–146, Patricia Springborg “Hobbes’s Challenge to Descartes, Bramhall and Boyle: A Corporeal Deity,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20 (2012) 903–934: 916–917, 921,

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 ’    

account of Hobbes’s radical reframing of natural theology and the fact that his expressivist treatment of religious language pulls the rug out from under any would-be descriptive speculation about the divine attributes. Yes, Hobbes tells us that we should call the great cause partless, infinite, locationless, and the rest. But these are merely “Attributes of Divine Honour” (L 31.14: 564 marginal subheading), the honorific titles we should ascribe to God not in an attempt to describe anything, but merely as a rhetorical performance of our reverence and awe. Setting aside readings of Hobbes as advancing straightforwardly univocal and positive descriptive claims about the divine attributes and actions (whether with a view to sincerely describing God’s nature, or to insinuating a covert form of atheism), there are also other commentators who interpret Hobbes’s approach to religious language in more oblique terms, perhaps as a version of negative theology, or as a version of the doctrine of analogical predication. But neither of these alternative readings does justice to the distinctive and original nature of Hobbes’s expressivist theory. It is a mistake, first of all, to regard Hobbes’s account as simply a “rehearsal of the great rhythms of the Way of Negation”¹²—i.e., as a reprise the ‘negative’ or ‘apophatic’ treatment of religious language expounded by Pseudo-Dionysius (fifth–sixth centuries) and Maimonides (1138–1204), and which was associated in Hobbes’s seventeenth-century Christian context with pre-Quietist Catholic mysticism on the one flank, and perhaps with certain elements of Puritan

924, Edwin Curley, “ ‘I durst not write so boldly,’ or, How to Read Hobbes’ theological-political treatise,” in Hobbes e Spinoza, Scienza e politica, ed. Daniela Bostrenghi, intro. by Emilia Giancotti (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992), 497–593: 586–588, and “Hobbes versus Descartes,” in Roger Ariew and Marjorie Greene, eds., Descartes and his Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 97–109: 105–108, and Devin Stauffer, Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018), 119. ¹² J. G. A. Pocock, “Time, History, and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” in Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 148–201: 193. James R. Martel and Aryeh Botwinick also argue in some detail that Hobbes is offering a reprisal of negative theology (James R. Martel (Subverting the Leviathan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 80, 83–84, and Aryeh Botwinick (Skepticism, Belief and the Modern: Maimonides to Nietzsche (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 5–6, 140). David Berman, Edwin Curley, A. P. Martinich, and Paul Russell each characterize Hobbes as advancing a form of negative theology in briefer remarks (and even “extreme negative theology,” according to Berman), but do not develop this interpretive suggestion in any serious detail. If all that Berman, Curley, Martinich, and Russell intend is to emphasize that Hobbes’s view is that we know nothing about God’s nature, then there nothing to dispute but their theologically inaccurate and philosophically misleading choice of words (David Berman, A History of Atheism: From Hobbes to Russell (London: Routledge, 1988), 66, 69 note 38, Edwin Curley, “ ‘I durst not write so boldly,’ or, How to Read Hobbes’ theological-political treatise,” in Hobbes e Spinoza, Scienza e politica, ed. Daniela Bostrenghi, intro. by Emilia Giancotti (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992), 497–593: 588, and “Introduction to Hobbes’s Leviathan,” in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. with introduction by Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) viii–xlvii: xlvii, A. P. Martinich, “Natural Sovereignty and Omnipotence in Hobbes’s Leviathan,” in Laurens van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass, eds., Hobbes on Politics and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 29–44: 39–40, and “Hobbes’s Philosophical-Political Project: Science and Subversion,” in Sharon Lloyd, Interpreting Hobbes’s Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 29–48: 39–40), and Paul Russell, The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 51).

    

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iconoclasm on the other.¹³ According to this negative theology or ‘via negativa’ none of our words or ideas can apply in any positive descriptive sense to the deity, and we can therefore speak of God only in terms of what he is not, registering through negative pronouncements that he transcends this or that human conceptual and linguistic category. While rejecting any positive characterization of the divine nature, the negative theologian may therefore permit certain negative predications—for instance, the assertion that God is ‘infinite’ (i.e., not-finite), or ‘immutable’ (i.e., not-mutable), or perhaps, as Pseudo-Dionysius pursues this kind of naysaying to uncompromising effect, that God is “not soul, not intellect, not imagination, opinion, reason, not intellection . . . not life, not being, not eternity, not time,” and even “not divinity, not goodness.”¹⁴ There are some superficial points of similarity here with Hobbes’s approach. Hobbes can agree that we understand little about the nature of the God, and hence can say little about the deity in positive descriptive terms. He can also agree that, in spite of our inability to positively describe God, we can properly apply certain negative predicate terms to the deity, Hobbes’s own examples of such “Negative Attributes” being (as we have seen) “Infinite, Eternall, Incomprehensible” (L 31.28: 566). But beyond these small coincidences, the comparison with negative theology is inaccurate and misleading. First, Hobbes allows that some limited description of God in positive terms is possible, as we can describe the deity both as overwhelmingly powerful, and as the cause of the humanly comprehensible world. Second, Hobbes’s critique of all other descriptive talk about the nature of God is epistemological in character, not metaphysical or semantic. There is no argument in Hobbes that our conceptual and linguistic categories cannot apply to God, but rather simply that with our limited faculties and meager information, we cannot know which, if any, do apply. Third, Hobbes holds that we can properly ascribe a rich array of grammatically positive attributes to God, albeit purely for their honorific force: examples include “seeing, hearing, willing, knowing, justice, wisedom, &c.,” and being “Most High, most Great,” “Good,” and “Holy” (QLNC 334; L 31.28: 566). Where the via negativa encourages a kind of awed silence before an ineffable God (fortified, as necessary, by a shield-wall of negations), Hobbes urges an expansive discourse about the divine attributes, with much of it conveyed in grammatically positive terms. Indeed Hobbes would regard PseudoDionysius’s refusal to call God good (or divine, or mind-like, etc.), as an insulting impiety—precisely the sort of offense, in fact, that philosophers can fall into when

¹³ Martel emphasizes certain parallels between the hostility to religious imagery among the Puritans of Hobbes’s day and the via negativa’s rejection of positive descriptions of God (Subverting the Leviathan, 83–93). The points of coincidence here are interesting, but it is possible to overstate their significance. The Puritan animus toward imagistic representations of religious subjects was consistent with a voluble attentiveness to the written word, and with elaborate wrangling over God’s nature, grace, and predestinarian purposes. ¹⁴ Quoted in Raoul Mortley, From Word to Silence, 2 vols. (Bonn: Hannstein, 1986), ii.230.

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 ’    

they speculate about the nature of God in descriptive terms.¹⁵ For consider, fourth and most importantly, negative theology is descriptive and truth-apt in intent, even if the only descriptions it permits are negative in character (‘God is not finite,’ ‘God is not mutable’), and therefore specify attributes that the deity lacks rather than positively possesses. In declaring that God is not finite, the negative theologian means to say something literal, descriptive, and true about the divine nature—namely that God is not accurately described as a finite being, that he does not fall under this human category of descriptive classification. This is to describe God in some sort, if only by negation. Here Hobbes’s expressivist approach is fundamentally different in its orientation. For Hobbes, the fact that it is appropriate to declare that God is ‘infinite’ and ‘immutable’ has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether, as a matter of literal descriptive fact, the great cause is actually finite or infinite, mutable or immutable. Such declarations are properly only a performative display of the speaker’s reverence and awe, not a matter of truth-apt description, whether positive or negative.¹⁶ It is also a mistake to interpret Hobbes’s account of talk about the divine attributes as a recitation of the kind of analogical theory of religious language propounded by Aquinas and his followers.¹⁷ According to the analogical theory, while human words cannot capture God’s unique nature in straightforward univocal terms, we can use predicate terms analogically to some informative effect—for instance, applying a word such as ‘wise’ to God on account of a putative similarity between the divine nature on the one hand and the kinds of thing represented by the word in its ordinary, non-theological employment on the other. God is not wise in the same exact sense that Socrates is wise, but when applied to God the word conveys some attenuated descriptive content derived from the analogy with its ordinary descriptive meaning. The most obvious objection to assimilating Hobbes’s account of talk about the divine attributes to the analogical tradition is that that tradition treats such talk as conveying descriptive content, however partial and inadequate. Indeed, the ¹⁵ Compare Hobbes’s charge that John of Damascus “falls into atheistic expressions” when he engages in a form of negative theology in his account of the Nicene Creed (L App 3.6: 1128). Since Curley interprets Hobbes as himself a kind of negative theologian, he finds it puzzling that here in the Appendix Hobbes attacks “a brand of negative theology reminiscent to his own” (“Introduction to Hobbes’s Leviathan,” xlvii; and, more generally, see note 11 above). The problem dissolves once we appreciate that Hobbes’s expressivist theory of religious language is not a form of negative theology. ¹⁶ Hobbes is explicit that this applies to “Negative Attributes” as much as to positive attributes. In both cases our words should serve not to describe anything, but merely to signify our “Humility, and . . . Will to honor [God] as much as we can” (L 31.28: 566; DCi 15.14). For a specific example of this expressivist approach to the negative attributes, consider that the explicit reason we should call God ‘infinite’ is that “to say he is Finite, is not to Honour him: For it is not a signe of a Will to Honour God, to attribute to him lesse than we can” (L 31.18: 564, see also DCi 15.14). As usual, the expression of a will to honor, not descriptive accuracy, is the controlling norm. ¹⁷ Robert Arp, “The Quinque Viae of Thomas Hobbes,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 16 (1999), 367–394: 383. See also Will B. Glover, “God and Thomas Hobbes,” in K. C. Brown (ed.), Hobbes Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 141–168: 159.

    

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whole point of the analogical theory is to explain how it is that humans can describe God in some sort, notwithstanding his unique and transcendent nature. But Hobbes rules out even a partial analogical understanding of the divine attributes: God is incomprehensible; that is to say, that there is nothing can arise in our fancy from the naming of him, to resemble him either in shape, colour, stature, or nature; there is no Idea of him; he is like nothing that we can think on. (C 31)

If God “is like nothing that we can think on,” then any analogical characterization of his attributes is stalled from the outset. And in fact, as was likewise the case with negative theology, the underlying descriptive intent of the Thomist approach is completely at odds with Hobbes’s insistence on the purely honor-expressing function of this kind of talk. Rather than groping for analogies with the traits of created beings in order to give us some sense of the divine nature, Hobbes tells us that in talking of God we should “consider not what Attribute expresseth best his Nature, which is Incomprehensible; but what best expresseth our desire to honour Him” (L 46.15: 1078). The proper function of this talk is not to hazard an account of God’s actual nature as best we can using human words, but only to display an attitude of reverence and awe. As we have seen, in ascribing attributes to God, “we are not to consider the definition of the words”—blocking any univocal or analogical descriptive meaning—“but what intention to honor they signify” (L 31.33: 569–570 Latin variant). Arp cites two passages in support of his reading of Hobbes’s theory as a version of the Thomistic doctrine of analogical predication.¹⁸ First, Arp quotes Hobbes’s remark that certain attributes of God “are put Metonymically” (HNCH 9). But the context of the excerpted remark shows that Hobbes means only to argue that, while it is appropriate to say (for instance) that ‘God is wise,’ and, metonymic speech being a familiar and unobjectionable part of ordinary language, therefore also appropriate for worshippers to say that ‘God is wisdom itself,’ properly understood the latter expression is just a figure of speech that adds nothing to the former, and it is therefore a mistake for theologians to hypostatize the abstraction ‘wisdom’ as if God were some sort of Platonic Form.¹⁹ ¹⁸ Arp, “The Quinque Viae,” 383. ¹⁹ The passage is involved, but the current point is sufficiently clear in this longer extract: “The Attributes therefore of God in the Abstract, when they are put for God, are put Metonymically; which is a common thing in Scripture; for Example, Prov. 8.28 . . . the Wisdome there spoken of being the Wisdome of God, signifies the same with the wise God. This kinde of speaking is also ordinary in all Languages. This considered, such abstracted words ought not to be used in Arguing, and especially in the deducing the Articles of our Faith; though in the Language of God’s eternal Worship, and in all Godly Discourses, they cannot be avoided” (HNCH 9). For a further attack on the linguistically confused “School-men or Metaphysicians” who engage in “senseless disputes” about the reified abstract nouns of metonymic speech about God, see QLNC 266–267; compare also OLN 63–64 and HE 623–627: 374–375.

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 ’     In the second passage that Arp points to, Hobbes does invoke a kind of analogy: When . . . we attribute a will to God, it is not to be understood as like our will, which is called rational desire. For if God desires, he lacks something, and to say that is an insult; we must suppose that it is something analogous which we cannot conceive. (DCi 15.14)

Hobbes states that the will that we attribute to God is “something analogous [aliquid analogum]” to ordinary wills, and this might put us in mind of analogical predication of the Thomistic variety. But Hobbes’s purpose in this passage is to emphasize the fact that we have no conception of the “something” here ascribed to God, not to claim that we have some partial analogical understanding of it along Thomistic lines.²⁰ Indeed, if there is any meaningful analogy in the area when we attribute a ‘will’ to God, for Hobbes it can only be between the honorific illocutionary force of our pious utterance and the expression of approval that can attend the ascription of a will to ordinary creatures, not between some actual aspect of the divine nature one the one hand and ordinary creaturely wills on the other.²¹ This is confirmed by the immediate context of the quoted remark. It appears in a long paragraph in which Hobbes assesses the propriety or impropriety of ascribing various specific attributes to God, always looking only to whether such ascriptions display our will to honor rather than to the question of descriptive accuracy. And the paragraph culminates in the following statement summarizing Hobbes’s position regarding all discourse about God’s attributes, just two sentences after the above-quoted excerpt: Anyone who wishes to attribute to God only those names that reason directs, must use names . . . in the sense that we are not trying to say what is (which would be to confine him within the limits of our imagination), but to confess our own admiration and obedience, which is a sign of humility and of a disposition to give as much as honour as one can. (DCi 15.14, emphasis added)²² ²⁰ Compare also AW 30.34, where Hobbes insists that that God’s ‘will’ is entirely “incomprehensible” and, for various reasons, can be nothing like the human. ²¹ Compare Hobbes on talk about God’s unactualized potential power in Anti-White, in which he rejects the Thomistic view that we can talk analogically about God’s potential power to some descriptive effect but does allow that a kind of “analogy” or “deliberative equivocation” operates when we talk this way for purely honorific purposes. “It is true that it is only ‘by analogy’ or by ‘deliberate equivocation’ that God is said to be ‘in potential to’ [perform] any act external to himself. It is also true that God’s potential is not understood in the usual meaning of ‘potential,’ i.e., that when we apply that term to God we neither understand nor come to know anything. Because God Himself is incomprehensible, everything within God is incomprehensible too. Yet we assign that term [‘potential’] to God equivocally, it being an honorable one to us, for it is our purpose not to philosophize about God but to honor Him. Hence [to use] such a word is rightly said to be ‘deliberate equivocation,’ namely [when we do so] with the intention of honoring God; for if anyone intentionally used equivocation in philosophy, no reason could be given for such an intention, except, perhaps, in order that he should seem to know what [in fact] he did not” (AW 34.7, emphases added). ²² In Anti-White and the “Postscript” to Of Libertie and Necessitie, Hobbes is explicit that this purely honorific and non-descriptive treatment of the divine attributes extends to talk about God’s will. “[A]lthough we ascribe to God [the faculties] to will, to understand, to know, to see, to hear, to do, and

    

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This is pure expressivism. As in Hobbes’s other works addressing natural theology, description of is off the table, and with it not just affirmative and univocal speculation about the divine nature, but negative theology and descriptive analogical predication as well. In asking not for the descriptive meaning of religious language but its performative use, Hobbes is closer to Wittgenstein than he is to the received traditions of Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, and Aquinas. So I suggest that Hobbes’s expressivist account of talk about the divine actions and attributes is something new in its conception. And as we shall see in the following chapters, Hobbes holds that his novel analysis of religious language promises new answers to the traditional questions of natural and revealed theology.

2.3 Is Hobbes’s Expressivism Descriptive or Revisionary? In advancing his expressivist theory Hobbes means to tell us what we should be doing when we speak of the divine attributes and actions. If we would speak in accordance with the dictates of natural human reason, such talk should only display our reverence and awe, and not be used to convey descriptive claims about God’s nature and behavior. But does Hobbes also intend his expressivist theory as a description of ordinary speakers’ actual employment of the language of divine attributes and actions, or is it a revisionary proposal so far as ordinary usage is concerned? As we have seen, Hobbes holds that literal-minded philosophers and theologians often do take the proper function of such talk to be to describe God, and this is a mistake he is keen to rectify. But are ordinary devotees involved in any such mistake in their spontaneous and unaffected employment of this language? In its natural habitat in temple, mosque, and church, is talk of God’s ‘seeing’ and ‘willing,’ and of his ‘justice,’ ‘wisdom,’ and ‘infinitude’ meant to describe anything, or is it merely an expression of awed veneration? Hobbes says less about this important question than one would like, and does not address it in any direct way in the most detailed statements of his expressivist theory in De Cive and Leviathan. But the more plausible hypothesis is that he regards his expressivist account as capturing the way that ordinary unselfconscious devotees actually do talk about God in practice, and thus that he views the project of describing God’s actions and attributes in truth-apt terms as no part of ordinary pious talk in the pews. Hardly anything that I say elsewhere in this book turns on this hypothesis. My overall account throughout the other chapters could be presented simply as an interpretation of Hobbes’s account of how one ought to talk about God without weighing in on his view of how popular religious discourse actually operates. But the question of ordinary usage is surely of interest in its own

similar attributes, these expressions need to be interpreted only as evidence of the reverence and the religious feeling of those who speak in such terms” (AW 26.9; and for the postscript to Of Libertie and Necessitie, see also QLNC 334, quoted in Section 2.3 of this chapter).

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 ’    

right, not only for a proper understanding of Hobbes’s philosophy of religion, but also as we consider Hobbes’s place in the history of expressivism, and the ways in which his view might or might not anticipate the expressivist theorizing of philosophers such as Berkeley, Hume, and Wittgenstein. One other qualification is in order. My hypothesis is not that Hobbes holds that ordinary worshippers are reflectively aware that it is their desire to honor God that prompts and controls their talk about the divine attributes, or that they would explain themselves in expressivist terms if one interrupted their unselfconscious devotional talk and asked them what they were doing.²³ I do not see any evidence on this point one way or the other. Moreover, whatever ordinary worshippers might believe about the mental states behind their talk about the divine attributes, Hobbes might even approve of their claiming that they are indeed describing and not simply honoring God when they speak of him as ‘infinite,’ ‘wise,’ ‘just,’ and so on, insofar as that claim (however false) might give God more honor than the alternative. Why should we think that Hobbes holds that his expressivist theory captures the way that ordinary religious discourse actually functions in unaffected and prephilosophical practice? First there is the fact that Hobbes never explicitly raises concerns about ordinary devotional language, though he does repeatedly attack those who would “disput[e] Philosophically” about the divine attributes (L 46.23: 1086, see also L 31.33: 568, AW 35.16, DCi 15.15, QLNC 334, B 183). Second, when Hobbes presents his expressivist account of talk about the divine actions and attributes in Anti-White (AW 35.16, quoted more fully in Section 2.1 of this chapter) his indicative grammatical constructions suggest that he means to say how such talk is used in ordinary speech, not simply to prescribe how it ought to be used. For instance, when Hobbes states that “the words under discussion are not the propositions of people philosophizing but the actions of those who pay homage,” he is on the face of it talking about the pious speech of actual believers, not merely envisaging the speech of some ideally improved worshippers who are speaking as Hobbes would prescribe. Or again, when he states that the “expressions ‘God sees, understands, wishes, acts, brings to pass’ and the like . . . do not display the Divine Nature, but our own piety . . . [and] [t]herefore [they] are rather oblations than propositions,” on the face of it Hobbes is describing the way these expressions are in fact used in ordinary pious speech, as opposed to urging a revision of their ordinary employment. Of course, it is also possible to prescribe new patterns of behavior using the indicative mood. (“The medicine is taken twice a day, with food.”) But the most natural reading of AW 35.16 takes the indicative ²³ The analogous distinction crops up in debates over the correct interpretation of other areas of Hobbes’s philosophy of language. For instance, it is one thing to say that ordinary speakers’ pronouncements that things are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ are in fact controlled by their own subjective appetites and aversions rather than any objective and mind-independent properties of goodness and badness (EL 7.3, L 6.7: 80–81), and another thing to say that ordinary speakers understand this.

    

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appearances at their descriptive face value. Third, in a “Postscript” to Of Libertie and Necessitie Hobbes draws the following contrast between talk about the divine actions and attributes that is pre-philosophical and laudable on the one hand, and philosophically speculative and blameworthy on the other: Pious men attribute to God Almighty, for honour sake, whatsoever they see is honourable in the world, as seeing, hearing, willing, knowing, justice, wisedom, &c. But deny him such poor things as ears, brains, and other organs, without which we worms, neither have nor can conceive such faculties to be; and so far they do well. But when they dispute of Gods actions Philosophically, then they consider them again, as if he had such faculties, and in that manner, as we have them. This is not well; and thence it is they fall into so many difficulties. We ought not to dispute of Gods Nature, he is no fit subject of our Philosophy.²⁴

On the most natural reading of this passage, the “[p]ious men” of the first sentence (who laudably ascribe actions and attributes to God on honorific grounds) are ordinary worshippers speaking in accordance with the original motivating purpose of this kind of talk—people speaking unselfconsciously in the ordinary devotional way. Those who go on from this laudable way of speaking to “dispute of God’s actions philosophically” are then certain literal-minded theological speculators (including most obviously Bishop Bramhall, Hobbes’s opponent in this particular exchange) who have misunderstood the proper purpose of pious talk, and hence are drawn into endless disputes about the supposed descriptive and truth-apt consequences of what is said. Overall then, there is some evidence corroborating the hypothesis that Hobbes regards ordinary worshippers’ talk about the divine attributes as purely honorific in function, and given that there are no texts on the other side of this question, on balance this interpretation of Hobbes’s expressivist account is more plausible than the revisionary alternative. Ordinary worshippers are talking as they should about God’s attributes and actions: bestowing attributes upon the deity and withholding them simply in accordance with their sense of which titles best display their own will to honor. Two further points should be made that nuance this picture of ordinary religious language. First, even if (as I have argued) Hobbes regards attempts to describe God’s attributes and actions as perversions of the original purely honorific function of ordinary folk discourse, the question remains of how widespread he believes this sort of improper descriptive talk has become. Does Hobbes hold that it is only a clerkly elite who attempt to describe God in truth-apt terms,

²⁴ This “Postscript” to Of Libertie and Necessitie was not included in the unauthorized 1654 edition, but was included along with the rest of Of Libertie and Necessitie in Bramhall’s 1655 A Defence of True Liberty, and then again in Hobbes’s 1656 Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance. The text here is from Hobbes, QLNC 334 (with emphasis added).

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 ’    

“ventur[ing] to reason of [God’s] Nature, from these Attributes of Honour,” to their own inevitable confusion and embarrassment? (L 46.23: 1086) Or does he think that worshippers much more commonly slip into descriptive, truth-apt talk about the divine attributes and actions at least on occasion, possibly without noticing that in its proper and original habitat of devotion and worship, talk about God’s attributes and actions (perhaps including their own pious talk most of the time) is governed only by a wish to display reverence and awe before the deity? I see nothing in Hobbes’s writings that guides us on this matter, though perhaps it is not hard to imagine ordinary worshippers (especially in an age of religious turmoil, liturgical reformation, and increasing biblical literacy) who speak purely for honor’s sake much of the time in worship, prayer, and song, but who also occasionally adopt the descriptive mode in their more speculative moments, perhaps wondering about the kind of benefits that may follow from God’s ‘goodness,’ considering whether his ‘justice’ is likely to fall on them as punishment or reward, and so on. Second, even if we focus exclusively on the purely honor-expressing kind of talk about the divine attributes that Hobbes approves of, it is important to remember that he also allows that a form of soft associationistic logic can control this kind of discourse, as the use of one honorific title may properly lead us to use or avoid others in virtue of the associations that these words have in light of their nontheological, descriptive employment. This can lead purely honor-expressing speech to mimic patterns of philosophical reasoning and inference, and hence make it superficially appear somewhat like the sort of literal-minded descriptive speculation about God’s nature that Hobbes totally rejects. For instance, Hobbes tells us that since we ought to call God ‘infinite’ (albeit simply in order to honor him (L 31.18: 546)), we ought not to say that God “is in this, or that Place: for whatsoever is in Place, is bounded, and Finite.” Likewise, since whatever moves or rests is in a place, we ought not to say “that [God] is Moved, or Resteth” (L 31.22: 566, L 31.33: 566; and more generally L 31.18–24: 564–566, DCi 15.14). Hobbes’s point here is not that God is infinite as a matter of descriptive fact, and must therefore lack place, and therefore lack movement-or-rest. Who knows what God, the great cause, is actually like? Rather his point is simply that one sort of expression may be habitually associated with another given the relations between these words in their non-theological, descriptive employment, and hence people looking to display reverence before God by bestowing attributes of honor should buttress their honorific talk with the affirmative associations while avoiding the negative.²⁵ So Hobbes positively approves of our religious discourse following out these kinds of association, just so long as we do not take such ‘inferences’ too seriously or treat the ‘inferred’ attributions as literal descriptions. At all times the

²⁵ See also the case of the attributes of infinitude and lack of figure, addressed in note 8 above.

    

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expression of a will to honor should be our governing intention, and wherever an associative ‘inference’ would not in fact give more honor (as words can have multiple associations at once, and one association or another may be more or less salient in different conversational contexts) we should reject it in favor of speaking more reverentially. In ordinary descriptive contexts, if something sees and thinks it must have organs of sight and thought; but Hobbes tells us to attribute the honorable actions to God but not the contemptible organs (AW 35.16, QLNC 334, see also L 31.27: 566). In ordinary descriptive contexts, if one is the author of every human action then one is the author of our sins; but Hobbes tells us to affirm the former of God (it being “honorable to do so”) but to deny the latter (since that way of talking is “sacrilegious and profane”) (AW 35.16). Thus while natural human reason can prompt us to proceed from one attribute to another by association, the controlling principle is not a hard philosophical logic but only “those rules of Honour, that Reason dictateth” whenever we speak before the powerful (L 31.13: 564). The purely honorexpressing religious speech that Hobbes endorses, and which he appears to regard as the language of ordinary folk devotion, may then sometimes emulate forms of philosophical inference and thus far appear superficially truth-apt and descriptive. But this patterning is only partial and does not amount to a complete and consistent quasi-realism.²⁶ Before we leave this topic, it is worth noting that Hobbes’s fair-weather, on-again off-again variant of quasi-realism gives him a certain flexibility when it comes to saving the phenomena of ordinary religious language. On the one hand, by pointing to the soft logic of association controlling our honorific attributions, Hobbes can explain the fact that ordinary worshippers sometimes embed their assertions about the divine attributes and actions in what appear to be inferential contexts. (“If God is infinite, then God he lacks figure or shape.” “The Lord is my shepherd, [therefore] I shall not want.”) This gives Hobbes a way to reply to Frege– Geach type objections to an expressivist understanding of talk about the divine attributes and actions.²⁷ On the other hand, Hobbes can also explain why ordinary ²⁶ Quasi-realism about a certain area of discourse is the view that that kind of discourse actually serves to express non-descriptive attitudes or states of mind rather than to describe anything, but nevertheless preserves the realist-sounding appearance of descriptive language, for instance in permitting the embedding of its ‘assertions’ in inferential contexts. On the resources of quasi-realism, especially as an account of moral discourse, see Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 181–223, and Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1992), 3–9. ²⁷ The Frege–Geach objection is a challenge to the expressivist treatment of certain areas of discourse, and alleges that statements whose content can be embedded in unasserted contexts (including conditional inferential contexts, such as the embedding of ‘P’ in ‘If P then Q’) cannot have a nonrepresentational expressive function rather than a descriptive and truth-apt function (since, for instance, whatever non-representational attitude is supposedly expressed by an utterance of ‘P’ is not plausibly expressed in the antecedent clause of ‘If P then Q’). Hobbes seems to be aware that any plausible expressivist theory must be able to accommodate the embedding of expressive language in inferential contexts when, speaking of “[t]he formes of Speech by which the Passions are expressed,” he

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 ’    

worshippers refuse certain otherwise compelling inferences when they are applied to the divine attributes and actions, thereby permitting certain ‘contradictory’ assertions about the divine nature. (“God is the author of every human action,” and yet “God is not the author of our sins.” “God sees and thinks,” and yet “God does not have organs of sight and thought.”) And insofar as ordinary devotional talk plausibly falls sometimes into ‘inferential’ patterns, and sometimes into ‘contradictory’ ones, and does so in each kind of case in line with the tendency of such talk to convey honor, then Hobbes has evidence that ordinary devotional talk follows an honor-expressing rather than a descriptive and truth-apt logic.

2.4 Why Should We Show God Honor? Natural human reason mandates that we show signs in words and deeds of our will to honor the great cause, and it is this rational duty that governs our talk about the divine actions and attributes. But why does rationality require such “worship”—i.e., the outward display of signs of the will to honor in verbal and non-verbal behavior (L 31.8: 560, DCi 15.9)? Does Hobbes think that we have a prudential kind of reason to worship God, as if we ought to display our reverence in the hope of pleasing him and gaining his favor? It might appear so when Hobbes presents the worship that we should show God as being “directed . . . by those rules of Honour, that Reason dictateth to be done by the weak to the more potent men, in hope of benefit, for fear of dammage, or in thankfulnesse for good already received from them” (L 31.13: 564). The comparison can give the impression that worship of God, including all our honorific talk about his attributes and actions, is driven by the same sort of prudential reasons that recommend worship of princes and magistrates in the hope of putting oneself in their good graces (L 31.8: 560).²⁸ But we are not compelled to to read the passage this way. The forms of behavior that properly convey honor toward God might be determined by the same “rules of Honour” as the forms of behavior owed to “more potent men”—in the first instance, natural (i.e., universally recognizable) signs of honor such as a humble manner, prayers, and laudatory speech—but perhaps not the reason to show such honor in the first place.²⁹ states that certain passions “have particular expressions by themselves, which neverthelesse are not affirmations, unlesse it be when they serve to make other inferences, besides that of the Passion they proceed from” (L 6.55: 94, emphasis added). For discussion of this last point, see Thomas Holden, “Hobbes on the Function of Evaluative Speech,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (2016), 123–144: 142 note 20; and for a useful survey of the Frege–Geach objection, see Mark Schroeder, “What is the Frege-Geach Problem?” Philosophy Compass 3 (2008), 703–720. ²⁸ Jeremy Waldron, “Hobbes on Public Worship,” in Melissa Williams and Jeremy Waldron, eds., NOMOS 48: Toleration and its Limits (2008), 31–53: 34–35. ²⁹ Indeed, the overall sentence is naturally read as separating the question of the justificatory basis of our worship (i.e., from whence it “proceeds”) from that of the rules that “direct” (i.e., dictate the appropriate form of) that worship, addressing each of these points in a separate clause. “[T]he worship

    

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In any case it is implausible to read Hobbes as holding that the rational mandate to worship God follows from self-interested considerations of prudence, rather than from a form of disinterested reverence properly owed to a being of such sublime and awe-inspiring cosmological power. The prudential explanation of our rational duty to worship assumes an anthropomorphic picture of the deity, a vision of God as attentive to our praise and perhaps inclined to reward us for our panegyrics. This is difficult to square with Hobbes’s insistence that we know nothing whatsoever about the “inconceivable” and “incomprehensible” nature of the great cause beyond the fact that this otherwise utterly unknowable being has the overwhelming power required to produce the world (EL 11.2, TSO 127, AW 35.16, L 3.12: 46, 11.25: 160). It also makes for an awkward fit with Hobbes’s clear distinction between the irrational and anxiety-driven human impulse to posit anthropomorphic and possibly appeasable supernatural powers as the proximate causes of bad weather, poor harvests, rough seas, and so on (L 11.25: 162, 12.6: 166), as against the rational, disinterested, purely curiosity-driven cosmological reflections that lead humans (“all . . . without thought of their fortune”) to posit an incomprehensible great cause behind the entire humanly comprehensible universe (L 12.6: 166). And whereas human beings enjoy a special kind of pleasure, “glory,” when they are honored by others (EL 9.1, DCi 15.13), and also are glad to be publicly honored as this can enhance their reputation and thence their power (DCi 15.13, L 31.13: 564), Hobbes is doubtful that any of this could apply to the great cause. In this very context he states that, in contradistinction to praise- and power-hungry humans, “God has no ends” (L 31.13: 546), and also—somewhat inconsistently, unless he is simply speaking honorifically—in the re-write of this passage in the Latin Leviathan that “I do not see any end for which God, who is omnipotent, may wish to be worshipped, other than our own benefit” (L 31.13 Latin variant 565). In fact, of course, Hobbes is relentlessly hostile to any suggestion that the great cause literally has human-like mental states and faculties such as desires, a will, knowledge, and understanding (EL 11.3, AW 34.9, 35.16, DCi 15.14, QLNC 334, L 31.25–27: 566), never mind an ear for applause and a tendency to reward the ingratiating. I therefore propose an alternative hypothesis: that Hobbes holds that our worship of the great cause is rationally required as the proper expression of a disinterested reverence before this overwhelmingly powerful but otherwise indecipherable cause of the humanly imaginable universe. On this picture, showing signs of our regard for this being in words and deeds gives proper voice to a sort of aesthetic or quasi-aesthetic veneration rationally due to the sublimely powerful empyreal source of nature. Failing to express humility and

we do [God], [i] proceeds from our duty, and [ii] is directed according to our capacity by those rules of Honour, that Reason dictateth to be done by the weak to the more potent men, in hope of benefit, for fear of dammage, [etc.]” (L 31.13: 564, emphases added).

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 ’    

reverence before the mysterious but awe-inspiring great cause would be oblivious, insensate, small-minded—rather like failing to express reverence for the majesty of the cosmos itself, though perhaps even more obtuse. On this issue Hobbes once again says less than one would like. But in addition to the awkward and implausible anthropomorphism attending the rival prudential interpretation, there is also some positive evidence that Hobbes was committed to it being a requirement of reason that we sincerely express a disinterested reverence for the great cause. First, the underlying mental state of honor that prompts any sincere outward performative of reverence is simply a belief in the superior power of the revered person or object. “Honor consisteth onely in opinion of power”: for Hobbes, to honor something inwardly in the mind just is to believe it to be of overmatching power (L 10.48: 142; see also EL 8.5). Insofar as reason requires us to believe that some being surpasses us in power, that just is a requirement that we inwardly honor it in the mind—the more powerful the being, the greater the honor. And this general account explicitly applies to the honor we owe to the deity: “[to] honour God internally in the heart, is the same thing that we ordinarily call honour amongst men: for it is nothing but the acknowledging of his power” (EL 11.12; see also L 45.12: 1028). So to believe in the existence of an overwhelmingly powerful cause responsible for the great frame of nature, as Hobbes holds that reason requires, is already to honor God in this internal, mental sense.³⁰ Thus far, belief in God’s surpassing power appears to be sufficient: there is no further specification that we need also believe that that power may harm or assist us if we offend or gratify it. As for ‘worship’ or the outward display of signs of a will to honor (which outward display may also be called ‘honoring’ in a looser sense of the term deriving from its stricter, purely inward meaning (DCi 15.9)): clearly such worship may be rationally required of us for prudential reasons, as when we seek to please and appease powerful humans. But there is some positive indication that the worship we owe God may be rationally required simply as a proper expression of a disinterested regard for as sublime and as awesome a being as the great cause of the humanly comprehensible universe. Consider this passage from Of Libertie and Necessitie: piety consisteth onely in two things; one, that we honour God in our hearts, which is, that we think as highly of his power as we can (for to honour any thing is nothing else but to think it to be of great power.) The other is, that we signifie that honour and esteem by our words and actions, which is called cultus, or worship of God. He . . . that thinks that all things proceed from Gods eternal will, . . . [d]oes he not esteem of his power as highly as is possible? which is to honour God as much as may be in his heart. Again, he that thinketh so, is he

³⁰ See Chapter 5, Section 5.5 for a fuller analysis of Hobbesian ‘honor.’

    

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not more apt by external acts and words to acknowledge it, than he that thinketh otherwise? . . . [T]his external acknowledgment [is] the same thing which we call worship. (OLN 36–37)

The greater the estimation one has of God’s power, the “more apt” one is, Hobbes states approvingly, to display that regard in outward signs. Strictly speaking, this is consistent with the prudential interpretation. But the passage makes no reference to any prudential considerations and is more simply and straightforwardly read as indicating that the inward attitude of honor that the worshipper appropriately holds toward God—as high an estimation of his power “as is possible”—is already sufficient to mandate an outward expression of a will to honor, all without further thought for private self-interest or the prospects of ingratiating oneself with a praise-attentive great cause. And indeed the passage proceeds immediately to an analysis of prayer that illustrates the general account of piety, honor, and worship just delivered, and which seems to confirm the disinterested character of the worship that Hobbes holds is required from us. For Hobbes, prayer is not properly an attempt to move or appease God, but rather an act of homage that we owe to the deity on account of the many “blessings” it has created through the great system of natural causes. [E]ven amongst men thanks is in use as an acknowledgment of the benefit past, though we should expect no new benefit for our gratitude. And prayer to God Almighty is but thanksgiving for Gods blessings in general, and though it precede the particular thing we ask, yet it is not a cause or means of it, but a signification that we expect nothing but from God, in such manner, as he, not as we, will . . . The end of prayer, as of thanksgiving, is not to move but to honour God Almighty, in acknowledging that what we ask can be effected by him onely. (OLN 38–39)

This passage presents prayer not merely as an expression of regard for God’s power, but also as a kind of appreciativeness for the positive things of the world. But it is not an attempt to solicit God’s favor in anthropomorphizing, interpersonal terms, to influence him one way or the other with thanks or entreaties in the expectation of personal benefit. The “end” of prayer is “not to move but to honour God”: the proper purpose of the devotee’s expressions of appreciation for God’s blessings in prayer is to show outward signs of a will to honor the deity, and this proper purpose is explicitly contrasted with any attempt to influence the deity in our favor. Prayer properly refers all events to the divine ‘will’—which is of course to be understood, as usual, as an honorific title bestowed in recognition of God’s surpassing power (AW 34.9, DCi 15.14, QLNC 334, L 31.26: 566)—in an “acknowledge[ment] that what we ask for can be effected by him onely.” So in Hobbes’s account, prayer is properly only adorational, a performative display of

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our reverence before the great cause, free from any attempt to influence this being to our own benefit. By contrast, any petitionary prayer that is actually aimed at influencing the deity would have to be dismissed as improper, superstitious, and perhaps even insulting. At the very least, these passages from Of Libertie and Necessitie confirm that Hobbes holds that a kind of disinterested acknowledgement of God’s awe-inspiring power can move us to worship him. And given the obstacles facing the alternative prudential explanation of the rational mandate to worship the great cause, the more plausible view is that Hobbes holds that it is also this disinterested regard for the overwhelming power of the great cause that explains why we should worship it.³¹

2.5 Is Hobbes’s Position Genuinely Religious? Natural human reason mandates that we honorifically attribute the traditional theistic perfections to the cause of the humanly comprehensible world. But natural human reason can tell us nothing about the actual attributes and operations of this mysterious being apart from the bare fact that it has the vast power required to create the great frame of nature. What sort of natural religion is this? Hobbes’s position is unconventional, and from one point of view might not seem to be authentically religious. At least so far as natural human reason goes, it ³¹ Hobbes never addresses the hypothesis, which would later be aired by Hume, that the great cause may now be a spent force, rather like Hesiod’s primordial but now overthrown gods Uranus and Kronos, or the modern cosmologist’s Big Bang if we regard the creative force behind that event as now discharged and done. If the hypothesis of an exhausted great cause did occur to Hobbes, he had sufficient reason not to mention it out loud—perhaps including reasons of honor and natural piety as well as a desire not to offend the religious authorities. But the consideration of such a hypothesis could have helped clarify whether he regards reason as mandating a disinterested duty to show honor toward any sufficiently awe-inspiring power, insofar as a now-spent divinity can no longer touch us for good or ill. In looking to clarify Hobbes’s views on this point, we might ask analogous questions about his views about whether we owe inward and outward honor to geographically or historically remote figures of great power who are now too distant to materially harm or help us. We believe in the once-great power of Cyrus and Augustus. Hobbes presumably believed in the great power of Shah Jahan and the Mehmed IV, contemporary figures neither of whom could plausibly do him good or ill on account of their geographical remoteness. But for Hobbes, to believe that the power of these emperors surpasses his own just is to honor them inwardly in the mind. Humans also sometimes show outward signs of honor for ancient princes and sages, celebrating them with laudatory words, statuary, and other such outward tokens of inner regard. Hobbes himself says in his “Answer to William D’Avenant’s Preface before Gondibert” that “Princes and men of conspicuous power (anciently called Heroes)” can have “a lustre and influence upon the rest of men, resembling that of the Heavens” (AWDPG 121). In An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall, Hobbes states unqualifiedly that “all power is honourable, and greatest power is most honourable,” without any explicit requirement that that power be able to harm or help us (AB 16–17). And in the dedicatory epistle to William Cavendish accompanying his translation of Thucydides, Hobbes writes that “in History, actions of honour and dishonour doe appeare plainely and distinctly” (LHT iii). These passages are suggestive and have some cumulative weight, but each has its interpretive complications. It would be nice for my favored interpretation, but overall I do not see a text that unambiguously confirms that Hobbes regards reason as mandating a disinterested duty not just to inwardly honor the powerful in the mind, but also to outwardly honor them with words and actions.

    

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comprehends a near-total skepticism regarding any descriptive account of the divine nature.³² We have no basis for attributing wisdom, goodness, partlessness, eternality, or any other anthropomorphic or metaphysical perfection to the deity in any literally intended (or even merely analogical) descriptive sense. Worse, Hobbes implies that if we did attribute the traditional array of theistic perfections to God in a literally intended way, we would be painting forth an incoherent theology awash with “Incongruities” and “Inconveniences” (L 46.23: 1086). This will not sit well with those committed to traditional descriptivist forms of natural theology and a realist understanding of the divine attributes as so many actual features of God. Descartes expressed indignation at the “impious” and “impertinent” consequences of the view that the deity can be said to exist but is otherwise entirely unknowable in a July 1641 letter to Mersenne, which view Descartes attributes to an anonymous correspondent who has more recently been plausibly identified as Hobbes himself.³³ Such a position nominally concedes the existence of God, but in removing so much descriptive content from that concession it can seem to take away with its left hand what it gives with the right.³⁴ Leibniz similarly found there “something strange and indefensible” in Hobbes’s maintaining God’s justice and power in certain contexts, and yet speaking elsewhere “as if what is said about God were only compliments, that is to say, expressions proper for paying him honor, but not for knowing him.”³⁵ Nor is Hobbes’s reassurance that we should talk of the great cause as if it possessed all the traditional theistic perfections

³² This leaves open the theoretical possibility that we might be able to gather a descriptive account of the divine attributes and actions from supernatural sources, perhaps including scripture and other forms of divine revelation. But as I will argue in Chapter 7, Hobbes is just as skeptical about descriptive claims about the divine nature supposedly derived from such sources. ³³ René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and tr. John Cottingham, Anthony Kenny, Dugald Murdoch, and Robert Stoothoff, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–91), iii. 185, and, for the identification of the anonymous correspondent with Hobbes, Gianluca Mori, “Hobbes, Descartes, and Ideas: A Secrete Debate,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 50 (2012), 197–212. See also Descartes’s rejection of Hobbes’s position that we have no idea of God in the Third Objections with Replies (Descartes, Philosophical Writings, ii. 127–128, 129, 132, 133). ³⁴ The Anglican churchman Thomas Tenison (who later became Archbishop of Canterbury) presses a similar complaint against “you [i.e., Hobbes], who worship, you know not what”: “to say that God is, and also that you apprehend not any attribute that properly appertaineth to his nature, is only to pronounce of God, as of an indefinite Name: for such is naked Being, strip’d and devested of all such attributes as required to particularness or distinction of things” (Thomas Tenison, The creed of Mr. Hobbes examined; in conference between him and a student in divinity (London: Francis Tyston, 1670), 28). ³⁵ G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil, ed. Austin Farrer, tr. E. M. Huggard (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 394; see also 398. When considering the specific divine attribute of wisdom, Leibniz sharpens his critical language and suggests that Hobbes may have had consciously irreligious intentions: “Mr. Hobbes asserts in [QLNC 161] that the wisdom attributed to God does not lie in a logical consideration of the relation of means to ends, but in an incomprehensible attribute, attributed to an incomprehensible nature to honour it. It seems as if he means that it is an indescribable something attributed to an indescribable something, and even a chimerical quality given to an chimerical substance, to intimidate and deceive the nations through the worship which they render to it” (403). (I examine the relevant passage from QLNC 161 in Chapter 3, Section 3.5.)

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likely to placate realist-minded theologians concerned that descriptively empty discourse amounts to no real theology at all. This at least is Cudworth’s analysis in his True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), where he complains that Hobbes leaves us with no genuine “Idea of God,” but only meaningless flattery offered up to the void. As Cudworth sees it, given Hobbes’s account the Notion or Conception of a Deity, that is commonly entertained, is nothing but a Bundle of Incomprehensibles, Unconceivables, and Impossibles; it being only a compilement of all Imaginable Attributes of Honour, Courtship, and Complement, which the Confounded Fear, and Astonishment of Mens minds, made them huddle up together, without any Sence or Philosophick Truth.³⁶

From the point of view of this realist about the divine attributes, Hobbes is substituting a recitation of empty words in place of the living God. A “compilement of all Imaginable Attributes of Honour, Courtship, and Complement” does not a divinity make. To put the point in a less prosecutorial way, we might notice that Hobbes’s position bears at least some comparison to a rhapsodic, reverence-emphasizing species of twenty-first century atheism. We are all familiar with the variety of twenty-first century atheist who regards the theistic conception of God as totally unfounded, but who would be aghast to be mistaken for an impervious philistine who does not revere the majesties of nature, the heavens turning above, and (since you asked) the mysterious but awe-inspiring sources of the humanly comprehensible universe, whatever they may be. Such a position is not so different from the one that Hobbes is recommending, though the modern rhapsodic atheist might well resist Hobbes’s claim that we rationally ought to express our reverence for the mysterious sources of nature in the sort of honorific language that presents the verbal trappings of a traditional theistic God. However, one need not be immersed in early modern devotional literature to appreciate that this sort of rhapsodic attitude before the incomprehensible causes of the cosmos could readily be articulated in religious language in the seventeenth century, and without the sort of embarrassment or self-consciousness that such language can provoke in the twenty-first. Certainly, Hobbes himself is not shy about our using the traditional vocabulary of theistic piety to show our reverence for the overwhelmingly powerful but utterly mysterious cause of the humanly comprehensible universe. And as Hobbes sees it, his position is a genuinely religious one. After all, he holds that the great cause, “which all men call by the name of G” (EL 11.2), indeed exists, and that we are rationally required to show signs of our will to honor its awe-inspiring power in an outward words and ³⁶ Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 2 vols. (London: R. Royston 1678), i. 63.

    

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actions, which is (for Hobbes) just to say that we are rationally required to worship it (L 31.8: 560, DCi 15.9). For Hobbes, this already amounts to a religion properly so called.³⁷ Moreover, notwithstanding the speculative fantasies of rationalist theologians, the great cause is in fact inconceivable and incomprehensible, which leaves the pious no recourse but to abandon description and speak of this divinity only in a language of honor and exaltation. This last thesis that the cause of the humanly comprehensible world is inconceivable and incomprehensible is a theorem of natural reason for Hobbes.³⁸ But in his exchanges with Descartes, Hobbes also insists that Christians especially must accept it, for “the Christian religion obliges us to believe that God cannot be conceived of ” (TSO 133). Indeed, the fact that we can frame “no idea or image corresponding to the sacred name of God . . . is why we are forbidden to worship God in the form of an image; for otherwise we might think that we were conceiving of him who is incapable of being conceived” (TSO 127). Similarly, in remarks aimed at the Presbyterian divine John Wallis more than two decades later later, Hobbes again insists that Christians must grant that God is incomprehensible and uses this point to turn the tables on those who charge that his own approach to talk about the divine attributes is implicitly irreligious. To the contrary, Hobbes’s own purely honor-expressing way of speaking is what natural reason and a properly understood Christianity requires; and it is the literalminded realist about the divine attributes who is more in danger of impiety. Consider the following passage, which we have already had occasion to cite in partial preview. (Here Hobbes speaks of himself in the third person.) It is by all Christians confest, that God is incomprehensible; that is to say, that there is nothing can arise in our fancy from the naming of him, to resemble him either in shape, colour, stature, or nature; there is no Idea of him; he is like nothing that we can think on. What then ought we to say of him? What Attributes are to be given him, not speaking otherwise than we think, nor otherwise than is fit, by those who mean to honour him? None but such as Mr Hobbes hath set down, namely, expressions of reverence, such as are in use amongst men for signs of Honour, . . . and not such as neither Reason nor Scripture hath approved for Honourable. This is the Doctrine that Mr Hobbes hath written, both in his Leviathan, and in his Book de Cive, and when occasion serves, maintains. . . . Is not Mr Hobbes his way of Attributing to God, that only which the Scriptures Attribute to him, or what is never any where taken but for

³⁷ “Religion is the external worship (cultus) of men who sincerely honour God. . . . [R]eligion as such (that is natural) consists of two parts: whereof one is faith (or the belief that God exists and that He governs all things), the other is worship” (DH 14.1). For discussion of Hobbes’s definitions of religion, see Chapter 8. ³⁸ I discuss Hobbes’s arguments on this front in Chapter 4.

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 ’     honour, much better than this bold undertaking of yours [i.e., Wallis’s], to consider and decypher Gods nature to us? (C 31–34)

Far from being a kind of atheism by consequence, the purely honorific discourse that Hobbes endorses provides the only way to revere God appropriately and without deception (“not speaking otherwise than we think, nor otherwise than is fit”), and it is mandated by a rational, pious, and properly Christian acceptance of God’s incomprehensibility and inconceivability. So as Hobbes presents the terms of trade, his approach to the divine attributes is what an authentically religious humility and veneration requires; and it is rather those who venture to describe God’s actual nature in human words and concepts who risk falling into impiety. Of course, even if it is granted that this is Hobbes’s official account of his own religious position, there is a venerable tradition of commentary that regards him as sporting “Vizards and Disguises” when it comes to religious topics,³⁹ and holds that his official self-presentation on religious matters may be an elaborate masquerade giving cover to (and perhaps, by parts, artfully revealing) an esoteric irreligious philosophy. I address this conspiratorial reading more fully when I examine Hobbes’s treatment of scripture and revealed religion (in Chapter 7). But for the moment it will suffice to note that there is no sign of irony in the many pages that Hobbes devotes across multiple works to the position that natural reason directs us to show how much we honor the great cause by offering it prayers, magnificent titles, and acts of thanksgiving (EL 8.12, AW 27.8, 35.16, DCi 15.14–15, QLNC 334, L 31.14-39: 564–572, DH 14.10). Skinner’s comprehensive study of the tropes and figures of scorn and burlesque in Hobbes’s writings is sometimes cited as if it demonstrated Hobbes’s contempt for religion (though no such conclusion is drawn by Skinner himself).⁴⁰ But for all the ridicule heaped upon school divines for their vain metaphysics and futile descriptive theology, their abuse of scripture, and their outrageous political usurpations, nothing is ever said to discredit the simple rational mandate that we worship of the great cause through honor-giving words and actions. Nor do I see any other reason to doubt that Hobbes is sincere in endorsing this “natural piety,” as he calls it (DH 14.4), which does indeed seem to be a plausible consequence of his wider view that “all power is honourable, and greatest power is most honourable” (AB 16–17). This is at least his official and explicit position across all his works addressing natural religion. Those who deny that Hobbes genuinely believes that we ought to show honor to the great cause must regard his detailed elaboration of this doctrine across speech and practice as a mille-feuille confection of lies, which, all else being equal, seems to me a cost of their reading.

³⁹ Cudworth, True Intellectual System, i. 61. ⁴⁰ Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 395–425.

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One other point should be made before we leave the question of whether or not Hobbes’s approach to the divine attributes is authentically religious. Once he has dismissed realist attempts to fathom the actual nature of the deity as presumptuous fantasies, Hobbes is not shy about presenting his own position as a kind of vindication of the divine attributes. Consider this from An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall, Hobbes’s point-by-point reply to Bramhall’s essay ‘The Catching of Leviathan,’ which had been appended to his Castigations of Mr. Hobbes (1658): [Bramhall] has not yet found the place where I contradict either the Existence, or Infiniteness, or Incomprehensibility, or Unity, or Ubiquity of God. I am therefore yet absolved of Atheism. But I am, he says, inconsistent and irreconcileable with my self; that is, I am, (though he says not so, he thinks) a forgetful blockhead. I cannot help that: but my forgetfulness appears not here. (AB 6)

In An Answer, Hobbes does not explain that he regards these various attributes as so many honorific titles, though anyone familiar with his previous exchanges with Bramhall (or with De Cive or Leviathan) ought to understand it well enough.⁴¹ And later in the pamphlet Hobbes will argue that Bramhall’s own attempt to give a realist characterization of God’s ubiquity, partlessness, and nunc-stans eternality is incoherent where it is not entirely meaningless. But anyone reading this passage in the light of Hobbes’s philosophy of religious language will understand what explains its air of insouciant self-confidence. While descriptive accounts of the divine attributes unravel into absurdity, Hobbes’s approach vindicates pious talk about the divine nature, permitting us to affirm any and all of the great theistic perfections, and liberating what is most venerable from the threat of contradiction and the probing questions of impertinent speculators.

2.6 Labeling Hobbes’s Religious Position Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them. But what words should we reckon with if we want to sum up Hobbes’s religious position? That position does not make for a straightforward fit either with ‘theism’ or with ‘atheism,’ at least as these labels are generally understood.⁴² In fact the traditional distinction between these two classificatory categories loses much of ⁴¹ See the excerpt from the “Postscript” to Of Libertie and Necessitie, quoted in Section 2.3 above; and note 24 for the publication details. (Of Libertie and Necessitie was an earlier part of the exchange with Bramhall that eventually led to Bramhall’s Castigations and ‘The Catching of Leviathan,’ and to Hobbes’s reply in An Answer.) ⁴² On the employment of the term ‘atheism’ among seventeenth-century controversialists, see Chapter 9, Section 9.1.

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its sharpness when it comes into contact with Hobbes’s expressivist theory. On the one hand, we might make a case with some color for calling Hobbes a theist: he believes that there is a great cause behind nature, that we should worship it, and that we should attribute all the traditional theistic perfections to this awesome being. But on the other hand, he holds that all such talk about the attributes of the great cause should be descriptively empty, and so far as ontological commitments go there may be no difference between his position and that of our rhapsodic atheist. One can see both why Hobbes regards himself as “absolved of Atheism” (AB 6), and yet also why realists about the divine attributes such as Descartes, Cudworth, and Leibniz might regard this performance of theistic discourse as a hollow outward show. One can also see why Hobbes’s dismayed former friend Henry Hammond could reach for as paradoxical an expression as “Christian atheism” to describe Hobbes’s philosophy in Leviathan.⁴³ And despite Hobbes’s usual practice of characterizing his own position in affirmatively theistic terms, one can even see why—if we can believe William Joyner, a member of the royal household during the Parisian exile who claimed to have been “much acquainted” with “Mr Hobs”—he “tooke no exceptions in being estimd a Atheist unles it were with malice.”⁴⁴ So I suggest that the label ‘theism’ is apt to mislead when used to characterize Hobbes’s position (at least without further qualification), since it is often enough taken to import a realist understanding of the essential theistic attributes. But at the same time, the label ‘atheism’ is no less likely to mislead, for it would ordinarily be taken to exclude a position of sincere piety and respectful worship directed toward the great cause, never mind one that unblushingly employs the traditional theistic language of divine perfections. Richard Tuck suggests that we might characterize Hobbes’s natural theology as kind of deism.⁴⁵ Certainly this term is apt to convey a sense of how alien and remote Hobbes’s divinity is, and to underline the fact that talk about its interest in human affairs should not be literally intended. But this categorization would also have to come with riders if it is not to mislead. Deism is generally understood as involving a belief not merely in a great cause of the humanly comprehensible universe, but in an intelligent cause, a mind-like being that ordered the world with foresight and design. But for Hobbes the attributes of intelligence and design are simply honorific ascriptions (see Chapter 3, Section 3.5). Furthermore, there is the fact that the label ‘deism’ is generally associated with a rejection of the scriptural ⁴³ [Anon], “Illustrations of the State of the Church during the Great Rebellion,” Theologian and Ecclesiastic 9 (1850), 294–295, quoted in Tuck, “The ‘Christian Atheism’ of Thomas Hobbes,” 111. ⁴⁴ Allan Pritchard, “The last days of Hobbes: evidence of the Wood manuscripts,” Bodleian Library Record 10 (1980), 178–187: 186, quoted in Alan Cromartie, “The God of Thomas Hobbes,” The Historical Journal 51 (2008), 857–879: 857. ⁴⁵ Tuck, “The ‘Christian Atheism’ of Thomas Hobbes,” 128. Setting aside the current question of labels, I am in broad agreement with the main lines of Tuck’s reading of Hobbes on the honorific function of the language of natural religion (see Chapter 1, note 4).

    

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practices of traditional religions, and even a kind of anti-Christian irreligiosity. Hobbes intends nothing of the sort. While he is skeptical of descriptively interpreted scriptural revelations of God’s attributes and actions, as we shall see in Chapter 7, he regards his own account of religious speech and practice as vindicating traditional religious forms in general and Christian scriptural practice in particular. So ‘theist,’ ‘atheist,’ and ‘deist’ are all problematic labels to apply to Hobbes. Nor is he helpfully described as a pantheist, for Hobbes does not identify God with the entire world, but rather with an external cause set apart from (at least) the humanly comprehensible universe. Nor is Hobbes helpfully described as a mystic, for while he does urge the worship of a God almost entirely beyond human comprehension, he totally rejects the kind of visionary supernaturalist epistemology and contempt for reason associated with that label. It is a mark of the innovative character of Hobbes’s natural religion that it slips between these traditional classificatory categories. To reckon up his position we must devise some new counters. I suggest that we dub his species of natural religion ‘pious expressivism’—the label being intended to signify an authentically worshipful attitude toward the great cause, but also the position that religious language is to be employed only to express non-descriptive attitudes, and not in an attempt to speak of the actual nature of the great cause. The verbal anachronism in applying the modern jargon term ‘expressivism’ to a seventeenth-century thinker is perhaps a little awkward. But (to borrow from another early modern expressivist) as long as the meaning is understood, I hope the word can do no harm. To be clear: Hobbes not only does not call himself a pious expressivist but might also have reason to resist the characterization of his own views in such anatomically explicit terms. There is after all a certain doubleness to Hobbes’s position. Although he clearly and consistently affirms the purely expressive function of talk about the divine attributes across all his various discussions of the language of natural religion, unsurprisingly he does not bring up this expressivist theory every time he mentions this or that divine attribute. And there may be more considerations at play here than brevity alone. It is plausible that when discoursing at the object level about the divine nature, in many contexts it would show the deity more respect to simply speak like a theist without undercutting the honorific force of that speech with meta-commentary on the non-descriptive function of one’s own words. There is a dignity in theistic language and the ceremonial names of God that is lost with excessive commentary and disrobing explanation. Constantly flagging one’s expressivism, explaining that one fulsomely calls God ‘wise’ but do not mean to imply that he is actually wise, could become boorish and indecorous. So Hobbes may hold that in some contexts we would show the great cause more honor by skipping the meta-linguistic remarks and simply saying that we ascribe the great theistic perfections to God—as Hobbes himself does indeed say often enough of this or that particular theistic perfection

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in media res. My suggestion is that Hobbes might have equally said of the honorific language of natural religion what he in fact said of our discourse about the mysteries of revealed religion (and for the same basic reason, as we shall see when we consider revealed religion in Chapter 7): that it is like those “wholsome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the vertue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect” (L 32.3: 578). And the current point would apply to Hobbes’s own honorifically intended statements about the divine nature. So while his simple and unqualified attributions of theistic perfections to God can be regarded as sincere in their own way, it is a mistake to interpret them as literal-minded descriptions. They are the words of a pious expressivist, as I will show in detail when we look at various canonical theistic attributes in the following chapters, including wisdom, justice, goodness, eternality, independence, God’s role as lawgiver, and his status as first cause of all.

3 Cosmological and Teleological Reasoning In the previous chapter we saw that, for Hobbes, natural human reason supports only an honorific rather than a descriptive kind of discourse about God’s attributes and actions. Talk about the divine nature and behavior, at least where it is licensed by natural human reason, is properly only a speech act displaying our reverence before this indecipherable being, not an attempt to describe it in literal or truth-apt terms. The only exceptions, or so I claimed, are assertions to the effect that this being (i) is the cause the humanly comprehensible universe, (ii) is overwhelmingly powerful, and (iii) exists. In the current chapter I examine Hobbes’s case for these literally intended assertions, which are at once the sum total of his descriptive natural theology and the spur to his more expansive reverence-expressing religious discourse. Hobbes gathers his minimalistic descriptive natural theology from reflection on the regress of natural causes. He holds that such reflection shows us that we are rationally required to posit a surpassingly powerful being as cause of the humanly comprehensible universe. That is not the same thing, notice, as holding that we must posit a first cause of all causes—and in fact Hobbes is explicit that natural human reason cannot rule out an infinite regress of causes with no beginning at all. Although certain prominent texts state that God is the first cause of all, this pronouncement is not literally but only honorifically intended. So Hobbes’s position is that rational reflection on the great chain of causes does reveal a proper object of religious devotion, a great cause of the humanly comprehensible world that deserves to be dignified with the most lustrous honorifics that we can confer, and among them the title ‘the first cause of all.’ But reason cannot show us that there is literally a first cause. It is only when we appreciate both the restrained economy of Hobbes’s descriptive natural theology and the liberal range of his pious expressivism that we can understand his various assays on cosmological reasoning and square them one with another. And as we shall also see (in Section 3.5 below), the same expressivist form of explanation also applies to those other passages where Hobbes might seem to entertain, not merely the cosmological inference to a first cause of all, but, further, a version of the teleological inference to a designing intelligence and mind-like deity.

Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion. Thomas Holden, Oxford University Press. © Thomas Holden 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871329.003.0003

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3.1 For and Against the Cosmological Argument? Can natural human reason establish the existence of a first cause of all things? Hobbes tells us quite clearly that it can. Yet on other occasions he also tells us that our natural reason cannot rule out an eternal chain of causes with no beginning at all. The plot thickens when we consider his ambidextrous treatment of the only proof to which he gives any serious attention. On the one hand, Hobbes seems to endorse a fairly conventional version of the cosmological argument in The Elements of Law and Leviathan, reasoning without apparent irony from the inadmissibility of an infinite regress of causes to the existence of a first cause of all. On the other hand, he systematically attacks this sort of cosmological argument in Anti-White and De Corpore, offering, in fact, what amounts to the most extensive critique of the cosmological proof presented by any major early modern philosopher, Hume and Kant not excepted. The hypothesis that Hobbes simply changed his mind on this question would require an implausible series of reversals and counter-reversals to account for all the various texts, and his interpreters have rightly looked for a more stable position behind his apparent shifts in argument and attitude. Some have suggested that Hobbes does endorse one particular kind of cosmological argument for a first cause, and that his critical remarks are intended to apply only to certain other forms of cosmological proof. I will argue that this kind of reading leaves major contradictions unexplained. Others have suggested that Hobbes does contradict himself on this topic but does so intentionally, that he is dissimulating, and does not actually accept any argument via natural human reason for a first cause of all. I will argue that this kind of reading is unduly suspicious-minded. More importantly, I will argue that neither line of interpretation takes proper account of Hobbes’s expressivist treatment of religious language. In fact we can better explain the apparent contradictions in Hobbes’s texts if we take him at his word, not only when he says that natural human reason can establish the existence of what he calls the “first cause of all causes,” but also when he tells us that the proper function of talk about the attributes of this being is not to describe it in literal truth-apt terms, but to express our reverence, awe, and humility. My proposal is that this expressivist approach to talk about the divine attributes extends even to talk about the deity’s status as first cause of all, and that this putative feature of the deity is, for Hobbes, simply one more “attribute of divine honour.” Hobbes can certainly appear to endorse some sort of cosmological argument aimed at establishing the existence of a first cause. There are three passages that give this impression, one in The Elements of Law (first circulated by Hobbes in 1640) and two in Leviathan (1651): [T]he effects we acknowledge naturally, do necessarily include a power of their producing, before they were produced; and that power presupposeth something

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existent that hath such power; and the thing so existing with power to produce, if it were not eternal, must needs have been produced by somewhat before it; and that again by something else before that: till we come to an eternal, that is to say, to the first power of all powers, and first cause of all causes. And this is it which all men call by the name of G. (EL 11.2) [L]ove of the knowledge of causes, draws a man from consideration of the effect, to seek the cause; and again, the cause of that cause; till of necessity he 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 there is one God Eternall. (L 11.25: 160) [H]e that from any effect hee seeth come to passe, should reason to the next and immediate cause thereof, and from thence to the cause of that cause, and plonge himself profoundly into the pursuit of causes; shall at last come to this: that there must be (as even the Heathen Philosophers confessed) one First Mover; that is, a First, and an Eternall cause of all things; which is that which men mean by the name of God. (L 12.6: 166)

The reasoning here is compressed and rather enigmatic: Hobbes tells us that the pursuit of causes must eventually lead us to a first cause of all, but he does not spell out quite why. Still, these passages are not obviously ironic, and it is hardly surprising that commentators have often taken them as sincere endorsements of a fairly traditional kind of cosmological proof. If these were the only texts that Hobbes had left us, no one would think of doubting that he is genuinely committed to some sort of argument from the inadmissibility of an infinite regress of causes to the existence of a first cause of all. The problem is that Hobbes sets out a series of pointed objections to this kind of proof in Anti-White (composed in the early 1640s) and De Corpore (1655). If Anti-White were the only troublesome text, we might be tempted to discount it as an unauthorized manuscript that Hobbes never sought to publish, and whose anomalous sections (we might perhaps speculate) could have been composed more in the spirit of hypothetical philosophical experimentation than as a testament to his own settled opinions. But the fact is that Hobbes presents much the same battery of objections a decade later in the authorized publication De Corpore, and indeed that he explicitly stands by this critique in published exchanges with John Wallis into the 1660s.¹ Together Anti-White and De Corpore are mutually supporting pieces of evidence, testifying to real and enduring scruples on Hobbes’s

¹ On the relationship between Hobbes’s treatment of the cosmological argument in De Corpore and his dispute with Seth Ward and John Wallis, see Siegmund Probst, “Infinity and Creation: The Origin of the Controversy between Thomas Hobbes and the Savilian Professors Seth Ward and John Wallis,” The British Journal for the History of Science, 26 (1993), 271–279.

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part about at least some forms of cosmological inference—scruples that he must have been aware of, perhaps when he composed The Elements of Law, but certainly when he went to print with his apparent endorsement of a cosmological proof in the English Leviathan in 1651 and again in the reworked Latin Leviathan in 1668. A brief review of some of the leading objections in Anti-White and De Corpore will suffice to give the general direction of Hobbes’s critique. First there is a complaint, not about the plausibility of any attempted proof of a first cause, but about the political propriety of advancing proofs of any article of faith required by an established state religion. Objection 1: It is a usurpation, and potentially dangerous, to present philosophical arguments for the existence of a first cause. For Hobbes, the confession that there is a first cause of all is an article of faith mandated by the state religion and required of all subjects by law.² It is therefore “unlawful to dispute of” this question, which is not to be determined by philosophers, but settled “by those who are lawfully authorized to order the worship of God” (DCo 26.1). “For a private person to call for a re-examination of matters that have once and for all been settled and determined by the authority of the Supreme Power is absurd,” a betrayal of the social contract. It is also dangerous, threatening both to open up politically disruptive theological controversies, and to undermine popular religious belief if vaunted proofs of articles of faith are exposed as fallacious (AW 26.6). Other objections go to the plausibility of attempts to prove a first cause: Objection 2: “[N]o absurdity will follow” from the hypothesis of an eternal world. Hobbes states quite bluntly that no absurdity or logical contradiction can be derived from the hypothesis of an eternal series of past causes, and that “the same things which now appear, might appear, whether the Creator had pleased [the world] should be finite or infinite” (DCo 26.1). In Anti-White he pointedly adds that those who deny this are denying that God could have created a world co-eternal with himself if he had wanted to (AW 26.3; compare also AW 2.5–8). Objection 3: Humans cannot hope to reason about infinities. We can form no positive idea of anything infinite and use the word merely to register our own inability to conceive the limits of the thing thus described (DCo

² Hobbes is not claiming that the state has the right or the ability to command our belief, but only our outward professions. “By [the sovereign’s] Authority, I say, it ought to be decided, (not what men shall think, but) what they shall say in those Questions [concerning the beginning and magnitude of the world]” (C 36; see also L 32.5: 578, 40.2: 738, 46.37: 1096, and for discussion, Chapter 7, Section 7.4).

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7.11–12, 26.1; compare also DCi 15.14, L 3.12: 46). Hobbes concludes that any proof of the impossibility of an actually infinite series, including the impossibility of an actually infinite series of past causes, must fail. “[A]s soon as [those who argue in this way] are entangled in the words infinite and eternal, of which we have in our mind no idea, but that of our own insufficiency to comprehend them, they are forced to speak something absurd, or, which they love worse, to hold their peace” (DCo 26.1). Objection 4: Arguments from the inadmissibility of a completed infinity would tell against an eternal God as much as against an eternal world. “They, which in this manner take away eternity from the world, do they not by the same reasons take away eternity from the Creator of the world?” (DCo 26.1; see also AW 26.9) Objection 5: Any mover must itself have been moved in turn. Hobbes asserts both “that nothing is moved by itself” and “that nothing is moved but by that which is already moved” (DCo 26.1; compare also DCo 9.7, 15.1): two principles that would seem to jointly entail an endless regress of moving phenomena, with each moved in turn by some other back to infinity. His own explicit conclusion is that while “it may rightly be inferred, first of all, that there was some eternal mover; yet it can never be inferred . . . that that mover was eternally immovable, but rather eternally moved” (DCo 26.1). His point, I think, is that the only “eternal mover” natural reason could infer is the whole eternal system of moved movers.³ We need not be detained with the merits of these objections, or of the others that Hobbes also sets out (AW 2.4–8, 26.4–5, 27.10–14, 29.2). For our purposes the point is simply that Anti-White and De Corpore each make a sustained case for the conclusion that natural human reason cannot rule out an eternal world or establish that the regress of causes had a beginning. Nor does Hobbes pull his punches when driving this message home. “[T]hose that boast they have demonstrated, from reasons drawn from natural things, that the world had a beginning . . . are condemned by idiots, because they understand them not; and by the learned, because they understand them; by both deservedly” (DCo 26.1). “[T]hose who ³ The widely used 1656 translation of De Corpore may be misleading here. I propose reading ‘primum’ as an adverb rather than adjective (giving us “it may rightly be inferred, first of all, that there was some eternal mover,” rather than the 1656 translation’s “it may rightly be inferred that there was some first eternal mover”), as the grammar allows and the logic of the sentence’s final clauses would seem to require. (“Præterea etsi ex eo quod nihil potest movere seipsum, satis recte infertur primum aliquod esse movens quod fuerit æternum, non tamen inferetur id, quod inferre solent, nempe æternum immobile, sed contra æternum motum; siquidem, ut verum est nihil moveri a seipso, ita etiam verum est, nihil moveri nisi a moto.” (DCo 26.1))

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declare that they will show that God exists or that no body at all existed . . . at some time in the past” by way of this sort of cosmological reasoning “act unphilosophically,” “err against theology,” “sin against religion,” “sin against Providence,” and act “inquitabl[y]” (AW 26.2, 26.3, 26.4, 26.5, 26.6).⁴

3.2 The Affirmative and Skeptical Interpretations How should we explain this apparent conflict between The Elements of Law and Leviathan on the one hand and Anti-White and De Corpore on the other? If Hobbes holds that we cannot hope to show that the world had a beginning through the exercise of natural human reason, what business does he have endorsing, or appearing to endorse, an argument from the regress of causes to the existence of a first cause of all? According to one group of commentators, we should take the appearances of The Elements of Law and Leviathan at face value and read Hobbes as sincerely accepting some sort of cosmological reasoning aimed at establishing the existence of a first cause of all.⁵ Advocates of this affirmative interpretation have sought to explain away the more skeptical-sounding Anti-White and De Corpore by suggesting that these texts do not attack the particular sort of cosmological argument that Hobbes himself endorses, but rather are directed against one or another alternative species of cosmological reasoning. Sometimes it is said that in the skeptical-sounding works Hobbes merely intends to rule out any putative demonstration of a first cause of all, where “demonstration” is understood in the strict Aristotelian sense as an argument that analyzes definitions to show that the meaning of a certain predicate is contained within the meaning of the subject term. On this reading Hobbes is insisting that there is no prospect of demonstrating the existence of a first cause through this sort of subject-predicate analysis, but he still regards it as provable in some other way.⁶ However, while Hobbes does explicitly rule out the possibility of a strict subject-predicate “demonstration” of a first cause in Anti-White (AW 26.2), this hardly exhausts his critique of attempts to prove the existence of a first cause, as the review of objections in Section 3.1 above already shows. Hobbes

⁴ Translation slightly adapted from Jones. ⁵ A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 194–195, 346–350, Peter Geach, “The Religion of Thomas Hobbes,” Religious Studies 17 (1981), 549–558, Robert Arp, The ‘Quinque Viae’ of Thomas Hobbes,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 16 (1999), 367–394, Stewart Duncan, “Knowledge of God in Leviathan,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 22 (2005), 31–38, Yves Charles Zarka, “Liberty, Necessity and Chance: Hobbes’s General Theory of Events,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (2001), 425–437: 435–436, and Agostino Lupoli, “Hobbes and Religion without Theology,” in A. P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 453–480: 458. ⁶ Martinich, Two Gods, 348. For this use of ‘demonstration,’ see DCo 6.16–17.

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plainly has a much wider critique of cosmological reasoning in mind, and indeed in his array of objections in De Corpore the narrow claim that subject-predicate analysis cannot establish the existence of a first cause never even comes up.⁷ Another gambit is to suggest that Hobbes views his cosmological reasoning in The Elements of Law and Leviathan as establishing that there is some sort of ontologically or explanatorily “first” cause, where this is distinct from establishing that there is a temporally first cause. Hobbes is clear enough in Anti-White and De Corpore that we cannot prove that the world is not eternal, and so cannot prove that it has a temporally prior initiating cause. But still (on the current interpretation) Hobbes holds that we can prove, via the sort of reflections on the regress of causes that he points to in The Elements of Law and Leviathan, that there is a being that provides the ultimate ontological basis or final explanation for the whole system of causes, and so is a “first cause” in one (or both) of these non-temporal senses.⁸ On this reading Hobbes looks rather like Aquinas, who similarly holds that natural human reason leads us to posit an ontologically ultimate “first cause” that grounds the entire series of temporally ordered causes, whether or not that series has a beginning. But this interpretive proposal also fails, and its failure is instructive. Forget the fact that the relevant texts show no sign of registering or employing this distinction between temporal and non-temporal senses of “first cause.”⁹ Forget Hobbes’s doubts about the intelligibility of this sort of Thomistic talk about a God that operates outside the temporally ordered system of causes.¹⁰ A more direct and decisive objection is available. We can simply point to the fact that Hobbes states in De Cive and again in a close rewrite in Leviathan that “those who assert that the world was not created but eternal, are (since the eternal cannot have a cause) denying that the world has a cause, i.e., that God exists” (DCi 15.14; see also L 31.16: 564). Hobbes is quite clear: an eternal world “cannot have a

⁷ Granted, in De Corpore Hobbes presents his objections as an attack on “those that boast they have demonstrated, from reasons drawn from natural things, that the world has a beginning” (DCo 26.1, emphasis added). But there is no indication that he is using ‘demonstrate’ in the strict Aristotelian sense either from the immediate context of this remark or from the actual arguments Hobbes presents in this section. And Hobbes does sometimes use ‘demonstrate’ in a looser, non-Aristotelian sense, meaning something simply like ‘show with sufficient evidence’ (see, for example, C 38). ⁸ Martinich, Two Gods, 194–195, 348–349, Arp, “Quinque Viae,” 378–379. ⁹ Ronald Hepburn, “Hobbes on the Knowledge of God,” in Maurice Cranston and Richard Peters (eds.), Hobbes and Rousseau: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 85–108: 94–95. ¹⁰ Hobbes condemns talk of God existing outside of time as unintelligible (L 46.22: 1084, DCo 26.1, OLN 63–64; compare also QLNC 346). Similarly in Anti-White he rejects as an abuse of language talk about God “preceding” the world in an ontological rather than a temporal sense. Hobbes quotes Thomas White as stating that “God preceded the world, not by a profusion of empty centuries, but by the necessity of existing,” and replies as follows: “How are we to understand these words? What about that ‘pre’ in ‘preceded’? Does it not imply both precedence and consequence, i.e., that God came first and the world came afterwards? Does not the particle ‘pre’ denote time and sequence? But nothing is said to be ‘pre’ something else except according to some order and sequence either of things themselves or our knowledge of them; and the ‘necessity of existing’ does not mean a sequence . . . [T]he above words of his are meaningless and incomprehensible” (AW 30.35).

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cause.” It can have no cause in the only sense of “cause” that is at issue, i.e., the sense that Hobbes has in mind when he states that “by the name God is meant the cause of the world” (DCi 15.14). These passages leave no room to read Hobbes as reasoning toward an ontological or explanatory cause distinct from a straightforward temporally preceding cause. They show us that, for Hobbes, to assert that the world is eternal is to deny that there is a first cause—a cause, as he put it in Leviathan, “whereof there is no former cause, but is eternall; which is it men call God” (L 11.25: 160). It follows that if natural human reason cannot rule out an eternal world, there cannot then be a proof of such a cause by way of natural human reason. Contrary to this first group of commentators, there is then no way of rendering Hobbes’s position in Anti-White and De Corpore consistent with a sincere commitment to a cosmological proof of a first cause—or indeed with a sincere commitment to any proof via natural human reason. A second group of commentators acknowledges this inconsistency and suggests that Hobbes’s actual position is that there is no successful version of a cosmological proof establishing the existence of a first cause of all. Where Hobbes appears to be endorsing some form of cosmological argument either he is simply insincere or he intends to convey a rather different message, perhaps one artfully concealed in a play of double meanings.¹¹ This skeptical interpretation has its attractions. Certainly if we must choose between the apparent endorsement of cosmological reasoning in The Elements of Law and Leviathan and the apparent skepticism about cosmological reasoning in Anti-White and De Corpore, there is reason to prefer the latter as the more likely guide to Hobbes’s real convictions. First, while neither Anglican nor Calvinist orthodoxy requires accepting any proof of God’s existence by way of natural human reason, it is easier to imagine that Hobbes felt that he was under political or social pressure to appear to endorse such a proof than it is to imagine that he felt that he was under pressure to appear to reject such arguments. There are plausible motives to fabricate in the former case, but not in the latter. Second, the passages that seem to endorse cosmological reasoning have something of a pro forma character to them. They present argumentation that is perfunctory and, if taken at face value as an attempted proof of a first cause, quite conventional. By contrast the argumentation in the passages attacking cosmological reasoning is sustained, multi-layered, and original to Hobbes himself. The comparison might suggest that Hobbes is simply paying lip-service to a fairly routine version of the argument for appearance’s sake in The Elements of Law and Leviathan, while his

¹¹ Douglas Jesseph, “Hobbes’s Atheism,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26 (2002), 140–166: 150–151, Patricia Springborg, “Hobbes’s Challenge to Descartes, Bramhall and Boyle: A Corporeal Deity,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20 (2012), 903–934: 928, Edwin Curley, “ ‘I durst not write so boldly,’ or, How to Read Hobbes’ Theological-Political Treatise,” in Daniela Bostrenghi, ed., Hobbes e Spinoza, Scienza e politica (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992), 497–593: 573–579.

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real convictions rest with the more developed but also potentially more scandalous skeptical arguments in Anti-White and De Corpore. Third, the passages that appear to endorse a version of the cosmological argument do in fact admit of a double reading. Rather than reading EL 11.2, L 11.25: 160, and L 12.6: 166 as endorsing the inference to a first cause of all as rational and justified, we might read them as simply describing a common psychological process through which people come to accept the existence of a first cause of all. After all, why must the process of tracing causes back to their prior causes ultimately lead one to conclude that there is a first cause of all rather than an eternal regress? All Hobbes tells us is in L 12.6: 166 is that someone who traces the regress of causes backwards “shall at last come to” the conviction that there must be a first cause of all. Similarly L 11.25: 160 simply says that when “love of the knowledge of causes, draws a man” to pursue the regress of causes “he must come to this thought at last, that there is [a first cause].” Each of these two passages from Leviathan readily admits of a psychological and descriptive rather than a rational and justificatory interpretation. Even the passage from The Elements of Law can be read this way if we treat Hobbes’s claim that causes require prior causes “till we come to a [first cause]” as a description of the psychological result of this chain of thought, not a rational and justified conclusion. (EL 11.2) So it is at least possible to read The Elements of Law and Leviathan not as endorsing a version of the cosmological proof, but simply as reporting a kind of psychological process that can take hold of people who are gripped by a “love of the knowledge of causes.”¹² And in fact there are compelling reasons to interpret Hobbes as intending this psychological reading, even if he may also have taken care to craft these texts in such a way that they equally admit of a more conventional surface interpretation, perhaps to allow a kind of plausible deniability should it be required. It is not simply that the psychological reading would make these passages consistent with the critique of cosmological reasoning in Anti-White and De Corpore, or that the Leviathan passages occur within a broader run of text describing the kinds of psychological disposition that lead humans to posit divinities of one sort of another.¹³ More than this, the psychological reading dovetails perfectly with Hobbes’s account in De Corpore of what actually happens when human beings attempt to pursue the regress of causes backwards in their imaginations: [T]he knowledge of what is infinite can never be attained by a finite inquirer. Whatsoever we know that are men, we learn it from our phantasms; and of ¹² Jesseph, “Hobbes’s Atheism,” 150–151, Springborg, “Hobbes’s Challenge,” 928, Robert McIntyre, “Concerning ‘men’s affections to Godward’: Hobbes on the First and Eternal Cause of all Things,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 54 (2016), 547–571: 550–551. ¹³ In Hobbes’s account, fear and ignorance lead us to posit the proximate spirits and gods of animism and polytheism, while a disinterested curiosity or love of the knowledge of causes leads us to posit a remote first cause of all (L 11.24–27: 160–162, 12.6: 166).

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 ’     infinite, whether magnitude or time, there is no phantasm at all; so that it is impossible either for a man or any other creature to have any conception of infinite. And though a man may from some effect proceed to the immediate cause thereof, and from that to a more remote cause, and so ascend continually by right ratiocination from cause to cause; yet he will not be able to proceed eternally, but wearied will at last give over, without knowing whether it were possible for him to proceed to an end or not. But whether we suppose the world to be finite or infinite, no absurdity will follow. (DCo 26.1, emphasis added)

As we reason back from cause to prior cause we must “at last give over,” not because there is any rational necessity that we admit a first cause, but because we are “finite inquirer[s]” whose imaginations must eventually weary and stagger. If (as Hobbes put it in L 11.25: 160) a “love of the knowledge of causes, draws a man [to pursue the regress of causes] till of necessity he must come to this thought at last, that there is [a first cause],” it is not a rational necessity at work but merely the psychological necessity of the weariness and exhaustion of a finite mind.¹⁴ It is not likely to be a coincidence that the passages in The Elements of Law and Leviathan admit of this psychological reading, when some sort of psychological account of the way human thought about the regress of causes ultimately gives out is positively mandated by De Corpore. So this weariness interpretation of the superficially pro-cosmological argument passages has force. It is plausible that, for Hobbes, it is not logic but a kind of mental exhaustion that leads us to posit an ultimate source of the great cascade of causes. This second, more skeptical line of interpretation then has its virtues. But there remains room for improvement. As it stands, the current reading cannot avoid charging Hobbes with at least some inconsistencies, for while it offers a plausible and consistent psychological reading of our proof texts EL 11.2, L 11.25: 160, and L 12.6: 166, it cannot account for the multiple passages in De Cive where Hobbes states outright that the existence of God can be known “by natural reason” or “by natural light” (where, as usual, “by the name God is meant the cause of the world”) (DCi 14.19 note, 2.21, 15.14; see also DCi 16.4), or for Hobbes’s statement in An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall that “right reason dictates, There is a God.” (AB 14) Advocates of the current interpretation can only claim that, for whatever reasons, De Cive and An Answer simply contradict what they take to be Hobbes’s more settled opinions. Second, the skeptical interpretation does not do justice either to Hobbes’s many expressions of reverence for what he calls “the . . . first cause of all causes” (EL 11.2), or to his extensive account of the norms of decorum governing speech about the attributes of this first cause (EL 11.3–4, DCi

¹⁴ In the Latin Leviathan Hobbes drops the language of necessity from this passage altogether, replacing “till of necessity he must come to this thought at last” simply with “and so on; until he come to this thought at last.”

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15.14–15, L 31.7: 560, 31.14–28: 564–566, 31.33: 568), each of which he presents as dictated by natural human reason. There are no obvious signs of irony in these many texts, but again advocates of the current interpretation are forced to regard this part of Hobbes’s system as an elaborate tissue of faux-pious indirection, since on their reading there is no sense in which natural human reason can show us that there is a first cause, much less one that must be spoken of in certain ways. Fortunately we can do better, both in accounting for all the various texts, and in showing how the genuine virtues of the skeptical interpretation can be carried over into a reading that takes proper account of what Hobbes tells us he is actually doing when he speaks of the being and attributes of a first cause of all.

3.3 The Expressivist Interpretation I will be arguing that, for Hobbes, the deity’s status as first cause of all is but one more “attribute of honour.” That is to say, our talk about this attribute is not properly understood as an attempt to describe some feature of the deity, but rather—like our talk about other divine attributes such as God’s justice, wisdom, partlessness, and so on—simply an attempt to express our reverence before this awesome and incomprehensible being as best we can. On this interpretation Hobbes can allow that there is a being that deserves to be called “the first cause of all”—now understanding these words in their purely reverence-expressing rather than descriptive employment—without thereby claiming to have settled the cosmological question of whether there is a literally a first cause. As we have seen, Hobbes holds that natural human reason cannot settle this cosmological question: given the arguments of Anti-White and De Corpore, we cannot hope to determine whether the chain of causes traces back to some ultimate source or simply recedes to infinity. But this cosmological agnosticism is perfectly consistent with allowing that there is a being that is properly, if honorifically, called “the first cause” (or, varying the expression as Hobbes himself does, “the first mover,” “the first cause of all causes,” “the cause of the world,” etc.); and indeed consistent with allowing that the existence of such a being can be established by natural human reason. For consider further: this interpretation allows us to read Hobbes as endorsing, and not merely describing, a form of the weariness version of the cosmological inference. Recall that where Hobbes is sometimes read as advancing a fairly traditional version of the cosmological proof (i.e., in EL 11.2, L 11.25: 160, L 12.6: 166), he is in fact better interpreted as intending a descriptive account of a common psychological process in which the imaginative pursuit of the regress of causes leads to a kind of mental exhaustion and the admission that there is some sort of first cause of all. I now propose that we read Hobbes as endorsing this psychological process as rational, understanding it now as a process that

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carries us (via the imaginative pursuit of the regress of causes and the mental exhaustion that results) to admit the existence, not of a literal first cause of all, but of a being that deserves to be called, honorifically, “the first cause of all.” Hobbes is telling us that as humans trace back from cause to prior cause they will eventually weary and stagger, defeated by the mind-boggling sequence of causes that recedes beyond the limits of human imagination, but also properly awe-struck by the fact that something must have produced this torrent of causes cascading down to the present from at least as far back as we can hope to picture or imagine. Located somewhere beyond the point where our ability to reason back from cause to cause gives out defeated by our own mental finitude, this being might in fact be a literal first cause, but for all that has been said here it could equally be some part of the regress of causes that precedes the humanly imaginable part, or it could even be the entire endless chain of causes running back to infinity from the point where human imagination founders. Still in each case we are dealing with a being that is powerful enough to have produced (at least) the humanly imaginable part of the great chain of causes, which makes it a proper object of human awe and reverence, and hence, for Hobbes, a proper object of human worship and for the application of titles—“divine attributes,” “attributes of divine honour”—that express our desire to venerate it as best we can. Once we grasp that the regress of causes exceeds the limits of human imagination, we are justified in inferring that there is a proper object of human worship—and hence a being that is properly dignified with attributes of honor, including the title “the first cause of all”—even if we are not justified in inferring that there is literally a first cause. So the current reading neatly resolves the interpretive puzzle of Hobbes’s apparently contradictory remarks on the force of cosmological reasoning. Still, the expressivist interpretation will seem excessively speculative unless we can make good on the claim that Hobbes does indeed extend his expressivist treatment of talk about the divine attributes even to talk about the deity’s status as first cause of all. And indeed, while we have seen that Hobbes holds that talk about God’s anthropomorphic and metaphysical perfections is merely a performative expression of our reverence, it might seem that God’s status as first cause of all (or, varying the expression, God’s status as the first mover, or as the cause of the world) must present a rather different case, since Hobbes invokes it when defining the term ‘God,’ as when he writes that “by God, is understood the cause of the World” (L 31.15: 564; see also DCi 15.14); or that “one First Mover; that is, a First, and Eternall cause of all things . . . is that which men mean by the name of God” (L 12.6: 166; see also L 11.25: 160, EL 11.2). Here it can look as if Hobbes is using the property of being first cause of all to fix the reference for all our talk, honorific or otherwise, about the being we call God; in which case it might seem that this attribute must be intended literally. What indeed are we saying when we declare that “God exists”—a statement that Hobbes allows is truth-apt (AW 35.16)—if not that there is literally a first cause?

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But in fact it is possible to interpret all of these texts in an expressivist manner. On this reading when we say that “God exists,” we are saying, in literal, truth-apt terms, that the being that we call ‘God’ does indeed exist—i.e., the being that we rightly, but honorifically, call the first cause of all. We read the above-cited “definitions” in an expressivist fashion, so that Hobbes is interpreted as saying that “by God is understood honorifically the cause of the world,” a being properly dignified in these reverential terms. But it will be asked: which being is it that deserves this honorific treatment? Hobbes tells us in the passages that introduce the notion of God for the first time in The Elements of Law and Leviathan, namely our three proof texts EL 11.2, L 11.25: 160, and L 12.6: 166, and his answer is: the being that we come to posit as a result of our reasoning back from cause to prior cause along the great chain of causes. As I have argued, the best way to understand these proof texts in the light of Hobbes’s other explicit commitments is to take them as endorsing the weariness version of cosmological reasoning, i.e., our reasoning, when, awed by the mind-boggling fact that the regress of causes exceeds the utmost limits of human imagination, we conclude that there is a proper object of human veneration and worship—namely, the being that is responsible for (at least) the sequence of causes running back as far back as we can hope to picture or imagine—and hence a being that is properly, but honorifically, called “the first cause of all.” I grant that Hobbes does allow some truth-apt description of the divine nature, for we can say quite literally that the being that we call ‘God’ (i) is the cause of the humanly imaginable system of causes, (ii) is powerful enough to deserve human worship, and (iii) exists. This much is dictated by the weariness version of the cosmological inference, and it would also neatly accommodate the two exceptions that Hobbes admits to his otherwise universal expressivism regarding our talk about the divine attributes.¹⁵ But I deny that Hobbes extends this minimalistic characterization to comprehend any description of the deity as literally the first cause of all. This attribute, like all the other remaining divine attributes, is merely a title of honor, which is to say, an expression of our reverence. Granted that it is possible to read Hobbes’s various remarks about the deity’s status as first cause in an expressivist manner, is it plausible? Certainly it is. First, as we have seen this reading solves our leading interpretive puzzle, allowing us to reconcile the apparently affirmative texts in The Elements of Law, De Cive, and Leviathan with the apparently skeptical treatment of cosmological reasoning in Anti-White and De Corpore. No other interpretation that I am aware of can do this, and those who advocate a literal, descriptivist reading of Hobbes’s talk about

¹⁵ Recall that Hobbes permits just two exceptions to his claim that talk about the divine attributes should simply signify our humility and a will to honor the deity: “there is but one Name to signifie our Conception of [the divine] Nature, and that is I AM; and but one Name of his Relation to us, and that is God; in which is contained Father, King, and Lord” (L 31.28: 566; compare also DCi 15.14).

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 ’    

a first cause of all must face the fact that their approach renders Hobbes’s various assays on this topic systematically contradictory. Second, Hobbes treats the deity’s status as first cause of all as if it were an attribute of honor in his official attribute-by-attribute account of the predicates that we can properly apply to God (at DCi 15.14 and the close rewrite thereof at L 31.14–28: 564–66). This is where we find Hobbes’s declaration that “by God is understood the cause of the world” and, similarly, “to say there is no cause of [the world] [is to say that there is] no God” (L 31.15: 564; compare DCi 15.14)— assertions that I maintain ought to be read in the light of Hobbes’s expressivist theory, so that ‘God’ names the being that deserves this honorific title. After all, the all-important context for these remarks is Hobbes’s account of the “Praecepts [that] are dictated to men, by their Naturall Reason onely, without other word of God, touching the Honour and Worship of the Divine Majesty” (L 31.7: 560, my emphasis; compare DCi 15.8). Here God’s status as the cause of the world appears in a list of the various attributes that we ought to apply to God according to “rules of Honour, that Reason dictateth to be done by the weak to the more potent” (L 31.13: 564). This list is in fact explicitly labeled “Attributes of Divine Honour” (L 31.14 marginal subheading: 564)—and as we have seen, God’s “Attributes of Honour” do not “signifie what he is,” but “ought to signifie our desire to honour him, with the best Appellations we can think on” (L 46.23: 1086). Finally, just as Hobbes maintains that the other attributes on this list should be applied to God on account of the fact that talking this way signifies our humility and reverence, so when he insists that it would be improper to deny that there is a cause of the world (i.e., a God), his reason is that to do so would be to “[speak] unworthily of him.” As with the other attributes, the controlling norm is that our words express a desire to honor the deity, not that they accurately represent him. Third, Hobbes discusses four attributes that are commonly associated with the deity’s status as first cause of all: its status (i) as “creator,” (ii) as “author of every deed,” (iii) as an “eternal” being, and (iv) as a (causally) “independent” being. In each case Hobbes explicitly tells us that talk about the attribute in question is not properly an attempt to describe the nature of the deity, but an expression either of our reverence or of our inability to comprehend the divine nature. But it is difficult to see how talk about the deity’s status as first cause could be descriptive and truthapt in character if talk about these other attributes is not also descriptive and truth-apt. After all, given the traditional descriptive interpretation of talk about the divine attributes, there are at least some logical connections between the four above-mentioned attributes and the deity’s status as first cause of all, with one or another of the four attributes either logically entailing or being a logical consequence of God’s status as first cause. Take the four attributes in turn. In the Latin Leviathan Hobbes tells us that we ought to call God “the creator of all things” (omnium rerum Conditor), while in the corresponding passage in the English Leviathan he writes that “to say the

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World was not Created, but Eternall, . . . is to deny there is a God” (L 31.16: 564). So it seems that Hobbes treats God’s status as creator as reciprocal with, or at the very least intimately related to, God’s status as cause of the world. But just a few paragraphs later in both the English and the Latin edition he cites ‘creator’ as an example of the sort of predicate that we properly give to the deity “not to declare what he is . . . but . . . [as] a signe of . . . a Will to honour him as much as we can” (L 31.28: 566). Quite explicitly, God’s status as creator is simply an attribute of honor. Hobbes also tells us that “God is the author of every deed,” an attribute traditionally connected with the deity’s status as first cause of all, and associated with it in the Latin Leviathan, where Hobbes writes of the deity’s status as “the first cause of things and actions” and relates this double attribute to the deity’s status as “the cause of every deed” (AW 25.16, L 46.22: 1091). But in Anti-White, at least, Hobbes insists that this attribute should be taken simply as another honorific title, not as an attempt to represent the divine nature in literal, truth-apt terms: we may reverently . . . say of God that He is the author of every deed, because it is honorific to do so, but to say ‘God is the author of sin’ is sacrilegious and profane. There is no contradiction in the matter, however, for . . . the words under discussion are not the propositions of people philosophizing but the actions of those who pay homage. (AW 35.16)¹⁶

The third attribute that is bound up with the deity’s status as first cause of all is God’s eternity. Thus in each of the three proof texts setting out the reasoning that leads us to posit a first cause, Hobbes tells us that this first cause would also have to be regarded as an eternal being, and in two of these passages he seems to treat these two attributes as if they are logically interconnected, as when he writes that the pursuit of causes will eventually bring us to “an eternal, that is to say, to the first power of all powers, and first cause of all causes,” or that we will at last admit “that there is some cause, whereof there is no former cause, but is eternal” (EL 11.2, L 11.25: 160; compare also L 12.6: 166). But, once again, Hobbes explicitly cites “eternal” alongside “creator” as another example of a predicate that reason mandates that we apply to God “not to declare what he is . . . but . . . [as] a signe of . . . a Will to honour him as much as we can” (L 31.28: 566).¹⁷ God’s eternity is another attribute of honor.¹⁸

¹⁶ Translation slightly adapted from Jones. ¹⁷ Similarly, in The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656), Hobbes explicitly numbers “Eternity” among “those Attributes [we give] to God, not to shew that we apprehend how they are in him, but to signifie how we think it best to honour him” (QLNC 267). ¹⁸ Further, even if we were to waive the point that talk about God’s “eternity” is honorific rather than descriptive in function, and suppose that this word conveys its usual, non-honorific descriptive content when we apply it to God, still this will not help secure the traditional literalist reading of Hobbes’s talk

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Hobbes discusses our fourth attribute, causal independence, in his exchange with Descartes in the Objections and Replies (1641). Here he does not set out his expressivist interpretation of talk about the divine attributes or claim that talk about the deity’s independence serves an honorific function, perhaps because these would be unnecessary complications in the limited dialectical context of his objections to Descartes’s Meditations. However, Hobbes does make it clear that he regards our talk about God’s causal independence not as an attempt to capture some positive metaphysical feature of the divinity, but rather simply as a registration of our own inability to imagine this incomprehensible being arising from prior causes. Consider the following parallel with the attribute of infinitude: [The substance I call ‘God’] . . . is infinite (that is, it is impossible for me to conceive or imagine any supposed limits or extremities without being able to imagine further limits beyond them). And it follows from this that what arises in connection with the term ‘infinite’ is not the idea of the infinity of God but the idea of my own boundaries or limits. In addition, the substance is independent; that is, I do not conceive of a cause which produced God. From this it is clear that the idea which I have in connection with the term ‘independent’ is simply the memory of my own ideas, which began at different times and hence are dependent. Hence to say that God is independent is simply to say that God belongs to the class of things such that I cannot imagine their origin. Similarly, to say that God is infinite is the same as saying that he belongs to the class of things such that we do not conceive of them as having bounds. (TSO 131)

As the comparison with the attribute of infinitude makes clear, Hobbes’s view is that when we ascribe causal independence to the deity, we should not be understood as making the metaphysical claim that the deity actually has no prior cause or origin. Rather we are simply registering our own inability to imagine, i.e., visualize or picture, any such cause or origin. So once again we have an attribute that is traditionally associated with the deity’s status as first cause of all—indeed, an attribute that seems a precondition for that status—and yet an attribute that

about a first cause of all. Hobbes tells us that when we say that some object is “eternal,” or has any other sort of “infinite” magnitude or duration, we are not to be understood as affirming that that object is in fact unlimited in magnitude or duration so much as registering our own inability to discern its limits. “[W]hen we say that something is infinite, we are not signifying anything in reality but an incapacity of our own minds; as if we were saying that we do not know whether and where it ends” (DCi 15.14, final emphasis mine; see also L 3.12: 46, DCo 26.1). So when Hobbes moves back and forth freely between characterizations of the deity as “eternal” and as “the first cause of all causes” (as in our proof texts), this would not in fact support the literal interpretation of his talk about a “first” cause so much as it would our rival reading of Hobbes’s deity as the being that we posit (and honorifically label ‘the first cause’) when we give up on the pursuit of causes, exhausted by a mind-boggling regress that surpasses our ability to picture or comprehend.

   

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proves on examination not to be a feature of the divine nature itself, but rather an expression of our own human reactions to that incomprehensible being. And as a bonus, we can see that Hobbes’s deflationary handling of the deity’s causal “independence” fits perfectly with our interpretation of his deity as the cause of the humanly imaginable sequence of causes—as the being that we come to posit when, exhausted by the pursuit of causes, we find ourselves unable to go on in speculating about ever-earlier causes in a regress that surpasses the limits of human imagination. The being that we call God just is the inconceivable (i.e., unimaginable, un-image-able) posited cause of all that we can conceive, an assumed or ‘supposed’¹⁹ great cause lying over the horizon of the human imagination. Whether or not this inconceivable being has its own causes in turn is simply beyond us. But certainly we can conceive nothing of them.

3.4 God and World So the case for extending Hobbes’s expressivist interpretation of the divine attributes to the deity’s status as first cause of all is compelling. But since as oft as reason is against a Hobbes scholar, so oft will a Hobbes scholar be against reason, from whence it comes that they who have written of Hobbes’s natural theology do all invade each other, and themselves, with contradiction, I now consider two remaining objections to my proposed interpretation. First, Hobbes tells us that “to say the World was not Created, but Eternall, (seeing that which is Eternall has no cause,) is to deny there is a God” (L 31.16: 564; see also DCi 15.14). But on my interpretation, Hobbes holds that we cannot know that the regress of causes does not simply recede to infinity with no beginning at all. So it might seem to follow that Hobbes is committed to saying that we cannot know that the world is not eternal, in which case it seems to follow (in the light of L 31.16: 564) that he is committed to saying that we cannot know that there is a God, which of course contradicts several primary texts and the thrust of my own proposed reading. Second, on my interpretation, Hobbes’s deity is the being that we posit as the cause of the cascade of causes coming down to the present from at least as far back as we can hope to picture of imagine. Such a being might in fact be a literal first cause, but it could equally be a part of the overall chain of causes that precedes the humanly imaginable part of the series, or even the whole preceding chain of causes itself, receding perhaps endlessly. But these latter options might seem to make God a part of the world, which is something that Hobbes squarely rules out: “the philosophers who have said the world itself or the soul (i.e., a part) of the world is

¹⁹ On God’s status as a ‘supposed,’ or posited, being, see Chapter 4, Section 4.3.

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God, have spoken unworthily of him; for they are giving him no attributes; they are denying his existence altogether. . . . Those who say that the world is God, are saying that there is no cause of the world, i.e., that there is no God” (DCi 15.14; compare also L 31.15: 564). But these objections fail for now familiar reasons. Neither takes account of the fact that Hobbes is simply treating of “Attributes of Divine Honour” in these passages (L 31.14 marginal subheading: 564). Indeed we must not “say” that the world is eternal, or that God is a part of the world, since that would be to speak less reverently than we might. It would even be to deny that there is a God, i.e., a being that is properly dignified with the highest honorific titles, especially “the first cause of all” and “the cause of the world.” But that hardly tells us that the world is not in fact eternal, or that God is not in fact a part of the world. It simply tells us that those who pay proper respect to God will say that this being is distinct from the world and that the former alone is eternal.²⁰ The case is analogous to that of the attribute of infinitude (addressed just two sentences later), which Hobbes tells us we ought to say applies to God (since “to say he is Finite, is not to Honour him: For it is not a signe of the Will to Honour God, to attribute to him lesse than we can”), without meaning in the least to declare “what [God] is,” but simply to signify our “Humility, and . . . a Will to honour him as much as we can” (L 31.18: 564, 31.28: 566; compare DCi 15.14). In fact the Latin Leviathan replaces the English Leviathan’s rather awkward and superficially descriptive sounding “to say the World was not Created, but Eternall, (seeing that which is Eternall has no cause,) is to deny there is a God” simply with “[t]hose who say the world is eternal do not honor God as much as they can” (L 31.16: 564–65), making it clear that the expression of a will to honor, not accurate description and the expression of true propositions, is, as usual, Hobbes’s controlling concern.

3.5 The Teleological Argument Even the casual reader of Hobbes’s major works can scarcely avoid encountering passages that entertain some variation of the cosmological argument, or at any rate some inference arising from reflection on the regress of causes to the existence of a being that Hobbes calls the first cause of all. With the teleological argument it is a different matter, and what strikes the student of early modern philosophy is rather how little attention Hobbes gives to this celebrated argument from the order and apparently purposive organization of the world to the existence of a ²⁰ Notice that this approach neatly solves the problem, faced by all commentators who read Hobbes as granting the existence of some sort of God, of explaining how Hobbes can say that God is a corporeal body (L Appendix 3.6: 1228–1231, C 32–33), and that the world is the system of all bodies (L 46.15: 1076–1078), while also saying that God is not a part of the world (DCi 14.15; compare also L 31.15: 564).

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designing intelligence behind it. Nevertheless, there are three brief passages that can give the impression of endorsing some version the teleological argument, and some commentators have taken this appearance at face value.²¹ For purposes of completeness, I briefly review the relevant texts here, though I will suggest that they are more plausibly explained in the now-familiar non-descriptivist manner rather than as literal-minded ratifications of this traditional form of naturaltheological reasoning. First, in Leviathan, there is the following remark embedded within a longer paragraph that is otherwise purely ‘cosmological’ in expression: “by the visible things of this world, and their admirable order, a man may conceive there is cause of them, which men call God” (L 11.25: 160, emphasis added). Second, in De Homine, Hobbes states that if those who examine the mechanisms of generation and nutrition in biological systems “do not see that that they have been put together and ordered by a mind, then they should be judged mindless themselves” (DH 1.4;²² compare also DH 12.5). Third, in the 1678 Decameron Physiologicum: ’tis very hard to believe, that to produce Male and Female, and all that belongs thereto, as also the several and curious Organs of Sense and Memory, could be the work of any thing that had not understanding. (DP 130–131)

Hobbes never develops the teleological line of reasoning beyond these three disconnected remarks, and particularly when one considers the divergent dialectical contexts of the various passages, their appearance in Hobbes writings can be fairly characterized as “perfunctory and incidental.”²³ Still, we can agree that these passages do at least confirm that Hobbes was perfectly willing to allude to this familiar form of argumentation, and to do so in positive and affirmative terms. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to take these passages literally, as if they were actual endorsements of the inference from the order and arrangement of the world to a designing intelligence responsible for that world. Any such inference would contradict Hobbes’s claim that “God has no ends” (L 31.13: 564).²⁴ But more fundamentally, it would contradict Hobbes’s very firm position that the intrinsic nature of God is totally incomprehensible, shut off from human inquiry—that “we ²¹ K. C. Brown, “Hobbes’s Grounds for Belief in a Deity,” Philosophy 37 (1962), 336–344: 341–344, Alan Cromartie, “The God of Thomas Hobbes,” The Historical Journal 51 (2008), 857–879: 869–870, Geoffrey Gorham, “Hobbes and Evil,” in Daniel N. Robinson, Chad Meister, and Charles Taliaferro, The History of Evil in the Early Modern Age: 1450–1700 (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 168–178: 176, and see also Arrigo Pacchi, “Hobbes and the Problem of God,” in G. A. J. Rogers and Alan Ryan, Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 171–187: 178 note 31. ²² DH 1.4 is not included in Gert’s selections from De Homine. The translation is mine from p. 4 of the 1658 Latin original. ²³ Ronald Hepburn, “Hobbes on the Knowledge of God,” in Maurice Cranston and Richard S. Peters, eds., Hobbes and Rousseau (Garden City, NY: 1972), 85–108: 91. ²⁴ As Curley observes (Curley, “ ‘I durst not write so boldly,’ ” 573 note 98). It is possible, however, that this dogmatic- and descriptive-sounding pronouncement is itself only honorifically intended.

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understand nothing of what he is, but only that he is” (L 34.4: 614). It would contradict Hobbes’s view that the ascription of “Knowledge and Understanding” to God should no more be literally intended than the ascription of “Sight, and other acts of Sense.” Rather, such ascriptions are properly only a way of affirming “the power by which [God] effecteth every thing” (L 31.26–27: 566; see also DCi 15.14). Hobbes is in fact very clear that he rejects the descriptivist ambitions and implicit anthropomorphism of any literally intended, truth-apt inference to the mind-like qualities of a designing intelligence in God. Thus, commenting on various passages in scripture that seem to attribute to God this or that purpose, intention, or process of thought he writes that when God speaks to men [i.e., through scripture] concerning his Will and other Attributes, he speaks of them as if they were like to those of men, to the end he may be understood. And therefore to the order of his work, the world, wherein one thing followes another so aptly as no man could order it by Designe, he gives the name of Will and Purpose. For that which we call Designe, which is reasoning, and thought after thought, cannot be properly attributed to God, in whose thoughts there is no fore nor after. (QLNC 11)

Explicitly, “[d]esigne” and “reasoning” “cannot properly be attributed to God,” at least not as descriptive labels in constative speech. Presumably, as with the other anthropomorphic perfections, these words can only applied to God in an honorific sense. As in the ‘postscript’ to Of Libertie and Necessitie, “knowing, . . . wisdom, etc.” should be ascribed God only “for honour sake” (QLNC 334).²⁵ Or again: Nor is Wisdom in God a logicall examination of the means by the end, as it is in in men; but an incomprehensible Attribute given to an incomprehensible nature, for to honour him. (QLNC 161)

So if we are speaking as we ought, our attributions of design, reasoning, knowledge, wisdom, and foresight to the great cause will only be honorific in intent. The same point must therefore extend to Hobbes’s teleological-sounding language in our three passages. The order of the natural world is indeed “admirable,” apt to produce wonder and astonishment. It does honor to the great cause to emphasize this striking feature of the creation, and to say that it evidences design and intelligence. Such traditional teleological expressions effectively display our veneration and are therefore pious and fitting. But in Hobbes’s mouth, they do not indicate any descriptivist-minded, truth-apt speculation about God’s actual intrinsic nature. One can see both why Hobbes is perfectly happy to recite the resonant and ²⁵ For details about the publication of “postscript” to Of Libertie and Necessitie, see Chapter 2, note 24.

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traditional words, but also why his teleological-sounding pronouncements are cursory, detached from any wider program of descriptively intended natural theology, and exhibit no interest in argumentative detail.

3.6 Worshipping the ‘First’ Cause I conclude that, for Hobbes, while natural human reason cannot show us that there is literally a first cause or a designing intelligence behind the humanly comprehensible world, it can show us that there is a great cause that is a proper object of reverence and awe, and which deserves to be dignified with the honorific title ‘the first cause of all,’ and accorded reverence-expressing attributive names such as ‘wise’ and ‘intelligent.’ As with Hobbes’s pious expressivism more generally, his unconventional account of the deity’s status as ‘first cause of all’ might seem to some to fall short of a natural theology properly so called. And in allowing that the being that he calls ‘God’ might (for all we know) be dependent on other unknown causes, Hobbes’s position may appear less than convincingly religious. To return to the comparison with the rhapsodic, nature-admiring atheist,²⁶ it is easy enough to imagine a reflective twenty-first century person who does not regard herself as religious in the least, but who is happy to concede both that the regress of causes staggers the human imagination, and that where our comprehension of the origins of the world gives out—perhaps with the unknown sources of the Big Bang, or with speculation about the formation of universes on the membranes of a wider multiverse—we have traced the universe back toward a being (or a principle, or a system of forces) that is a proper object of reverence and awe. But for Hobbes a proper object of reverence and awe just is a proper object of worship. And at least for this seventeenth-century thinker, reverence and awe before the overwhelmingly powerful but otherwise incomprehensible source of the humanly imaginable system of causes is properly expressed in the familiar language of natural theistic piety—and indeed (as we shall see in Chapter 7) also through whatever conventional forms of religious practice are embraced by the local culture and sanctioned by the civil state. So as Hobbes sees it, the traditional theistic modes of worship and discourse are vindicated, not undermined, by his naturalistic case for the existence of a surpassingly powerful but otherwise utterly mysterious “cause of the world.”

²⁶ See Chapter 2, Section 2.5.

4 Talking and Thinking about an Inconceivable God Hobbes consistently maintains that God is inconceivable, meaning that we can frame no idea—no conception, image, or mental representation—of this being. But if we can frame no idea of God, how is thought and talk about God possible in the first place? Pressing this challenge, various commentators from the seventeenth century down to our own time have argued that Hobbes’s thesis that God is inconceivable leads by implication to semantic atheism, the doctrine that there is no genuine human thought about God at all and that human talk about God is senseless and insignificant speech. The view that Hobbes’s account of God’s inconceivability entails semantic atheism need not always be wedded to the view that Hobbes himself accepts this entailment or that he intends his close readers to grasp it. But in practice it usually is, with various commentators both in Hobbes’s day and our own taking Hobbes to be intentionally insinuating that God-talk and wouldbe God-thought is void of meaningful content.¹ As Ralph Cudworth puts it in his bestiary of irreligion The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), the charge is that in insisting that we “can have no Phantastick Idea” answering to the word ‘God,’ Hobbes intends his sharper readers to read between the lines and understand that his implied message is that the deity “is but an Incomprehensible Nothing.”² In the current chapter I consider and reject the suggestion that Hobbes is committed to semantic atheism (Sections 4.1–4.3). Although he holds that no human can frame an idea or conception of God’s intrinsic nature, Hobbes’s device of ‘indefinite names’ enables us to refer to this mysterious being in language and thought by way of a purely relational characterization. In Section 4.4, I address Hobbes’s purposes in asserting that the deity is a kind of body or ¹ Seventeenth-century commentators adopting this interpretation include Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 2 vols. (London: R. Royston, 1678), i. 57, 62, 64, 62, 192, ii. 638. Cudworth has a policy of not mentioning naming Hobbes by name, though he does quote from L 46.23: 1083 and QLNC 5 (attributing these to “a Modern Writer”) when setting out the charge sheet against “Atheists” who argue that “no man can have an Idæa or Conception of God, and that he is an Incomprehensible Nothing” (i. 63–4, i. 57). Compare also Thomas Tenison, The Creed of Mr. Hobbes Examined; in a feigned conference between him and a student of divinity (London: 1670), 30–31. More recent commentators adopting this interpretation include Patricia Springborg, “Hobbes’s Challenge to Descartes, Bramhall and Boyle: A Corporeal Deity,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20 (2012), 903–934: 926–927 and Douglas Jesseph, “Hobbes’s Atheism,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26 (2002), 140–166: 149–150. ² Cudworth, True Intellectual System, i. 64.

Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion. Thomas Holden, Oxford University Press. © Thomas Holden 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871329.003.0004

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corporeal being—an assertion that, quite apart from its apparent theological eccentricity, might seem to contradict Hobbes’s doctrine that we can frame no idea of God’s nature.

4.1 The Charge of Semantic Atheism In Chapter 2, Section 2.5 we met with a cousin of the view that Hobbes’s account of God’s inconceivability implies semantic atheism. On that occasion the charge was that Hobbes’s account of God as the sufficiently powerful but otherwise completely incomprehensible cause of the humanly comprehensible universe did not amount to theism properly so called, even if Hobbes went on to insist that we should worship this mysterious being and talk of it (for honor’s sake) as if it possessed all the traditional theistic perfections. Apart from the bare relational thought that this incomprehensible x caused the humanly comprehensible world and is sufficiently powerful to have done so, on Hobbes’s view there is no descriptive content to our notion of this being, and in particular no descriptive account of its intrinsic character. All Hobbes allows us is a purely relational understanding of the being he calls ‘God,’ a placeholder thought that picks out this being simply by way of its position in a system of relations—as the unknown x, whatever it might be, that produced the humanly comprehensible universe. But this (so the charge went) is not a conception of a theistic divinity properly so called: a cognitive blank is not a thought of a real divinity, and a descriptively ineffable x cannot serve as a theistic God no matter how many honorific titles we bestow upon it. Hobbes of course responded vigorously to this line of criticism. But whatever we make of this first challenge to his position, it does not deny that Hobbes is at least entitled to a relational, reference-fixing thought of the being that he calls ‘God.’ By contrast, the current view that I wish to consider is not merely that Hobbes is committed to the position that humans can frame no idea of God’s intrinsic nature, but to the position that we can frame no mental representation of any kind answering to the name ‘God.’ There just is no mental content whatever answering to this word, and hence nothing this word might succeed in referring to, much less capture in descriptively contentful terms. Semantic atheism (as I am using the expression) precludes any meaningful thought and talk about God. As Cudworth puts it, it is the position “That the Word God hath no Signification, and that there is no other Idea or Conception in Mens Minds, answering thereunto, besides the mere Phantasm of the Sound.”³ And the view that I engage in the current chapter is that Hobbes’s thesis that God is inconceivable commits him to just such a

³ Cudworth, True Intellectual System, i. 192.

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semantic atheism, and not merely to a theologically inadequate, purely relational, placeholding idea of God. Faced with the suggestion that Hobbes might have intended his account of God’s inconceivability to imply semantic atheism, advocates of a sincerely theistic Hobbes have responded by pointing out that various ancient and well-respected traditions of Christian thought have equally insisted on the inconceivability of the deity.⁴ But by itself the appeal to Christian tradition is not obviously exculpatory. First, many Christians who say that the deity is inconceivable may not mean to concede that we can frame no idea of the deity whatsoever, but merely that human thought admits of only a partial and inadequate idea of this being. For instance, when Hobbes asserts in the Third Set of Objections that “the Christian religion obliges us to believe that God cannot be conceived of (which means, in my view, that we have no idea of him),” Descartes replies with the counterclaim that “[w]hen [Christians] say that God ‘cannot be conceived of,’ this refers to conceiving in such a way as to have a fully adequate grasp of him.”⁵ And this weaker understanding of God’s ‘inconceivability’ is plausibly the more mainstream Christian view. Second, while it is true that certain Christian mystics and negative theologians have adopted the more extreme position that we can frame no idea of God whatsoever, the familiar objection to such theologies is that their proponents, however pious their intentions, are in danger of falling into semantic atheism without perhaps realizing it. Aquinas and other advocates of an analogical understanding of God’s attributes had pressed this charge against negative theology,⁶ and it would be surprising if Hobbes, usually a relentless critic of senseless and insignificant speech, was unaware of the concern. So more must be said if we are to understand whether Hobbes intends to evade semantic atheism, and if so, how.

4.2 Naming, Conceiving, and Imagining The challenge of explaining what makes talk and thought about God meaningful is one that Hobbes raises for himself. At the start of Elements of Law chapter 11,

⁴ A. P. Martinich, “Hobbes’s Political-Philosophical Project: Science and Subversion,” in S. A. Lloyd, Interpreting Hobbes’s Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 29–39: 39, and The Two Gods of Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 186–190. ⁵ See Hobbes’s eleventh objection and Descartes’s reply in René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and tr. John Cottingham, Anthony Kenny, Dugald Murdoch, and Robert Stoothoff, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ii. 132. Notice also that Descartes holds that we can “touch [something] with one’s thought” without entirely grasping it, in the same way that “we can touch a mountain with our hands but we cannot put our arms around it” (letter to Mersenne, 27 May 1630, in Philosophical Writings, iii. 153). Compare also the similar move in Cudworth, True Intellectual System, ii. 638–639. ⁶ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. T. Gilby et al., 61 vols. (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1964–1981), part 1, question 12, articles 2, 5, and 12.

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“           ,” he sets out his agenda in the following terms: Now forasmuch as we give names not only to things natural, but also to supernatural; and by all names we ought to have some meaning and conception; it followeth in the next place, to consider what thoughts and imaginations of the mind we have when, we take into our mouths the most blessed name of G. (EL 11.1, emphasis added)

Names are sensible marks—in the first instance vocalized sounds—“by which we recall into our mind some conceptions of the things to which we give those names.” They are “arbitrarily imposed . . . to bring to [the] mind some conception concerning the thing on which it is imposed” (EL 5.2; see also AW 4.1, 30.16). Our passage from EL 11.1 simply extends this understanding of the conceptionrecalling function of names to talk about the deity: all names, ‘God’ included, “ought to have some meaning and conception” associated with them if they are to be more than empty sounds. So Hobbes recognizes that he must provide some account of how the word ‘God’ gets its meaning consistent with his theory of linguistic signification and mental content. The problem is to understand how Hobbes can account for the meaning of this word given his imagistic model of mental content and his view that we can frame no image-like idea of the deity. For Hobbes, all our ideas (which he also calls ‘conceptions,’ ‘thoughts,’ and ‘phantasms’) are simply so many traces of senseexperience in the corporeal imagination. They are decaying material motions that echo in the memory and nervous system following the original agitation of our sense organs, and which appear to first-person consciousness as mental images or mind-pictures (allowing for tactile, auditory, gustatory, and olfactory as well as visual ‘images’ and ‘pictures’) whose imagistic content is derived, in whole or part by part, from materials originally presented in sensory experience (EL 1.8, 3.1–6, AW 30.3–5). And “because whatsoever . . . we conceive, has been perceived first by sense, either all at once, or by parts; a man can have no thought, representing any thing, not subject to sense” (L 3.12: 46). It follows that all human thought must ultimately be explained in terms of the play of images and after-images in the imagination, the inner magic lantern show of superimposed mental phantasms, each “remaining, and little by little decaying from and after the act of sense” (EL 3.1). Thus where Descartes, Cudworth, and other rationalist philosophers posit a faculty of pure intellect capable of supporting a non-imagistic idea of God, Hobbes rules out any non-imagistic representation of the deity, as of anything else. To appreciate the totalizing ambition of Hobbes’s imagistic model of thought, consider the following passage from The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656), in which he resolves all manner of cognitive operations and passions to the production of mind-pictures in the corporeal imagination:

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 ’     If the Bishop [i.e., Bramhall, Hobbes’s interlocutor] had observed what he does himself, when he Deliberates, reasons, understands, or imagins, he would have known . . . that consideration, understanding, reason, and all the passions of the mind; are imaginations. That to consider a thing, is to imagine it; that to understand a thing is to imagine it; that to hope and fear are to imagine the things hoped for and feared. The difference between them is, that when we imagine the consequence of any thing, we are said to consider that thing; and when we have imagined any thing from a sign, and especially from those signs, we call names, we are said to understand his meaning that maketh the sign; and when we reason, we imagine the consequence of affirmations, and negations joyned together; and when we hope or fear, we imagine things good or hurtful to our selves: insomuch as all these are but imaginations diversly named, from different circumstances, as any man may perceive as easily as he can look into his own thoughts. (QLNC 278–279 emphasis added, see also 309)

Notice that it is not just the mental “consideration” of a thing but also any linguistic “understanding” of a word naming a thing that involves the production of mental imagery. And given this uncompromisingly imagistic approach both to the content of thought and to linguistic understanding, a conspiratorial reading of Hobbes as directing us to semantic atheism by implication might seem plausible. On the one hand, Hobbes tells us that that thought and meaningful talk require imagistic conceptions. On the other, he insists throughout his works that we can frame no imagistic conception of God—telling us that “we have no idea or image corresponding to the sacred name of God,” “that we can have no conception or image of the Deity,” and that “God is unconceivable” (TSO 127, EL 11.2, 11.11; see also AW 35.36, L 3.12: 46, 11.25: 160, AB 18). If this is a bread crumb trail leading us to semantic atheism, it is not a long or a circuitous one.

4.3 Relational Thoughts and Indefinite Names However, Hobbes is not committed to semantic atheism, wittingly or unwittingly. Although he insists that genuine thought must be backed by imagistic conceptions, in practice Hobbes allows that we can think about things that have inconceivable intrinsic natures. He is explicit that he allows this, and gives various specific examples, thought about God prominent among them. I will argue that, for Hobbes, thought about things that have inconceivable intrinsic natures is possible insofar as we can refer to them by way of some identifying relational characteristic. And such relational, reference-securing thought can be explained by the play of imagistic conceptions in the imagination, even while we can form no conception of the intrinsic nature of the thing of which we speak. In the particular case of God, that identifying relational characteristic is its role as cause of the

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humanly comprehensible world. So on my interpretation, when Hobbes tells us that God is inconceivable, he means to say that we can form no conception of this being’s intrinsic nature—that we can frame no imagistic mind-picture of what it is like in itself. But he does not mean to deny that we can form a relational thought picking it out it as the whatever-it-is that caused the humanly comprehensible world, a relational thought that is ultimately explicable in terms of the flux of images in the mind. First then: Hobbes allows that we can meaningfully talk and think about certain things that cannot be conceived in his usual sense of ‘conceive,’ meaning to frame a mental image of the thing in question, a mind-picture that offers us, to a degree, a simulation of what it would be like to encounter it directly in sense-experience. He tells us that “men that are utterly deprived from their Nativity, of the light of the bodily Eye, have no Idea at all, of any such light” (L 44.2: 958). But while Hobbes might insist that the congenitally blind can frame no idea that simulates, from the inside, what the visual experience of light is like, presumably he would allow that they can still understand that others can experience sensations of something called ‘light,’ the intrinsic character of which sensations is unknown to the blind. Or again, Hobbes even holds that “no man conceives in his imagination any greater light, than he hath at some time, or other, perceived by his outward Senses” (L 44.2: 958). But presumably Hobbes would allow that a man can meaningfully refer to and discourse about a light that is “greater” (i.e., brighter) than any that he has experienced first-hand, even while being unable to “conceiv[e] in his imagination” an idea that captures what the experience of such a light is like from the first person point of view. Plausibly, when Hobbes says that the congenitally blind “have no Idea at all” of light, and that no man “conceives in his imagination” any greater light than he has experienced through sense-perception, he means to say only that the intrinsic character of the sensation cannot be conceived, not that the people in question can have no referring thought at all about these kinds of sensation. Or consider Hobbes’s declaration that “What kind of Felicity God hath ordained to them that devoutly honour him, a man shall no sooner know, than enjoy; being joyes, that are now as incomprehensible, as the word of Schoole-men Beatificall Vision is unintelligible” (L 6.58: 96). However impish or double-edged this remark, it shows that Hobbes holds that he can meaningfully refer to the “kind of Felicity God hath ordained to them that honour him,” even while his purpose in referring to it is to insist that we will never in this life be able to imagine what this mysterious felicity is like. In some texts Hobbes is explicit that we can meaningfully think or talk about certain things that cannot be conceived. The great cause behind the humanly comprehensible world is among these, but other cases also help to illustrate Hobbes’s approach. Consider this passage from De Homine, in which he tells us that we can experience passions such as hope and fear directed toward things that we cannot conceive, again in his usual sense of ‘conceive,’ meaning to form a

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 ’    

mental image of the thing in question, a picture in the mind’s eye that captures to some degree what it would be like to sense it directly. Even the most insubstantial arguments are sufficient for hope. Yea, even what the mind cannot truly conceive can be hoped for, if it can be expressed. Similarly anything can be feared even though it be not conceived of, provided that it is commonly said to be terrible, or if we should see many simultaneously fleeing [ . . . ]. For we believe that those that first fly have seen some danger as a cause for flight. (DH 12.4, emphases added)

Here an inference from the reports or behavior of others lead can us to suppose the existence of something to be hoped for or feared even while “the mind cannot truly conceive” what this thing actually is. We can form no mental picture or image-idea of the unknown x that we posit in such a case, but only some sort of roundabout conviction that it is the kind of thing that might do us good or ill.⁷ Another example involves Hobbes’s account of thought and talk about substances, where the word ‘substance’ captures something that is “Subject, to various accidents” (L 34.2: 610), and approximates to Greek terms such as “to on, huphistamenon [the entity, that is placed under], or hupostan [standing under] and hupostasis [substance]” and the Latin “ ‘subjectum,’ ‘suppositum,’ ‘substantia,’ ‘basis,’ and ‘fundamentum’ ” (L Appendix i. 65: 1170). Consider Hobbes’s remarks in the Third Set of Objections to Descartes’s Meditations. There is a great difference between imagining, that is, having an idea, and conceiving in the mind, that is, using a process of reasoning to infer something exists. . . . Even the Peripatetics of classical times taught clearly enough that a substance is not perceived by the senses but is inferred by reasoning. (TSO 125)⁸ I have already frequently pointed out that we do not have an idea of God, or the soul. I will now add that we do not have an idea of substance. For substance, insofar as it is the matter which is the subject of accidental properties and of ⁷ And this, notice, despite Hobbes’s insistence in the roughly contemporaneous Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, that hope and fear do require some sort of mental imagery conveying our thought, somehow or other, to whatever it is we hope for or fear (QLNC 278–279, quoted in Section 4.2 of this chapter). I offer some further analysis of DH 12.4 and the issue of what sort of imagery the passions of hope and fear require in Chapter 5, Section 5.2. ⁸ Note that in the first of these two extracts Hobbes uses ‘conceiving’ in a manner that is out of line with his usual employment of the word as a synonym for directly imagining, i.e., framing a mental image that simulates what it would be like to experience such a thing in sense-perception. More often Hobbes uses the expression ‘supposing’ to refer to the positing the existence of something as a result of a process of reasoning (TSO 127, DCo 3.3), rather than expressions like ‘conceiving’ or ‘conceiving in the mind’ (but see L 11.25: 160). In the second extract here from the Third Set of Objections, Hobbes’s usage of ‘conceive’ reverts to type.

      

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changes, is something that is established solely by reasoning; it is not something that is conceived, or presents any idea to us. (TSO 130, emphasis added)

Substances are the posited or supposed beings underlying the various shifting appearances of things. They are not “perceived by the senses,” and hence there can be no direct sense-derived image of a substance, no picture in the mind’s eye that captures what it is like: substance “is not something that is conceived, or presents any idea to us.” But reason can properly lead us to infer the existence of substances from the outward appearances of things, to suppose that this or that substance exists. And the 1668 Appendix to Leviathan confirms that the kind of inference that leads us to suppose the existence of a substance underlying certain sensible appearances involves a relational (or ‘relative’) kind of thought, some notion of the posited entity as standing in a particular relation to those sensible appearances. When you look at something you call ‘white,’ you impose that name on a substance or underlying body, such as marble, even though your eyesight cannot penetrate the substance of the marble or of any other entity whatsoever. . . . We understand well enough that that appearance cannot be without some cause or foundation—in other words, that ‘white’ cannot exist unless there is in reality some substance that stands under the appearance itself, being its cause and (as logicians say) its subject. . . . Now what I have said about perception by sight is also to be understood of the other senses. For the ‘hypostasis’ [i.e., the substance, that which stands under] is opposed to the phantasm [i.e., the appearance] as a cause to its effect, that is to say relatively. (L Appendix i.65: 1170–1172; emphases added)

Thus while substances are not perceived by any of the senses, and hence there can be no direct conception or image-idea capturing what they are like in themselves, it is still possible to refer to them by way of a relational kind of thought. The thought of such-and-such a substance will be the cognitive correlate of the definite description ‘the x that stands as cause and underlying subject of such-and-such sensible appearances’—in Hobbes’s specific example, the x, whatever it is, that is the cause and underlying subject of this particular instance of whiteness.⁹ In the manuscript work Anti-White (composed in the early 1640s), Hobbes is explicit that he allows the existence of inconceivable beings, God among them.

⁹ For an analysis of the pervasive role of inferred existents and supposed beings (conceivable and inconceivable, real and fictional) in Hobbes’s philosophy of logic, science, and religion, see Robert McIntyre, “Concerning ‘men’s affections to Godward’: Hobbes on the First and Eternal Cause of all Things,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 54 (2016), 547–571: 557–569. See also Alan Cromartie, “The God of Thomas Hobbes,” The Historical Journal 52 (2008), 857–879: 868–869.

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 ’     Two types of ens are recognized. There are the entia of which we retain some kind of picture in the mind. For instance, we can conjure up a man, an animal, a tree, a stone, in fact . . . any kind of object at all. There are other entia of which we have no picture in the mind, so that a man is quite unable to perceive or to imagine them. God and the angels, the good as well as the evil, can be neither perceived nor embraced within our imagination. . . . But since philosophy is in no way allowed to decide or dispute in matters outside man’s capacity, and since we shall not define the ens which we cannot cannot conceive, and which is usually termed ‘incorporeal substance,’ we shall define only the ens that is conceivable. (AW 27.1)

Here Hobbes could hardly be clearer that he allows the existence of beings “of which we have no picture in the mind,” and which cannot be “embraced within our imagination.” Moreover, despite some commentarial speculation that AntiWhite might sometimes experiment with philosophical strategies that Hobbes later abandons,¹⁰ it is worth noting that this passage, at least, is entirely consistent with all the published works. In particular, both Hobbes’s insistence that the natures of inconceivable beings are beyond our human capacity, and his lawyerly hedge that such beings are “usually termed” incorporeal (but perhaps for all that he says here, may or may not actually be incorporeal), are of a piece with the wellknown passage at the beginning of De Corpore (1655) in which Hobbes excludes those things whose composition or generation we cannot conceive from the possibility of any philosophical understanding or account, and explicitly lists among these excluded things God, the angels, and “all such things as are thought to be neither Bodies, nor properties of Bodies” (DCo 1.8, emphasis added). And the passage from in Anti-White also squares well with Hobbes’s familiar characterizations of God as an invisible power behind the great frame of nature—a being of which we have no sense-perception, and hence, presumably, which we cannot conceive in any direct, sensory-encounter simulating way (L 6.36: 86, DH 12.5). So my hypothesis is that (i) Hobbes holds that the deity is inconceivable in the sense that we can form no image-idea or mind-picture of its intrinsic nature; but that, far from being committed to semantic atheism, (ii) he also holds we can form a relational, reference-securing thought of the deity as the x, whatever its intrinsic nature might be, that produced the humanly comprehensible world. Moreover, (iii) he holds that this relational thought is ultimately explicable through a play of mental imagery assisted by language, giving us an understanding of the uniquely referring relational expression ‘the cause of the humanly comprehensible world.’ ¹⁰ Edwin Curley, “Religion and Morality in Hobbes,” in Jules L. Coleman and Christopher Morris, Rational Commitment and Social Justice: Essays for Gregory Kavka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 90–121: 107–108, Stewart Duncan, “Hobbes’s Materialism in the Early 1640s,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 3 (2005), 437–448: 444–445, 448.

      

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The evidence favoring this interpretation includes, first, the analogy with Hobbes’s treatment of the other kinds of inconceivable phenomena that we can successfully refer to, including inconceivable sensations, inconceivable objects of hope and fear, and inconceivable substances such as the posited subject of a certain instance of whiteness. Such cases illustrate Hobbes’s distinction between “imagining, that is, having an idea” of something—i.e, framing an image or mind-picture of its intrinsic character—versus “using a process of reason to infer something exists,” or “establish[ing] [the existence of something] solely by reasoning”—i.e., concluding that something exists, perhaps without any imagistic representation of its intrinsic character but merely by way of a relational kind of thought (TSO 125, 130). A second piece of evidence points to Hobbes’s more careful statements regarding our inability to conceive of God. As we have seen, on several occasions he says without qualification that we can have no idea or image of God (TSO 127, 129, 130), or that God is “unconceivable” or “incapable of being conceived” (EL 11.11, TSO 127). But on other occasions he qualifies this kind of talk, making it clear that he means only to say that we can frame no idea of God’s nature—which I understand as the position that we can form no idea or thought representing the deity’s intrinsic character, leaving open the possibility that we might yet be able to frame a relational thought referring to this being. A good example is the passage in Leviathan in which Hobbes argues that sustained reflection on the regress of causes will lead humans to posit a God. [I]t is impossible to make any profound enquiry into naturall causes, without being enclined thereby to believe there is one God Eternall; though they cannot have any Idea of him their mind, answerable to his nature. . . . [B]y the visible things of this world, and their admirable order, a man may conceive there is a cause of them, which men call God; and yet not have an Idea, or Image of him in his mind. (L 11.25: 160: emphasis added)

We can frame no idea of God “answerable to his nature.” But the passage shows that Hobbes regards this human limitation as entirely consistent with our thinking—and even “conceiv[ing],” in some sense of ‘conceive’¹¹—that “there is a cause of [the visible things of this world], which men call God.” Or similarly consider the following passage from Elements of Law, which immediately follows upon Hobbes’s programmatic assertion that “by all names we ought to have some meaning and conception,” including “the most blessed name of G” (EL 11.1). Forasmuch as God Almighty is incomprehensible, it followeth that we can have no image or conception of the Deity; and consequently all his attributes signify

¹¹ See note 8.

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 ’     our inability and defect of power to conceive any thing concerning his nature, and not any conception of the same, excepting only this: that there is a God. (EL 11.2, first emphasis added)

Our incapacity is that we cannot form any conception capturing God’s nature, “excepting only this, that there is a God,” where ‘God’—“[a]nd this is it which all men call by the name of G”—refers to the great cause behind nature, “the first power of all powers, and first cause of all causes” (EL 11.2). The distinction between our conceiving of God’s nature versus thinking of him merely in terms of the relation he bears to the world is also at work in De Homine, as when Hobbes states that “questions about the nature of God, the creator of nature, are excessive inquisitive” (DH 14.4). We should not speculate about God’s nature, Hobbes tells us. But in the same breath he employs a uniquely referring expression (“the creator of nature”) that picks out the being he is talking about in relational terms. Third, Hobbes’s analogy between a blind man’s inability to imagine the shape and color of the fire that warms him and the human inability to imagine the nature of the cause of the humanly comprehensible world (TSO 127) confirms that he intends God’s ‘inconceivability’ to be consistent with our being able to refer to this mysterious being by way of a roundabout, relational kind of thought. Indeed, Hobbes’s position on this question should not really be any great mystery. The essential point of this analogy, which Hobbes repeats in three different works (Elements of Law, the Third Set of Objections, and Leviathan, on each occasion when presenting the line of thought that leads human enquirers to posit a great cause of nature), is precisely this: that the human mind can frame a relational, reference-securing thought of God as the cause of the humanly comprehensible world even while it cannot frame any conception of this being’s intrinsic nature. [A]ll men that will consider, may naturally know that God is, though not what he is; even as a man born blind, though it be not possible for him to have any imagination what kind of thing is called fire; yet he cannot but know that something there is that men call fire, because it warmeth him. (EL 11.2) A man born blind, who has often approached fire and felt hot, recognizes that there is something which makes him hot; and when he hears that this is called ‘fire’ he concludes that fire exists. But he does not know what shape or color fire has, and has absolutely no idea or image of fire that comes before his mind. The same applies to a man who recognizes that there must be some cause of his images or ideas, and that this cause must have a prior cause, and so on; he is finally led to the supposition of some eternal cause . . . But he has no idea which he can say is the idea of that eternal being; he merely gives the name or label ‘God’ to the thing that he believes in, or acknowledges to exist. (TSO 127; see also L 11.25: 160)

      

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Hobbes is simplifying and must mean only to say that a blind man can frame no vision-emulating, sight-derived idea or image of fire. But with that qualification, the point of the analogy between the blind man’s thought of the whatever-it-is that produces warmth (the thing called ‘fire’) and human thought of the whatever-it-is that caused the humanly comprehensible world (the thing called ‘God’) is plain enough. We can refer to the unknown cause of some known effect, even while we have no idea what that unknown cause is like in itself. Finally, what of my suggestion that Hobbes regards the relational, referencesecuring thought of God as being explicable simply in terms of a play of mental images assisted by language? Hobbes does not offer us any account of the specific mental or linguistic mechanisms that enable this particular relational thought. But we know that he holds that predication and thought about general kinds of things depend on “Names Universall” (or, as we might say, general terms) being introduced in our language, where “[o]ne Universall name is imposed on many things, for their similitude in some quality, or other Accident” (L 4.8: 52, 4.7:52). Moreover, once we have such universal names at our disposal (including, inter alia, the universal name ‘cause’), we can use them to refer to things by an “Indefinite Name”—a name that supplies some descriptive, predicative content but is “of uncertaine signification, because the Hearer knowes not what thing [i.e., what particular thing] it is the Speaker would have him conceive” (DCo 2.11). The device of indefinite names permits definite descriptions. For example, employing the general term ‘cause,’ a speaker might use the expression ‘the cause of Colonel Mustard’s death in the library’ as an indefinite name in order to refer to the thing, whatever it was, that killed the Colonel, and perhaps without the speaker having any conception of the intrinsic nature of the cause here referred to. And so likewise, one might use the expression ‘the cause of the humanly comprehensible world’ as an indefinite name without having any conception of the intrinsic nature of the being in question. Mental images of particular examples of causes might accompany our understanding of the universal name ‘cause,’ and we must be able to picture paradigmatic exemplars if we understand the word. And imagery might accompany, or constitute, our understanding of the expression ‘the humanly comprehensible world.’¹² But for Hobbes, with the linguistic device of universal and indefinite names, there will be no need for any further representational faculty besides the imagination to explain our understanding of this referring expression,

¹² Moreover, Hobbes might also allow that we sometimes use mental images as placeholders to help us keep track of our referring thoughts, even where we can frame no image of the actual nature of the thing to which we refer, in much the same way that the mark or sound ‘x’ sometimes stands proxy for an unknown referent. For instance, he reports that when thinking about angels (i.e., invisible agents of God’s will, which “we believe in, or suppose to exist”), he might conjure mental imagery of “a flame” or “a beautiful child with wings”; but “I feel sure that this has no likeness to an angel, and hence that it is not an idea of angel” (TSO 126–127). For discussion, see McIntyre, “Concerning ‘men’s affections to Godward,’ ” 559–560.

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 ’    

even while we can form no idea-image or mind-picture capturing the nature of the great cause itself.¹³

4.4 God’s Corporeal Existence God’s nature is inconceivable, meaning that we can frame no conception or mindpicture of the nature of this being in the human imagination. Does that preclude our knowing anything about God’s nature? In various texts Hobbes insists that the only thing we can know about the nature of this entity is the fact that it exists. However, in other texts Hobbes adds that God is a body or corporeal substance. On the face of it, this appears to be a substantive claim about God’s nature, and moreover one with further implications that we might hope to tease out, as we already know a good deal about the character of corporeal substances, their geometrical, mereological, and causal-dynamical properties, and so on. In this last section of the chapter, I examine Hobbes’s purposes in talking of God as a corporeal substance. I argue that Hobbes’s assertions here are better understood as an emphatic and reverence-expressing way of insisting on the fact of God’s existence, rather than as an attempt to say anything genuinely informative about the actual nature of this indecipherable being. To be clear: I do not mean to suggest that Hobbes might secretly suspect that God is an incorporeal substance. Hobbes is firm that incorporeal substances are impossible, and that the expression ‘incorporeal substance’ is a contradiction in terms (L 4.21: 60). Rather, my proposal is just that Hobbes holds that we know nothing about the cause of the humanly incomprehensible world besides the fact that it exists, that whatever nature or mode of existence it has may be beyond human categories of language and thought, and that it might bear no meaningful analogy to the empirical phenomena from whence we derive our concept of corporeal nature. The point is to renounce all descriptive speculation about the nature of God, and to insist only on its incomprehensibility. We can and should call the great cause ‘corporeal,’ but only to affirm its existence, not to offer any further descriptive claim about it. If we are speaking with the license and seal of natural human reason, then barely any of our talk about the attributes of God will be descriptively rather than honorifically intended.¹⁴ Indeed, in an important passage that appears first in De Cive and then in a close translation in Leviathan, Hobbes tells us that natural ¹³ A further advantage of this interpretation is that it permits us to explain how Hobbes can define “ ” as involving a kind of “Feare of power invisible, feigned by the mind” where the power that we imagine “is truly such as we imagine” (L 6.36: 86), while also stating elsewhere that we cannot actually imagine or form any mind-picture of God. For discussion of this point, see Chapter 8, Section 8.1. ¹⁴ See Chapter 2, Section 2.1 for discussion of this expressivist treatment of religious language.

      

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human reason permits us to apply just two names to God with descriptive and truth-apt intent—two names that comprehend all that we can say of the deity in literal rather than merely honorific terms. Here again we see the distinction between God’s nature and his relational place, albeit this time in a more heightened Biblical language: Hee that will attribute to God, nothing but what is warranted by naturall Reason, must [use attributes] . . . in such sense, as if he meant not to declare what he is, (for that were to circumscribe him within the limits of our Fancy [i.e., our imagination],) but how much wee admire him, and how ready we would be to obey him; which is a signe of Humility, and of a Will to honour him as much as we can: For there is but one Name to signifie our Conception of his Nature, and that is  : and but one Name of his Relation to us, and that is God; in which is contained Father, King, and Lord. (L 31.28: 566, first two emphases added; compare also DCi 15.14)

Taking these names in reverse order, there is on the one hand a single “Name of his Relation to us.” That relation-specifying name is “God,” where by ‘God,’ as Hobbes defines the word one page earlier, “is understood the cause of the World” (L 31.15: 564). So this name gives us our relational characterization and referencefixing definite description of the deity as the being, whatever its nature, that caused the world—and consequently as a being that is worthy of our most profound veneration (for ‘God’ “contain[s] Father, King, and Lord”). On the other hand, we have “but one Name to signifie our Conception of his Nature”—i.e., but one thing we can say about the intrinsic character of the being that stands to the world as cause to effect—“and that is  .” But this name simply announces God’s existence, and gives no further descriptive account of his intrinsic character: all that we can say about the nature of this being is that it exists. Other writings also confirm this assessment. Each of Hobbes’s major works addressing natural religion from the early 1640s through the late 1660s (i.e., Elements of Law, Anti-White, De Cive, the English Leviathan, and the Latin Leviathan) is explicit both that (i) God’s existence can be properly classified as part of his nature, and that (ii) existence is all that we can affirm of God’s nature if we would speak with the patent of natural human reason and in literal and truth-apt rather than honorific terms.¹⁵ And even where Hobbes does not speak ¹⁵ On points (i) and (ii) both: given that “propositions are a kind of language by which we express our concepts of the natures of things” and that “the nature of God is unfathomable,” Hobbes holds that “no proposition about the nature of God can be true save this one: God exists.” Similarly: “no title correctly describes the nature of God other than the word ‘being’ [ens]” (AW 35.16, emphases added; see also AW 27.8). Or again, Hobbes tells us that natural human reason licenses us to assign attributes to God only in order to “signify our inability . . . to conceive any thing concerning his nature, and not any conception of the same, excepting only this: that there is a God” (EL 11.2, first emphasis added). See also DCi 15.14, L 31.28: 566, L Latin variant 31.28, 567.

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explicitly of existence as the only knowable part of God’s nature,¹⁶ various other passages ratify his underlying position that all we can know of this being (besides its relational place) is the fact that it is real—“that we understand nothing of what he is, but only that he is” (L 34.4: 614; see also L 33.33: 568 and the final sentence of EL11.2). So it seems that all we can know of the divine nature is the fact that this being exists: that it is, as Hobbes puts it, a substance or an entity, not a phantasm or an empty name (L 46.16: 1079, L App i.72–73: 1174). Our task is to reconcile this refusal to speculate about the nature of the deity with the fact that in two works composed in the late 1660s Hobbes declares not simply that God exists, but also that God is a body or corporeal substance. Assuming that Hobbes’s usual definition of ‘corporeal substance’ applies, this would amount to the thesis that God is something real—i.e., something that exists independently of human imagination—that has spatial magnitude (L 43.2: 610, L App i.72–73: 1184, DCo 8.1; see also EL 11.4, AW 4.3). Hobbes did not openly endorse this eccentric-sounding and potentially scandalous thesis before 1668, though some had heard its footsteps in the attic. In Elements of Law (first circulated in 1640) and then more emphatically in the English Leviathan (1651), he had indeed rejected incorporeal substance in general as contradictory and unintelligible (EL 11.4, L 4.21: 60, L 12.7: 168, 34.2: 610).¹⁷ But in these works

¹⁶ Martinich and Mori each note that it is unusual to classify God’s existence as part of his nature. More commonly philosophers of Hobbes’s day would distinguish between a being’s existence on the one hand and its essence on the other (Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan, 196, Gianluca Mori, “Hobbes, Descartes, and Ideas: A Secrete Debate,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 50 (2012), 197–212: 206 n.44). However, despite Hobbes’s rejection of the essence-existence distinction (AW 28.5) and his self-conscious treatment of existence as a predicate (L App 1.4: 1144), it would be a mistake to see in this classification any inclination toward a ontological proof of God’s existence. (Ronald Hepburn speculatively flirts with this interpretation in “Hobbes on the Knowledge of God,” in Maurice Cranston and Richard Peters, ed., Hobbes and Rousseau: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 85–108: 90.) Hobbes is clear and consistent that there can be no aprioristic demonstration of the existence of anything, God included (AW 26.2); and as we saw in Chapter 3, Hobbes’s own case for positing God as the cause of the humanly comprehensible world is not a matter of a priori demonstration. To say that ‘God exists’ is simply to say that “God is something real, not a figment of the mind; a hypostasis, not a phantasm” (L 46.16: 1079), and so God can be defined (per the two truth-apt names that Hobbes allows) as a real being—i.e., a hypostasis or substance—that is the cause of world. But one can always ask whether there is in fact any being that satisfies this definition, and there is no demonstrable or verbal contradiction in denying it. For relevant discussion, see Arash Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Agnostic Theology before Leviathan,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (2017), 714–737: 732 n.14, McIntyre, “Concerning ‘men’s affections to Godward,’ ” 564–565, Mori, “Hobbes, Descartes, and Ideas,” 210 n.55. ¹⁷ According to a dismissive response that Descartes sent to Mersenne on January 21, 1641, Hobbes had raised issues “about the corporeal nature of the soul and God [de animâ et Deo Corporeis], . . . and other matters” in a long letter to Descartes dated November 5, 1640 (René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, tr. John Cottingham, Robert Stoodhoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), iii. 288). With the letter lost and little in the way of a direct response on this point from Descartes, it is unclear in what spirit Hobbes had raised the topic of a corporeal God, though given that he was never on friendly terms with Descartes, it seems unlikely that he would have openly confessed to such a potentially compromising position. For useful discussion, see Agostino Lupoli, Nei Limiti della Materia. Hobbes e Boyle: materialismo espistemologico, filosofia corpusculare e dio corporeo (Milan: Baldini Catoldi Dalai, 2006), 523–524 and Patricia Springborg

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he did not address the specific question of whether we must therefore regard God as a corporeal being, deflecting from the issue by emphasizing that the nature of God is entirely beyond human comprehension (EL 11.4, L 12.7: 168, L 34.4: 614), and by pointing out that it is perfectly unobjectionable to call God ‘incorporeal’ so long as such talk is not intended to describe but simply to give honor.¹⁸ Nevertheless, theological critics of the English Leviathan seized upon Hobbes’s rejection of incorporeal substance in general, and used it to press the charge that he is committed by obvious implication to the thesis that God is corporeal, if indeed he allows that God exists at all.¹⁹ Hobbes replies to this charge in three separate works in the 1660s. In Mr. Hobbes Considered in his Loyalty, Religion, and Manners (1662), a riposte to the Oxford mathematician John Wallis, he still does not openly commit to the doctrine of God’s corporeality. Instead he emphasizes, accurately enough, that the consistent view throughout his writings—“the Doctrine that Mr Hobbes hath written, both in his Leviathan, and his Book de Cive, and when occasion serves, maintains”—is that we should not talk about God’s nature with any descriptive intent, but simply in order to give him honorific titles (C 32). Nevertheless, Mr. Hobbes Considered does openly attack the doctrine of an incorporeal God for the first time—asserting that it not only has no basis in reason or scripture, but also that it threatens to reduce God to a mere phantasm of the mind akin to “those thin Inhabitants of the brain [one] see[s] in sleep” (C 32). It is not until 1668 with the appendices to the Latin Leviathan and again in An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall (composed in 1668, published posthumously in 1682) that Hobbes explicitly endorses the thesis that God is a corporeal substance (L App 3.6: 1228,

“Hobbes’s Challenge to Descartes, Bramhall and Boyle: A Corporeal Deity,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20 (2012) 903–934: 910–911. In Anti-White, composed in the early 1640s, Hobbes asserts that God lacks spatial magnitude (AW 27.1), which by Hobbes’s own lights would entail that God is not corporeal. However, he immediately problematizes this assertion by stating in the next sentence that philosophy should avoid “matters outside man’s capacity” and adds, perhaps with suspicious precision, that he has no intention to define the sort of being, such as God, “that we cannot conceive and which is usually termed ‘incorporeal substance’ ” (AW 27.1, emphasis added and translation slightly adapted). And as we have seen, Anti-White will also go on to categorically disallow all descriptively intended claims “about the nature of God . . . save this one: God exists” (AW 35.16). ¹⁸ If worshippers do “give him such a title [i.e., ‘Incorporeall Substance’]” they ought properly to do so “not Dogmatically, with intention to make the Divine Nature understood; but Piously, to honour him with attributes, of significations, as remote as they can be from the grossenesse of Bodies Visible” (L 12.7: 168; see also EL 11.4, L 46.15: 1078). ¹⁹ Alexander Ross, Leviathan drawn out with a hook, or Animadversions upon Mr. Hobbs his Leviathan (1653), 35–36, 87, Seth Ward, In Thomae Hobbii philosophiam exercitation epistolica (Oxford, 1656), 340, John Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes . . . With an Appendix concerning The Catching of Leviathan, Or the great Whale (London: 1658) 471–472, Henry More, The immortality of the soul, so farre forth as it is demonstrable from the knowledge of nature and the light of reason (1659), 56–65. Similar charges appear in the following decades, in works following the Latin Leviathan such as Cudworth, True Intellectual System, i. 66–69 and Tenison, Creed of Mr. Hobbes Examined, 11–12, 14–15, 27.

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AB 31, 40, 131), and in each of these works he also strongly implies that the only alternative to a corporeal God is no God at all.²⁰ Hobbes’s declaration that God is a corporeal substance is unconventional to say the least. Numerous commentators from Hobbes’s day to ours have taken it at face value as a substantive claim about God’s nature—as an informative description of the character of the cause of the humanly comprehensible world that that goes beyond the bare assertion that some such cause (of whatever nature) exists. These commentators can be divided into two groups. On the one hand, there are those who regard Hobbes as sincerely endorsing the hypothesis of a corporeal God, a deity with a bodily nature and material properties. Perhaps Hobbes means to present us with a rational theism (or, as it might be, a rational deism, pantheism, or panentheism) fit for the modern age and the austere new mathematical physics, purged of the ghostly presences, transubstantial magic, and incorporeal powers that have been conjured by the superstitious imagination and nurtured by deceiving (and self-deceiving) priests. He might, for instance, be envisaging God as a kind of rarefied fluid that pervades his creation, or perhaps as some sort of materialistically understood pantheistic deus sive natura.²¹ On the other hand, there are those who regard Hobbes as an atheist whose declarations in favor of a corporeal deity are simply a pretense. Perhaps it is a pretense that offers a kind of plausible deniability when the atheistic consequences of his materialism are brought to public attention. Or perhaps it is a pretense intended to signal his own covert atheism to an elite audience who can read between the lines and see that Hobbes intends the doctrine of God’s corporeality to contradict other assertions that he makes about the divine nature (regarding its infinitude, say, or partlessness, or lack of determinate figure), and that his whole theology is therefore pregnant with deliberate absurdity.²²

²⁰ In the dialogue between ‘A’ and ‘B’ in the Appendix to the Latin Leviathan: “A: . . . he [i.e., Hobbes] denies that there are any incorporeal substances. What is this if not to deny that God exists, or to assert that God is a body? / B: He does indeed assert that God is a body” (L App 3.5–6: 1228). “[T]o say that God is an Incorporeal Substance, is to say in effect there is no God at all” (AB 30). ²¹ A. Lupoli, “Fluidismo e Corporeal Deity nella filosofia naturale di Thomas Hobbes: a proposito dell’Hobbesiano Dio delle Cause,” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 54 (1999), 573–609, Dominique Weber, Hobbes et le Corps de Dieu (Paris: Vrin, 2009), 79–97, 99–103, Geoffrey Gorham, “The Theological Foundations of Hobbesian Physics: A Defense of Corporeal God,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (2013), 240–261) and “Mixing Bodily Fluids: Hobbes’s Stoic God,” Sophia 53 (2014), 33–49. ²² Douglas Jesseph, “Hobbes’s Atheism,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26 (2002), ed. Peter French, 140–166: 142–146, Patricia Springborg “Hobbes’s Challenge to Descartes, Bramhall and Boyle: A Corporeal Deity,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20 (2012) 903–934: 916–917, 921, 924, and “Calvin and Hobbes: A Reply to Curley, Martinich and Wright,” Philosophical Readings 4 (2012), 3–17: 6, 9, Edwin Curley, “ ‘I durst not write so boldly,’ or, How to Read Hobbes’ theologicalpolitical treatise,” in Hobbes e Spinoza, Scienza e politica, ed. Daniela Bostrenghi, intro. by Emilia Giancotti (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992), 497–593: 586–588, and “Hobbes versus Descartes,” in Roger Ariew and Marjorie Greene, ed., Descartes and his Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 97–109: 105–108. Compare also Devin Stauffer, Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018), 122–125.

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I reject both the physico-theological and the covertly atheistic interpretations of Hobbes’s talk about the corporeal nature of God. Hobbes’s declarations that God is a corporeal substance should not be read as presenting any descriptive claim about the intrinsic nature of this being (whether sincerely, per the physicotheological interpretation, or insincerely, per the covertly atheistic interpretation)—or at least, no descriptive claim that goes beyond a bare affirmation of its existence. Instead, these declarations are intended only as a way of emphasizing that this inconceivable and incomprehensible great cause does indeed exist. We humans can only conceive (i.e., frame a mental image) of something existing insofar we picture it as corporeal, and although this is a fact about our own representational powers rather than a fact about the actual nature of the unknowable great cause (AW 7.6), our calling this being ‘corporeal’ serves as a way of forcibly expressing the point that we regard it as a real thing, and decidedly not as a fiction of the human mind. To talk in this way is not to advance an informatively descriptive claim about the actual character of God, but simply to insist, in appropriately assertive and vigorous terms, on the fact of his existence. A properly assertive emphasis on fact of the deity’s existence will also tend to give God honor, especially in conversational contexts where that existence might otherwise be in doubt (DCi 15.14, L 31.14: 564). In this way God’s ‘corporeality’ can also be regarded as another attribute of divine honor, i.e., as an honorific title that we properly give to the deity in order to display our reverence before it, rather than in an attempt to delineate its nature in literal and truth-apt terms.²³ Granted, we might also ascribe incorporeality to God for honorific purposes in certain conversational contexts (“as a signification of our reverence, who desire to abstract from him all corporeal grossness” (EL 11.4; see also L 12.7: 168, 46.15: 1078)). But in other contexts, particularly those in which the question of his existence is to the fore, the attribution of corporeality will better demonstrate our esteem.²⁴ In favor of this interpretation we might note, first, that it makes Hobbes’s declarations of God’s corporeality in the two 1668 works consistent with his general account of talk about the divine attributes as presented in all his major works addressing natural religion (AW 27.8, 35.16, DCi 15.14, L 31.13–28: 564–566, QLNC 334, C 31–32). In those works, Hobbes is clear that we should assign attributes to the deity with honorific rather than descriptive intent. He is ²³ This reading of Hobbes’s talk about God’s ‘corporeality’ is in broad alignment with Cees Leijenhorst, “Hobbes’ Corporeal Deity,” Rivista di storia della filosafia 1 (2004), 73–95, and “Hobbes, Heresy, and Corporeal Deity,” in John Brooke and Ian Maclean, ed., Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 193–222, Cromartie, “The God of Thomas Hobbes,” 878–879, and Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Agnostic Theology,” 717–718. ²⁴ Hobbes has no concern about our using apparently contradictory terms such as ‘corporeal’ and ‘incorporeal’ in order to honor God in different circumstances, as different words can give honor in different conversational contexts. Moreover, there can be no genuine contradiction among statements when “the words under discussion are not the propositions of people philosophizing but the actions of those who pay homage. A contradiction is found, [wherever one is found,] in propositions [i.e., truthapt statements] alone” (AW 35.16). See Chapter 2, Sections 2.1 and 2.3 for further discussion.

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also clear that theologians who do attempt to literally describe God’s inconceivable nature are both ignoring the limitations of natural human reason and are speaking impertinently in “inconsiderate, and vain abuses of his Sacred Name” (L 31.33: 568; compare also L 46.23: 1086). No exception is mentioned for talk about divine corporeality, any more than it is for talk about the divine understanding, wisdom, justice, partlessness, immutability and the rest. This same honorific account of talk about the divine attributes is reasserted in the 1668 Latin Leviathan (L Latin variant 31.13–28: 565–567), which is to say, a work that includes in its new Appendix one of Hobbes’s two explicit declarations that God is a corporeal being. Moreover, later in the very same paragraph that contains that famous declaration—i.e., that “He does indeed assert that God is a body” (L App 3.6: 1228, with ‘B’ speaking of Hobbes in the third person)—Hobbes again makes his customary move of determining whether or not any proposed attribute should be ascribed to the deity by appealing to the controlling principle whether such an ascription would give honor.²⁵ So if we are to apply Hobbes’s own account of religious language to his own words, then his declarations of God’s corporeal nature should also be understood as honorific in intent, not as attempts to describe the indescribable. Second, the proposed interpretation makes Hobbes’s declarations of God’s corporeality consistent with his view that the only thing that humans can know of God’s nature is the fact that this being exists—that it real, a substance or entity, not a figment of the mind. This view also appears in all the major works addressing natural theology (EL 11.2, AW 27.8, 35.16, DCi 15.14, L 31.28: 566); and again that includes its ratification in the 1668 Latin Leviathan.²⁶ But it is consistent with the declaration that God is a corporeal being only if that declaration imports no descriptive information about God besides the fact that he exists. On this point it is worth noting that Hobbes chastises Wallis for endorsing the theory of divine incorporeality on the grounds that one ought not offer any descriptive account at all of the incomprehensible divine nature at all.²⁷ But that same objection would apply equally to Hobbes’s own 1668 declarations that God is a corporeal being, if those declarations convey any substantive description beyond a bare (if perhaps emphatic and reverence-expressing) affirmation of God’s existence. Or again, in An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall, Hobbes

²⁵ “Those who attribute purity to God are indeed right to do so; for it does him honour. But it is dangerous to attribute to him tenuousness, as that is one of the steps on the way to nothingness” (L App 3.6: 1230, emphasis added). ²⁶ God “has one name unique to his nature,  ” (L Latin variant 31.28, 567, translation slightly adapted). ²⁷ “Is not Mr Hobbes his way of Attributing to God, that only which the Scriptures attribute to him”—for honorific reasons, as Hobbes had just explained, in order to provide “expressions of reverence” that “Scripture hath approved for honourable”—“or what is never any where taken but for honour, better than this bold undertaking of yours [i.e., Wallis’s], to consider and decypher God’s nature to us?” (C 33–34, 31–32).

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remains firm that “the Divine substance” is beyond human comprehension,²⁸ and the driving motivation behind his assertions that God is a corporeal substance in An Answer seems plainly to be (i) to ensure that he is speaking of the deity in a properly respectful way,²⁹ and (ii) to confirm that his view is that this being is unquestionably real: He that holds there is a God, and that God is really somewhat (for Body is doubtlessly a real Substance) is as far from being an Atheist, as is possible to be. But he that says God is an Incorporeal Substance, no man can be sure whether he be an Atheist or not. For no man living can tell whether there be any Substance at all, that is not also Corporeal. For neither the word Incorporeal, nor Immaterial, nor any word equivalent to it is to be found in Scripture, or in Reason. (AB 129–130)

Here the payoff and, I suggest, the point of Hobbes asserting that God is corporeal—at least in contexts where he is being pressed about his commitment to God’s existence, as Hobbes was before making his two 1668 declarations in favor of divine corporeality—is that such talk makes it plain that the holds God to be “really somewhat.” By contrast, those who talk like “the exorcists in the Church of Rome” in terms of an incorporeal divinity leave the matter uncertain, if they do not positively reduce God to a “Phantasm,” a “Spright,” or “nothing at all” (AB 130).³⁰ Third, as is well known, in the same passage in the Appendix in which Hobbes announces that God is a corporeal substance, he cites the authority of Tertullian as a precedent. Less often remarked on is the fact that the particular statement from Tertullian that Hobbes quotes as prefiguring his own view is actually quite permissive: “Every substance is a body of its own kind” (“Omnis substantia est Corpus sui generis,” L App 3.6: 1228, emphasis added).³¹ This is potentially a more accommodating and open-minded position than is usually attributed to Hobbes,

²⁸ “I cannot conceive nor comprehend either the Divine substance, or the way of its operation” (AB 18). Hobbes might seem to be describing God’s nature in An Answer when he characterizes the deity as “a Perfect, Pure, Simple, Infinite Substance” (AB 26). But consistent with Hobbes’s usual treatment of religious language, these attributes will be intended merely as honorifics. It is also worth noting that his ascription of this string of attributes to God comes in reply to Bramhall’s assertion (which Hobbes had just previously quoted) that genuine Christians regard God as “a perfect, pure, simple, indivisible, infinite Essence” (AB 24). ²⁹ “[O]ut of this that God is a Spirit corporeal and infinitely pure, there can no unworthy or dishonourable consequences be drawn” (AB 131). ³⁰ Here I agree with Cromartie, “The God of Thomas Hobbes,” 878–879. ³¹ As Noel Malcom observes in his editorial apparatus (L 1228, note g), Hobbes appears to be quoting from Tertullian’s De Carne Christi, while misidentifying his source as Tertullian’s Adversus Praxeam. In fact Hobbes had previously quoted what appears to be the same passage in Mr. Hobbes Considered (if rendered slightly differently, as “omne quod est, corpus est sui generis [ . . . ] that is to say, whatsoever is anything, is a body of its kind”), where again his point was that the thesis of a corporeal God is authorized by this respectable Church Father. In Mr. Hobbes Considered, Hobbes correctly attributes the passage to De Carne Christi (C 37).

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for it is arguable that the qualification “of its own kind” cancels any implication that we might be able to understand God’s ‘corporeal’ nature by analogy with other things that we call corporeal. In other words, the statement from Tertullian that Hobbes presents as a pattern of his own position need not be read as entailing that God has the same sort of material, bodily nature that we find in other things we call corporeal. Certainly, this sort of permissive interpretation of Tertullian’s words was possible for Hobbes’s contemporaries, for the seventeenth-century Cambridge theologian John Templer read Tertullian in just such a way, arguing that it was a mistake to interpret him as affirming that God is a ‘body’ (or ‘corpus’) in the narrow sense of an extended, material being like the other bodies we know, rather than merely affirming the more abstract proposition that God has some sort of “bare essence and substance.”³² Fourth, an experimentum crucis: if Hobbes intended his assertion that the deity is a corporeal substance to convey genuine descriptive content beyond a bare affirmation of this being’s existence, then that assertion should have further implications for how we think about the deity’s properties. For instance, if Hobbes holds that we should think of the deity as a corporeal substance with material, bodily properties along the lines of other bodies we know, consequences should follow for God’s spatial, mereological, and causal-dynamical character. Whatever we can prove of bodies in general will hold true of God, the great cause, in particular. But Hobbes refuses any such extrapolative consequences in the case of God. The deity remains as incomprehensible as ever, and Hobbes’s willingness to say that it is a corporeal being is in this sense entirely inert. Hobbes of course regarded himself as a pioneer of the new mathematical physics and wrote two large treatises examining the nature and workings of material body, the unpublished manuscript Anti-White (sometimes called ‘De Motu,’ i.e., ‘On Motion,’ composed in the early 1640s) and De Corpore, i.e., ‘On Body’ (1655). But in Jon Parkin points out that when wrestling with the implications of the English Leviathan for the nature of God, Hobbes’s critic Alexander Ross first suggested the identification of Hobbes’s position with Tertullian’s in his 1653 Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook, several years before Hobbes went on to cite the authority of Tertullian himself. So it is possible that Hobbes borrowed from Ross when making this connection (Ross, Leviathan Drawn Out with a Hook (London: 1653), 35–36); for discussion see Jon Parkin, “Hobbes on the Future of Religion,” in Lauren van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass, ed., Hobbes on Politics and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 184–201: 197). ³² Templer, a Fellow and quondam tutor of Dryden at Trinity College Cambridge, argues that Tertullian employs the term ‘body’ in two distinct ways: “for it is used either to indicate a passible nature, or the bare essence of a thing . . . When Tertullian calls God body, he uses ‘body’ in the latter significance, that is, to represent bare essence and substance.” Templer takes himself to be blocking what he regards as Hobbes’s appeal to Tertullian as a precedent for the view that God is a body in the narrow sense of an extended, material being. My suggestion is that Hobbes may need no such correction, and may only be citing Tertullian’s statement in order to license the position that we can properly say that God, the great cause, is a body, but without thereby implying that we know anything whatever of the nature of this being besides the fact that it exists (John Templer, Idea theologiae Leviathanis (1673), 34, quoted with useful discussion in Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 286).

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each of these works Hobbes is perfectly clear that the great cause stands beyond the subject matter and theoretical consequences of his materialist physics (AW 27.1, DCo 1.8). So Hobbes may indeed “assert [affirmat] that God is a body” (L App 3.6: 1228, emphasis added). But nothing actually follows from this assertion, and in fact Hobbes explicitly rejects the application of any of the physical theorems set out in his treatise entitled ‘On Body’ to this particular ‘body.’ Some body! Taking stock. Hobbes holds that we can meaningfully talk and think about the great cause by way of a uniquely referring definite description (and the cognitive correlate of this referring expression in thought) that picks this being out by way of its relational place. But notwithstanding his 1668 declarations that God is some kind of body, Hobbes does not allow us any genuinely descriptive account of this being’s intrinsic nature. Given his clear and consistent view that the intrinsic nature of God is totally unfathomable, the most plausible hypothesis is that in calling God a body, Hobbes does not mean to convey any substantive claim about the particular intrinsic character of the deity, but merely to underscore his conviction that this great cause is real, and to do so in a resounding and unmistakable way. His emphatic message is that a surpassingly powerful cause of the humanly comprehensible universe most assuredly exists, and that it is to be honored on account of that enormous power. But the intrinsic nature of this being is beyond human knowledge and conception. It is a permanent terra incognita, the proper object of our humbled reverence and awe, but not our descriptively intended, truth-apt speculation.

5 Love and Fear of an Inconceivable God In the previous chapter I considered the implications of Hobbes’s position that God is inconceivable for questions about human talk, thought, and knowledge about this being. I now turn to the question of religious emotion, and consider the implications of Hobbes’s position that God is inconceivable for questions about human passions that take, or purport to take, this great cause as their object. Hobbes advances the radical view that no human passion—i.e., no emotion, feeling, sentiment, or affective attitude, including love, fear, hate, and the rest— can genuinely be directed toward as inconceivable a being as the deity. Moreover, even if passions directed toward God were possible, other texts imply and even openly argue that the traditionally valorized religious passions of love and fear of God would be improper, being mawkish, superstitious, incontinent, and perhaps disrespectful. In the current chapter I document these various arguments problematizing passions that purport to take God as their object. Following Hobbes I focus on the specific passions of love and fear, but also, where appropriate, consider the implications for the passions more generally. Taking stock of the competing evidence, I argue that Hobbes avoids any genuine commitment to God-directed passions, even when it comes to the honor and worship that we are rationally required to show toward the deity. As we shall see, he radically redefines the sort of ‘love’ and ‘fear’ that we owe to God, and thereby presents us with an intellectualized form of natural religion purged of sentiment and performative faux-sentiment.

5.1 Love and Fear of God On the face of it, Hobbes certainly seems to endorse the conventional theistic view that human beings can love and fear God, and that they should love and fear him. In De Cive (1642) he approvingly cites what Christ called “the first and greatest commandment”: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22.37–38, quoted by Hobbes in DCi 17.8). All the worship that is mandated both by natural human reason and by Mosaic Law can be summarized, he says, purely as a matter of our loving God (DCi 17.8). Besides this, Hobbes’s highly original expressivist approach to talk about the divine attributes is founded on the principle that we ought to ascribe attributes to God simply in order to show how much we honor him, where “the opinion which is Honour” naturally prompts feelings of love and fear toward the Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion. Thomas Holden, Oxford University Press. © Thomas Holden 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871329.003.0005

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honoree, or so at least Hobbes tells us in De Cive.¹ Indeed, the underlying purpose of all our worship, whether through ritual, prayer, or other religious speech, is properly to show that God—i.e., “the cause of the world”—is “honoured, i.e., loved and feared” (DCi 15.14, 15.13; see also L 31.8–9: 560–562, DH 14.4). So it seems that we can love and fear God, the great cause, and that we should love and fear him. But there is an artfulness to Hobbes’s treatment of the traditional theistic injunction to love and fear God, or so I will argue. When Hobbes urges us to ‘love’ God, the attitude or stance that he is enjoining is a form of love in name only. In Elements of Law (composed 1640), Anti-White (composed in the early 1640s), and De Homine (1658) Hobbes problematizes the traditional duty to love God. These texts show that Hobbes has doubts about whether we can experience any passion, love and fear included, that are genuinely directed toward the great cause of nature. Moreover, these texts also show that Hobbes holds that, even if passions directed “to Godward” (EL 11.11) were in fact possible, love of this being, in the usual, straightforward sense of ‘love,’ would be inappropriate. Hobbes’s positive account of love and fear of God is crafted with these doubts in mind. In Elements of Law, De Cive, and De Homine, he redefines ‘love’ and ‘fear’ in the case of God, so that these terms become labels simply for obedience to God’s laws—i.e., the laws of nature, the standards of morality and enlightened self-interest—and not by any sort of feeling or affective attitude directed toward the first cause of all. The picture that emerges is of an intellectualized and unsentimental form of natural piety (i.e., the form of piety mandated simply by natural human reason, independently of any further religious practices mandated by the state)—one that involves an inward acknowledgement of the power of the first cause and is outwardly expressed through worship and conformity with the laws of nature, but which lacks the sort of God-directed affective feeling, emotion, or interpersonal sentiment that one would usually associate with religious ‘love’ and ‘fear.’ Commentators who favor a covertly atheistic reading might seize upon Hobbes’s redefinition of the ‘love’ and ‘fear’ that we owe to God as evidence of his irreligious intent. But the more plausible hypothesis is that Hobbes is sincere in regarding his revisionary form of natural piety as authentically religious. Most likely, he holds that his intellectualized form of natural piety—insistent on a rational recognition of the power of the first cause together with outward worship and obedience to the laws of nature, but properly removed from superstitious and anthropomorphizing religious emotions—does amount to a genuinely religious attitude.² ¹ “Properly speaking,  is nothing other than the opinion one has of the union of power and goodness in another person. . . . Three passions are stirred by the opinion which is Honour: Love, which relates to Goodness, and Hope and Fear which relate to power” (DCi 15.9; compare also L 31.9: 562). As we shall see below (Section 5.5), this definition needs to be set against others. ² There is little commentary on the issue of love and fear of God in Hobbes. But see Edwin Curley, “ ‘I durst not write so boldly,’ or, How to Read Hobbes’ Theological-Political Treatise,” in Daniela Bostrenghi, ed., Hobbes e Spinoza, Scienza e politica (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992), 497–593: 574 note 99, and Paul Cooke, Hobbes and Christianity (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 157.

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5.2 The Argument from Inconceivability Hobbes’s doubts about the possibility of humans experiencing love or, by implication, hate, fear, or any other passion directed toward God are set out in Elements of Law. This potentially scandalous argument from inconceivability (as I shall call it) does not appear in any of Hobbes’s authorized publications. However, it seems to be a straightforward consequence of the account of the passions one finds throughout Hobbes’s writings together with the thesis, which is also consistent across his work, that the great cause behind nature defies imagistic mental representation. For Hobbes, human passions such as love, hate, and fear are physiological, bodily responses to our ‘conceptions,’ i.e., our ideas, thoughts, or mental representations. They are surgings and ebbings of vital motion in the body, produced in reaction to the shifting conceptions in our minds, and felt as characteristic forms of pleasure and pain. Thus the passion of “love,” at the most comprehensive level of description (including all kinds of approval and pro-attitude), is just a certain kind of “motion about the heart,” experienced from the first-person point of view as “delight, contentment, or pleasure,” and which motion, or delight, is particularly named ‘love’ when we would relate it to the object responsible for causing it (EL 7.1; see also AW 30.23, L 6.1–3: 78–80). The same physiological response in the body may therefore be called ‘pleasure’ or ‘delight’ as it is felt in first-person experience, ‘love’ when we would name it with reference to the object responsible for producing it, or ‘appetite’ as that same motion stirs our animal endeavor to draw toward the pleasure-producing object: “So that pleasure, love and appetite, which is also called desire, are divers names for divers considerations of the same thing” (EL 7.2). So passions are bodily responses prompted by our conceptions. And our conceptions may themselves be looked at in two ways. From the third-person, physiological point of view, conceptions are simply so many material motions in the brain: reverberations in brain tissue that ultimately trace back (whether directly via current motion in the organs of sense, or indirectly by way of stored memories) to the original shockwave stimuli of sense-experience. Meanwhile from the first-person point of view, conceptions will appear as phantasmata, imagines, imaginationes, or memoriae of sensation: mental images or mind-pictures whose imagistic content is derived, in whole or part by palimpsestic part, from materials originally presented in sensory experience (EL 1.8, AW 30.3–5). The obstacle to our experiencing any passions directed toward God is that the deity is inconceivable—i.e., unimaginable, ‘un-image-able.’ Although Hobbes is clear that cosmological reflection on the regress of causes naturally leads us to the ‘supposition’ of some sort of great cause behind the humanly comprehensible universe (TSO 127; compare also EL 11.2, L 11.25: 160, 12.6: 166), he is equally

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clear that we can form no imagistic mental representation of this being whose existence we suppose (EL 11.2, TSO 127, AW 35.16, L 11.25: 160), possibly because this being is posited as responsible for and hence distinct from the entire humanly imaginable regress of causes.³ Hobbes underlines the point in his comparison between our cosmological speculations and the reflections of a blind man before a fire. Just as a man born blind may grant or even “know” that there is something there responsible for the heat he feels, even though “it be not possible for him to have any imagination what kind of thing is fire,” so likewise reflecting on the great regress of causes naturally leads us to posit a first cause, even though we “can have no image or conception” of this being which we postulate (TSO 127, EL 11.2, compare also L 11.25: 160). Hobbes states the problem for love of God as follows: Now concerning man’s affections to Godward, they are not the same always that are described in the chapter concerning passions. For there, to love is to be delighted with the image or the conception of the thing loved; but God is unconceivable; to love God, therefore, in the Scripture, is to obey his commandments, and to love one another. (EL 11.11)

As he had explained in “the chapter concerning passions” (i.e., EL chapter 7), love is a positive response to a conception or mental image of the thing beloved. But in that case love of the first cause of all, in any literal, straightforward sense of ‘love,’ is quite impossible. Hobbes immediately claims a scriptural license for this result, suggesting that in the Bible our love of God does not so much show itself in obedience to divine commands and our love for one another, as it is exhaustively constituted by such behavior: we are presented with a kind of reductive analysis, in which ‘love of God’ amounts to nothing more than love of neighbor and obedience to God’s commands. However tendentious or controversial this moment of scriptural interpretation might be,⁴ it confirms that Hobbes does intend the conclusion that love of God, in the usual or literal sense of ‘love,’ is impossible. Furthermore, as Hobbes hints in the first sentence of the passage, the problem that he identifies will generalize to all passions, since all passions are responses to ³ On the nature of ‘suppositions’ and inconceivable posits in Hobbes, see Robert McIntyre, “Concerning ‘men’s affections to Godward’: Hobbes on the First and Eternal Cause of all Things,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 54 (2016), 547–571: 557–570. ⁴ Hobbes is likely thinking of St. Paul’s readiness to treat an entire “fulfilling of the law” simply as a matter of love of neighbor, apparently either neglecting the commandment to love God, or treating it as if it were somehow contained in the commandment to love one’s neighbor (Galatians 5.14, Romans 13.8–10). Some twentieth–century theologians have developed this latter line of scriptural interpretation (Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, tr. Philip Watson (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 123–130, Gene H. Outka, Agape: An Ethical Analysis (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972), 44–52). But at least on the face of it, the gospels present Christ’s “first and greatest” commandment to love God as separate and distinct from his “second” commandment mandating love of neighbor (Matthew 22.37–40; compare also Deuteronomy 6.5–18).

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conceptions (if they are not themselves simply their own kind of conception⁵). And in his Objections to Descartes’s Meditations, published in 1641, Hobbes comes close to applying this point openly to fear of God when he begins his Sixth Objection with the assertion that “When someone . . . is afraid, he has an image [imaginem] of the thing that he fears” (TSO 128). A theologically sensitive reader would not have to look far to connect the dots and see the consequences for fear of God, since this assertion immediately follows Hobbes’s detailed case for the unimaginability of God (in his Fifth Objection) and precedes his making a similar claim about God’s inconceivability over again just two paragraphs later (in his Seventh Objection).⁶ Many believers do of course take themselves to experience literal love and fear of God. But it follows from Hobbes’s argument that such people must be misinterpreting their own sentiments. While one might experience love and fear before physical or mental imagery of a celestial patriarch or a mother with child, or toward the majesties of nature and the starry heavens above, Hobbes insists that such phenomena cannot properly be identified with the first cause of all or stand proxy for this imagination-transcending cosmological posit. “[W]e have no idea or image corresponding to the sacred name of God. And this is why we are forbidden to worship God in the form of an image; for otherwise we might think that we were conceiving of him who is incapable of being conceived” (TSO 127, emphasis added). Hobbes’s premises would have had their critics among seventeenth-century philosophers and theologians. An opponent of the argument from inconceivability might join Descartes in maintaining that, along with whatever imagistic mental representations we derive from experience, the human mind is also endowed with innate and non-imagistic ‘intellectual’ ideas, and that among these is an idea of God with sufficient representational content to engage our passions.⁷ Or one might hold with Locke that humans can construct a sufficiently detailed mental representation of the first cause from empirically derived ideas, framing a complex idea of the divine attributes by augmenting our everyday notions of causal power

⁵ In The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656), Hobbes treats passions as conceptions (or ‘imaginations’) that are taken in a certain way. “[A]ll the passions of the mind; are imaginations. . . . [T]o hope and fear are to imagine the things hoped for and feared. . . . when we hope or fear, we imagine things good or hurtful to ourselves” (QLNC 278–279). Whether or not this is ultimately a different analysis than the account in Elements of Law and Leviathan according to which passions are a kind of reaction to a conception, the essential point for our purposes remains clear: there can be no passion directed toward an object without a conception, i.e., an imagination or mental image, of that object. ⁶ In the Fifth Objection: “we have no idea or image . . . of God”; “[God] is incapable of being conceived”; “there is no idea of God in us.” In the Seventh: it “seems to be the case [that] we do not have an idea of God” (TSO 127, 129). ⁷ René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and trans. John Cottingham, Anthony Kenny, Dugald Murdoch, and Robert Stoothoff, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1991), ii. 132.

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and wisdom.⁸ Or, rejecting Hobbes’s nominalist metaphysics, one might join the Cambridge Platonist John Smith and the scholar-physician Thomas Browne in maintaining that the world discloses fragmentary glimmers of an abstract entity, the Form of Goodness or Beauty itself, which can in some sense be identified with God.⁹ Or perhaps one might join the metaphysical poet and divine Thomas Traherne in rejecting the premise that love must be attended by a cognitive representation of its object, at least when it comes to a kind of mystical adoration of the deity that can take hold of the heart (so Traherne tells us) absent any real descriptive or representational understanding of its object.¹⁰, ¹¹ Interestingly, in the later period of De Homine (1658) Hobbes seems to reverse himself and grant that passions can in fact be directed toward an object even in the absence of a conception of that object. Recall these remarks on the passions of hope and fear (which we already had occasion to cite in Chapter 4, Section 4.3 above): Even the most insubstantial arguments are sufficient for hope. Yea, even what the mind cannot truly conceive can be hoped for, if it can be expressed. Similarly anything can be feared even though it be not conceived of, provided that it is commonly said to be terrible, or if we should see many simultaneously fleeing; for, even though the cause be unknown, we ourselves also flee, as in those terrors that are called panic-terrors. For we believe that those that first fly have seen some danger as a cause for flight. (DH 12.4)

A thing might be hoped for or feared if it can be “expressed” or “said to be” worthy of hope of fear, even if we cannot conceive it. Likewise we can become afraid of a something-we-know-not-what if we see others recoil from it, even while we have no understanding of what it is they are recoiling from. So in De Homine Hobbes ⁸ John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1975), 2.17.1, 4.10.1, 4.10.6–7. ⁹ “All that is truely amiable is God, or as it were a divided piece of him, that retaines a reflex or shadow of himselfe” (Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1642/1643), in The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Penguin, 1977), 59–161: 159). “[T]rue religion never finds itself out of the infinite sphere of the Divinity, and wherever it finds beauty, harmony, goodness, love, ingenuousness, wisdom, holiness, justice and the like, it is ready to say, here, and there is God. Wheresoever any such perfections shine out, a holy mind climbs up by these sunbeams and raises itself up to God” (John Smith, Select Discourses (1660), excerpted in Gerald R. Cragg, ed., The Cambridge Platonists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 75–140: 129). ¹⁰ “[T]hough it be a maxim in the schools that there is no Love of a thing unknown, yet I have found that things unknown have a secret influence on the soul, and like the centre of the earth unseen violently attract it. We love we know not what . . . As iron at a distance is drawn by the loadstone, there being some invisible communications between them, so is there in us a world of Love to somewhat, though we know not what in the world that should be” (Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, ed. Bertram Dobell (London: P. J. and A. E. Dobell, 1950), 3. ¹¹ I survey the wider early modern debate over the relationship between the imagination and religious passions in Thomas Holden, Spectres of False Divinity: Hume’s Moral Atheism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 84–93.

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points to language use and our interpretation of others’ behavior in order to explain how our passions might become directed toward objects that we cannot picture imagistically.¹² Moreover in the next paragraph Hobbes goes on to explicitly consider certain religious passions: All men are of the opinion that there is an invisible something or invisible things, from which (accordingly as they be favourable or unfavourable) all goods are to be hoped and all evils are to be feared. For men, whose power is small, when they saw those enormous works, heaven and earth, the visible universe, the motion and intellect of animals of the most subtle devising, and the most ingenious fashioning of the organs, could not contemn their genius (since they can imitate none of them), and hence it is not to be wondered at that all good is expected from Him by whom the greatest things are made when he is gracious, and all evil when He is angered. And this is the emotion [affectus] that is called natural piety, and is the first foundation of all religions. (DH 12.5)

Here Hobbes allows that human passions of hope and fear might relate, in some way at least, not just to invisible gods and spirits acting within nature, but also to the cause of the entire “visible universe,” which presumably means God properly so called. So it might seem that Hobbes had come to abandon the position that passions directed toward God are impossible by the later period of De Homine. However, we should note that in DH 12.5 Hobbes does not present our hope and fear as directed toward the cause of the visible universe but rather toward the good and evil events that we regard as attributable to the activity of this being. Thus while DH 12.4 clearly allows that human passions can be directed toward certain inconceivable objects under certain conditions, DH 12.5 does not in fact present a case where our passions are directed toward the inconceivable great cause itself, and the kind of hope and fear that Hobbes characterizes here as constituting “natural piety” and “the first foundation of all religion” does not actually take God as its object. So what Hobbes says in De Homine is at least consistent with the denial of God-directed passions in the earlier works. I emphasize this point since two chapters further into De Homine, Hobbes will go on to radically redefine the ‘love’ and ‘fear’ that we properly owe to God, stripping them of the God-directed passional content we would usually associate with these words (DH 14.1–2, 14.5, discussed in Section 5.6 below)—which might suggest that Hobbes continues to have doubts in De Homine about whether human passions can genuinely take God ¹² In order to fill out this account, perhaps Hobbes could avail himself of the device of ‘indefinite names’ and the characterization of an object in terms of its relational place rather than its intrinsic character (discussed in Chapter 4, Section 4.3). The proposal would be that humans might be able to experience certain passions in response to the kind of reference-securing relational thought that we can form of certain objects, even when we are unable to form any conception of the intrinsic natures of those objects.

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as an object. But however that might be, Hobbes does imply that such passions are impossible in the early-1640s period of Elements of Law and the Objections to Descartes. Here at least the passions of Hobbes’s humans are unable to fix upon the great cause itself but can only attach to objects and events in the spate of natural causes pouring forth from this inconceivable divinity, just as Milton’s seraphim are unable to look directly upon God, but can only peek through their wings at the blazing corona of light that surrounds him.

5.3 The Argument from Propriety Hobbes’s argument from inconceivability purports to show that we cannot experience love in any literal sense (or, by implication, fear, or any other passion) “to Godward” (EL 11.11). But even if human love of God were possible, Hobbes has a further argument—call it the argument from propriety—suggesting that loving God as we love other persons would be impious and improper. The argument first appears in Anti-White when Hobbes attacks the Catholic philosopher Thomas White’s assertion that “Of necessity God loves himself.” For Hobbes, this pronouncement is pure speculation with no evidence or scriptural warrant behind it. It may also amount to an insult to the great cause, since necessitation implies a kind of weakness, and self-love can bleed into a vice (AW 31.9). But Hobbes continues his critique, and in so doing raises a general objection to love of God, whether it be God’s love of himself or human love of God: [W]hat is ‘to love’ if not ‘to wish well of ’? Or, how can someone ‘wish well’ of anyone except of a person for whom all is not well, or can be not well? Neither condition applies to God. (AW 31.9)

A variant of the argument also appears in De Homine: God is not to be loved by man, as man is by man. For we always understand by the love of man toward man either the desire for embraces or benevolence, both of which would be unsuitable for understanding love toward God. To love God is to keep His commandments gladly. (DH 14.2)

To love someone implies being benevolently disposed toward that person (or, in the equally problematic alternative added in De Homine, it implies a desire for their “embraces”). But for humans to adopt an attitude of benevolence toward God would be improper, since that patronizing, ameliorative stance implies that God may have flaws or imperfections. Despite any superficial appearance to the contrary, the current argument does not depend on the claim that we know, somehow, that the great cause has no flaws

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or imperfections, or that we can discern, somehow, that God is not someone for whom “all is not well.” In fact (as we have seen in previous chapters) Hobbes is clear that we know nothing whatsoever about the nature of the great cause apart from the fact that this being possesses the awesome power required to create the world, that being the reason we postulated this being in the first place. Still, in light of its awesome power, we should speak and act before this incomprehensible being only in the most reverential manner (DCi 15.11, L 31.13: 564). Our words and behavior before the great cause ought to display our humility and respect before this being as best we can, which means speaking of it only in terms that signify honor among humans (according the great cause honorific titles—“greatest, mightiest, highest,” “good, just, mighty, creator, king and so on”—as if they were so many divine attributes) and acting in ways that show “a disposition to give as much honour as one can” (DCi 15.14; compare also DCi 15.11; EL 11.3; AW 27.8, 35.16; L 31.28: 566, 568, 34: 614; EW 4: 426). The point is not to describe the indescribable, or to represent God’s incomprehensible nature in human words and ideas (for that “would be to confine him within the limits of our imagination” (DCi 15.14)), but simply to express our desire to honor this overwhelmingly powerful being as best we can in human words and actions. And we certainly ought not to speak or act in ways that dishonor the great cause, such as those that suggest it is weak, fallible, or is someone “for whom all is not well, or can be not well.” Plainly this argument from propriety is aimed at a narrower species of love than the argument from inconceivability. The current argument does not target love of God in the wider, comprehensive sense of love as defined in EL 7.1 that covers all kinds of approval and pro-attitude, and which would include, for instance, love of food, or love of music, neither of which involves any benevolence toward its object. The argument, if it is sound, will show merely that it is improper to love God in the sense of interpersonal love, the kind of love that one might feel for another human—a kind of love that (if Hobbes is correct) implies either benevolence or a desire for embraces. That said, it is interesting to note that Hobbes immediately follows the statement of the argument in De Homine with the assertion that the ‘love’ we owe God is properly nothing more than obedience to his commands (DH 14.2, quoted above). Having explicitly rejected interpersonal forms of love of God as improper, he also seems to be implicitly rejecting non-interpersonal love of God as well (at least as we would usually understand it, as a matter of sentiment, feeling, or affective attitude). It is as if Hobbes wants all talk of ‘love of God’ reframed, purged of its usual connotations of feeling, passion, and sentiment, and resolved entirely to a matter of obedience to commands. And, speculating a little, perhaps it suggests that even in the later period of De Homine, Hobbes still holds that love for God in the more comprehensive sense is either improper or impossible for other independent reasons that he does not share in this text—possibly including

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the sort of reasons given in his earlier argument from inconceivability, or in the argument from ignorance that I examine next.

5.4 The Argument from Ignorance I now consider one last argument problematizing love of God—the argument from ignorance, as I shall call it—that is not explicitly presented in Hobbes’s works, but which is a fairly obvious consequence of his express commitments both as they appear in the early 1640s period, and also again in the later works of the 1650s. For Hobbes, to love some object in the most comprehensive sense of ‘love’ (covering all forms of approbation and pro-attitude, interpersonal and noninterpersonal) is to regard that object as good; and to regard an object as good is to love it. As we have seen, love implies an appetite or attraction toward some object that produces pleasure. Further, according to Hobbes we call objects ‘good’ only insofar as they produce pleasure and engage our appetites (EL 7.3, DCi 14.17, AW 30.24, 38.5, 39.4, L 6.7: 80).¹³ Indeed, the term ‘good’ having no objective, appetite-independent meaning, even talk about God’s goodness must be understood in this subjective, appetite-relative way (at least if it is intended literally, and not merely as an honorific label): “even the goodness which we attribute to God Almighty, is his goodness to us . . . . [W]e call good and evil the things that please and displease” (EL 7.3). So love for an object is inseparable from a view of that object as good. But does Hobbes hold that God, the cause of the humanly comprehensible universe, is good? Is God good to, or for, Hobbes himself, or good to, or for, humans more generally? In other words: can we expect God to be a source of pleasure for humans, or—since a judgment of God’s overall goodness will reflect the balance of pleasures and pains we anticipate from this being (EL 7.8, AW 30.35)—more pleasure than pain? The question is not impertinent in Hobbes’s system, since this is how we must judge any claim that God is good, i.e., a proper object of love.¹⁴ But in fact there is nothing in Hobbes’s philosophy of religion that would suggest that God is good, or that humans are not to God as flies to wanton boys. ¹³ Notice that this holds whether Hobbes regards talk about an object’s goodness as descriptive in character, or whether he views such talk as expressing purely non-descriptive attitudes (e.g., perhaps prescriptive attitudes). Either of these readings is consistent with the fact that Hobbes views any sincere judgment that an object is good as running in tandem with a conviction that that object is pleasureproducing (Thomas Holden, “Hobbes on the Function of Evaluative Speech,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (2016) 123–144: 127, 133–134). ¹⁴ That Hobbes’s subjective, appetite-relative theory of goodness extends even to questions of God’s goodness is confirmed in an amusing riposte to Bramhall. “Goodness is one of Gods Powers, (namely that Power by which he worketh in men, the Hope [i.e., the expectation of a future good (see EL 9.8, L 6.14: 84)] they have in him) and is relative; and therefore unless the Devil think that God will be good to him, he cannot esteem him for his Goodness” (QLNC 159–160).

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First, the nature of this being is completely opaque to natural human reason (EL 11.2, TSO 127). We can discern nothing about the intentions of the incomprehensible and inconceivable great cause, if indeed it has any, and nothing about its disposition toward us. Second, although Hobbes insists that we should call God ‘good,’ and indeed sometimes calls God ‘good’ in his own voice, this attribute is one of his explicit examples of a title properly given to God in order to honor rather than describe. We should apply this title to God “in the sense that we are not trying to say what is . . . [but rather simply as] a sign of humility and of a disposition to give as much honour as one can” (DCi 15.14; see also L 31.28: 566). In calling the deity ‘good,’ we should merely be giving it an honorific title (i.e., an “Attribute of Divine Honour” (L 31.14, marginal subheading: 564), not hazarding any sort of judgment about God’s actual character. Third, neither of the theodicies that Hobbes advances suggests that God is in fact good to, or for, humans. In De Cive and Leviathan he answers the question “Why Evill men often Prosper, and Good men suffer Adversity” simply by asserting that God’s overwhelming power provides Him with an incontestable right to do whatever he wants (L 31.6: 558–560; compare also the very similar wording in DCi 15.5). And in AntiWhite Hobbes argues that there is no contradiction between the pious assertion that God is the author of every human action and the equally pious assertion that God is not the author of our sins, since (if we are speaking of God as Hobbes says we ought, in language intended to honor rather than describe) in neither case are we affirming truth-evaluable propositions or attempting to describe God, but merely offering so many performative “oblations” or acts of homage. (AW 35.16). Each of these theodicies would disarm a version of the problem of evil. One can readily imagine a sincerely pious believer embracing either one of them, or both. But neither theodicy requires, or tends to show, that God is actually good. And if Hobbes thought that natural human reason could mount any real case for thinking God good, it would be surprising if he rested his apologetic arguments without saying so. Overall then, it seems that Hobbes holds that we cannot know one way or the other if God is good or not, in which case love of God is improper—premature, incontinent, and irrational. Loving the incomprehensible cause of the great frame of nature would be like loving the contents of a sealed box when one has no idea what those contents are. But even if Hobbes holds that natural human reason discovers no evidence that God is good, might he not yet hold that we know of God’s goodness by way of scripture and supernatural revelation? In the nature of the case, it is impossible to rule out this hypothesis entirely. But there is no evidence that Hobbes takes any such doctrine from scripture. He never cites scripture as ratifying God’s goodness, but only God’s right to govern us, and our obligation to honor and obey Him, on the basis of his irresistible power (DCi 15.6, citing Job 38.3 and John 9.3). Further, while scripture might promise us felicity in another life, Hobbes famously seems dismissive in Leviathan, stressing the incomprehensibility and irrelevance of such

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joy to humans as we are currently constituted (L 6.58: 96). And of course, the proposed hypothesis requires that Hobbes sincerely believes that some scripture is in fact a reliable source of information about the nature of God.¹⁵

5.5 The Anatomy of Honor A complication remains. I have said that, according to Hobbes, we ought to call God ‘good’ not in an attempt to describe this incomprehensible being, but rather simply to show how much we honor it. Further, I have said that our rational requirement to honor the great cause follows simply from a recognition of its overwhelming power. This at least is Hobbes’s position in Elements of Law, Of Libertie and Necessitie, and Leviathan, where reason mandates that we honor those who have more power than us (whether they be humans or the great cause itself) purely on account of that overmatching power: [T]he acknowledgment of power is called honour; and to honour a man (inwardly in the heart) is to conceive or acknowledge, that that man hath an excess of power above him that contendenth or compareth himself. (EL 8.5) To honour God internally in the heart, is the same thing with that we ordinarily call call honour amongst men: for it is nothing but the acknowledging of his power. (EL 11.12) [T]o honour any thing, is nothing else but to think it to be of great power. (OLN 36) Honour consisteth onely in the opinion of Power. (L 10.48: 142; see also L 10.16–17: 134–136, 45.12: 1028)

To help confirm the point, Hobbes remarks that the ancient Greeks honored their gods with poems narrating the gods’ “Rapes, Thefts,” and “Frauds.” These poems proclaim the sheer power of the gods well enough, and do thereby show them honor, even while the gods are portrayed as performing “unjust, or unclean acts” (L 10.48: 142). As in An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall, no qualification is required: “all power is honourable, and greatest power is most honourable” (AB 16–17, emphasis added). The problem is that in the chapter on natural religion in De Cive, by contrast, to honor a person (or God) inwardly in one’s thought seems to require believing that that person (or God) is not only more powerful than oneself, but also good. Here,

¹⁵ I argue that Hobbes does not sincerely accept the divine authenticity of any scriptural tradition in Chapter 7, Section 7.2.

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when setting up his discussion of the outward signs of honor and forms of worship that we ought to give to God, Hobbes writes that: Properly speaking, honour is nothing other than the opinion one has of the union of power and goodness in another person . . . . Three passions are stirred by the opinion which is Honour: Love, which relates to Goodness, and Hope and Fear which relate to power. (DCi 15.9)

And shortly afterwards, Hobbes writes of one being “honoured, i.e., loved and feared” (DCi 15.13), thereby presenting honor as implying love, which, as we have seen, implies a view of its object as good. Moreover, even in Leviathan, where honor had been previously defined (in chapter 10) purely as an acknowledgment of power, we find a similar passage in the chapter on natural religion, with Hobbes again seeming to say that honoring someone implies thinking of that person as good as well as powerful: Honour consisteth in the inward thought, and opinion of the Power, and Goodnesse of another: and therefore to Honour God, is to think as Highly of his Power and Goodnesse as is possible. (L 31.8: 560)

So in De Cive and again in L 31.8: 560, Hobbes writes as if we must regard God as both powerful and good in order to inwardly honor Him. And since Hobbes is very clear that we should inwardly honor God, it seems that he must regard God as good after all—not merely deserving of the title ‘good’ as an honorific, but genuinely good, good in the literal, straightforward sense. That result would mean that Hobbes could not in fact endorse the argument from ignorance (since that argument requires the premise that we have no idea whether God is good or not). And more damagingly yet for my overall line of interpretation, it would mean that Hobbes must endorse a genuine form of love of God after all. For Hobbes is clear throughout his works that natural human reason obliges us to honor God, and if honor implies a view of its object as good (as it appears to in De Cive and L 31.8: 560), then natural human reason obliges us to regard God as good—and to regard God as good (as we have seen) just is to love God. I think we should discount the appearances of De Cive and L 31.8: 560. We have here a conflict among the texts regarding what is required for us to honor a person (or a God) inwardly in the mind. In Elements of Law, Of Libertie and Necessitie, Leviathan chapter 10, and An Answer, an acknowledgement of that person’s (or God’s) power is sufficient, whereas in De Cive and L 31.8: 560 an acknowledgement of both power and goodness is needed. It is not plausible to suppose that the texts where an acknowledgment of power is sufficient are simply shorthand for the fuller view requiring an acknowledgment of both power and goodness, for not only do the former texts include Hobbes’s official definitions of honor

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in chapters explicitly devoted to “honour” or “power, worth, dignity, honour, and worthiness” (EL 8 chapter heading, L 10 chapter heading), they also state in consistently exclusionary language that honoring requires “onely,” “nothing but,” and “nothing else” than a recognition of power (L 10.48, EL 11.2, OLN 36). So either we must say that Hobbes changed his mind repeatedly on this question, or we should take the one group of texts as presenting his settled and consistent view, and seek to explain away the appearances of the other. And in fact there is a compelling case for discounting the superficial appearances of De Cive and L 31.8: 560. First, we have seen Hobbes raising explicit doubts about whether we can love God in any literal sense (in the argument from inconceivability) in the same early 1640s period as De Cive. But he could not have had these doubts if he held that God was in fact good, since whatever is good is ipso facto a proper object of love. Second, as we have seen, Hobbes holds that natural human reason cannot disclose the nature of the incomprehensible great cause, and I see no case in De Cive (or anywhere else) that would permit him to make an exception for God’s goodness. Third, since Elements of Law and Leviathan chapter 10 are the places where Hobbes addresses the nature of honor most extensively, it is reasonable to take these passages as presenting Hobbes’s considered view, and to regard De Cive and L 31.8: 560 as merely indulging in a kind of flattering loose talk when stating the case for honoring God, perhaps permitting Hobbes to appear more conventional on this sensitive topic than he in fact is. Fourth and most important, Hobbes allows that we should indeed call God ‘good’ (if only as an honorific), and thus can play along readily enough with talk of a good God whenever it seems appropriate to do so. Perhaps talking of God’s goodness in this more expansive way does God more honor. Perhaps it avoids offending any traditional Christian readers who are accustomed to thinking of God’s goodness as a real positive attribute and not merely an honorific title. But the point is that all such talk of God’s ‘goodness,’ and of our awed response to that ‘goodness,’ can be understood as honorific in its underlying motivation.¹⁶ Stepping back for a moment, we might now make a further observation regarding the rational requirement that we honor God—a requirement that plays a decisive role in Hobbes’s philosophy of religion, perhaps most obviously in honor-expressing approach to religious discourse. As we have seen, Hobbes holds that reason requires us to honor the surpassingly powerful but otherwise unknowable cause of the humanly comprehensible universe, dictating both that we regard this being with honor inwardly in our thought and also that we show

¹⁶ Not surprisingly, Hobbes holds that attributing goodness to a person gives that person honor, and that implying that one loves and fears a person also gives that person honor. “To praise, magnifie, or call happy, is to Honour; because nothing but goodnesse, power, and felicity is valued.” “To shew any signe of love, or feare of another; is to Honour; for both to love, and to feare, is to value” (L 10.25 136, 10:24 136).

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external signs of our desire to honor it, meaning worship in outward words and actions. Here there are three things to distinguish: (i) the inward attitude of honor in the mind (which is all one with a belief in the surpassing power of God); (ii) the desire to honor God with words and actions, which desire is signified by our outward actions and speech, and which is typically prompted by the underlying inward attitude of honor in the mind; and (iii) the outward speech and actions, external performances that signify our desire to honor him.¹⁷ Innocently, one might perhaps have expected that an inward attitude of honor in the mind (or “in the inward thought,” “inwardly in the heart,” “internally in the heart” (L 31.8: 560, EL 8.5, 11.1, all quoted more fully above)) would be some sort of passion, sentiment, or feeling—some sort of emotion or affective attitude directed toward God. But as we can now see, that is not in fact how Hobbes understands it. Rather, for Hobbes, to regard something with honor inwardly in the mind is just to believe that that thing overmatches oneself in power. That belief is simply an intellectual matter, determined by our “power cognitive” (EL 1.8), not by our passions, feelings, or “motive” powers (EL 1.7). The passions only enter the picture in the second stage of the triptych, with the desire to honor God with words and actions—and we might notice that that particular passion (or desire) is not actually directed toward the great cause itself. It is not a passion that takes the deity itself as object, but rather a passion—more specifically, a desire or conative pro-attitude—that is directed toward a certain sort of performative behavior, to acting in a certain sort of way. Outward worship signifies, i.e., gives external evidence of, this desire, and in ordinary circumstances it will also signify the underlying inward attitude of honor (i.e., belief in God’s power) behind that desire. So the rational requirement to honor God—which I have also variously referred to throughout this book (for variety’s sake) as the requirement to ‘revere’ God, or ‘venerate’ him, or to regard him with ‘awe’—is in fact simply a requirement to believe in or “acknowledge[e]” his power inwardly in thought (EL 11.2), and to display outward signs of a desire to honor this being in speech and actions (DCi 15.9, L 31.8: 560). None of this actually involves any passions or affective attitudes directed toward God himself as object. Human psychology being what it is, further passions of one sort of another may naturally attend our inward belief in God’s power and our desire to honor him, and are likely to show themselves in the external ceremonials that give God honor. Among the passions that we experience in response to the phenomena of the world, some might be more likely to become associated in our thought with the originating great cause (perhaps, for example, wonder before the starry heavens,

¹⁷ Recall that on Hobbes’s theory, reverential speech about God is properly intended to signify our desire or (which comes to the same thing) our will or intention to honor the great cause (L 34.4: 614, 31.33 Latin version: 569–570, and for discussion, see Chapter 2, Section 2.1). The same is true of all of our worship, whether in words or actions (L 31.28–29: 566–568, DCi 15.15).

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admiration for nature, guilt and feelings of inadequacy for personal failings, or joy in a new birth); and certain of these passions might lend color to the religious practices that humans employ to demonstrate honor. We might also experience passions of hope and fear directed toward future events that we imagine the great cause may yet bring upon us—the outcome of a battle, the failure of a harvest, a ship coming in. Perhaps focusing attention upon one’s belief in an overwhelming power is apt to prompt feelings of humility in most humans. And so on. Such feelings may be inevitable, and nothing in Hobbes’s account of natural religion tells us that their expression in our religious practices is necessarily improper or superstitious. Nevertheless, so far as Hobbesian natural piety goes, all such passions are peripheral and incidental. At its essential core, the natural piety that is required of us is not a matter of experiencing passions, sentiments, or feelings that are directed toward the great cause itself, but simply a matter of (i) believing in the existence and surpassing power of the great cause, (ii) outwardly displaying our desire to honor this being through appropriate words and actions, and (iii) of the outward honorgiving behavior itself.¹⁸

5.6 Redefining ‘Love’ and ‘Fear’ of God As we have seen, Hobbes expresses doubts about whether we can experience any feelings of love or fear directed toward the deity (in the argument from inconceivability), and also doubts about whether feelings of interpersonal love toward God would be appropriate and respectful (in the argument from propriety). I have also suggested that Hobbes’s general account of love as an attraction to objects deemed good (i.e., pleasure-producing), along with his insistence that the character of the deity is entirely unknown, together imply the irrationality and incontinence of any feelings of love directed toward this being (the argument from ignorance). Given these doubts about love and fear of God, how should we understand the mandate to love and fear this being that I have cited in De Cive and De Homine? Is Hobbes simply inconsistent across his various works, or perhaps even dissembling, saying different things in works intended for publication as against the privately circulated Elements of Law and Anti-White? But the hypothesis of outright self-contradiction here is not in fact the most plausible interpretation.

¹⁸ This comports with Hobbes’s definition of piety. “[P]iety consisteth onely in two things; one that we honour God in our hearts, which is, that we think as highly of his power as we can, (for to honour any thing is nothing else but to think it to be of great power.) The other is, that we signifie that honour and esteem by our words and actions, which is called Cultus, or worship of God” (OLN 36). I discuss this definition in more detail in Chapter 8, Section 8.2.

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Instead, I propose that we understand the ‘love’ and ‘fear’ of God required of us in De Cive, Leviathan, and De Homine not as love or fear in any ordinary sense of these words, but (as in Elements of Law) nothing more than a disposition to obey God’s laws, which is to say the laws of nature, the principles of morality and enlightened self-interest. Hobbes is certainly prepared to employ traditional religious language valorizing love of the deity, and even to cite scripture as requiring love of God. But here he does not intend ‘love of God’ or ‘fear of God’ in the literal sense of these words. Without drawing much attention to what he is doing, and perhaps even being content for his conservative religious readers to interpret him in a more conventional sense, Hobbes quietly but explicitly alters the force of these expressions. The ‘love’ and ‘fear’ required from us are love and fear in name only. They are not a kind of feeling or passion directed toward the great cause, but rather simply a matter of conducting oneself in accordance with the rational precepts of natural law. Certainly Hobbes’s interest in ‘love’ and ‘fear’ of God in the chapter on natural religion in De Cive is entirely a practical matter of obedience to divine commands. When considering “the end and aim of [worship]” in De Cive, he insists that when a person enjoys being worshipped it is because it shows that that person is “being honoured, i.e. loved and feared, i.e. that he has men’s services and assistance at his command” (DCi 15.13). Love and fear matter because they promise obedience. Or, when Hobbes reviews the properly honorific ways of talking about God, he considers the case of disrespectful persons who claim that the first cause is indifferent to human affairs, and thereby imply that “they have no reason to love and fear God.” Hobbes regards this kind of talk as a problem not only because it dishonors God (DCi 15.14), but also because it indicates a refusal to “accept [God’s] precepts or fear his threats” (DCi 15.2). Again, love and fear of God matter because they are bound up with obedience. In a later chapter in De Cive, Hobbes explicitly affirms the equivalence of love of God (as he understands it) with obedience to God’s laws in a dizzying passage in which a number of virtues—repentance, love of God, love of neighbor, charity, justice—are reduced one after another to “obedience,” by which Hobbes means “nothing other than the will or effort to obey, i.e., to act according to the laws of God, i.e., the moral laws which are the same for all, and the civil laws” (DCi 18.3). He argues as follows: [O]bedience is equivalent to Repentance. For the virtue of Repentance does not consist in the pain which accompanies the memory of a crime, but in a turn to the right direction and a determination not to offend again. Those who love God cannot fail to want to obey the Divine law and those who love their neighbour cannot fail to want to obey the moral law, which consists . . . of the prohibition of pride, ingratitude, insult, unkindness, unmercifulness, wrongs and such offenses

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by which we hurt our neighbours. Therefore Love too, or Charity, is equivalent to the word obedience; justice (which is a steady determination to give everyone his due) is also equivalent. (DCi 18.3)

So “Love”—whether love of God or love of neighbor—“is equivalent to the word obedience [voci obedientiæ æquiualet etiam Amor]”: the identification is explicit. And indeed Hobbes must hold that the reduction of ‘love of God’ to obedience is entire. The driving purpose of this chapter is to show that all religious virtues resolve to nothing more than faith on the one hand or obedience on the other (DCi 18.2–6)—so that repentance and justice, for example, are exhaustively reducible to obedience. Hobbes must likewise intend the reduction of love of God to obedience in DCi 18.3 to be entire, or the master argument of the chapter fails. Notice also that love in the ordinary sense of the word (whether it be interpersonal love or love for a different kind of object) does not entail obedience to the beloved. So when DCi 18.3 presents love of God as entailing obedience, it is not because Hobbes is drawing out the usual implications of the word ‘love,’ but rather revising its meaning. If we take Hobbes at his word in this passage, De Cive can also be seen to cohere with the other works where Hobbes advances the same identification of love of God with obedience to God’s laws. As we saw above, in Elements of Law he maintains that we simply cannot love God in the usual sense of ‘love,’ and “to love God therefore, in the Scripture, is to obey his commandments and love one another” (EL 11.11). Here the love we owe God is reducible to obedience to God’s commands, i.e., the laws of nature, together with love for “one another,” which is also most plausibly understood in a Hobbesian framework simply as a matter of acting in accordance with the laws of nature.¹⁹ We see a similar analysis of the love we owe God in De Homine, and also the explicit extension of the account to fear of God as well. In chapter 14 (“Of Religion”), immediately after presenting the argument from propriety with its conclusion that to love God as we love other persons would be an unacceptable insult, Hobbes asserts that both the love and the fear we owe God is simply as a matter of our being disposed to obey God’s laws: God is not to be loved by man, as man is by man . . . . To love God is to keep his commandments gladly. To fear God is to watch lest we fall into sin, in the same way that we are accustomed to keep the laws. (DH 14.2)

¹⁹ For Hobbes’s exhaustive reduction of love of one’s neighbor to obedience to natural law, see DCi 18.3, just quoted above. Similarly: “The whole of the law of nature is divine, and conversely the whole of the law of Christ (fully laid out in chapter 5–7 of Matthew)”—which of course includes the injunction to love one’s neighbor and one’s enemy (Matthew 5.43–44)—“is nature’s teaching” (DCi 4.24).

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Since to love God is the same as to keep His commandments, and to fear God is the same as to fear lest we do something against His commandments, it can further be asked how one can know what things God hath commanded. To this question it can be replied, God himself, because He hath made men rational, hath enjoined the following law on them, and hath inscribed it in all hearts: that no one should do unto another that which he would consider inequitable for the other to do unto him. (DH 14.5, emphases added)

Given these definitions, the ‘love’ and the ‘fear’ that we owe God is not some sort of passion, sentiment, or affective attitude directed toward this being, but purely a matter of being disposed to obey God’s commands.²⁰ And as we also see in the extract from DH 14.5, as consistently in De Cive and Leviathan (DCi 2.1, 3.33, 4.1–2, 4.24, 15.8, L 15.41: 242), those commands are identified simply with the rational principles of natural law. To love the deity “is the same as to keep his commandments,” which is to say, the same as to keep the law that is “inscribed . . . in all [human] hearts” simply in virtue of our being rational. What these passages show is that Hobbes’s commitment to a duty to love and fear God is merely nominal. While maintaining the superficial appearance of endorsing such a duty, in works from 1640 through 1658 he in effect replaces any expectation that we feel passions of love and fear directed toward the great cause simply with the requirement that we obey the rational precepts of natural law. Consistent with Hobbes’s arguments problematizing love and fear of God explicitly (the argument from inconceivability and the argument from propriety) and plausibly also implicitly (the argument from ignorance), the ‘love’ and ‘fear’ of God required of us is nothing more than the disposition to obey the laws of nature, which laws are themselves simply practical maxims of mutual accommodation and enlightened self-interest that make no reference to God. To subvert the traditional understanding of Christ’s “first and greatest commandment” in this way might seem a remarkable act of insolence. It is certainly a bold interpretation of Matthew 22.37–38. But for Hobbes there is no affront here to the great cause

²⁰ In the opening paragraph of De Homine chapter 14, Hobbes appears to reduce love and fear of God to a combination of both obedience to God and a disposition to give thanks and make supplications. Here he declares that the “endeavour to obey [God] in all things” and the “endeavour to give thanks in prosperity [and] to utter supplications in adversity” are together “the most characteristic works of piety; in them are contained the love and fear wherewith we are commanded to love and fear God” (DH 14.1, emphasis added). But to give thanks and make supplications is plausibly just another way of outwardly signaling that we honor the deity, in keeping with Hobbes’s general view that entreaties and displays of gratitude are signs of honor (L 10.19: 136, 10.22:136). In any case, in the paragraph following immediately upon this sentence, we get Hobbes’s more consistent view that love and fear of God can be reduced exclusively to a matter of obedience (DH 14.2, quoted above), with the requirement to give thanks and utter supplications no longer mentioned. Either way the key point remains that Hobbes is defining the ‘love’ and ‘fear’ that we owe God in terms of a certain sort of external behavior, rather in terms of the sort of passion or feeling that one would usually associate with these words.

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itself, but only to those who would interpret the God of scripture in a sentimental and anthropomorphizing way.²¹

5.7 Unsentimental Natural Religion Natural human reason dictates that we posit a being that is powerful enough to produce the imagination-defying cascade of causes. Further, in light of this being’s overwhelming power, reason dictates that we should honor it inwardly in our thought (i.e., acknowledge its power), and display a will to honor it as best we can in outward signs, meaning worship in words and actions. Among the rest this includes ascribing ‘attributes of divine honor’ to the great cause—applying titles to it not with descriptive intent, but purely for the connotations of honor these words have among humans—and hence calling this being ‘good’ (and ‘just,’ ‘wise,’ and so on), and speaking of it as if it were a proper object of love and fear (L 10.24: 136). But it does not follow that we should actually love and fear the great cause. Across Elements of Law, De Cive, and De Homine, the ‘love’ that we owe God proves to be nothing more than obedience to the laws of nature, a kind of love in name only. In De Homine, the same sort of revisionary account is explicitly extended to the ‘fear’ that we owe God as well. On this interpretation, what we owe the great cause, along with a recognition of its overmatching power and the outward display of honor (i.e., worship) that follows, is simply the conformity of our behavior with the rational principles of natural law. Granted, humans might habitually associate certain passions with their cosmological thoughts and performative rituals of worship, and they might experience passions of hope and fear directed toward the future events that they judge the great cause may yet bring about. They might also speak of these solicitous passions as part of their natural piety. But none of this need entail any passion directed toward the unimaginable great cause itself. Hobbes is an unconventional religious thinker with a highly original account of the forms of religious speech and practice mandated by natural human reason. If the argument of this chapter is correct, that account includes a comprehensive reinterpretation of the traditional duty to love and fear God. Hobbes regards such God-directed passions as irrational, anthropomorphizing, and perhaps even impossible, and he reframes the ‘love’ and ‘fear’ that we owe the great cause as simply a matter of rational conformity with the laws of nature. Those who favor an irreligious interpretation of Hobbes might seize on this as one more insinuating

²¹ Hobbes’s imaginative but nevertheless respectful handling of Matthew 22.37–38 is very much of a piece with his general approach to scriptural interpretation. See Chapter 7, especially Sections 7.2, 7.3, and 7.6.

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hint toward a godless world. But I see no reason to doubt that Hobbes is sincere in holding that we ought to posit an overwhelmingly powerful being that is properly dignified as ‘God,’ or in maintaining that we owe this being both honorific titles and worship, and obedience to natural law that it has inscribed through reason in the human mind.²² ²² Granted, Hobbes does not tell us what connection, if any, he sees between the rational requirement to believe in, honor, and worship the great cause of nature on the one hand, and the rational duty to obey the laws of nature on the other. In particular, he does not tell us why obedience to the laws of nature should be considered as part of our religious duty—properly presented as a matter of obedience to God’s commands, and labeled as a kind of ‘love’ and ‘fear’ owed to the deity (as in the various texts emphasized above, EL 11.11, DCi 18.3, DH 14.2, 14.5; and on the laws of nature as divine commands see also DH 14.1, L 15.41: 242)—rather than simply as a rational or prudential duty that is independent of our religious obligations. Certainly, Hobbes cannot suppose that the laws of nature are literally commands from the great cause—a being that does not speak to us, is entirely incomprehensible, and is properly ascribed a ‘will’ only as an honorific title. (On the ‘Taylor-Warrender thesis’ that Hobbes does regard the laws of nature as literally commanded by God, see Chapter 6, note 14.) This is a significant gap either in Hobbes’s account, or in my interpretation of Hobbes’s account. But to speculate. Perhaps Hobbes holds (like Justus Lipsius and other neo-Stoics) that reflection on the awesome power of the great cause and the enormity of its creation is apt to put our more parochial, impulsive, and akratic passions in perspective, to help us to see the bigger picture, and hence act in the more measured way dictated by the laws of nature, the precepts of reason and moderation that guide us to mutual accommodation, self-preservation, and the curbing of our short-sighted urges. In this way, Hobbes might regard a properly religious cosmological reverence and humility as encouraging conformity with the laws of nature. Or again, perhaps Hobbes holds that our talking about the great cause as if it were a lawgiver to whom we owe obedience and the farsighted author of the prudentially rational principles of natural law is simply another way of showing this incomprehensible being honor.

6 Sin, Necessity, and God’s Moral Attributes If we would speak in descriptive and truth-apt terms, all that we can say about the actions and attributes of God is that this being is the surpassingly powerful cause of the humanly comprehensible world. Although reason also permits and indeed requires us to ascribe anthropomorphic and metaphysical perfections to God, that further talk is sanctioned for honorific purposes only. Properly, it serves only to demonstrate our obeisance before the great cause, not to describe its actual nature. In the current chapter I extend this expressivist interpretation of Hobbes’s natural theology to his treatment of God’s moral attributes. From one point of view this is a straightforward matter. One might already have expected Hobbes’s general approach to talk about the divine attributes to apply to talk about God’s moral character. And while Hobbes’s commentators have not always taken the relevant passages to heart, various texts explicitly confirm that talk about the justice and goodness of the great cause is properly only honorific. In this way, Hobbes’s treatment of the moral attributes provides us with an illustration of his general approach to talk about the divine nature, and thus far corroborates the expressivist interpretation of his philosophy of religious language. However, we need to address two complications before Hobbes’s expressivist treatment of the moral attributes can come fully into focus. First, certain texts might seem to affirm not an expressivist approach to God’s moral attributes, but rather a voluntarist picture of God’s relationship to moral standards. “[W]hen men will to do something,” Hobbes writes in Anti-White, “they will to do so because it is good; but what God does is good because He has willed to do it” (AW 30.34, translation adapted). Or in Of Libertie and Necessitie: “God cannot sin, because his doing a thing makes it just and consequently, no sin” (OLN 24). Passages such as these can make it look as if whatever God does counts as just and good simply because it is a manifestation of his divine will. And given this voluntarist reading of Hobbes’s position, it seems that God’s goodness and justice should be understood in metaphysically realist terms. These attributes flow immediately from the exercise of the divine will, and therefore exist independently of human ways of thinking and talking. This marks a contrast with the expressivist interpretation, according to which God’s ‘goodness’ and ‘justice’ are not mindand language-independent realities, but simply honorific titles that we apply to the great cause in non-descriptive acts of oblation. So if the expressivist interpretation Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion. Thomas Holden, Oxford University Press. © Thomas Holden 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871329.003.0006

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of Hobbes on the moral attributes is to be sustained, something will have to be said to explain his voluntarist-sounding statements while avoiding their apparently realist implications. The second challenge comes from a different direction. According to various commentators, Hobbes’s contemporary critic Bishop John Bramhall prominent among them, Hobbes’s deterministic thesis that all events are necessitated by prior causes will entail more about God’s moral character than he is wont to admit.¹ Given the “doctrine of Necessity” (i.e., determinism) that Hobbes endorses (QLNC 14, 77, 133), all human actions are the necessary and inexorable result of a concourse of prior causes, each of which is likewise necessitated in turn, and so all human actions must eventually trace back to God, the great cause of nature, as their remote source. So far Hobbes is in explicit agreement. But then it will follow (so the charge goes) that God is the author of our sins, and hence cannot have a perfect moral character. Hobbes might work to raise a veil of pious honorifics around the great cause, but the obvious implication of his own philosophy is that the being behind this laudatory gauze is responsible for all our wrongdoing, and therefore is either morally corrupt or simply morally indifferent. This analysis again complicates any straightforwardly expressivist reading of Hobbes on God’s moral attributes. It threatens to show that, no matter what positive epithets we might like to bestow on the deity to honor him, nevertheless, the consequence of Hobbes’s deterministic metaphysics is that this being demonstrably falls short of moral perfection—that the great cause is, in reality, either amoral or positively compromised by immorality. For Bramhall, it is enough to point out that Hobbes’s express commitments lead to this intolerable result without speculating about whether Hobbes himself positively intends it. But it is easy enough to imagine variations of the analysis that take one or the other side of that further question—perhaps painting an image of Hobbes as intentionally signaling an implied moral atheism to an elite audience capable of reading between his lines, or perhaps, to take the other side of the question, an image of Hobbes as dug into a kind of stubborn but sincere denial about the implications of determinism for God’s moral status. I address these two challenges in reverse order. In Sections 6.1–6.4 I consider the argument that Hobbes’s determinism entails God’s moral imperfection. I examine Bramhall’s tenacious prosecution of this charge in his debate with ¹ Alexander Ross, Leviathan drawn out with a Hook (London: 1653), 89–90, Jeremy Taylor, A Sermon Preached in Christ-Church, Dublin: at the Funeral of the most Reverend . . . John, Late Lord Archbishop of Armagh, and Primate of all Ireland (London: 1663), 39. Mintz suggests that an argument to similar effect in John Milton’s manuscript De Doctrina Christiana “sounds as though [it was] directed against Hobbes” (Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-century reactions to the materialism and moral philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1962), 118; Mintz includes the relevant passage from Milton’s manuscript (which was not published until 1825)). I document and analyze Bramhall’s serial critique of Hobbes’s doctrine of necessity in Section 6.1 of this chapter.

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Hobbes (Section 6.1), together with Hobbes’s multiple lines of response (Sections 6.2–6.4). In Section 6.5 I consider the issues presented by Hobbes’s use of voluntarist language, and show that Hobbes’s expressivist theory of religious discourse provides the key, here as elsewhere, to his vindication of the divine attributes.

6.1 Determinism and the Threat to God’s Moral Perfection Hobbes is clear that all human actions are part of the deterministically unfolding system of the creation. He is also clear that since the deterministic cascade of causes producing our actions traces back to the deity, God is the remote cause of all human behavior, “the first cause of things and actions” and “the cause of every deed” (L 46.22 Latin version: 1091). All our actions are therefore causally necessitated by God, and hence can be called (at least in a metaphorical sense) God’s ‘decree’ and ‘good pleasure’: That which I say necessitateth and determinateth every action, . . . is the summ of all things, which being now existent, conduce and concurr to the production of that action hereafter, whereof if any one thing now were wanting, the effect could not be produced. This concourse of causes, whereof every one is determined to be such as it is by a like concourse of former causes, may well be called (in respect they were all set and ordered by the eternal cause of all things, God Almighty) the Decree of God. (OLN 15) I have maintained . . . That the will is not free, but subject to change by the operation of external causes; That all external causes depend necessarily on the first eternal cause God Almighty, who worketh in us both to will and to do, by the mediation of second causes; . . . That there is nothing brought to passe by fortune as by a cause, nor any thing without a cause or concurrence of causes, sufficient to bring it so to passe, and that every such cause, and their concurrence, do proceed from the providence, good pleasure, and working of God. (QLNC 345)

The same picture of a God that deterministically foreordains all human behavior is consistent throughout Hobbes’s metaphysical writings, as for instance in Leviathan: [B]ecause every act of mans will, and every desire, and inclination proceedeth from some cause, and that from another cause, in a continuall chaine, (whose first link is in the hand of God the first of all causes,) they proceed from necessity. So that to him that could see the connexion of those causes, the necessity of all

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mens voluntary actions, would appear manifest. . . . [Men] can have no passion, nor appetite to any thing, of which appetite Gods will is not the cause. (L 22.4: 326; see also AW 35.7–8, 37.2, 37.14)

God is therefore the remote cause of all human actions. And this is one of the rare divine attributes that is not for Hobbes simply an honorific title. Even if speaking of God as the cause of all human actions might in some contexts show him honor, it is also a literal description of the deity’s relational character, one that says nothing about God’s inconceivable intrinsic nature, but traces out the consequences of Hobbes’s determinism together with his purely relational characterization of God as the great cause behind the humanly comprehensible world. Bramhall advances numerous scriptural and philosophical objections against this deterministic system, both in the manuscript brief from his 1645 debate with Hobbes in Paris and then in their subsequent pamphlet exchange in the 1650s.² But two persistent complaints dominate: first, that Hobbes’s doctrine of necessity rules out all human moral responsibility, and second, that it locates moral responsibility for our behavior with God instead. Bramhall does not mince his words about these consequences: Though I honour T. H. for his person, and for his learning, yet I must confess ingenuously, I hate this Doctrin [i.e., determinism, the doctrine of necessity] from my heart. And I beleeve both I have reason so to do, and all others who shall seriously ponder the horrid consequences which flow from it. It destroyes liberty, and dishonours the nature of man. It makes the second causes and outward objects to be the Rackets, and Men to be but the Tennis-Balls of destiny. It makes ² In 1645 Hobbes and Bramhall debated liberty and necessity at a salon in Paris hosted by William Cavendish, Marquis (later Duke) of Newcastle, and at Newcastle’s request they each provided written statements of their positions, with Hobbes replying point by point in a manuscript work Of Libertie and Necessitie to Bramhall’s initial written statement, and Bramhall subsequently responding in similar point by point fashion in A Vindication of True Liberty. By mutual agreement, none of these manuscripts were to be published. However, almost a decade later a copy of Hobbes’s manuscript Of Libertie and Necessitie was printed, perhaps without his permission (London: 1654). Bramhall responded by publishing A Vindication under the title A Defence of True Liberty from Ante-cedent and Extrinsecall Necessity (London: 1655). Hobbes replied in The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (London: 1656), and Bramhall responded again Castigations of Mr. Hobbes (London: 1657). For further details of the debate and its transition into a bitter pamphlet war, see Vere Chappell, ‘Introduction,’ in Vere Chappell, ed., Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), ix–xxiii: ix–x, A. P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 195–196, 266–271, Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 39–40, 153–164, Nicholas D. Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall, and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity: A Quarrel of the Civil Wars and Interregnum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). On the vexed question of how much Hobbes might have known about the publication of Of Libertie and Necessitie, see Jackson, who argues that it may have been published without Hobbes’s permission, but also that Hobbes failed to lift a finger to prevent the second edition, also published in 1654 (Hobbes, Bramhall, and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity, 190–195).

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the first cause, that is, God Almighty, to be the introducer of all evill, and sin into the world, as much as Man, yea, more than Man, by as much as the motion of the Watch is more from the Artificer, who did make it and wind it up, than either from the spring, or the wheels, or the thred, if God, by his speciall influence into the second causes, did necessitate them to operate as they did. And if they being thus determined, did necessitate Adam inevitably, irresistibly, not by an accidentall, but by an essential subordination of causes to whatsoever he did, Then one of these two absurdities must needs follow, either that Adam did not sin, and that there is no such thing as sin in the world, because it proceeds naturally, necessarily, and essentially from God. Or that God is more guilty of it, and more the cause of evill than man, because man is extrinsecally, inevitably determined, but so is not God.³

So in Bramhall’s analysis the determinist is driven to a dilemma: either there is no sin in the world, or God bears full moral responsibility for it. And since the existence of sin is undeniable, the inescapable conclusion is that the determinist’s God is “guilty” of all human wickedness. In effect, Hobbes’s determinist doctrine “transforms God (I write it with horrour) into the Devill, and makes tempting to be Gods own work, and the Devill to be but his instrument.”⁴ Bramhall therefore has his anathema: Excuse me if I hate this doctrine with a perfect hatred, which is so dishonorable both to God and man; which makes men to blaspheme of necessity, to steal of necessity, to be hanged of necessity, and to be damned of necessity. And therefore I must say and say again; Quicquid ostendes mihi sic, incredulus odi. It were better to be an Atheist, to believe no God; or to be a Manichee, to believe two Gods, a God of good, and a God of evill, or with the Heathens, to believe thirty thousand Gods: than thus to charge the true God to be the proper cause and the true Author of all the sins and evills which are in the world.⁵

Here we will focus on Bramhall’s charge that determinism renders God the morally culpable author of evil, setting aside the perhaps more familiar and in any case non-theological question of whether determinism is consistent with human liberty and moral responsibility. To help us to understand the structure of Bramhall’s theological argument and to distinguish Hobbes’s various replies, I map the argument as a succession of simple but compounding inferences:

³ John Bramhall, A Defence of True Liberty from Ante-cedent and Extrinsecall Necessity, Being an answer to a late Book of Mr. Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, intituled, A Treatise of Liberty and Necessity (London: John Crook, 1655), 60–61. ⁴ Bramhall, A Defence, 73. ⁵ Bramhall, A Defence, 61.

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The argument from determinism to God’s moral imperfection A1. If determinism is true, then God is the cause of all human actions. A2. If God is the cause of all human actions, then God is the cause of sin. A3. If God is the cause of sin, then God is the author of sin. A4. If God is the author of sin, then God is morally imperfect. Hence, A5. If determinism is true, then God is morally imperfect (from A1–A4). Determinism traces all our actions to God as their remote cause. But then God is “the proper cause and [hence] the true Author” of all our wrongdoing, in which case God lacks moral perfection. For Bramhall and other critics of Hobbes’s deterministic cosmology, this consequence for God’s moral character is intolerable and absurd, and hence can serve as a reductio of Hobbes’s doctrine of necessity. Hobbes grants premise A1. But in his exchanges with Bramhall and in other published works he takes separate issue with A2, A3, and A4. As we shall see, Hobbes argues that A3 and A4 are each straightforwardly false. So there are two distinct ways to block the argument even if we accept Bramhall’s terms of the debate and consider his premises as so many truth-evaluable propositions. With A2 the matter is different. Hobbes does not actually deny the truth of A2. Nor does he admit it. Instead, he argues that while we can piously and respectfully assert the antecedent of A2 (i.e., that ‘God is the cause of all human actions’), we cannot do this of the consequent (i.e., that ‘God is the cause of sin’). Shifting registers, he refuses to engage on the question of A2’s truth, but rather argues that this sort of speech dishonors God, and that it therefore violates the essential controlling purpose of talk about the divine attributes. When Bramhall presses awkward questions about the implications of God’s universal deterministic providence for God’s true nature (in advancing principle A2, and so similarly through the subsequent stages of the argument), he trespasses upon the kind of descriptivist theological speculation that violates the rational mandate to speak of God only in honorific terms. We therefore have three defensive lines facing Bramhall’s argumentation: two outworks that meet Bramhall on his own descriptivist ground, and the inner citadel of Hobbes’s own alternative philosophy of religious language.

6.2 Causing Sin and Authorizing Sin I first consider the defensive outworks. Begin with Hobbes’s rejection of premise A3, the conditional claim that if God is the cause of sin, then he is the author of sin. According to Hobbes, for someone to count as an author of an action, that action must be properly “considered as his owne”—meaning that the accountability for its occurrence properly falls on that person, even if the action is physically carried out by someone else (L 16.2: 244; see also L 16.2: 244). The

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action belongs to the author in the sense that the author is someone who might properly ‘own up to it’ and could properly be held responsible—where, notice, the ‘responsibility’ at issue is not (or not simply) a matter of causal responsibility, but of moral or legal responsibility (L 16.4: 244).⁶ In Hobbes’s analysis a person is therefore the author of an action either when she performs it herself, wittingly, compos mentis, and in her own name, or alternatively when she wittingly, compos mentis, authorizes some other agent to act in her name—as, for example, when one authorizes a lawyer to act on one’s behalf in court, or when a field marshal authorizes a brigadier general to conduct such-and-such a military maneuver. As such cases illustrate, authorization might proceed either by permission or by command, and typically involves the transfer of a right to perform the action— so that “by Authority, is always understood a Right of doing any act; and done by Authority, done by Commission, or Licence from him whose right it is” (L 16.4: 244). Given this analysis of what it is to be the author of an action, it is a straightforward matter for Hobbes to point out that God might be the cause of sin without thereby being the author of sin. There is no logical contradiction between the thesis that God is the predetermining cause of our sins and the thesis that God does not authorize our sins in the sense of licensing them through permission or command: [T]hough God be the cause of all motion and of all actions, and therefore unless sin be no motion, nor action, it must derive a necessity from the first mover; nevertheless it cannot be said that God is the Author of sin, because not he that necessitateth an action, but he that doth command and warrant it, is the Author. (QLNC 106; see also 175) [T]hough men may do many things, which God does not command, nor is therefore Author of them; yet they can have no passion, nor appetite to any thing, of which appetite Gods will is not the cause. (L 21.4: 326)⁷

It is then one thing for God to cause Pharaoh to sin (as Hobbes’s God might do, perhaps hardening Pharaoh’s heart by way of deterministically foreordained secondary causes), and another for God to authorize Pharaoh to sin (either by commanding or permitting it—neither of which Hobbes’s deity actually does). With this criticism of principle A3, Hobbes imports his own original philosophical analysis of what it is to be the author of an action and applies it to the ⁶ Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes on Person, Authors, and Representatives,” in Patricia Springborg, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 157–180: 158. ⁷ Similarly: “The author of a deed is the one who orders that it be done; the cause is the one by whose physical power it is done. God orders no one to do or try to do anything against the laws; but all that we do, we do with the physical power given to us by God” (L 46.22 Latin version: 1093).

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traditional Augustinian question of whether God is the author of sin.⁸ Here we might notice that Hobbes does not launch this particular criticism of Bramhall’s reasoning in the earlier phase of their debate during the Parisian exile, but only beginning with the 1651 English Leviathan, which is where the account of authorization and representation first makes its appearance.⁹ In a subsequent response Bramhall will flatly reject Hobbes’s Leviathan-and-after analysis of what it is to be the author of an action, and continue to insist on his own analysis under which God’s causing sin is sufficient to make God the author of sin.¹⁰ But Hobbes may be on the stronger ground here. The general principle that in causing a sin one is ipso facto the author of that sin is a truism if we are talking about the sense of ‘author’ simply involving causal responsibility. But it seems less plausible in the sense of ‘author’ implying moral responsibility for the occurrence of that sin—in the sense where ‘author’ (like Locke’s word ‘person’) is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit. (If Abel’s pious behavior drives Cain to murder, is Abel morally responsible?) And it is this latter sense importing moral responsibility that Bramhall needs to invoke in the next step of the argument (in A4) if he is to establish that a God that is the author of sin is morally imperfect. Bramhall might counter that, whatever reservations one might have about the general principle, in the specific case of God we are dealing with an omniscient, perfectly foresighted being that (on the deterministic hypothesis) is not merely a contributing and partial but the sufficient and total cause of all our actions, which makes it more plausible that this particular being is indeed morally responsible for whatever it causes. However, that would be to assume a descriptive account of certain divine attributes (intelligence, omniscience, personhood) that Hobbes rejects as literal-minded and anthropomorphizing, as expressing a failure to appreciate the sheer incomprehensibility of the divine nature, and perhaps also

⁸ The question “whether God is not the author of evil?” frames Augustine’s De libero arbitrio voluntatis. See Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, on Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Peter King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3. On this point and for useful discussion of the wider theological background, see Alan Cromartie, “Hobbes, Calvinism, and Determinism,” in Lauren van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass, eds., Hobbes on Politics and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 95–115: 98–104. ⁹ Skinner emphasizes that nothing like this analysis of authorization and representation appears in the pre-Leviathan statements of Hobbes’s civil philosophy Elements of Law (first circulated in 1640) and De Cive (1642), notwithstanding its crucial role in the system of Leviathan (Skinner, “Hobbes on Person, Authors, and Representatives,” 157). To this we can add that nothing like the current objection to principle A3 (which objection appeals to the Hobbesian analysis of authorization) appears in Hobbes’s pre-Leviathan exchange with Bramhall in their 1645 debate (subsequently published, without Hobbes’s permission, as Of Libertie and Necessitie in 1654). That line of objection appears only with the 1651 English Leviathan, and subsequently in Hobbes’s 1656 broadside against Bramhall Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, and in a new passage added to the 1668 Latin Leviathan (L 21.4: 326, QLNC 106, L 46.22 Latin version: 1093). ¹⁰ “[Hobbes’s] assertion is most false, That he onely, who commandeth or warranteth sin, is the authour of it: He who acteth sin, he who necessitateth to sin, he who first bringes sin into the World, is much more the authour of it, than the bare commander of it” (John Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes (London: 1657), 145).

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as mistaking God’s “Attributes of Honour” (i.e., his honorific titles) for metaphysically real “Attributes of Nature” (L 46.31: 1090). Without this sort of innocently descriptive and anthropomorphic picture of God, the case for A3 looks weak. It is also worth noting that, while Hobbes’s critique of A3 does invoke his own original analysis of what it is to be the author of an action (in the forensic sense of ‘author’), he is not likely to accept that that analysis is idiosyncratic or contrived. Presumably, he instead regards it as capturing our ordinary pre-philosophical employment of the word, as he claims is true of all the definitions provided in Leviathan “of such words as are Essentiall to all Politicall reasoning” (L 32.1: 576). According to Hobbes, ordinary employment properly determines “the signification of words in common use,” and he suggests that it lends his own faithfully clarifying definitions the backing of a kind of implicit “universal agree[ment]” or “Consent (concerning the use of words)” (QLNC 70, L 32.1: 476; see also AW 35.15, EL 27.13).¹¹

6.3 Authorizing Sin and Committing Sin Setting aside all reservations about descriptive theology and theological anthropomorphism, let us to suppose for a moment that God is the kind of being that might not merely cause human actions but also stand as their author. To fix ideas, let us further suppose (however improbably) that God is indeed the author of our sins even by Hobbesian standards—i.e., that God does not merely cause all our sins but positively licenses them, so that we sin in his name, with his commission. Principle A4 tells us that it follows from these suppositions that God is morally imperfect. Hobbes also denies this premise. He gives two separate arguments for maintaining (against A4) that even if God were the author of sin, this need not tell against his moral character. Each purports to show that God himself cannot sin (or commit wrongdoing, or injustice) even if he is the author of our sins: that even when our actions count as sins in relation to us, they do not count as sins when considered in relation to their remote predetermining cause and author. So even if God could properly ‘own up’ to our sins and be regarded as morally accountable for their occurrence, this would not impugn his own moral character. Hobbes summarizes the two arguments in Of Libertie and Necessitie and again in a close paraphrase in The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, on each occasion making it clear they should be reckoned as two distinct lines of reasoning: ¹¹ Hobbes also buttresses his analysis of ‘author’ in Leviathan with an account of the wider interconnected vocabulary of authorization, “,” “Commission,” “License,” “Actors, Representers, or Procurators,” and so on (L 16.4–5: 244–246).

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God cannot sin, because [i] his doing a thing makes it just, and consequently, no sin; as also because [ii] whatsoever can sin, is subject to another’s Law, which God is not. (OLN 24) God cannot sin, because [i] what he doth his doing maketh just; and because [ii] he is not subject to anothers Law. (QLNC 105)

The argument identified by my parenthetic numeral ‘[i]’ in each of the passages— call it the direct argument—asserts that whatever God does is made just (“and consequently, no sin”) simply by the fact that God himself does it. Stated as bluntly as it is in these two extracts, the direct argument can give the impression of invoking a form of voluntarism. I defer consideration of this argument to my wider discussion of voluntarist readings of Hobbes’s moral theology in Section 6.5 below, where I will make the case that the voluntarist appearance here is merely superficial. The argument identified by my numeral ‘[ii]’ in each of the two passages—call it the argument from natural right—asserts that since God is not “subject to another’s law,” it is impossible for him to sin. To understand Hobbes’s reasoning here, we must locate it the context of his wider treatment of sin, injustice, our natural right to all things, and the source of our rational obligations under natural law. To sin, in Hobbes’s system, is to violate a law, and also, more generally, to show contempt for the legislator (L 27.1: 452). The laws in question include the civil laws of the commonwealth, but they also include the laws of nature, i.e., the rationally discoverable principles of enlightened self-interest, which do double duty in Hobbes’s system as the precepts of morality and the standard of virtue.¹² Depending on the de facto power relations and covenantal situation, particular human individuals may or not be subject to civil law. But no human can escape being subject to the law of nature.¹³ God is plainly not subject to any civil law, and so cannot sin in that sense. But nor is God subject to the laws of nature. This will be true if we take Hobbes literally when he when he speaks of the laws of nature as being so many commands (and hence laws properly so called) dictated by God himself. God is not subject to his own commands; no sovereign can be bound by his own laws.¹⁴ But it is also true ¹² It should be appreciated here that sin is not a narrowly religious notion for Hobbes, but an expansive concept covering all kinds of wrongdoing. It comprehends all immoral conduct and vice (L 15.10: 226, 15.40: 242, 27:3: 454, DCi 14.16–17), and also all injustice—meaning, for Hobbes, action contrary to the rational precepts of natural law, and in particular, action that proceeds without right, ignoring a previous covenant or pact in which one renounced some part of one’s natural right to all things (L 15.3: 220, 15.10: 226). ¹³ “[W]here Law ceaseth, Sinne ceaseth. But because the Law of Nature is eternall, Violation of Covenants, Ingratitude, Arrogance, and all Facts contrary to any Morall virtue, can never cease to be Sinne” (L 27.3: 454). ¹⁴ The ‘Taylor–Warrender thesis’ that Hobbes regards the laws of nature as being literally commands dictated by God faces a number of problems. Most obviously, commands are expressions of the will and hence the desires of the commander (L 25.2: 398), but “God has no ends” (L 31.13: 564). The anthropomorphizing theology that ascribes a will and desires to the deity is disrespectful (L 31.25–26: 566),

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even if we adopt the more plausible interpretation that Hobbes’s laws of nature are ‘laws’ and ‘commands’ from the deity merely in a metaphorical sense, in that this incomprehensible great cause is responsible for creating, along with the rest of nature, human beings with their urge to survive, as well as the dangerous circumstances of human life in which defiance of the prudentially rational laws of nature tends to be ‘punished by’ (i.e., lead to) misery and death (L 31.40: 572). With this latter, metaphorical understanding of the ‘laws’ of nature, the reason we have to abide by them (and, which is all one, the reason we have to act justly and avoid sin) is not because they are literally commanded by an anthropomorphic legislatorgod, but because such behavior serves our strategic interests of safety and security in this world. Reason dictates the laws of nature as practical maxims to this end, hence their authority over us insofar as we value the end, as humans in fact overwhelmingly do. Thus, given our vulnerability and our aversion to death, humans ought rationally to act so as to promote peace, and, in particular, to keep faith with covenants in which we mutually set aside our natural right to all things. But were we beyond all danger or had no care for our safety and survival, the self-restraint mandated by the laws of nature would serve no intelligible purpose. Hobbes makes these points with reference to our natural right to all things, which we would have no need to grant away if, like God, we were possessed of sufficiently overwhelming power. Seeing all men by Nature had Right to All things, they had a Right every one to reigne over all the rest. But because this Right could not be obtained by force, it concerned the safety of every one, laying by that Right, to set up men (with Soveraign Authority) by common consent, to rule and defend them: whereas if there had been any man of Power Irresistible; there had been no reason, why he should not by that Power have ruled, and defended both himself, and them, according to his own discretion. To those therefore whose Power is irresistible, the dominion of all men adhaereth naturally by their excellence of Power; and

and in any case such an account of God’s intrinsic nature plainly cannot be substantiated by natural human reason (AW 34.9, L 31.33: 568). If the suggestion is that we might learn of God’s will, or at any rate learn of his commands, through some form of supernatural revelation (such as scripture or the supernaturally inspired teachings of a prophet), the problem is that Hobbes’s epistemology makes warranted belief in the authenticity of any supposedly supernatural revelation practically impossible (as I argue in detail in Chapter 7, Section 7.2). For the Taylor–Warrender thesis, see A. E. Taylor, “The Ethical Doctrine of Thomas Hobbes,” Philosophy 13 (1938), 406–424: 418–420 and Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957) 98–100. For criticism of the thesis, see Edwin Curley, “Religion and Morality in Hobbes,” in Jules S. Coleman and Christopher W. Morris, eds., Rational Commitment and Social Justice: Essays for Gregory Kavka (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press 1998), 90–121: 102–105. For more sympathetic assessments of the thesis, see A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1992), 71–135, and Yves Charles Zarka, Hobbes and Modern Political Thought, tr. James Griffith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 131–132.

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consequently it is from that Power, that the Kingdome over men, and the Right of afflicting men at his pleasure, belongeth Naturally to God Almighty; not as Creator, and Gracious; but as Omnipotent. (L 31.5: 558)

Thus given God’s surpassing power, he has no reason to act in conformity with the laws of nature, or to respect the precepts of morality and enlightened self-interest that bind humans. The distinction between just and unjust behavior is intelligible only in human circumstances where reason guides us in light of our weakness and desire for security. God therefore cannot sin, even where, ex hypothesi, he is both the predetermining cause and the author of our own sins. Whereas the direct argument maintains that God cannot sin because his actions are made just by the fact of his doing them, the argument from natural right maintains that God cannot sin because the standards of justice and injustice do not apply to his actions. Like a tiger or a blizzard, God is outside the framework of natural law, human morality, and the circumstances in which the distinction between just and unjust action has any purchase or application.¹⁵ On the face of it, there might appear to be a contradiction between the conclusion of the direct argument and the conclusion of the argument from natural right: how can God’s “doing a thing [make] it just” if the standards of justice and injustice do not apply to God’s actions? But the apparent contradiction is superficial and will disappear once we interpret the direct argument through the lens of Hobbes’s honorexpressing treatment of religious language (see Section 6.5 below). Hobbes’s argument from natural right depends on his understanding of the laws of nature—i.e., the standards of morality, justice, and sin—as having their normative authority only in human or human-like circumstances. Philosophers of a Platonist persuasion will resist this anthropocentric picture of the contingency and function of the moral law. Bramhall himself maintains that “If there had never been any positive commandment or law given, yet sin had still been sin, as being contrary to the eternall law of justice in God himself.”¹⁶ Nevertheless, it is worth noting that, if we bracket the particularities of Hobbes’s anthropocentric rationalization of the laws of nature and consider the matter more abstractly, his more general strategy of maintaining (against A4) that God might be able to ‘own up’ to our sins (and in that sense stand as their author) without thereby impugning his own moral character has a robust theological pedigree, especially in the Protestant tradition. It might be a mistake to regard Hobbes’s thesis that God deterministically foreordains all our sins as simply a variation of the traditional Calvinist thesis of predestination.¹⁷ Still, the basic strategy of distinguishing in the

¹⁵ Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography, 204. ¹⁶ Bramhall, Castigations, 145. ¹⁷ As Cromartie persuasively argues in his “Hobbes, Calvinism, and Determinism,” 95–115, esp. 97, 113.

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one human action a sin as it relates to the human agent, and yet no sin as it relates to God as its predetermining cause is familiar enough from Calvin and others.¹⁸

6.4 Causing Human Actions and Causing Sin As we have seen, Hobbes assesses premise A3 and premise A4 on their merits as truth-evaluable propositions and in each case argues that they are simply false. With premise A2, the principle that if God is the cause of all human actions, then God is the cause of sin, his approach is different. Hobbes clearly and consistently endorses the antecedent of A2. “[E]very act of mans will,” he tells us, can be traced back through a regress of prior causes to “the hand of God” (L 22.4: 326); God is “the cause of every deed” (L 46.22 Latin version: 1091). Does he also endorse the conditional principle A2 itself? On the one hand, he never denies that A2 is true. Moreover, on three separate occasions he goes out of his way to criticize an argument that purports to refute A2, and in so doing he might seem to reveal an implicit acceptance of the principle itself. Hobbes relates the argument against A2 first in Of Libertie and Necessitie and subsequently in Leviathan among a litany of blunders that he identifies in the scholastics’ hodgepodge stew of Aristotelian metaphysics and descriptivist theology (L 46.31: 1090, L 46.22 Latin version: 1091; compare also L 46.40: 1098). According to this school divine’s argument (as it is reported by Hobbes) God might be both the cause of all human actions and the cause of the law according to which certain of those actions are sins, but yet not be the cause of any sin, since an action’s sinfulness is a matter of its incongruity with the law, which incongruity is a mere privation or a negative fact, rather than anything positive that God has created.¹⁹

¹⁸ As for instance when Pharaoh is moved to sin out of his own cruelty and arrogance, but is at the same time also moved to do so by God for his own farsighted purposes (Exodus 7.3–5). Consider Calvin’s remarks on this sort of case: “[T]he wicked man is motivated either by his avarice, or his ambition, or envy, or cruelty to do what he does, and he disregards any other end. Consequently, according to the root which motivates his heart and the end toward which he strives, his work is qualified and with good reason is judged bad. . . . But God’s intention is completely different. For His aim is to exercise His justice for the salvation and preservation of good, to pour out His goodness and grace on his faithful, and to chastise those who need it. Hence that is how we ought to distinguish between God and men; by separating in the same work His justice, His goodness and His judgment from the evil of both the devil and the ungodly.” Jean Calvin, Against the Libertines, quoted in Paul Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 128 (emphasis added). ¹⁹ In their editorial apparatuses, Malcolm locates a version of the argument in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia IIae qu. 79 art. 2, and Curley points to the discussion of privation in Summa Theologiae Ia qu. 19 art. 9 and Ia IIae qu. 75 art. 1 as a relevant precursor, while adding the qualification that the argument reported by Hobbes in L 46.22 Latin version: 1091 sounds “only roughly” Thomistic (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), 1092 note ‘bs,’ Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 476 note 11). As Martinich stresses, this privation argument was a standard “set-piece” among the Arminian theologians of Hobbes’s day (A. P. Martinich, “Thomas Hobbes’s English Calvinism: Necessity, Omnipotence, and Goodness,” in Philosophical Readings 4 (2012), 18–30: 26). For a more specific

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Hobbes himself accepts the definition of a sin as an action that is incongruous with the law (L 27.1: 452). But he is unimpressed by the attempt to block A2 by treating sin as a kind of privation. First, although the “pleading” that “sin is a non being [non ens] and hence is not an effect” appears in “many celebrated writers,” it has the absurd consequence that humans are no more a cause of sin than God is (AW 35.16, translated slightly adapted). Second and more importantly for our purposes, it is manifest casuistry to suggest that God causes both the law and all our actions, and yet does not cause their mutual incongruity: [Scholastic philosophers] say that from the denial of free will it follows that God is the author of sin . . . though they nevertheless admit that God is first cause of things and actions; they try to obtain a reconciliation of these views from Aristotle, calling sin άνομία, that is, the very absence of conformity with the law, a mere privation, not any deed or action at all. So while acknowledging that God is the cause of every deed, and the cause of the law, they deny that he is the cause of the lack of conformity between them, rather as if someone were to draw two lines, one straight and one curved, and say that he has made both the lines, but that someone else has made the lack of conformity between them. (L 46.22 Latin version: 1091, compare also L 46.31: 1090) [Certain theologians] distinguish the action from the sin of the action, saying, that God Almighty does indeed cause the action, whatsoever action it be, but not the sinfulness or irregularity of it, that is, the discordance between the action and the Law. Such distinctions as these dazle my understanding; I finde no difference between the will to have a thing done, and the permission to do it, when he that permitteth can hinder it, and knows that it will be done unless he hinder it. Nor finde I any difference between an action & the sin of that action, as for example, between the killing of Uriah, and the sin of David in killing Uriah, nor when one is cause both of the Action and of the Law, how another can, because of the disagreement between them, no more than how one man making a longer and a shorter garment, another can make the inequality that is between them. (OLN 23–24)

So Hobbes is clear that one cannot be the cause of both human actions and the law, and yet not be the cause of the incongruity between the two. In the English Leviathan, he explicitly labels the contrary view an “absurdit[y]” (L 46.31: 1090), which is to say, a self-contradiction (EL 16.2). One might then be forgiven for thinking that Hobbes’s critique of the scholastic argument against A2 amounts to an endorsement of A2 itself. If God both causes all our actions and causes the law, and immediate source of the privation argument, we might note that in Anti-White, Hobbes’s chapter by chapter commentary on the Catholic theologian and philosopher Thomas White’s De mundo dialogi tres (1642), Hobbes attributes the argument to White (AW 35.16).

, ,   ’   

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and if it is absurd to hold that God might cause actions that are incongruous with the law without causing that incongruity, must he not cause our sins? Similarly, when Hobbes writes that “Nor finde I any difference between an action & the sin of that action, as for example, between the killing of Uriah, and the sin of David in killing Uriah,” does he not imply that if God causes the action, God causes the sin? So it might seem that Hobbes must accept that principle A2 is true, even if he never says so out loud. However that might be, Hobbes not only fails to affirm A2 and fails to affirm its consequent that God causes sin, but refuses to do so as a point of principle. He quotes Bramhall’s assertion that “he who doth necessitate the Wil to evil, is the true cause of evil” and notes that here Bramhall “thinks he shall force me to say, that God is the cause of sin.” Hobbes makes three distinct points in response: I say . . . that to cause sin is not always sin [TH: presumably in light of the Hobbesian objection(s) to A3 and/or A4], nor can be sin in him that is not subject to some higher Power [TH: presumably in light of the Hobbesian argument from natural right against A4]; but to use so unseemly a Phrase, as to say that God is the cause of sin, because it soundeth so like to saying that God sinneth, I can never be forced by so weak an argument as this of his. (QLNC 234–235)

With his first two points, Hobbes reminds us even if he were to allow that God is the cause of sin, he has objections in hand that would block the further stages of the argument to God’s moral imperfection. But in the final clause of the extract, Hobbes offers a different kind of response. He tells us that he in any case refuses to “say” that God is the cause of sin on the grounds that that expression sounds “so like to saying” that God himself sins that it is “unseemly.” So Hobbes refuses to make such a disrespectful-sounding assertion, or at least “can never be forced [to do so] by so weak an argument” as that which Bramhall presents. Moreover in the sentences immediately following, Hobbes backs up this refusal with the claim that it puts him in good company. He cites various Protestant authorities— prominently including Luther, Bucer, Calvin, and the Synod of Dort—that allow, in one way of another, that human actions are all necessitated, and states that I could add more. For all the famous Doctors of the Reformed Churches, and with them St. Augustine are of the same opinion. None of them denied that God is the cause of all Motion & Action, or that God is the cause of all Laws; and yet they were never forced to say, that God is the cause of sin. (QLNC 235, emphasis added)

Hobbes’s refusal to say that God is the cause of sin might seem to be merely a matter of etiquette that makes no difference either to the logical or the dialectical

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situation. By Hobbes’s own standards (as we saw in his response to the school divine’s argument), the thesis that God causes all our sins seems to be an inescapable consequence of the thesis that God causes all our actions. Bramhall might therefore appear justified in regarding this decorous politesse on Hobbes’s part as a kind of evasion.²⁰ What does it matter if Hobbes refuses to confirm A2 out loud, if he and his critics both understand that he is logically committed to it? But perhaps an interpretation might be mounted in which Hobbes’s refusal is more than a question of good manners—a reading in which he holds that it is improper to affirm A2 and its consequent both because these statements are disrespectful, and because they are not even candidates for truth, justification, and belief. After all, it is for Hobbes not merely impolite but an abuse of language to air unflattering descriptions of the deity, a failure to grasp the proper function of religious speech. In ordinary non-theological discourse, reason tasks us to examine our assertions with an eye to descriptive truth and falsehood, and to follow out their logical consequences for better or for worse. But when we speak of the divine attributes and actions, our words are not to be assessed for their truth or internal logic, but as a demonstrative performance aimed at the greater glorification of God. Here reason itself dictates that we speak purely for honor’s sake, and that we pay no mind to the usual questions about logical consistency and entailment among our statements.²¹ Notwithstanding any superficial grammatical appearance to the contrary, our statements in this area of discourse are not in the business of stating truths or articulating truth-apt propositions and are not properly brought to the bar to answer for their supposed logical consequences. So rather than interpreting Hobbes as silently agreeing that A2 and its consequent are true but refusing to say so out loud for reasons of decorum, perhaps we might take his view to be that such statements cannot properly be regarded as conveying truth-apt propositions at all. Bramhall abuses religious language when he insists that A2 is a true conditional statement and that since Hobbes is committed to its antecedent, he must therefore accept its consequent. This sort of logical analysis is out of place when we speak about the divine attributes and actions. It is not merely tasteless and impertinent but fails to grasp the exclusively honor-expressing function of such talk. Given our interest in Hobbes’s turn toward expressivism in the philosophy of religion, it will prove instructive to test the limits of his position by weighing the merits of this more radical interpretation.

²⁰ “Allthough [Hobbes] be convicted that it followeth from his principles, That God is the cause of all sin in the world, yet he is loath to say so much, for that is an unseemly phrase to say that God is the cause of sin, because it soundeth so like a saying that God sinneth; yea, it is even as like it, as one egge is like another, or rather it is not like it, for it is the very same” (Bramhall, Castigations, 278). ²¹ We may of course be concerned with the looser associationistic ‘logic’ of honorific connotations (as, for instance, when Hobbes himself states that it is “unseemly” to say that “God is the cause of sin” on account of the fact that “it soundeth so like to saying that God sinneth” (QLNC 234–235). But this is not the hard logic of truth-entailment. (See Chapter 2, Section 2.3 for further discussion.)

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This reading of Hobbes’s handling of A2 in his exchange with Bramhall might seem to be corroborated by his treatment of the issue in Anti-White.²² The relevant passage runs as follows: [White’s opinion that every action derives from God by a series of intermediate causes] would seem to imply that God is the cause of evil. . . . Personally, while I hold that the nature of God is inconceivable, and that propositions are a kind of language by which we express our conceptions of the natures of things, I incline to the view that no proposition about the nature of God can be true save this one: God exists, and that no title correctly describes God other than the word ‘being’ [ens]. Everything else, I say, pertains not to the explanation of philosophical truth, but to proclaiming the states of mind that govern our wish to praise, magnify, and honor God. Hence the expressions ‘God sees, understands, wishes, acts, brings to pass’ and the like, which mean nothing to us except motion, do not display the Divine Nature, but our own piety who desire to ascribe to Him the names most worthy of honor among us. Therefore they are rather oblations than propositions, and these names, if we were to apply them to God as we understand them, would be called blasphemies and sins against God’s ordinance (which forbids us to take His name in vain) rather than true propositions. Again, neither propositions nor notions about His nature are to be argued over, but are a part of our worship and are evidences of a mind that honors God. Propositions that confer honor are correctly enunciated about God, but the opposite ones irreligiously; we may reverently and as Christians say of God that He is the author of every act, because it is honorable to do so, but to say ‘God is the author of sin’ is sacrilegious and profane. There is no contradiction in the matter, however, for, as I said, the words under discussion are not the propositions of people philosophizing but the actions of those who pay homage. (AW 35.16, translation slightly adapted from Jones, emphases mine)

Here Hobbes roundly rejects all truth-apt discourse about the nature of God besides the bare claim that this being exists. Moreover, apart from that one minimalistic concession, he even says that “no proposition about the nature of God can be true [veram esse posse]” (emphasis added)—perhaps not so much because we know nothing about God’s actual attributes and actions (for it is ²² I note one superficial complication in this earlier manuscript work. In the relevant passage in Anti-White, Hobbes starts by raising the question of whether God is the cause of evil [“causam mali”]; but by the end of the paragraph he has shifted, without comment, to the question of whether we can say that God the author of sin [“peccati author”] (AW 35.16). However, besides this shift in terminology, Hobbes shows no sign of distinguishing between the two questions in this paragraph or in Anti-White more generally, which, it should be recalled, was written in the early 1640s, before the first exchange with Bramhall and significantly before the first appearance of Hobbes’s novel analysis of ‘author’ in Leviathan. For whatever reason, in Anti-White Hobbes treats the two questions as effectively equivalent, or at least writes as if the one is question is contained within the other.

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difficult to see why such ignorance would make it impossible for us to say true things about God, even if only by accident), but because our other ‘propositions’ (i.e., statements) about God are not actually in the business of making truth claims in the first place. But however that might be, Hobbes insists that all further talk about the deity—including our use of expressions such as God “acts” and “brings to pass”—properly serves not to convey “our conceptions of the nature of things,” but only to display how much we honor the deity. This gives us license to say that God “is the author of every act,” but none to say that “God the author of sin.” To the literal-minded this might present the appearance of contradiction, but only so long as our words are mistaken for truth-apt descriptions when in fact they are merely “the actions of those who pay homage.” The error lies in taking a purely honorific illocutionary act for an attempt to describe God’s attributes and actions in truth-apt terms. And, in fact, the same basic diagnosis reappears in Leviathan when Hobbes offers a kind of coroner’s report on the school divines’ failed attempt to refute A2 by appealing to the metaphysics of privation. “[S]uch is the Philosophy of all men that resolve of their Conclusions, before they know their Premises” Hobbes pronounces of that attempt, “pretending to comprehend, that which is Incomprehensible; and of Attributes of Honour to make Attributes of Nature” (L 46.31: 1090, emphasis added). Again, the mistake behind the mistake is an error in the philosophy of language—namely, the confounding of the titles that are given to God in honor-expressing acts of obeisance for so many metaphysical realities. So a case with some color can be made for an interpretation on which Hobbes refuses to affirm A2 and its consequent both because it would be disrespectful to do so and because statements like these are not even candidates for truth. However, I now argue that the more plausible reading is that Hobbes actually believes that A2 and its consequent are true, and merely holds that it is inappropriate to say such things out loud. A respectful courtier simply does not say that the sovereign prince has caused the various disasters that roil the kingdom, even if he privately believes just that. As we have just seen, the manuscript text AW 35.16 might be read as adopting the position that we can say nothing whatever in descriptive terms about how God “acts” and what he “brings to pass.” But this is not in fact Hobbes’s considered view. As we saw in Chapter 4, Hobbes’s consistent position across the authorized works published in his own lifetime is that, while we cannot hope to describe the intrinsic properties (or “nature”) of this inconceivable being, we can make some true descriptive claims about God’s relational properties—in particular regarding what this being causes (and, in that sense, how God acts and what he brings to pass). After all, reason dictates that we posit this mysterious being precisely in order to stand as the cause of the humanly imaginable regress of causes (EL 11.2, TSO 127, L 11.25: 160). For Hobbes, the name ‘God’ just means “the cause of the world,” and therefore encapsulates a uniquely referring definite description

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couched in relational terms (L 31.15; compare also EL 11.2). And, as we have seen in this chapter, Hobbes is perfectly explicit that as cause of the great frame of nature, God is also thereby the cause of every human action, where this is to be understood as an accurate description of God’s relational properties, and not simply an honorific title. So Hobbes’s consistent published position is that we can say, in literal, truth-apt, and descriptive terms, that God causes the great frame of nature and, among the rest, all human actions. If AW 35.16 denies this, it conflicts with the published works. But perhaps we might bring AW 35.16 into line with the later publications by interpreting it merely as insisting, albeit it in aggressively hyperbolic language, that all we can say in descriptive terms about the intrinsic character of the being that we call ‘God’—i.e., the cause of the great frame of nature, as Hobbes, as usual, intends the name ‘God’ to be understood—is that it exists. Here in this polemical riposte to White, Hobbes is pressing the point that we can say nothing descriptive about the inconceivable “nature of God” (emphasis added)—i.e., about God’s inconceivable intrinsic character—nor with any specificity or detail about how exactly this being “acts” and “brings [things] to pass.” But this is not to deny that it is in fact the great cause of the humanly comprehensible world, and therefore (given determinism) the cause of all human actions. Whether or not we domesticate AW 35.16 in this way, Hobbes’s position in the published works is that, as a matter of descriptive fact, God is the cause of all human actions. It follows, as Hobbes must see, that God is the cause our sins. As Hobbes’s treatment of the case of David and Uriah makes abundantly clear, when God causes a human action that is a sin, he causes that sin. And in causing all human actions, God causes all our sins. So it seems that Hobbes must in fact accept that A2 and its consequent are true, even if he will not say so out loud.²³ The hypothesis that Hobbes actually accepts A2 also helps to explain why he tells us that he will not affirm so “unseemly” a proposition out loud. After all, Hobbes presumably regards it as just as unseemly to affirm the equally disrespectful A3 and A4, but since those propositions are demonstrably false, there is in their case no need to belabor the point.²⁴

²³ It might be objected that when Hobbes quotes Bramhall’s assertion that “he who doth necessitate the will to evil, is the true cause of evil” and replies that “I can never be forced [to “use to unseemly a phrase, as to say that God is the cause of sin”] by so weak an argument as this,” Hobbes indicates that he regards Bramhall’s quoted reasoning as weak (QLNC 234–235, emphasis added). But on the current interpretation, it seems that Hobbes ought to accept that Bramhall’s reasoning is not in fact weak but compelling, even if Hobbes will not actually say such a thing out loud. How can we explain Hobbes’s dismissive assessment of Bramhall’s argument as “weak,” if Hobbes actually believes that A2 is true? In reply, I suggest that we read Hobbes not as dismissing the logical force of Bramhall’s argument, but only as dismissing any supposed perlocutionary power of Bramhall’s statement of the argument to make Hobbes say that God is the cause of sin as weak, given the obvious unseemliness of that expression. ²⁴ My hypothesis that Hobbes believes that A2 is true while holding that it ought not to be affirmed out loud coincides with Leibniz’s interpretation in his “Reflexions on the work that Mr. Hobbes published in English on ‘Liberty, Necessity, and Chance’ ”: “[Hobbes] adds that it is not good to say

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Surveying the overall argument from determinism to God’s moral imperfection in the light of this more modest interpretation, we get the following picture. Hobbes accepts that premise A1 and premise A2 are both true, and given that he accepts determinism, he also privately accepts their consequents—i.e., that God is the cause of all human actions, and that God is the cause of sin. However, while it gives God honor to say that he is the cause of all human actions, it is disrespectful to say that he is the cause of sin. Thus, notwithstanding his private beliefs about the matter, Hobbes will only openly affirm A1 and refuses to openly affirm A2 and its “unseemly” consequent. As for A3 and A4: considered on their merits as truth-apt propositions, Hobbes holds that they are false. There is then no question that the overall argument from determinism to God’s moral imperfection is a failure even when addressed on Bramhall’s own terms. But it is also worth noting that whereas A1 and A2 merely draw out the logical ramifications of God’s relational property of being cause of the humanly comprehensible world, A3 and A4 import assumptions about God’s intrinsic nature (in assuming that God is the kind of being that can and does authorize the actions that he causes, and the kind of being that is a proper object of moral assessment, with all that that entails). These latter premises A3 and A4 thereby implicate the kind of theoretical discourse about God’s intrinsic nature that Hobbes totally rejects both for epistemological reasons and for reasons of decorum. God’s intrinsic character is entirely beyond our human comprehension and acting as if it were not dishonors God even at the best of times (L 31.28: 568, L 46.23: 1086); all the more so when (as in A3 and A4) it involves speculation about unflattering properties. The content of this theoretical speculation is a mirage and its practice is an insult. But more than this, such talk is also an abuse of language, a failure to appreciate that since “we understand nothing of what God is, but only that he is . . . the Attributes we give [God], are not tell one another, what he is, nor to signifie our opinion of his Nature, but our desire to honor him” (L 34.4: 614; see also L 46.23: 1086, DCi 15.14). Misunderstanding the function of this part of human speech, “they that venture to reason of his Nature, from these Attributes of Honour” commit, among the rest, a linguistic mistake. Such descriptivist theologians “lose[e] their understanding in the very first attempt,” and therefore cannot hope to say something true (L 46.23: 1086). This marks an important difference with A1 and A2, which, being limited to descriptive claims about the logical consequences that an action which God does not will happens, since that is to say in effect that God is lacking in power. But he adds also at the same time that it is not good either to say the opposite, and to attribute to God that he wills the evil; because that is not seemly, and would appear to accuse God of lack of goodness. He believes therefore that, in these matters telling the truth is not advisable.” Leibniz himself states that Hobbes is “to be commended” for not wishing to declare himself where it may “caus[e] offense to people” and adds that “He would be right [that telling the truth is not advisable on this point] if the truth were in the paradoxical opinions that he maintains” (G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil, ed. Austin Farrer, tr. E. M. Huggard (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 399).

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of God’s defining relational property, do not make any suppositions about God’s intrinsic nature, and do not mistake attributes of honor for metaphysical realities. A1 and A2 are then respectable candidates for truth and belief, even if A2 ought not to be affirmed out loud on grounds of decorum.

6.5 The Appearance of Voluntarism In this final section of the chapter I examine Hobbes’s use of voluntarist language and assess the case for a voluntarist interpretation of his moral theology. While there are passages that present the vivid appearance of voluntarism, I argue that such moments are specious. Hobbes is merely employing voluntarist-sounding language for honorific effect. Ordinarily, we might be expected to define voluntarism about the moral status of God’s actions in something like the following terms: voluntarism (narrow) =df the theory that God’s actions qualify as just or as good (or as both) simply in virtue of their being manifestations of God’s will. Hobbes can indeed say this sort of thing. However, any reading of Hobbes as a voluntarist in this narrowly defined sense falls at the first hurdle. That is because he clearly and consistently maintains that talk about God’s ‘will’ cannot be intended literally on pain of absurd anthropomorphism,²⁵ and is legitimate only insofar as it is a metaphor for “the Power, by which [God] effecteth everything” (L 31.26: 566; compare also DCi 15.14, AW 34.9, QLNC 334). So as we consider the proper interpretation of the voluntarist-sounding passages, I propose defining voluntarism in somewhat broader terms, in order to accommodate the point that Hobbes’s assertions about God’s will might simply be disguised assertions about his power; and moreover to accommodate those voluntarist-sounding texts that do not explicitly refer to God’s ‘will’ but only to the fact that he does things or makes things happen. On the definition that I will adopt: voluntarism (wide) =df the theory that God’s actions qualify as just or as good (or as both) simply in virtue of either (i) their being manifestations of God’s will, or (ii) their being manifestations of God’s power.

²⁵ For Hobbes, the will is simply a kind of desire or aversion, “the last Appetite in Deliberating,” which overrides other competing desires and aversions and hence precipitates action (L 6.53: 92; see also EL 12.2, DH 9.2). To attribute a literal will to God is to attribute desires and hence, Hobbes writes, “a capacity to suffer,” “a hoping or wanting for what [he] needs or lacks,” along with other aspects of an anthropomorphic psychology (DCi 15.14; see also AW 34.9).

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This wider definition preserves important core claims of the historical voluntarist tradition associated with the likes of Duns Scotus, Ockham, and Calvin. It preserves the claim that all of God’s actions are guaranteed to be just or good. It also preserves the key idea that we should answer the Euthyphro dilemma by saying that God’s actions are just or good because they are performed by him, as opposed to saying that God performs these actions because they are just or good. The positive moral properties attending God’s actions are a consequence of God’s nature or activity. But since the wider definition allows us to read Hobbes’s talk about God’s will simply as a metaphor for his power, it gives a reading of Hobbes as theorizing in broadly voluntarist terms about the moral status of God’s actions a bit more running room than the narrowly defined voluntarist interpretation would permit. Given that Hobbes categorically rejects literal-minded talk about God’s ‘will,’ I regard the narrowly defined voluntarist interpretation as textually hopeless. But commentators who read Hobbes in this more literal way have no grounds to complain of neglect: what I have to say against the wider voluntarist reading will of course apply equally to their narrower interpretation. So from here on out, I will use ‘voluntarism’ simply to refer to the more widely-defined theory and beg forgiveness for the etymological adulteration. The passages that might seem to endorse voluntarism are as follows. First there are the texts in Hobbes’s debate with Bramhall that advance the direct argument for the justice of God’s actions (see Section 6.3 above). Recall: in Of Libertie and Necessitie, “God cannot sin, because his doing a thing makes it just”; and similarly in The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance “God cannot sin, because what he doth, his doing maketh just” (OLN 24, QLNC 105). On the face of it, Hobbes seems to say here that whatever God does must be counted as just simply because it is an action performed by him, and at least when interpreted without further context, this is apt to put the reader in mind of the voluntarist approach to moral theology. Indeed, Hobbes can appear to double-down on this kind of voluntarist position in Of Libertie and Necessitie: [T]he power of God alone without other helps is sufficient justification of any action he doth. . . . That which he does is made just by his doing it . . . Power irresistible justifies all actions, really and properly, in whomsoever it is found . . . and because such power is in God . . . he must needs be just in all in his actions. (OLN 20–21, 22)

Plausibly, Hobbes is not just repeating the argument from natural right in these passages. His position here is not merely the negative thesis that the actions of God cannot count as unjust since he is not subject to any laws—which, after all, is something that is equally true of a tiger or a blizzard, beings whose actions are not unjust (since they are not subject to any law), but not just either. Rather, it is the positive thesis that whatever God does is affirmatively “justifie[d]” by his power,

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“really and properly,” “made just” by the fact of his doing it. As we saw in Section 6.3, Hobbes explicitly distinguishes between the argument from natural right with its negative conclusion and the current direct argument with its positive conclusion. In the current passages, God’s power makes or causes the justice of divine actions, and at least on the face of it, this amounts to a ratification of voluntarism.²⁶ Hobbes’s other apparently voluntarist episode occurs in Anti-White and concerns the goodness of God’s actions. Recall: “when men will to do something, they will to do so because it is good; but what God does is good because He has willed to do it” (AW 30.34, translation adapted). Once again, this can seem a straightforward affirmation of voluntarism. On the face of it, then, it might appear that there is a compelling case for reading of Hobbes as holding that whatever God does is both good and just simply because it is a manifestation either of his transcendent power or of his will. There is a significant body of commentary that reads Hobbes as some sort of voluntarist. Leopold Damrosch claims that “Hobbes’s theology embraces a total voluntarism.”²⁷ A. P. Martinich holds that Hobbes, “following Calvin,” would assert that divine actions are “[j]ust because [they are] willed by God” rather than the other way around. J. B. Schneewind maintains that “Hobbes is most naturally taken to be expounding a voluntarist position,” and that he “adumbrate[s]” the deity in “voluntarist terms.” I myself numbered Hobbes among early modern voluntarists in a previous work.²⁸ But that was a mistake, and it is an error to take Hobbes’s voluntarist-sounding texts at face value. Hobbes surely knows that the passages cited above will resonate with those attuned to voluntarist moral theology, and is no doubt happy to show that his own approach to religious language can perfectly well valorize this traditional way of talking. But in each of the works ²⁶ Commentators attracted to a voluntarist interpretation of Hobbes on the relationship between God’s actions and justice might also point to the famous paragraph at the end of Leviathan chapter 15 in which Hobbes says that the ‘laws of nature’—which constitute the standards of justice for humans— are in themselves nothing more than “Conclusions or Theoremes concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of [men],” and hence not laws properly so called unless and until these same theorems are “delivered in the word of God” as so many commandments (L 15.41: 242). Some have read this paragraph as endorsing a voluntarist picture of God’s relationship to the laws of nature and the standards of justice, claiming that Hobbes accepts that the laws of nature are in fact ‘laws’ properly so called, and therefore that they are an expression of the commands and hence the will of God. (See L 25.2: 398 on the nature of commands as expressions of will. For commentary on this reading of L 15.41: 242 and my own skepticism about this literal understanding of the ‘laws’ of nature, see note 14.) ²⁷ Leopold Damrosch, Jr., “Hobbes as Reformation Theologian: Implications of the Free-Will Controversy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979), 339–352: 343. In support of this reading Damrosch cites Hobbes’s “strong reading” of Job in L 31.6: 558–560 (though in fact here Hobbes references Job merely in support of the argument from natural right), along with the passage about “sufficient justification” from Of Libertie and Necessitie cited above (OLN 20–21, 22). ²⁸ Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan, 94; see also Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography, 351, J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), 98, 99, Thomas Holden, Spectres of False Divinity: Hume’s Moral Atheism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 213.

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where the voluntarist-sounding passages appear he is also explicit that this sort of talk is simply an honorific performance, a paean of our reverence and awe before the incomprehensible great cause, not a seriously intended, truth-apt account of its metaphysical relationship to justice and goodness. Two points should be emphasized to begin with, each of which tells against taking the voluntarist-sounding passages at face value. The first is that justice and goodness are two very different things for Hobbes. The second is that each is given an entirely naturalistic explanation in his philosophy. For Hobbes, for an action to be just is for it to be in accord with the laws of nature—i.e., with the maxims of prudential reason aimed at self-preservation— most especially, the rational mandate to stand by our covenants, including the agreement to authorize the actions of the sovereign and obey the civil law. Moreover, for Hobbes, the “Doctrine of the Lawes of Nature” just is “the true Morall Philosophie” (L 15.40: 242): the rational dictates of enlightened selfinterest are all one with the rules of morality, and the distinction between just and unjust action is at once both the distinction between prudent and imprudent behavior and the distinction between right and wrong conduct. It also stands behind Hobbes’s characterological distinction between virtue and vice (L 15.10: 226). Hobbes’s naturalistic account of what it is to be a just action gives us, in effect, his theory of the right—a delineation of moral conduct, and a template for virtuous character. The word ‘good,’ by contrast, has for Hobbes has no necessary connection to morality, right conduct, and virtue. When applied to some object or event, it expresses a positive evaluation; but that evaluation need not be moral in character. There are good cups of coffee and good tennis serves, as well as good, because virtuous, characters. And famously, for Hobbes, our practice of evaluative judgment is merely an expression of different individuals’ subjective, variegated, and changeable appetites and aversions, as “we call good and evil the things that please and displease” (EL 7.3). It makes no contact with any supposed objective, appetiteindependent properties of goodness or badness.²⁹ Whereas the criteria of just and ²⁹ “[T]hese words of Good, Evill, and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and Evill, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves” (L 6.7: 80–82; compare also EL 7.3, DCi 14.17, AW 30.24, 38.5, 39.4). There is controversy over the precise nature of evaluative judgment in Hobbes. Some commentators regard Hobbes as a reductionist who holds that an evaluative judgment can be analyzed into a descriptive report of the speaker’s appetites or aversions (David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 7, Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 29, Anat Biletzki, Talking Wolves: Thomas Hobbes on the Language of Politics and the Politics of Language (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 84–86, A. P. Martinich, Hobbes (New York: Routledge, 2005), 57–58). Some commentators regard Hobbes as an error theorist who regards all evaluative judgments as involving the mistaken attribution of an objective and mind-independent value to the object of assessment (Richard Tuck, “Hobbes’s Moral Philosophy,” in Tom Sorell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 208–245, Stephen Darwall, “Normativity and Projection in Hobbes’s Leviathan,” The Philosophical Review 109 (2000), 313–347). I regard Hobbes

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unjust action have a fixedness and a kind of interhuman objectivity rooted in our species’s universal (or near-universal) instinct for security and self-preservation, the standards of good and bad are much more subjective, differing between tribes, factions, tastes, the young and the old, from person to person, and from moment to moment. Anyone who would interpret Hobbes as sincerely endorsing voluntarism flies in the face of these central Hobbesian analyses. To take the voluntarist-sounding texts at face value involves a number of implausibilities. We have to believe that Hobbes regards the goodness and justice of God’s actions as mind- and appetiteindependent metaphysical realities, while holding that the goodness and justice of ordinary non-theological discourse are merely an expression of human needs and desires. That he treats the goodness and justice of God’s actions as inseparably locked together (each being an immediate consequence of God’s will or surpassing power), while in ordinary non-theological contexts the goodness and the justice of actions are very different questions, answering to a subjective theory of value on the one hand, and a species-objective theory of the right on the other. That he regards the goodness and justice of God’s actions as caused or constituted, in some unexplained way, simply by God’s will or power. That this divine goodness and justice, however different from the human in its origins, workings, and metaphysical status, can yet be substituted into the same sort of argumentative logic as human goodness and justice.³⁰ These metaphysical theses are at odds with Hobbes’s usual empirical and synthetic method, with the bracing naturalism of his account of ordinary-discourse goodness and justice, and with the pride he takes in enforcing precision and clarity in moral and psychological definitions. Instead of attempting to hammer square pegs into the round holes of Hobbes’s philosophical system, it is much simpler to read Hobbes’s voluntarist-sounding statements as yet another instance of his honorific and non-descriptive form of religious speech. That would explain why he is not concerned to differentiate goodness and justice when speaking of God’s actions—and for that matter why any number of other honor-giving adjectives (such as ‘wise,’ ‘far-sighted,’ ‘merciful,’ and so on) might equally well have been larded on in what is not in fact a description of the incomprehensible great cause and its actions, but a motet of reverence and awe before it. We can also see how it is that Hobbes can say that God’s simply “doing a thing makes it just,” and how it is that he can say that “what as a prescriptivist who holds that evaluative judgments neither describe the object of assessment nor the speaker’s appetites, but rather convey prescriptive attitudes (Thomas Holden, “Hobbes on the Function of Evaluative Speech,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (2016), 123–144). ³⁰ For instance, when Hobbes presents the direct argument and the argument from natural right in the same breath. Recall: “God cannot sin, because his doing a thing makes it just, and consequently, no sin; as also because whatsoever can sin, is subject to another’s law, which God is not” (OLN 24, emphasis added). Here the justice of God’s actions, which is apparently guaranteed simply in virtue of the fact that these actions are performed by him, is invoked to show that God cannot sin, in (as the second half of the sentence makes plain) the ordinary human sense of sin.

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God does is good because he has willed to do it” (OLN 24, AW 30.34, emphases added). This is not because God’s performing an action somehow causes that action to be good or just in any literal sense, but because reason requires us to call any action that God performs ‘good’ and ‘just’ in order to do him honor. The clearest evidence in favor of the expressivist reading of the contested passages comes from Hobbes’s methodological remarks elsewhere in the same works, where he is explicit that talk about God’s justice and goodness (and thus, presumably, the justice and goodness of his actions) is properly only an attempt to honor the deity. First consider justice. Hobbes’s voluntarist-sounding remarks about the justice of God’s actions were drawn from Of Libertie and Necessitie and The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, his two contributions to the debate with Bramhall. As we have seen, in each of these works Hobbes asserts that all of God’s actions are made just simply in virtue of the fact that he performs them. So far, so voluntarist. But each of these works also includes a cautionary remark about how all such talk is to be taken. In Of Libertie and Necessitie this comes in a final “Postscript” confirming Hobbes’s own expressivist approach to religious language and warning us against the marsh lights of descriptivist theology: Arguments seldom work on men of wit and learning, when they have once ingaged themselves in a contrary opinion. If any thing do it, it is the shewing of them the causes of their errours, which is this; Pious men attribute to God Almighty, for honour sake, whatsoever they see is honourable in the world, as seeing, hearing, willing, knowing, justice, wisedom, &c.. But deny him such poor things as ears, brains, and other organs, without which we worms, neither have nor can conceive such faculties to be; and so far they do well. But when they dispute of Gods actions Philosophically, then they consider them again, as if he had such faculties, and in that manner, as we have them. This is not well; and thence it is they fall into so many difficulties.³¹

Hobbes explicitly numbers justice alongside the other paradigmatic attributes of honor—seeing, hearing, willing, knowing, and the rest—that the pious properly bestow on God simply “for honour sake,” insofar as these words in their ordinary non-theological employment signify qualities that are “honourable in the world.” But when taken by literal-minded theologians for truth-apt descriptions, our pious honorifics lead into a maze of confusion. It is the familiar analysis, here

³¹ This “Postscript” to Of Libertie and Necessitie was not included in the unauthorized 1654 edition, but was included along with the rest of Of Libertie and Necessitie in Bramhall’s 1655 A Defence of True Liberty, and then again in Hobbes’s 1656 Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance. The text here is from QLNC 334 (with the emphasis added).

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explicitly applied to those who would “dispute of Gods actions” (emphasis added) and talk in descriptive terms about the “justice” of God. In The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, Hobbes’s position statement on the proper and improper use of religious language comes at the outset, among his preliminary methodological remarks setting the terms of his debate with Bramhall: And for the Arguments derived from the Attributes of God, so farre forthe as those Attributes are argumentative, that is, so farre forth as their significations be conceavable, I admit them for Arguments; but where they are given for honour onely, and signifie nothing but an intention and endeavour to praise and magnifie as much as we can Almighty God, there I hold them not for Arguments, but for Oblations; not for the language, but (as the Scripture calls them) for the calves of our lips; which signifie not true nor false, or any opinion of our brain, but the reverence and devotion of our hearts; and therefore they are no sufficient præmises to inferre Truth, or convince Falsehood. (QLNC 5)

Where the attributes we give to God signify nothing conceivable and are given simply to show honor, they are (in the metaphor borrowed from Hosea 14:2) the “calves of our lips,” sacrificial offerings given in words. Such non-descriptive “Oblations” are not truth-apt and do not express beliefs or “any opinion of our brain.” It is notable that Hobbes does not rule out the possibility of attributions that are descriptive, truth-apt and “argumentative”: cases where we can conceive of and reason about the properties of God signified by our words. But given Hobbes’s view that the nature of God is inconceivable, any such argumentative attributes would have to be limited to those purely relational properties of which we can form some sort of conception and speak in descriptive terms, such as being the cause of the humanly comprehensible world, and being the cause of all human actions.³² Although this passage does not mention justice or any other specific attribute in particular, later in The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance Hobbes does identify justice as an attribute given to God purely to show him honor, just as he had in Of Libertie and Necessitie.³³ The voluntarist-sounding texts about justice in these works should be interpreted accordingly.

³² Perhaps using the linguistic device of ‘indefinite names’ to help us form such relational thoughts, as I suggested in Chapter 4, Section 4.3. ³³ “Attributes are names; and therefore it is a contradiction, to say they are really one and the same with the Divine Essence. But if he [i.e., Bramhall] mean the Vertues signified by the Attributes, as Justice, Wisdome, Eternity, Divinity, &c. So also they are Vertues, and not one Vertue, (which is still a contradiction,); and we give those Attributes to God, not to shew that we apprehend how they are in him, but to signifie how we think it best to honour him” (QLNC 267, emphases added). Here Hobbes is replying to Bramhall’s claim that the divine attributes are distinguished from each other only in our blinkered human ways of thinking, and are “really one and the same with the Divine Essence, and

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It is the same story with God’s goodness. The voluntarist-sounding passage about the goodness of God’s actions was drawn from the manuscript work AntiWhite. But that work also includes the particularly uncompromising statement of pious expressivism AW 35.16 (quoted at length in Section 6.4 above), where Hobbes goes so far as to say that, apart the single assertion that God exists, everything else that we say of the deity “pertains not to the explanation of philosophical truth, but to proclaiming the states of mind that govern our wish to praise, magnify, and honor.” And in another chapter in the same manuscript, Hobbes explicitly applies this account both to talk about God’s justice and to talk about his goodness: No term of nature is applied to [God] except that He is; or negatively, ‘infinite’ and ‘incomprehensible’; or metaphorically in order to honor him, ‘good,’ ‘just,’ ‘wise,’ ‘blessed,’ and the like. (AW 27.8, translation adapted)

“[T]erm[s] of nature”—i.e., words backed by our naturally occurring, sense-based conceptions—cannot describe the nature of an inconceivable God. Instead, we call God good “in order to honor him.” The same position is reiterated in the later published works, with De Cive, Leviathan, and Mr. Hobbes Considered in his Loyalty, Religion, and Manners each explicit that talk of God’s goodness is properly only honorific.³⁴ And presumably the same point will equally apply to talk about the goodness of God’s actions. Any voluntarist-sounding pronouncement about goodness in Hobbes must therefore be taken in that same expressivist light. For a certain kind of theologian (perhaps of an Ockhamist, Lutheran, or Calvinist bent), part of the appeal of the voluntarist theory is that it foregrounds the transcendent, surpassing power of God’s will. For that very reason, Hobbes is more than happy to sing from the voluntarist doctrinal hymnal. But what he takes from it are the honor-giving words, not the mysterious metaphysics. One last observation is in order. Critics of voluntarism do not merely attack the theory for its ex machina moral metaphysics, but also for its moral among themselves.” As is clear from this extract, Hobbes rejects this for multiple reasons. For our purposes, the point is that, among the rest, he bridles at its descriptivist and metaphysically realist treatment of the traditional theistic attributes, justice expressly included. ³⁴ “Hee that will attribute to God, nothing but what is warranted by naturall Reason, must either use . . . Negative Attributes . . . or Superlatives . . . ; or Indefinite, as Good, Just, Holy, Creator; and in such sense, as if he meant not to declare what he is, (for that were to circumscribe him within the limits of our Fancy,) but how much wee admire him, and how ready we would be to obey him; which is a signe of Humility, and of a Will to honour him as much as we can” (L 31.28: 566; compare also DCi 15.14). “It is by all Christians confest, that God is incomprehensible . . . What then ought we to say of him? What attributes are to be given him, not speaking otherwise than we think, nor otherwise than is fit, by those who mean to honour him? None but such as Mr Hobbes hath set down, namely, expressions of reverence, such as are in use amongst men for signs of Honour, and consequently signifie Goodness, Greatness, and Happiness; and either absolutely put, as Good, . . . or Superlative, as most Good . . . This is the Doctrine that Mr. Hobbes hath written, both in his Leviathan, and in his Book de Cive, and when occasion serves, maintains” (C 31–32).

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unintelligibility. To such critics, it can seem not just implausible but morally repellent to hold that whatever God happens to do is just or good simply in virtue of the fact that God does it, and that if God had done the reverse, then that counterfactual behavior would have been equally just or good. But on the expressivist reading that I advocate, Hobbes’s voluntarist-sounding talk does not have this obnoxious result. Hobbes is not saying that God’s will or transcendent power makes his actions just and good, no matter what they are. He is not saying that ‘might makes right,’ or that the might of God makes his actions just and good. Rather, he is saying that God’s actions should be called ‘just’ and ‘good,’ not because they are in fact just and good, but because this sort of talk demonstrates our reverence and awe before such overwhelming power. Utterances of this sort are simply part of our rational duty of natural piety, i.e., our duty do show in outward words and actions how much we honor the great cause in our inward thought—which is to say, how impressed we are with its power.³⁵, ³⁶ Perhaps some will find Hobbes’s appropriation of voluntarist language in glorification of the great cause of the humanly comprehensible world almost as strange as voluntarism itself. Certainly, it involves a kind of power-worship, albeit one that I have argued has more in common with a quasi-aesthetic awe for the supernal sublime than it does with any solicitous and self-interested practice of flattery before a human potentate.³⁷ I do not claim that Hobbes’s use of words such as ‘good’ and ‘just’ in order to honor the transcendently powerful but otherwise utterly incomprehensible great cause will, or should, appeal to modern secular sensibilities. But I do claim that Hobbes’s voluntarist-sounding talk becomes consonant with his own moral and religious philosophy, and hence more intelligible, when it is viewed through the prism of his honorific theory of religious language. For Hobbes, absolute, appetite-independent standards of goodness, and eternal and immutable principles of justice that bind all rational beings regardless of circumstance are captious fantasies, the Spanish castles of philosophers and school divines. Instead, our ordinary talk and thought about goodness and justice can be perfectly well explained in anthropocentric and naturalistic terms—as a systematic expression of our human appetites and aversions on the one hand, and of instrumental rational reflection on how best to protect and defend ourselves on ³⁵ See Chapter 2, Section 2.4 and Chapter 5, Section 5.5. ³⁶ Martinich rightly emphasizes that what seems morally repellent to philosophers today may not necessarily have seemed abhorrent to a seventeenth-century thinker. Unabashed voluntarism was alive and well in Hobbes’s day, in reformed theology in particular (Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan, 93; see also 94, 73–74). I do not argue that the morally repellent character of voluntarism gives us an independent reason to doubt that Hobbes was himself a voluntarist; but rather that his own expressivist position avoids voluntarism, and that by the lights of his own moral philosophy, voluntarism is implausible. ³⁷ See Chapter 2, Section 2.4.

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the other. Nevertheless, we also export the language of ‘goodness’ and ‘justice’ (and ‘wisdom,’ ‘mercy,’ and so on) beyond the domestic human context that supplies its ordinary meaning, and, in applying this same vocabulary to God purely for its air of eulogy and approbation, transform it into an honor-giving incantation of natural piety.

7 Conventional Religion and Revealed Religion Through the preceding chapters we have examined Hobbes’s natural theology and his account of the requirements of natural piety. On the reading that I have advanced, Hobbes holds that our common human reason requires us to honor the surpassingly powerful but otherwise incomprehensible great cause with outward words and actions—which is to say, to worship it. Among the rest, this includes our anointing it with titles that are natural signs of honor, attributive names that would be recognized cross-culturally as conveying approval and respect. These universally recognizable honorifics provide us with a kind of liturgy of natural reason, one that comprehends the traditional vocabulary of theistic perfections, both anthropomorphic (‘just,’ ‘wise,’ ‘merciful,’ and so on) and metaphysical (‘infinite,’ ‘eternal,’ ‘independent,’ and the like). In the current chapter I turn from the religion of nature to the religion of scripture and consider the question of how Hobbes’s forays into Biblical interpretation fit within his overall philosophical system. I argue that to understand Hobbes’s treatment of scripture we need to see it in the light of his wider account of the rational norms controlling public religious speech and practice. On that account, we ought to venerate the deity not only with natural, universally recognizable signs of honor, but also by adopting the local culture’s religious practices, however arbitrary and conventional those practices might be. For the seventeenthcentury English subject, the Anglo-Protestant scriptural religion provides the appropriate vehicle to express this rationally mandated religious piety, and thus provides a form of devotion that Hobbes embraces in a spirit of genuine religious reverence. At the same time, he also regards the Anglo-Protestant religion, like all historical religions, as a conventional human artifact that, given the ear of the sovereign, he might hope to shape in favor of Hobbesian ideals such as civil obedience, the separation of philosophy from religion, and the extirpation of belief in an immaterial spirit-world. The proposed interpretation dissolves systematic problems facing irreligious readings of Hobbes’s treatment of scripture on the one hand, and more straightforwardly Christian readings on the other. In this chapter I will also have occasion to examine Hobbes’s account of our duties under the religious laws of the civil state. Here we shall see that, within certain limits, the state has the de jure authority to dictate which conventional practices may serve as proper forms of public worship. Up to a point, it may also Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion. Thomas Holden, Oxford University Press. © Thomas Holden 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871329.003.0007

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have the de facto power—employing, as best it can, the public sword, the universities, and a loyal priesthood—to influence conventional cultural attitudes in favor of its preferred religious forms. In considering Hobbes’s account of our religious duties under the civil state, we will also see that there is a principled rationale behind his own Vicar of Bray accommodations across the tumultuous years of Laudianism, godly Independency, and the Anglican Restoration. But I begin with his notorious scriptural exegeses in Leviathan.

7.1 Hobbes’s Engagement with Scripture Hobbes’s treatment of Christian scripture in Part 3 of Leviathan is a curious affair. The longest of the four parts of Leviathan, “Of a Christian Common-Wealth” presents, if not “a Rapsody of as strange Divinity, as since the dayes of the Gnosticks, and their several Progenies, the Sun ever saw,”¹ at the very least an unconventional reading of the revealed word of God as presented in the Bible. In elaborate detail, and without any obvious trace of irony, Hobbes discovers a holy book populated by corporeal angels, a terrestrial Kingdom of God, a Hell that lasts forever but in which the damned are mortal and can expect a second and final death, a deity that is perfectly relaxed about our offering public displays of worship to graven images and foreign gods, and a messiah who bears the person of God merely by speaking authoritatively for him in the same unmysterious way that a lawyer bears the person of his client in court. Existing interpretations of Hobbes’s treatment of Christian scripture divide into two main camps. According to the one group of commentators, Hobbes genuinely believes that he has discerned the true meaning of the revealed word of God. He holds that the Christian scriptures are authentic revelations from the deity, and that his proposed exegeses do at least plausibly capture the meaning of the various texts that he examines.² Call this the sincere belief interpretation. According to a second group of commentators, Hobbes is engaged in a form of faux-pious performance or theological lying. His apparent regard for scripture is merely an act, a cover for some underlying non-religious agenda. Perhaps his scriptural exegeses are an attempt to lay smoke around a scandalously irreligious esoteric

¹ The contemporary assessment of the Anglican churchman Henry Hammond (Henry Hammond, A letter of resolution to six quaeres (1653), 384). ² J. G. A. Pocock, “Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” in Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1971; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 148–201, Peter Geach, “The Religion of Thomas Hobbes,” Religious Studies 17 (1981), 549–558, F. C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes: An Interpretation of Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), “On the Proper Interpretation of Hobbes’s Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 34 (1996), 273–283, and “On Thomas Hobbes’s English Calvinism: Necessity, Omnipotence, and Goodness,” Philosophical Readings 4 (2012), 18–30.

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philosophy, or a sly burlesque of theology, or simply an ad hominem effort to persuade zealous readers that his materialist metaphysics and ultra-statist ecclesiology need not contradict their favorite holy books.³ Call this the irreligious interpretation. Each of these readings faces serious problems, and I want to make the case for a different way of understanding Hobbes’s treatment of Christian scripture in Leviathan and other works such as De Cive and De Corpore. The key point to appreciate is that Hobbes’s philosophical account of religious language applies reflexively to his own religious pronouncements. By his own lights, religious pronouncements made in public—which would certainly include his own published remarks on the meaning of scripture—are properly part of a wider system of religious practice whose controlling purpose is not the expression of belief in particular doctrines, but the expression of reverence and awe before a humanly incomprehensible deity. The norms of assertion that ultimately govern this form of speech are not belief and truth, but—like the norms governing ritual, liturgy, communal prayer, and other forms of public devotion—the expression of reverence before God: a matter of displaying the appropriate worshipful attitude, not of asserting this or that belief. Moreover, as Hobbes sees it, all but the most basic ways of expressing reverence for the deity are properly shaped by local human conventions, so that a display of religious veneration in one culture might properly invoke Christian scripture, while a display of religious veneration in another culture might properly invoke Qu’ranic or Vedic texts. It is not simply that all religious speech is rightly constrained by the religious laws of the commonwealth, be it Christian, Islamic, or whatever. It is also that, for Hobbes, the appropriate ways of honoring God are constituted by the religious practices, however arbitrary or conventional, that are regarded as pious and honorific in the local culture, for words and actions can only give honor if they are regarded as giving honor. Proper reverence for God itself demands this embrace of local religious forms as we display our inner regard for the deity through outwardly ³ Edwin Curley, “ ‘I durst not write so boldly,’ or, How to Read Hobbes’ theological-political treatise,” in Hobbes e Spinoza, Scienza e politica, ed. Daniela Bostrenghi, intro. by Emilia Giancotti (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992), 497–593, “Calvin and Hobbes, or, Hobbes as an Orthodox Christian,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 34 (1996), 257–271, and “Religion and Morality in Hobbes,” in Rational Commitment and Social Justice: Essays for Gregory Kavka, ed. Jules L. Coleman and Christopher W. Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 90–121, Paul Cooke, Hobbes and Christianity (Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 203–232, Douglas Jesseph, “Hobbes’s Atheism,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26 (2002), ed. Peter French, 140–166: 148–149, 157–160, Patricia Springborg, “Calvin and Hobbes: A Reply to Curley, Martinich and Wright,” Philosophical Readings 4 (2012), 3–17, and Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Its Basis and Genesis, tr. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 76. Compare also Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 405, 412, 420–421, 422. On the phenomenon of “theological lying” in early modern authors, see David Berman, “Deism, Immortality, and the Art of Theological Lying,” in J. A. Leo Lemay (ed.), Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1987), 61–78.

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recognizable signs of devotion. At the same time, recognizing the social power of religion, and regarding all culturally specific religious practices as matters of arbitrary human convention, Hobbes hopes that his writings might help to shape the practices of his own Anglo-Protestant culture in ways that promote his own moral and political ideals, particularly if he can gain the ear of the authorities inculcating the official state religion. Working within the limits imposed by a realistic and respectful deference to the settled religious forms and the existing religious laws, he therefore offers us readings of scripture that “manifestly tend toward Peace and Loyalty” (L Review and Conclusion 14: 1139)—and indeed toward other Hobbesian ideals, including the independence of philosophy from religion, the suppression of superstition, and his ultra-statist ecclesiology. But none of this means that Hobbes is not sincere in treating Christian scripture as dictating the appropriate framework for an English subject’s religious life, or that there is not a genuine piety animating his own public embrace of the established religion. There is no reason to doubt that Hobbes’s reverence for the deity is authentic, or that he sincerely holds that that reverence is best expressed, in a Christian commonwealth, through traditional Christian observances and a genuine respect, however creative in interpretation, for Christian holy texts.⁴

7.2 Against the Sincere Belief Interpretation First, however: what are the shortcomings of the sincere belief interpretation and the irreligious interpretation of Hobbes’s treatment of Christian scripture? The main lines of objection against the sincere belief interpretation are familiar enough, both from the original back-and-forth between Hobbes and contemporary critics of his theological liberties, and from the more recent literature. Here I simply rehearse what I take to be the major challenges facing this interpretation, together with my own reasons for thinking these objections cumulatively fatal. First, Hobbes tells us that, as part of our general duty of obedience required by the social contract, we ought to go along with whatever public religious practices the state requires and outwardly accept whatever scriptures the state declares to be God’s revealed word (AW 26.5, L 26.41: 444, 32.5: 578, 40.2: 738, DH 14.4). This outward conformity is required not only if the established religion is Christian or Protestant, but equally under “Heathen Princes, or Princes . . . that authorize the ⁴ On the central point that Hobbes regards Christian scripture as dictating the proper framework for expressing reverence for God in a Christian commonwealth, but does not regard it as conveying an authentic revelation from the deity, I am in agreement with Tuck, at least in his reading of Leviathan (Richard Tuck, “The ‘Christian Atheism’ of Thomas Hobbes,” in Michael Hunter and David Wootton, ed., Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 113–130: 128–129). Tuck’s interpretation emphasizes Hobbes’s ecclesiology in Leviathan; my own argument focuses on the underlying philosophical account of religious language in this and other works, along with Hobbes’s analysis of the publicly performative nature of honoring and worship.

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teaching of an Errour” (L 42.131: 922). At the same time, Hobbes is clear that we have no duty to inwardly believe in the claims made by the established religion (L 32.5: 578, 40.2: 738).⁵ So the sincere belief interpretation requires us to accept a certain coincidence: it tells us that, as it happens, Hobbes privately believes in the divinely revealed character of just those texts that he is already obliged to outwardly accept as if they were divinely revealed, namely “those which have been commanded to be acknowledged for such, by the Authority of the Church of England” (L 33.1: 586). Hobbes got lucky. In another life, he might have been a subject of pagan or Muslim kings, and been obliged to outwardly accept holy books that he did not privately believe in. To be clear: my point is not that Hobbes’s insistence on outward conformity to the established religion explains away all the various passages in which he appears to endorse Christian scripture. It does not. After all, he did not have to bring up scripture in his writings at all, or at any rate not as often and extensively as he in fact does. My point is simply that the sincere belief interpretation does require a rather fortunate coincidence, and that it is naïve to assume that Hobbes’s outward embrace of Christian scripture provides unambiguous evidence of his inner convictions. By his own admission, if the laws had mandated acknowledgement of some other non-Christian revelation or even the explicit renunciation of belief in Christ, his own public professions should have followed suit (L 42.11: 784). Second, Hobbes’s epistemology of human testimony makes it next to impossible to have any warranted belief that any purported divine revelation is in fact authentic. As we just saw, he does hold that we ought to act as if we believe in any revelation that the state tells us is authentic. But, quite explicitly, that is a matter of external behavior not inward belief. Hobbes does also grant the possibility of a genuine supernatural revelation from God: a case where the deity directly communicates with some authentic prophet or supernaturally inspired scribe. But the question for the rest of us, relying simply on our natural human reason, is whether we can responsibly believe in testimonial reports that such and such a supposed case of divine revelation is indeed authentic. And here, as Hobbes sees it, responsible, properly warranted belief is next to impossible. Given the human tendency toward credulity, wishful thinking, and even outright deception and pious fraud (L 8.21–25: 112–120, 32.6: 580), we ought not believe that any purported revelation actually comes from God unless it is substantiated by miracles (L 32.7: 580–582, DH 14.3; compare also B 176). But further, Hobbes insists, human nature being what it is, testimonial reports of miracles substantiating a revelation are just as doubtful as the original testimonial reports of the supernatural revelation itself. The result is that we ought only believe that a purported revelation is genuine if it is substantiated by current miracles, miracles that the responsible

⁵ I examine Hobbes’s case for this thesis in Sections 7.4 and 7.5 below.

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believer cannot take on trust but must witness first-hand for him- or herself.⁶ The requirement is surely intended to be as good as prohibitive, particularly since Hobbes expects his readers to agree that “Miracles now cease” (L 32.9: 584; see also L 26.40 Latin version: 445, DH 14.4)—a position that was indeed common among educated seventeenth-century English Protestants, who typically held that miracles ended with the death of the last apostle. So we can see why he says that “men can neuer by their own wisdome come to the knowledge of what God hath spoken and commanded to be obserued” (B 136): it is practically impossible to have the kind of evidence we would need to substantiate any supposed divine revelation or act of transcendental ventriloquism. By Hobbes’s own lights, natural human reason cannot justify our believing that any particular putative divine revelation is in fact authentic; and if he sincerely believes that some particular putative divine revelation is in fact the authentic word of God, then he is violating his own epistemological strictures.⁷ Third, Hobbes’s particular interpretations of Christian scripture are often strained and tendentious—so much so that it is difficult to believe that he seriously takes himself to be discovering the true, original, or intended meaning of the text. It is not simply the material angels, the this-worldly character of the Kingdom of God, or the peculiar economy of Hobbes’s mortalist Hell. The moral teachings of Hobbes’s scripture are no less surprising than the metaphysical. In his hands, the Old and New Testament each urge us to shun any prophet who challenges a legally established religion, to reject martyrdom and worship false gods as required, and to take our earthly sovereigns as the final authority in matters of right and wrong. Most Christians would surely be surprised to learn that what [Christ] was teaching by the laws: You shall not Kill, you shall not commit Adultery, you shall not Steal, you shall honour your Parents, was simply that citizens and subjects should absolutely obey their Princes and sovereigns in all questions of mine, thine, his, and others’. (DCi 17.10)

The effective result of Hobbes’s various exegeses is to neutralize Christian scripture as any sort of independent authority or practical guide that might conflict with our duty of obedience to the civil sovereign. At least where Hobbes examines it, God’s revealed word emerges not as an other-worldly call to lift our eyes beyond the passions and preoccupations of the Kingdom of Nature, but as a seamless ⁶ “[H]ow can someone be believed who saith that the things that he saith or teacheth are confirmed by miracles unless he himself hath performed miracles? For if a private person is to be believed without a miracle, why should the various teachings of one man be any better than those of another?” (DH 14.3; see also L 37.13: 694–696, and the requirement of “a present Miracle” at L 32.8: 584). ⁷ The most compelling summary of the epistemological objections that Hobbes raises to accepting any putatively divine revelation as authentic remains Ronald Hepburn, “Hobbes on the Knowledge of God,” in Maurice Cranston and Richard S. Peters, ed., Hobbes and Rousseau (Garden City, NY: 1972), 85–108: 104–107.

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confirmation of his own decidedly this-worldly philosophy.⁸ And quite apart from the sheer convenience of his particular proposed readings of scripture, we might also find Hobbes’s relentless confidence in the accuracy of his exegeses itself suspicious, for it is quite out of line with his usual cautions about the indeterminacy of meaning in written texts and the difficulty of interpreting ancient books.⁹ Fourth, were Christian scripture the authentic word of God, we might hope to learn truths from it, at least from those passages that seem to present us with truth-apt assertions. We might hope to appeal to this divine revelation, as we appeal to human testimony, when shaping our theories and beliefs about the nature of the created world, the facts of sacred history, and perhaps even the nature and intentions of the deity. This at least is the traditional view, and on the face of it Hobbes himself can seem to treat scripture as a source of factual information, as when he offers us his account of the nature of the Kingdom of God and of Hell in the light of the scriptural sources, or when he cites scripture as confirming the existence of an original Adamite language that was subsequently lost at Babel. However, at least when he addresses the question directly, Hobbes is clear that our scientific and metaphysical theorizing about the nature of the world should not be informed by scripture, and indeed he vigorously attacks the sort of “Church-Philosophy” and “school divinity” that mixes science and metaphysics with scriptural interpretation (B 291, DCo epistle dedicatory; compare also EL 25.9, L 46.15: 1076, B 183). Hobbes’s methodological remarks at the beginning of De Corpore are particularly clear on this point. Here he casts “school divinity” as an “Empusa,” the hybrid monster of Greek myth that stumbles along on one ⁸ The convenience of Hobbes’s interpretations of scripture for his political philosophy is widely appreciated. (See especially David Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), Sharon Lloyd, Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Paul B. Davis, “Devil in the Details: Hobbes’s Use and Abuse of Scripture,” in Laurens van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass, eds., Hobbes on Politics and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 135–149, and Jon Parkin, “Hobbes on the Future of Religion,” in van Apeldoorn and Douglass, ed., Hobbes on Politics and Religion, 184–201: 191–195). In defense of the sincere belief interpretation, Martinich points out that “[m]any of Hobbes’s views which may have been nonstandard were at least not unprecedented” and can be found in one or another scriptural exegete whose sincerity is uncontroversial (Martinich, Two Gods, 4; see also 345–346, 388 note 10). But it is not just that Hobbes endorses this or that nonstandard position, which might perhaps be found in one or another perfectly sincere Christian theologian—Milton holding that angels are corporeal, Luther that humans are not conscious after death, and so on (4–5). It is that Hobbes’s whole fabric of exegetical positions is collectively so implausible, yet at the same time convenient, and therefore suspicious. ⁹ “Though words be the signs we have of one another’s opinions and intentions: because the equivocation of them is so frequent, according to the diversity of contexture, and of the company wherewith they go (which the presence of him that speaketh, our sight of his actions, and conjecture of his intentions, must help to discharge us of): it must be extreme hard to find out the opinions and meaning of those men that are gone from us long ago, and have left us no other signification thereof but their books” (EL 13.8). Hobbes also repeatedly appeals to the endlessly contestable ambiguities of positive and revealed law when arguing for the sovereign’s right to stipulate authoritative interpretations. For discussion of these and other tensions with Hobbes’s “self-proclaimed hermeneutic virtuosity” in the interpretation of scripture, see Hannah Dawson, Locke, Language and Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 141.

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donkey’s leg and one prosthetic brass leg—representing, in Hobbes’s allegorical figure, a pseudoscience grotesquely combining Aristotelian metaphysics and scriptural interpretation. This hobgoblin must of course be driven away—but consider how Hobbes proposes to do it: Against this Empusa I think there cannot be invented a better exorcism, than to distinguish between the rules of religion, that is, the rules of honouring God, which we have from the laws, and the rules of philosophy, that is, the opinions of private men; and to yield what is due to religion to the Holy Scripture, and what is due to philosophy to natural reason. (DCo epistle dedicatory)

Scripture and philosophy here are oil and water. The former can inform the religious laws and make claims on our outward behavior, but it has no proper claim on private belief. Further, even in matters of outward behavior, its sphere of authority is “the rules of honouring God,” not the assertion of philosophical or scientific doctrine. Scripture might properly shape our religious practice and rituals of worship, but not “philosophy [or] the opinions of private men”—the sphere where “natural reason” is instead our proper guide.¹⁰ So whatever else scripture might do for us, we ought not to treat it as a compendium of revealed truths—a system of true propositions, vouched for by God, that we need to take account of when theorizing about the nature of the world or the attributes of the deity. I suppose one might discount the fact-stating appearances of scripture in this way while still believing that it is indeed an authentic revelation from God. Perhaps the deity simply meant to present us with rules for honoring him, not to teach us any truths about him or his creation. But in any case, if we consider Hobbes’s position that scripture can make no claims on “philosophy [or] the opinions of private men” alongside our three previous objections, we have a compelling case against the view that his own scriptural exegeses—with their apparently truth-apt accounts of corporeal angels, a terrestrial Kingdom of God and mortalist Hell, and the rest—are animated by a sincere conviction that he has in fact discovered the true meaning of God’s revealed word. Morever, what I offer to explain, as the sincere belief interpretation does not, is just why Hobbes views scripture exclusively as a source of rules for honoring God, and in no part or respect as a reliable source of true propositions about the world.

7.3 Against the Irreligious Interpretation What of the irreligious interpretation of Hobbes’s forays into scriptural exegesis? Perhaps the implausibility of the sincere belief interpretation might seem to ¹⁰ Compare also L 8.26 Latin version: 121, and DH 14.13.

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provide us with an argument for the irreligious reading. After all, if Hobbes does not really believe that his scriptural exegeses plausibly capture the true meaning of authentic revelations from God and yet proceeds to advance these exegeses all the same, then it might seem that he must simply be lying, and moreover treating Christian scripture in such a cavalier fashion that he cannot have any sincere regard for it. He must simply be pretending to defer to scripture for some underlying non-religious or even anti-religious purpose. Perhaps, for instance, Hobbes means to mock or subvert Christianity before an elite audience capable of reading between the lines and detecting his esoteric irreligious message. Or perhaps his scriptural exegeses are simply intended to persuade potentially censorious critics that his materialist and ultra-statist philosophy can pass the test of Christian respectability. Or perhaps he merely intends to pipe the gullible godly toward peace and civil obedience. But this is too quick. I agree that Hobbes does not actually regard Christian scripture as an authentic revelation from God. I also agree with many irreligious interpreters that Hobbes sees himself, often enough, as crafting entirely new meanings from scripture rather than as uncovering the original or intended meaning of the text before him. But I do not think that we should characterize Hobbes as lying to or otherwise misleading his readers. That would be to ignore his own explicit arguments for outward religious conformity, which make it clear that the norms controlling public religious pronouncements are not truth and belief, but rather the expression of reverence for God—an expression of reverence that is properly shaped by the local religious traditions, texts, and laws, whatever they might be. Nor is the respect that Hobbes shows scripture simply a performance motivated by non-religious ends, but rather (I will argue) an expression, at least in part, of genuine reverence for the deity, albeit an expression that is articulated through religious forms that Hobbes regards as conventional, human, and fundamentally arbitrary. Finally, as we shall see, Hobbes—a philosopher who repeatedly emphasizes the distinction between inward belief and outward conformity—never actually says that he believes in the divine authenticity of Christian scripture, and indeed refuses to engage when challenged on the point by critics. Rather, he simply accepts Christian scripture as providing the appropriate framework for expressing reverence for God in the light of England’s Christian culture and religious laws. Private belief is in fact never the issue for Hobbes when it comes to a person’s religious propriety, but rather obedience to law and conformity with the local traditions of worship. On this point his works are consistent throughout, and his refusal to engage on the question of inner belief exhibits a distinctive kind of integrity that his commentators have not properly appreciated. The irreligious interpretation fails to do justice to these complexities in Hobbes’s philosophy of religion. But pending my own positive account of that philosophy (which follows in Sections 7.4 and 7.5 below), perhaps the most obvious challenge facing the irreligious interpretation is the question of why

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Hobbes devotes so much sustained and detailed attention to scriptural questions. He seems to go out of his way to engage these issues, at most length in Part 3 of Leviathan (chapters 33–43), but also in Part 4 (chapters 44–45) and in the earlier Elements of Law (chapters 18, 25–26) and De Cive (chapters 16–18). If all this is indeed a case of theological lying—the sort of insincere genuflection before scripture one finds on occasion in a Toland or a Hume—then it is by several orders of magnitude the most extensive, elaborate, and systematic such case in any early modern philosopher. Throughout the whole there is no obvious sign of irony, and for the most part Hobbes seems to have suspended his usual malicious wit as inappropriate to the topic. Pocock is correct: Although esoteric reasons have been suggested why Hobbes should have written what he did not believe, the difficulty remains of imagining why a notoriously arrogant thinker, vehement in his dislike of ‘insignificant speech,’ should have written and afterwards defended sixteen chapters of what he held to be nonsense, and exposed them to the scrutiny of a public which did not consider this kind of thing nonsense at all.¹¹

The sheer level of detailed engagement that Hobbes brings to the specifics of scriptural interpretation, together with his apparent seriousness of purpose and respectful manner in handling his scriptural sources, remains something of a mystery on the irreligious reading. What is needed is an account that can explain both the sustained and to all appearances pious attention that Hobbes shows scripture and the creative liberties that he takes in its interpretation.

7.4 Outward Conformity and the Authority of Scripture To understand Hobbes’s handling of Christian scripture, we must see it in the light of his own account of the norms controlling religious practice and speech. First, in a commonwealth a person’s religious propriety is a matter of his or her outward behavior rather than inner belief. Nothing is required from a subject’s inner psychological life, save perhaps the bare belief in and a general attitude of reverence toward the great cause of the humanly comprehensible universe. In particular, there is no requirement of inner belief in the more specific claims of any particular religious tradition. We must obey the laws regulating external religious practice, including public religious speech and the outward acceptance of mandated religious texts as authentic revelations. But a proper religious life

¹¹ Pocock, “Time, History and Eschatology,” 162. Pocock’s enumeration of “sixteen” chapters comprehends the whole of Leviathan Part 4 as well as Part 3.

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carries no requirement of inner belief in any specific holy books, points of doctrine, or articles of faith. We have already seen Hobbes’s injunction at the start of De Corpore that “the rules of religion, that is, the rules of honouring God” are to be taken “from the laws,” and must be distinguished from “the rules of philosophy, that is the opinions of private men,” where natural reason is our proper guide (DCo epistle dedicatory). Hobbes’s equation of the rules of religion with the rules of honoring God is important, and I will return to it. But begin by considering his claim that these rules are to be taken from the laws, and do not speak to inner belief. As Hobbes sees it, once we have left the state of nature for a commonwealth, we are obliged to obey the sovereign in matters of public religious practice, including public religious speech. At the same time, inner belief remains our own private affair: [A sovereign] may oblige me to obedience, so, as not by act or word to declare I beleeve him not; but not to think any otherwise than my reason perswades me. (L 32.5: 578) By [the King’s] Authority, I say, it ought to be decided, (not what men shall think, but) what they shall say in . . . Questions [concerning “the ordering of Religion”]. (C 36; see also AB 60)

Why does a subject’s duty of obedience not extend to the regulation of his private religious beliefs? Because beliefs are not subject to voluntary control, and one cannot simply believe as commanded: [I]n every Common-wealth, they who have no supernaturall Revelation to the contrary, ought to obey the laws of their own Soveraign, in the externall acts and profession of Religion. As for the inward thought, and beleef of men, which humane Governours can take no notice of, . . . they are not voluntary, nor the effect of the laws, . . . and consequently fall not under obligation. (L 40.2: 738; see also EL 25.3, L 42.43: 822, AB 73)

Thus while public religious practice and speech ought to conform with the religious laws,¹² inner belief is involuntary and hence cannot be required of any ¹² What about Hobbes’s qualification at the start of this extract from L 40.2: 738, where he seems to imply that those who do have a “supernaturall Revelation to the contrary” might not be obliged to obey the laws regarding outward religious practice? There is no reason to doubt that Hobbes sincerely intends this qualification, but it is (for Hobbes) extremely hypothetical, a theoretical concession with little real world purchase. The “supernaturall Revelation” that Hobbes requires for this qualification to take effect is not simply an indirect revelation mediated by prophets, apostles, or a holy book, but— much more demanding—a personal and incorrigible revelation received immediately from God. Thus, for instance, he writes that “in a Common-wealth, a subject that has no certain and assured Revelation particularly to himself concerning the Will of God, is to obey for such, the Command of the

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subject. At the very start of Leviathan part 3, Hobbes does assert that we should “captivate our understanding” to the word of God as presented in scripture (L 32.3: 578). But this duty to “captivate our understanding” is not a duty to believe: [B]y the captivity of our Understanding, is not meant a Submission of our Intellectuall faculty, to the Opinion of any other man; but of the Will to Obedience, where Obedience is due. For Sense, Memory, Understanding, and Opinion are not in our power to change; but always, and necessarily such, as the things we see, hear, and consider suggest unto us; and therefore are not effects of our Will, but our Will of them. We then Captivate our Understanding and Reason, when we forbear contradiction; when we so speak, as (by lawfull Authority) we are commanded; and when we live accordingly. (L 32.4: 578)

Indeed, not only do we have no duty to obey the state in matters of private religious belief, we have no duty to obey God in this matter either. Hobbes applies the same basic argument in each case, emphasizing the involuntary character of belief as against the voluntary character of external behavior. Thus a subject of a commonwealth is “bound by his own act” (in virtue of his general covenant of obedience to the sovereign) to obey the law in matters of external religious practice and public professions; but bound I say to obey it, . . . not bound to believe it: for mens beliefe and interiour cogitations, are not subject to the commands, but only to the operations of God, ordinary and extraordinary. Faith of Supernaturall Law, is . . . not a duty that we exhibite to God, but a gift that God freely giveth to whom he pleaseth. (L 26.41: 444)

The final clause of this passage sounds a familiar Protestant note with its invocation of faith as an unearned gift from God. But Hobbes’s underlying message is potentially more provocative: we will believe or not according to God’s “ordinary and extraordinary” operations—that is, through natural or supernatural causes— but violate no duty if we do not believe. Hobbes can even seem to go so far as to identify religion with a certain kind of law in his polemical apologias of the 1660s. In “An Apology for Himself and His Writings” (which prefaced his Seven Philosophical Problems, delivered to the Royal Society in 1662) he abruptly declares that “religion is not philosophy, but law” (SPP 5). In Mr. Hobbes Considered in his Loyalty, Religion, Reputation, and Manners (1662) he assures us that, unlike his adversary, the Presbyterian divine

Common-wealth” (L 25.41: 446, emphases mine; compare also B 176). Given Hobbes’s deep skepticism about claims to this sort of direct personal revelation, his qualification in L 40.2: 738 ought to be regarded as simply a theoretical concession. It is not likely that any actual subjects will qualify for this exemption.

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John Wallis who was recently in “actual Rebellion” against the Royal Supremacy, “Mr Hobbes . . . holds Religion to be a Law” (C 30). And in the dialogue Behemoth (1682, posthumously) he suggests that even when religion is considered not as a public institution but as a character trait and personal moral virtue, it can also be comprehended under the same basic account, being reducible to a disposition to obey to the relevant legal statutes. Consider this exchange between ‘A,’ the Hobbesian master, and ‘B,’ the eager and tractable Hobbesian student: : . . . [I]nasmuch as I told you, that all vertue is comprehended in obedience to the Laws of the Common wealth, whereof Religion is one, I have placed Religion among the Vertues. : Is Religion then the Law of a Common wealth? : There is no Nation in the world whose Religion is not established, and receius not its Authority from the Laws of that Nation. (B 167) So one has the virtue of religion—“the greatest Vertue of all others” as B calls it (B 166)—just in case one is disposed to obey the laws controlling religious practice, whatever those laws might be.¹³ Hobbes’s suggestion that religious propriety is simply a matter of obedience to the local religious laws is striking. On this view, subjects who possess the true virtue of religion will profess at public altars whatever the state demands. Their own private doctrinal convictions will be inert in the face of the established religion, having no practical weight against legal mandates regarding the profession of points of faith, oaths, or any other matter of external religious behavior. Still, however outwardly compliant, such subjects need not actually believe in the claims of the established religion, and a lack of inner belief in the doctrines of any particular religious tradition, Protestantism and Christianity not excepted, would not impugn their religious virtue. Considered against the background of religious conflict and coercion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hobbes’s position could serve as a brief for the Spanish converso, for the crypto-Huguenot before the Edict of Nantes, for the crypto-Catholic in Elizabethan and Stuart England, or for the temporizing politique: law-abiding subjects all willing to go along with the state religion while keeping their own private beliefs to themselves. By the same token, it could equally serve as a brief for the closet atheist, deist, or pious expressivist who privately doubts all supposed prophets and revelations, but who respects the civil law and is content to play his part in public ceremonial. In contrast to these figures of accommodating Hobbesian religious propriety, the

¹³ In other passages in Behemoth the two interlocutors also reaffirm the Hobbesian position that religion in a commonwealth is a kind of law: “Religion in it selfe admits no controversy. Tis a Law of the Kingdome, and ought not to be disputed” (B 225, ‘B’ speaking). “[T]hough not the same in all Countries, yet in euery Country [religion ought to be] vndisputable” (B 163, ‘A’ speaking).

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defiant recusant or puritan martyr who insists on displaying his inner convictions and publicly rejecting the established religion is not only a threat to civil peace, but also, for Hobbes, lacks the true virtue of religion altogether. The purity and even the truth of this sort of inflexible nonconformist’s specific doctrinal convictions (if indeed they are true) are beside the point: so long as one rejects obedience and outward conformity, one is not living a properly religious life.¹⁴ When Hobbes turns to the interpretation of scripture in Part 3 of Leviathan, his approach is explicitly grounded on this conformist understanding of proper religious practice. Before he gets down to his proposed readings of particular passages, he must perforce decide which specific books to treat as presenting the revealed word of God. And here, Hobbes argues, he must simply accept whatever scriptural canon is mandated by the established religious laws: Seeing therefore . . . that Soveraigns in their own Dominions are the sole Legislators; those Books only are Canonicall, that is, Law, in every nation, which are established for such by the Soveraign Authority. It is true, that God is the Soveraign of all Soveraigns; and therefore, when he speaks to any Subject, he ought to be obeyed, whatsoever any earthly Potentate command to the contrary. But the question is not of obedience to God, but of when, and what God hath said; which to Subjects that have no supernaturall revelation, cannot be known, but by that naturall reason, which guided them, for the obtaining of Peace and Justice, to obey the authority of their severall Common-wealths; that is to say, of their lawfull Soveraigns. According to this obligation, I can acknowledge no other Books of the Old Testament, to be Holy Scripture, but those which have been commanded to be acknowledged for such, by the Authority of the Church of England. (L 33.1: 586)¹⁵

Absent a personal and direct supernatural revelation of one’s own, all subjects, Hobbes included, must “acknowledge” whatever scriptures are mandated by the official state religion. Given Hobbes’s position that we cannot be obliged to believe, this obligation can only be a matter of our outward behavior. What is required is that subjects profess the authority and divine authenticity of whatever ¹⁴ Hobbes’s contemporary audience found his implied position that the various Protestant martyrs “needlessly cast away their lives” one of the most scandalous suggestions in all of Leviathan (L 42.12: 786; see also L 42.13–14: 788; and for discussion see Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 115–156). To appreciate the provocative nature of Hobbes’s position in its contemporary context, consider that after only the Bible, John Foxe’s 1563 sectarian martyrology Actes and Monuments (i.e., his ‘Book of Martyrs’) had been the best-selling book in England in the century since its publication. Notice also that “needlessly” seems to be a diplomatic understatement. Hobbes could just as well have said ‘unjustly and impiously,’ given his own view of the nature of the requirement of outward obedience. ¹⁵ Compare also Behemoth: “the Scripture it selfe was not receiued but by the Authority of Kings and States” (B 176).

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scriptures are backed by law, where profession—in keeping with Hobbes’s definition in De Cive—need not involve any “internal mental conviction” but only “external obedience” (DCi 18.5).¹⁶ Still, any public discussion of the meaning of God’s revealed word must take such a profession for granted, and therefore adopt whatever scriptural canon is mandated by the state as its basic framework. So Hobbes “acknowledge[s]” the divine authenticity of Christian scripture. He professes it; he publicly accepts it. But he never tells us that he actually believes in it.¹⁷ Nor does he assume that his fellow subjects will all believe in it either, but merely that “in Christian commonwealths all men either beleeve, or at least professe the Scripture to bee the Word of God” (L 43.8: 936, my emphasis). Nor does he hold that his proposed interpretations of Christian scripture will only have force and utility for those of his readers who believe that it is in fact an authentic revelation. All that is required is that his readers are prepared to go along with this scripture, outwardly acknowledging it as God’s revealed word, whether or not they inwardly believe: whether men Know, or Beleeve, or Grant the Scriptures to be the Word of God; if out of such places of them, as are without obscurity, I shall shew what Articles of Faith are necessary, and only necessary for Salvation, those men must needs Know, Beleeve, or Grant the same. (L 43.10: 936)

In sum: Hobbes regards Christian scripture, whether or not it is in fact an authentic revelation, as a text that subjects should publicly acknowledge as if it were God’s word, and which properly shapes the communal religious life of his own Christian commonwealth. Given their ratification by the state, the various books of the Bible properly serve as the basis for public preaching and any public examination of God’s purposes and commands. But there is no need to suppose that Hobbes actually believes that Christian scripture is more than a human creation, and both the various problems facing the sincere belief interpretation and the caution of his language suggest otherwise. Consider some further evidence of that caution. As I have noted, for all the attention that Hobbes gives to the difference between outward profession and ¹⁶ Similarly, “propositions are allowed for different reasons . . . Sometimes we allow propositions which, however, we do not accept in our own minds, until, in fact, we have examined their truth by seeing what would follow from them, and that is called assuming. We may also allow a proposition simply as such, perhaps from fear of the laws, and that is to profess or confess by external signs [profiteri, vel confiteri signis externis]; or from the automatic deference, which men give out of politeness to those whom they respect, and to others from love of peace, and this is to concede in the simple sense” (DCi 18.5). ¹⁷ I grant that in most ordinary contexts of discourse, to profess some proposition is to conversationally imply that one believes it: ordinarily, profession without belief is equivocation, and one cannot equivocate to Heaven. (Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.) But as we have seen, Hobbes goes out of his way to insist that outward profession can properly and non-culpably diverge from inward belief when it comes to questions of religious doctrine and conformist participation in the local religious traditions. So I take the fact that Hobbes never spells out that he believes in Christian scripture and doctrine, despite many opportunities and considerable pressure to do so, to be significant.

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inward belief, he never specifies that his own attitude to Christian scripture involves an inward belief in its divine authenticity. Instead he seems content to express his own position, however respectfully and deferentially, in more ambiguous terms. Look at Hobbes’s closing reflections on his examination of scripture at the very end of Leviathan Part 3: [T]hus much shall suffice, concerning the Kingdome of God, and Policy Ecclesiasticall. Wherein I pretend not to advance any Position of my own, but onely to shew what are the Consequences that seem to me deducible from the Principles of Christian Politiques, (which are the holy Scriptures,) in confirmation of the Power of Civill Soveraigns, and the Duty of their Subjects. (L 43.24: 954)

Hobbes presents himself as simply working out readings of the legally established scriptural canon that promote a proper understanding of our civil obligations and the rights of the state. He treats these texts respectfully and as the authoritative source of a distinctively “Christian Politiques.” But if we are looking for the pulse of inner belief, or a sense of Protestant conviction that he has the inerrant word of God in his hands, the passage could scarcely be more bloodless. Nor does godly conviction shine through in any of Hobbes’s other remarks on how his scriptural exegeses ought to be received. Consider this from 1662’s “An Apology for Himself and His Writings”: That which is in [“my Leviathan”] of theology, contrary to the general current of divines, is not put there as my opinion, but propounded with submission to those who have the power ecclesiastical. I never did after, either in writing or discourse, maintain it.

(SPP 5)

Granted, this is Hobbes in apologetic mode, emphasizing his willingness to abandon the theology of his Interregnum Leviathan wherever it offends the newly restored Crown and Anglican Church. But when Hobbes asserts that he merely “propound[s]” possible interpretations of scripture without intending to “maintain” them, this is not a new development. Rather he is simply echoing the language of the 1651 Leviathan, where he had already added the following crucial general caveat to his proposed interpretations of scripture (the immediate context here being Hobbes’s exegetical proposal that we read scriptural references to the Kingdom of God not as references to an otherworldly spiritual kingdom, but as references to a future terrestrial “Civil Common-wealth”): But because this doctrine (though proved out of Places of Scripture not few, nor obscure) will appear to most men a novelty; I doe but propound it; maintaining

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nothing in this, or any other paradox of Religion; but attending the end of that dispute of the sword, concerning the Authority, (not yet amongst my Countreymen decided,) by which all sorts of doctrine are to bee approved, or rejected; and whose commands, both in speech, and writing, (whatsoever be the opinions of private men) must by all men, that mean to be protected by their Laws, be obeyed. (L 38.5: 708)

As in L 43.24: 594, Hobbes again stresses his interest in the practical political effect of his proposed readings of scripture. And again there is no sense that he means to testify to his own private religious convictions. Finally, consider how Hobbes chooses to respond when publicly challenged to confirm his belief in Christian revelation. Such questions were in the air following the publication of Leviathan, and were potentially dangerous to Hobbes’s reputation. John Wallis explicitly pressed the point in his Elenchus Geometriae Hobbianae (1655), wondering out loud whether Hobbes actually believed in the Bible’s account of the Fall, or whether he merely saw it as a myth that happened to be endorsed by the civil laws. Here is Hobbes quoting Wallis’s provocation in Elenchus, and then his own entire reply in Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematiques (1656): And at the end of your objections to the eighteenth chapter, ‘Perhaps you take the whole history of the fall of Adam for a fable, which is no wonder, when you say the rules of honouring and worshipping of God are to be taken from the laws.’ Down, I say; you bark now at the supreme legislative power. Therefore it is not I, but the laws which must rate you off. (SL 350)¹⁸

For Hobbes, Wallis’s remark is impertinent and his resistance to treating the civil law as authoritative in matters of religious practice potentially criminal. But even so, nothing would have been easier than for Hobbes to have added in his reply (whether sincerely or otherwise) that, however impertinent the question might be, he did in fact believe in the Bible. Indeed, prudence might have recommended some such clarification. Yet instead, Hobbes leaves the question of his own inner belief quite unaddressed—in effect, dismissing it as beside the point. The civil state properly determines our public religious practice, and that is all that needs to be said.¹⁹ To my ¹⁸ Hobbes is in fact translating and paraphrasing Wallis (from John Wallis, Elenchus Geometriae Hobbianae (Oxford: H. Hall for John Crooke, 1655), 88) rather than quoting him verbatim. But he does not misrepresent Wallis’s basic charge. For a fuller translation of Wallis’s objection, see Douglas M. Jesseph, Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 313. ¹⁹ There is a similar refusal to engage the question of truth and inner belief at another point in Hobbes’s exchange with Wallis. Wallis had taken offense at Hobbes’s assertion in De Corpore that the question of the origin of the world is properly settled “by those who are lawfully authorized to order the worship of God” (DCo 26.1)—“as if,” Wallis says in Elenchus, “this were not sufficiently agreed in

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mind, the fact that Hobbes avoids the issue of truth and inner belief does tend to confirm Wallis’s suspicion that he regards the Christian scriptures as a human creation rather than the revealed word of God. But equally this strategy of avoidance exhibits an important form of integrity, as Hobbes resists the easy path of simply claiming to inwardly believe whenever it is convenient to do so.

7.5 Outward Conformity and Natural Piety Thus far I have been arguing that Hobbes’s respectful treatment of Christian scripture is dictated by his commitment to outward religious conformity, and that it is not at all likely that he inwardly believes that these texts in fact convey an authentic revelation from God. Hobbes is not in that sense a Christian. I now argue that his commitment to outward religious conformity is nevertheless an expression of a genuine religious piety: that Hobbes is sincere in holding that the appropriate way to worship the great cause of nature is to publicly adopt the local religious forms, including whatever scriptures are regarded as canonical. So on the proposed reading, Hobbes’s outward regard for Christian scripture is not simply a cover for some non-religious or anti-religious agenda. Rather, given the religious culture and laws of seventeenth-century England, Anglo-Protestant religious practice is the proper way of expressing reverence for the great cause of nature, and a freethinker who refused to go along with this system of worship, or did so merely in a detached or contemptuous way, would thereby show a disregard for the deity that is both impious and irrational. To substantiate this interpretation, I examine Hobbes’s case for a duty of outward religious conformity, since the reasoning that he employs confirms an authentic underlying piety and shows that he sees such outward conformity as the proper way of expressing a perfectly rational reverence before this great cause. At the core of Hobbes’s case for outward religious conformity is his conviction that worship of the great cause of the humanly comprehensible universe is already “dictated to men, by their Naturall Reason” prior to any human conventions and independently of any revealed religion (L 31.7: 560; see also DCi 15.14; DH 14.1). As we have seen in previous chapters, however incomprehensible this being might the Holy Scripture, but should depend entirely on the suffrage of sovereigns whether or not the world ever had a beginning” (Wallis, Elenchus, 90; as translated in Jesseph, Squaring the Circle, 314). Again, Hobbes simply ignores the issue of the reliability of Christian scripture, and instead reiterates his basic position that the state has the authority to mandate our particular doctrinal religious professions: “[W]hat an absurd question it is to ask me whether it be in the power of the magistrate, whether the world be eternal or not? It were fit you knew it is in the power of the supreme magistrate to make a law for the punishment of them that shall pronounce publicly of that question anything contrary to that which the law hath once pronounced” (SL 351–352). For useful discussion of the context of Hobbes’s exchange with Wallis, see Jesseph, Squaring the Circle, and Siegmund Probst, “Infinity and Creation: The Origin of the Controversy between Thomas Hobbes and the Savilian Professors Seth Ward and John Wallis,” The British Journal for the History of Science, 26.3 (1993), 271–279.

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be, it plainly possesses awesome power, and worship of this unimaginably potent being is therefore “taught . . . by the light of Nature” (L 31.14: 564). As I have argued (in Chapter 2, Section 2.5), there is no reason to doubt that Hobbes is sincere in his extensively elaborated endorsement of this “natural piety,” as he calls it (DH 14.4), which does indeed seem to be a plausible consequence of his general view that “all power is honourable, and greatest power is most honourable” (AB 16–17). But how does this rational mandate for natural piety translate into a case for outward conformity with the local religious practices? Consider Hobbes’s two arguments enjoining external conformity. Hobbes’s first argument—call it the argument from the public nature of honoring—does not require the existence of a commonwealth and would equally apply to people living in the state of nature without any superintending legal regime. According to this argument, just as our natural human reason directs us to worship God, so it also “and especially” directs us to worship God “in Publique, and in the sight of men,” since public acts of veneration give more honor than private (L 31.35: 570; compare also DCi 15.15). But to worship God in public, we must show our inner reverence for God through outward signs of honor, and no action or speech can qualify as a sign of honor unless others regard it as such: [W]hen Free [i.e., “such as the Worshipper thinks fit,” rather than as commanded] . . . , Worship consists in the opinion of the beholders: for if to them the words, or actions by which we intend honour, seem ridiculous, and tending to contumely; they are no Worship; and no signes of Honour; because a signe is not a signe to him that giveth it, but to him to whom it is made; that is, to the spectator. (L 31.11: 562) [If there were a disordered profusion of conflicting sectarian practices], it could not be rightly said of anybody that he was worshipping God, for no one worships God, i.e., offers external honours, unless he is offering something which others accept as honours. (DCi 15.17)

Indeed, unfamiliar religious practices may even be seen as a positive affront, a failure to treat sacred matters in the appropriately respectful way: [I]f individuals followed their own reason in worshipping God, worshippers are so different from each other that they would judge each other’s worship to be so unseemly or even impious; and would not accept that the others were worshipping God at all. And therefore it would not be worship, because the nature of worship is to be a sign of inward honour, but a thing is only a sign if it makes something known to others; a thing is therefore not a sign of honour, unless others accept it as a sign of honour. (DCi 15.17)

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It follows that we cannot employ idiosyncratic ways of revering God if we would worship him in public. Instead, any public worship that goes beyond the very basic natural, cross-culturally recognizable signs of honor (such as a humble manner, prayers, and thanks), or that would give determinate shape to these signs by enacting them in culturally specific ways, must draw on a common religious culture and a shared system of devotional practices that are understood to be honorific. To show our veneration for the first cause of all in public, as reason demands we must, we need to demonstrate our inner reverence through outwardly recognizable forms, and hence embrace the local religious practices. So it is not as if Hobbes is advocating an outward performance of religious conformity out of some oblique non-religious agenda, but rather, quite explicitly, from a conviction that the deity ought to be venerated, and venerated in a publicly intelligible way.²⁰ Hobbes’s second argument—his argument from the authority of the civil state— appeals to the obligations of subjects under the social contract. As I have already had occasion to note, for Hobbes, a subject’s general duty of obedience to the civil state comprehends a duty to obey legal statutes controlling religious professions and devotional practices. If the law mandates a specific form of worship or doctrinal confession, subjects are bound to obey—at least in the typical case. But as we probe the underlying logic of Hobbes’s religious position, it is the exceptions to this general rule and the corresponding limits to the state’s authority over religious practice that are of particular interest. For Hobbes, the point of religious laws is to ensure that subjects honor God through the sort of coherent and unified civil worship that befits a unified commonwealth—for, “seeing a Common-wealth is but one Person, it ought also to exhibite to God but one Worship; which then it doth, when it commandeth it to be exhibited by Private men, Publiquely” (L 31.37: 570; see also DCi 15.15). That is why, if we would honor God properly in a commonwealth, “those Attributes which the sovereign ordaineth, in the Worship of God, for signes of Honour, ought to be taken and used for such, by private men in their publique Worship” (L 31.38: 570). And that is why Hobbes, having identified the rules of religion with the rules of honoring God, can then take both to be fixed by the relevant civil statutes, writing (as we have seen) that “the rules of religion, that is the rules of honoring God, . . . we have from the laws” (DCo epistle dedicatory; compare also L 31.38: 570, DH 14.4, 14.9). However, there are limits to the state’s authority in determining the rules of honoring God, and corresponding limits to the subject’s obligation to follow the law in matters of ²⁰ As Waldron observes, here Hobbes is treating the outward signification of honor as “a threeperson relation” that obtains between the person doing the honoring, the person who is honored, and “an onlooker, who is supposed to be impressed by the honoring . . . . Honor, Hobbes implies, is a matter of A offering to B signs which any other person, C, looking on will understand as signs of high regard” (Jeremy Waldron, “Hobbes on Public Worship,” in Melissa Williams and Jeremy Waldron, ed., NOMOS 48: Toleration and its Limits (2008), 31–53: 37).

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public worship. In fact the state can only determine forms of “Arbitrary Worship”—that is, points of religious practice that are intrinsically indifferent, being neither signs of honor nor signs of dishonor by the lights of natural reason prior to instruction in human conventions. It cannot dictate or overrule the standards of “Naturall . . . Worship” (L 31.10: 562; see also DCi 15.11),²¹ which reflect those natural signs of honor and dishonor that all humans acknowledge independently of custom and convention: [B]ecause not all Actions are signes by Constitution [Latin variant: possunt Honorificae fieri per constitutionem hominum, i.e., can be made honorific by human constitution]; but some are Naturally signes of Honour, others of Contumely, these later (which are those that men are ashamed to do in the sight of them they reverence) cannot be made by humane power a part of Divine worship; nor the former (such as decent, modest, humble Behaviour) ever be separated from it. But whereas there be an infinite number of Actions, and Gestures, of an indifferent nature; such of them as the Common-wealth shall ordain to be Publiquely and Universally in use, as signes of Honour, and part of God’s Worship, are to be taken and used for such by the Subjects. (L 31.39: 572; compare also DCi 15.16)

Or, similarly: Against [Hobbes’s own position that the commonwealth can determine the appropriate ways to worship God], one could ask [ . . . ]: does it not follow that one must obey the commonwealth if it directly commands one to pour insults upon God or forbids his worship? I say that it does not follow, and that one must not obey; for no one could take a profusion of insults or total absence of worship as a mode of worship. And again before the formation of the commonwealth no one who acknowledged the reign of God had the right to deny the honour due to him, and he could not therefore transfer the right to give such an order to the commonwealth. (DCi 15.18; compare also DCi 14.10)

So the state can require us to pray before this or that altar or idol (DCi 15.18), to take instruction from this or that prophet (L 32.5: 578, B 167), or to acknowledge these scriptures or those (L 33.1: 586). It has complete control over this sphere of arbitrary worship. But still, the state cannot require us to violate the standards of natural piety. It has no right or authority to make us act immodestly or indecently toward God, or to perform any other action that natural human reason would already recognize as a sign of dishonor prior to religious instruction and artificial

²¹ Or “Rationall Worship,” as Hobbes sometimes calls it (L 31.33: 568; see also DH 14.9).

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human convention. So we can now see that the texts in which Hobbes seems to bluntly identify religion with a kind of law (quoted in Section 7.4 above) involve a form of shorthand. More precisely speaking, religion is “the external worship [cultus] of men who sincerely honour God” (DH 14.1), an outward display of inner reverence for the deity. This outward display might occur in or out of a commonwealth, but in a commonwealth it is properly controlled by the laws of the civil state (hence the shorthand identification of religion with a kind of law), at least so long as those laws do not violate natural standards of piety.²² Hobbes’s willingness to limit the state’s authority in this way again confirms that he is sincerely committed to the veneration of the great cause of the humanly comprehensible world. He holds that we ought to revere this awesome and incomprehensible being; that we may do so through arbitrary conventional forms that the state has the authority to determine; and that we are indeed obliged to follow the religious laws of the civil state and thus far exhibit an outward religious conformity—but only insofar as the those laws do not have us offend against the more fundamental rational requirement that we treat God in accordance with natural standards of honor and respect.

7.6 Further Interpretive Problems Solved Other peculiar features of Hobbes’s religious position now fall into place. First, Hobbes maintains that we owe more reverence and obedience to God than to any earthly sovereign (L 33.1: 586; DCi 15.18), and he also officially accepts Christianity; but then he also insists that any public allegiance to Christianity should be contingent on the permission of the civil state. That might sound contradictory, but it makes perfect sense on the proposed interpretation: an English subject ought to embrace the Anglo-Protestant religious system as the proper vehicle for expressing reverence for God, but a Turk living under the Caliphate should not. Second, the proposed reading also explains the striking contrast between Hobbes’s position that one ought not to obey the law when it commands a violation of natural piety, and his explicit insistence that one must violate Christian piety and publicly renounce Christ if the law so commands. In the latter case, Hobbes tells us that little is really at stake and that the social contract requires our conformist compliance, for “Profession with the tongue is but an externall thing, and no more then any other gesture whereby we signifie our obedience” (L 42.11: 784). But as we have seen, he allows no such excuse for violations of natural piety. The difference in Hobbes’s treatment of the two cases is readily ²² For discussion of the definition of religion at DH 14.1 together with Hobbes’s other definitions of religion and piety, see Chapter 8.

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explained by my hypothesis that he accepts the standards of natural piety and the rationality of worshipping the great cause through locally sanctioned devotional practices, but that he has no real belief that Christianity is an authentically divinely revealed religion.²³ Third, we can now understand how Hobbes can have a respectful and even reverential attitude to Christian scripture, to all appearances treating it without irony as a sacred text, while yet also being ready to twist its interpretation to his own ends, not only emphasizing those passages that might plausibly seem to support his own political and philosophical agenda, but also pushing his luck with several highly tendentious scriptural exegeses. Again, this makes sense if Hobbes views Christian practice as an entirely appropriate expression of rational religious piety, a form of worship that he takes seriously and enters into in a spirit of genuine veneration, but also at the same time sees it as a malleable human construct, an artificial convention that, given the ear of the sovereign or the cooperation of the universities, he might hope to shape, if only at the margins, in favor of Hobbesian ideals such as civil obedience, an ultra-statist ecclesiology, and the extirpation of belief in an immaterial spirit-world.²⁴ And just as one would expect, all of Hobbes’s readings of scripture are proposed with “due submission” to the state authorities in charge of religious law (L epistle dedicatory: 6; compare also L 38.5: 708), and square with episcopacy when advanced under the Stuarts, while switching over to support Independency, temporarily, when under the Interregnum Commonwealth.²⁵ Both the existing religious laws and the more deeply-entrenched aspects of existing religious culture will affect the ways in which Hobbes might hope to mold the interpretation of scripture and shape religious practice. It is a consequence of my interpretation that if Hobbes had ²³ The failure to distinguish between Hobbes’s attitude toward disobedience to state-commanded violations of natural piety as against his attitude toward disobedience to state-commanded violations of Christian piety causes trouble for some interpretations, as when Waldron argues that Hobbes changes positions between De Cive (where Hobbes approves of disobedience in the face of commands to violate natural piety) and “a more authoritarian line” in Leviathan (where Hobbes disapproves of Christian martyrdom) (Waldron, “Hobbes on Public Worship,” 43–44). But there is in fact no change between De Cive and Leviathan once we draw the necessary distinction. ²⁴ For discussion of Hobbes’s ambitions to shape popular religious thought through the tools of education, see Teresa M. Bejan, “Hobbes on Religion, Education, and the Metaphor of Imprinting,” in Laurens van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass, eds., Hobbes on Politics and Religion, 45–78. ²⁵ It is sometimes suggested that it is simply calculating self-interest that leads Hobbes to declare in favor of Anglican episcopacy in De Cive in 1642, only to reject it in favor of Independency under the new republican regime in the English Leviathan of 1651, and then to backtrack again following the Restoration, butchering the 1651 edition’s treatment of ecclesiastical government in the Latin re-write of Leviathan of 1668 and railing against Independency in Behemoth. But with the current interpretation it becomes possible to explain these shifts in Hobbes’s outward theological posture as a principled expression of his underlying position that public religious pronouncements ought to align with the legally mandated religious settlement, whatever that settlement happens to be. (On the “butcher[ing]” of the 1651 edition’s sections on ecclesiology, see Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 34. More generally, on the shifts in Hobbes’s treatment of episcopacy and Independency, see Noel Malcolm, “General Introduction” to Hobbes, Leviathan, 1–195: 40–41, 61–64, and Jeffrey R. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).)

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been a Spaniard, his public criticism of Catholic ecclesiology and Catholic superstition would have been modulated accordingly—and not simply out of fear of persecution, but also out of a genuine respect for the local ways of honoring God. However, that does not mean that a Spanish Hobbes might not still have hoped to shape Catholic practices, at the margins, in the direction of a more statist form of church governance and a more sober metaphysics.²⁶ Fourth, we can also now appreciate why Hobbes insists on a total separation of scriptural religion and philosophy and insists that while the former can teach us “the rules of honouring God,” it must not be understood as a source of factual information or philosophical doctrine (DCo epistle dedicatory). Revealed religion is a human creation, a conventional cultural artifact that provides us with publicly intelligible ways of demonstrating our veneration for the overwhelmingly powerful but otherwise incomprehensible cause behind the great frame of nature. It serves an important function and is not to be mocked or made light of. But it is not a reliable source of information either about the nature of God or about the world.

7.7 The Language of Revealed Religion How does Hobbes’s treatment of scripture and revelation relate to his wider account of the function of religious discourse? In the case of the language of natural religion, we saw that Hobbes advances a cleanly expressivist account. On that account, when we speak exclusively with the imprimatur of natural human reason without any assistance from revelation, our discourse about the divine attributes and actions will simply display a desire to honor the great cause. It will not be intended to convey any descriptive claims about the divine attributes or actions, both because humans have no natural comprehension of such things, and because such sallies at description would be a kind of impertinence, an “inconsiderate and vain [abuse] of [God’s] Sacred Name” (L 31.33: 568). (As always, I except the single descriptive assertion that there is an incomprehensible cause of surpassing power behind the human comprehensible world.) However, when it comes to the language of revealed religion, the matter is more complicated. Plausibly, for Hobbes, that language can in certain circumstances properly play

²⁶ We should resist loose talk of a “contradiction” or “usurp[ation]” on Hobbes’s part when he advances his own unsolicited and sometimes highly controversial views in theology and ecclesiology, while at the same time also insisting that we ought to speak and act in conformity with the religion of the commonwealth (Jacqueline Rose, “Hobbes among the Heretics?”, The Historical Journal 52 (2009), 493–511: 501, Nicholas D. Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall, and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity: A Quarrel of the Civil Wars and Interregnum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 200). There is no genuine contradiction or usurpation here, so long as the religious laws of the commonwealth do not forbid the specific pronouncements in question. For related discussion, see Thomas Holden, “Hobbes on the Function of Evaluative Speech,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (2016), 123–144: 138–139.

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a double role, with its honor-expressing function being accompanied by the expression of truth-apt propositions, description, and belief. It is plausible that Hobbes regards it as improper to speak descriptively about the divine attributes even in the light of scripture and other claims to revelation, for he is clear that God’s intrinsic nature remains permanently beyond human comprehension. Even if we were to set aside all doubts about the reliability and divine authenticity of Christian scripture, Hobbes in any case maintains that “the Christian religion obliges us to believe that God is inconceivable (which means, in my view, that we have no idea of him)” (TSO ii.132). So the nature of God remains beyond the capacity of human thought, even by the lights of Christian doctrine itself. I take this to imply that none of our talk about the nature of God and his attributes can properly be intended to describe, even when that talk is informed by scripture and revelation.²⁷ That part of our discourse must, presumably, remain purely honorific. However, I suggest that Hobbes would likely allow that certain other kinds of assertions that appear in scripture (and in other culturally specific forms of religious speech) can properly serve to convey descriptive, fact-stating, and truth-apt propositions. Most obviously, there are assertions about historical events that form part of the scripturally licensed narrative of sacred history. On the face of it, when the Bible tells us that Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, or that Jericho fell before Joshua’s trumpets, or that Jesus delivered a sermon on the mount, or walked on the Sea of Galilee, these are descriptions of historical events, and talk of and around these scriptural claims might be used to convey truth-apt propositions and belief in matters of descriptive fact. However, even if descriptive talk and truth-apt belief (and perhaps even warranted belief) here is possible, it is for Hobbes in an important sense incidental and subordinate to the requirements of proper religious behavior. This kind of discourse remains properly controlled by the trumping consideration of whether or not it is regarded as honorific in the local culture, and it should be embraced (or not) according to the local cultural conventions establishing honor-expressing religious practices. Where locally valorized, the discourse of scripture and the assertions of sacred history should be ‘accepted’ and adopted (whether or not they are actually believed) along with the rest of the culture’s conventional honor-signifying religious practices. But where locally rejected, such talk must be avoided. The properly pious person will outwardly affirm the narrative of Christian history if she lives in a Christian culture and do so (at least in part) to show appropriate regard for the great cause. But she will reject it if she resides in a culture that disdains Christian modes of worship, and again for the same reason. Whatever she privately believes about the apparent truth-claims of scripture is neither here nor there.

²⁷ Notice also that, while Hobbes has much to say about the correct interpretation of scripture, he never appeals to it to revise or amend his purely honorific account of what can be said about the divine attributes from the standpoint of natural human reason.

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7.8 Coda: The Religion of Thucydides In a brief biographical sketch “On the Life and History of Thucydides” prefaced to his 1629 translation Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre, Hobbes reports that Thucydides was “by some reputed an Atheist” (LHT x). In Hobbes’s own assessment, Thucydides did not in fact deserve this label, even if he did most likely regard his own culture’s pagan religion as quite fantastical: For though [Thucydides] were [no atheist], yet it is not improbable, but by the light of naturall reason, he might see enough in the Religion of these Heathen, to make him thinke it vaine and superstitious; which was enough to make him an Atheist, in the opinion of the people. (LHT x)

Given how little internal or external evidence there is for Thucydides’s actual religious views, Hobbes’s remarks are more speculative than he cares to admit. Still, it seems important to Hobbes to urge that Thucydides was genuinely pious, and to cite his History as evidence when it approvingly draws on the predictions of an oracle, or lauds the Athenian general Nicias “for his worshipping of the Gods.” On the other hand, it also seems important to Hobbes to insist that Thucydides had an admirable intellectual detachment from the specific beliefs and practices of the Greek religion, and was prepared, for instance, to criticize Nicias for “being too punctuall in the observation of [religious] Ceremonies . . . when he overthrew himselfe and his Army . . . by it.” The essay on Thucydides’s life and character was written many years before Hobbes’s philosophical treatment of natural and revealed religion in De Cive, Leviathan, and De Corpore. Even so, perhaps there is some projective self-identification in Hobbes’s portrait of Thucydides as an authentically pious man who could nevertheless maintain a critical distance when considering his own culture’s devotional forms and regard them as simply so many human conventions, laudable perhaps, but also negotiable—“[s]o that in his writings our Authour appeareth to be, on the one side not superstitious, on the other side not an Atheist” (LHT x).

8 Definitions of Religion Hobbes strives to build his arguments from clear definitions and such foundational principles “as passion not mistrusting may not seek to displace” (EL epistle dedicatory). The archaeologist of philosophy must work more gingerly from the outside in, proceeding from texts and hypotheses about relevant contexts through interpretations of argument and dialectic, and, with a sandpiper-movement alternating between analysis and synthesis, reveal by parts the fundamental terms in a system of thought, their utility, and meaning. With my general survey of Hobbes’s approach to natural and conventional religious speech and practice now in hand, in the current chapter I turn to examine his official definitions of religion. There are two such definitions, one in Leviathan (1651/1668), the other in De Homine (1658). Although the two are not co-extensive, I will argue that they do not contradict one other. Instead, each belongs to a different frame of analysis, the one descriptive and natural-historical, the other prescriptive and rational. Each defines a different kind of mental state or behavior, and each serves a different purpose in Hobbes’s overall system. As it happens, commentators have often taken the definition in Leviathan to insinuate the absurd contingency of religious belief, and many regard it as presenting an obstacle to the sort of sincerely pious interpretation of Hobbes that I advocate in this book. To the contrary, I will show that the definition in Leviathan squares with and thus far helps to confirm my authentically pious reading. And the same goes for the definition in De Homine. More than any other chapter in this book, the current chapter relies on interpretations of Hobbes’s philosophy of religion that I take to have been established in preceding chapters. If the reading of Hobbes’s philosophy of religion that I have advanced so far is correct, one would expect to see its consequences borne out in his definitions—and the same also goes for his characterization of atheism and irreligion, which I shall examine in the following chapter. The fact that my account of Hobbes’s philosophy of religion dissolves various well-known interpretive puzzles concerning his definitions of religion is one more point of evidence in its favor.

8.1 The Definition of Religion in Leviathan Hobbes’s better-known definition of religion appears in the midst of his genusand-species taxonomy of the passions in chapter 6 of Leviathan. It runs as follows: Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion. Thomas Holden, Oxford University Press. © Thomas Holden 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871329.003.0008

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Feare of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publiquely allowed, ; not allowed . And when the power is truly such as we imagine,  . (L 6.36: 86)

To many readers this passage has seemed a provocation, and perhaps a calculated one. It drew criticism as early as 1653 in Alexander Ross’s Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook, who heard in it “the voice of Leviathan, not of a Christian,” and since then has been cited by commentators down the ages as evidence of Hobbes’s between-the-lines irreligion or even overt mockery.¹ Two distinct features of the L 6.36: 86 definitions are singled out as supposedly telling against any sincerely pious interpretation of Hobbes’s philosophy. The first is Hobbes’s explicit relativization of the distinction between religion and superstition to whatever “tales” are “publiquely allowed.” Hobbes’s willingness to treat that distinction as a reflection of whatever the civil law—or, if we adopt a wider interpretation of “publiquely allowed,” popular opinion and the law of fashion²— happens to permit is said to show his contempt for religion in general, and lack of any serious commitment to Christianity in particular. Under a Nero or a Diocletian, Christian practice was not publicly allowed. Was it therefore merely a superstition? And, as Ross presses the issue: “what will [Hobbes] say of the Gentiles, among them tales were publickly allowed, were they therefore religious, and not superstitious . . . ?”³ Questions such as these are often thought to put any sincerely pious reading of Hobbes on its back foot. However, Hobbes himself does not seem to have been perturbed by this particular cross-examination, and made no effort to revise this aspect of the passage in the Latin edition of 1668.

¹ Alexander Ross, Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook (London 1653), 10, and Edward Hyde, A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and pernicious Errors to Church and State, in Mr. Hobbes’s Book, entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), 21. In the more recent literature, see Edwin Curley, “ ‘I durst not write so boldly,’ or, How to Read Hobbes’ theological-political treatise,” in Hobbes e Spinoza, Scienza e politica, ed. Daniela Bostrenghi, intro. by Emilia Giancotti (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992), 497–593: 523–525, Douglas Jesseph, “Hobbes’s Atheism,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26 (2002), ed. Peter French, 140–166: 148, David Berman, A History of Atheism: From Hobbes to Russell (London: Routledge, 1988), 65–67, and Devin Stauffer, Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light: A Study of the Foundations of Modern Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 93. ² Martinich suggests that the later An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall (1682) shows that by “publiquely allowed” Hobbes must have intended conformity with the civil law rather than conformity with popular opinion (A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 52, citing AB 59–60). However, in AB 59–60 Hobbes says only that “I make Prophetical Revelations subject to the examination of the Lawful Soveraign,” and that “every Soveraign Prince has a right to prohibite the publick Teaching of [doctrine or prophecies], whether false or true.” Those statements plausibly suggest that “publiquely allowed” requires conformity with any relevant civil law, i.e., any command from the sovereign. But they are consistent with “publiquely allowed” also requiring conformity with popular opinion in cases where the civil law is silent, or in the state of nature where there is no sovereign to speak authoritatively for the multitude. I emphasize the point since we have seen that Hobbes allows that popular opinion can make otherwise arbitrary forms of behavior honorable (and properly religious) or dishonorable (and religiously inappropriate) by convention, even in the absence of a sovereign. (See Chapter 7, Section 7.5.) ³ Ross, Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook, 10.

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In fact this feature of Hobbes’s text fits neatly with the reading already advanced in this book. It certainly makes it clear that Hobbes does not regard Christianity as the only possible religion properly so called, and also that he is willing to imply that there are certain counterfactual situations in which Christianity would no longer deserve that label at all. Those are striking views for a seventeenth-century philosopher to put into print, but they slot like missing jigsaw puzzle pieces into his overall philosophy of religion as I have here interpreted it. As the language of “tales publiquely allowed” makes clear, the definition of religion at L 6.36: 86 is keyed to the culturally specific forms of religion that require a kind of conventional ratification. It does not address natural religion and the universally recognizable ways of honoring the first cause (which Hobbes does not consider until 25 chapters later, in Leviathan chapter 31, “Of the     ”). Rather it concerns only conventional forms of religious practice, which (as we have seen) require the backing of a cultural consensus or the determinations of the civil law before they can become signs of an honorific attitude toward God. The definition at L 6.36: 86 therefore quite properly annexes religious practice to whatever doctrines, sacred legends, and “tales” are publicly permitted. As I have shown in this study, that is not because Hobbes secretly disdains religion, but because he holds that we should honor God publicly as well as privately, and that all publicly intelligible signs of honor that go beyond the universally recognizable code of natural piety require such conventional validation. (See Chapter 7, Sections 7.5–7.7.) So one might well question Hobbes’s commitment to Christianity as the only possible way of properly worshipping God. There is indeed in Hobbes a kind of Laodicean indifference toward the particular religious forms that are conventionally adopted: so long as they are consistent with natural piety, any arbitrary practices could serve. But L 6.36: 86 gives us no reason to question Hobbes’s commitment to the view that we ought rationally and piously to worship the great cause, nor his conviction that a seventeenth-century English subject should do so through the forms of the legally sanctioned Anglo-Protestant religion. The second aspect of the L 6.36: 86 definitions that is thought to tell against any sincerely pious reading of Hobbes is the specification that “ ” requires fear of an imagined power that is “truly such as we imagine.” This requirement might seem to sit oddly with Hobbes’s clear and consistent position that humans cannot in fact imagine the nature of God (L 3.12: 46, 11.25: 160; see also EL 11.2, 11.11, TSO 127, AW 35.16). Various commentators have therefore interpreted this definition as insinuating that no religion can in fact be true, for that would require (it is said) our accurately imagining what is in fact unimaginable.⁴ ⁴ For versions of the charge in the more recent literature, see Berman, A History of Atheism, 66–67, Jesseph, “Hobbes’s Atheism,” 148, Stauffer, Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light, 92; compare also Richard Peters, Hobbes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 228–229, and for critical discussion, Martinich, Two Gods, 55. Once again, an early version of this question about L 6.36: 86 (though not the explicit charge of covert atheism) can be found in Ross’s 1653 Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook: “[Hobbes]

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However, the interpretation that I have advanced in this book also accommodates this feature of the L 6.36: 86 definitions. For we might imagine God in the sense of forming whatever mental images are required to understand the relational description ‘the cause of the humanly comprehensible world’—perhaps (as I have suggested) employing Hobbes’s linguistic device of ‘indefinite names’ to facilitate this sort of purely relational thought—even while we are incapable of imagining the intrinsic nature of the being that occupies the specified relational place.⁵ (See Chapter 4, Section 4.3.) Given that there is such a great cause, then it is truly such as we hereby imagine, even though this ‘true,’ or accurate, image-based relational representation of the great cause conveys no specific account of its intrinsic nature. By contrast, the polytheist who fails to frame any such idea of a great cause behind the humanly comprehensible world and simply worships provincial ‘divinities’ that are envisaged as part of the overall creation does indeed fall short of practicing Hobbesian true religion. Meanwhile, the descriptivist-minded theist who aspires to more than a purely relational characterization of the great cause and takes himself to be able to frame ideas of this being’s intrinsic character errs on the other side, and thereby also strays beyond the parameters of Hobbesian true religion. This latter sort of believer perhaps interprets the play of images prompted by whatever tales are “publiquely allowed” (or by his own private “feign[ings]”) in a literal-minded way, as if they were true representations of the nature of God. But Hobbes holds that that is indeed to fall into false and idolatrous belief. In fact, the only sort of religion that Hobbes could regard as true—and as rationally supportable, and as properly pious—is one that limits its descriptive assertions about the deity to the claim that there is a surpassingly powerful but otherwise incomprehensible great cause behind the humanly comprehensible world, and which otherwise speaks of this being only with the intention to honor. Neither too hot nor too cold, Hobbes’s own characterization of God matches his definition of true religion just right. At the same time, one can see why Hobbes might have been moved to alter the potentially misleading language of the power being “truly such as we imagine” (which the reader might perhaps mistakenly interpret as requiring mental imagery of God’s intrinsic nature), and replaces it in the 1668 Latin version of the passage with the more abstract language of the power being truly such as we have accepted or allowed (“accepimus”).⁶

contradicts himself, for if the power be invisible, how can it be imagined, seeing (as he saith before) imagination is onely of things perceived by the sense, and it is so called from the image made in seeing” (10). ⁵ Martinich similarly argues that we may frame some representation of God through mental imagery, though he does not employ the distinction between thoughts of God’s relational place and thoughts of God’s intrinsic nature, or the device of indefinite names (Martinich, Two Gods, 54–55). ⁶ All talk of imagining and the imagination is removed in the Latin version: “Metus Potentiarum invisibilium, sive Fictae illae sunt, sive ab Historiis acceptae sint publicè, Religio est; si publicè acceptae non sint, Superstitio. Quando autem Potentiae illae revera tales sunt, quales accepimus, Vera Religio” (L 6.36 Latin variant: 87).

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8.2 “Feare of power invisible” My interpretation therefore dissolves the two traditional concerns about L 6.36: 86. But we are not quite clear yet. The passage presents one remaining puzzle that has not to my knowledge drawn prior attention. The issue is to do with Hobbes’s defining religion as a kind of fear of invisible power—which, if we are talking about religions that address themselves to God, the great cause, would presumably involve fear of this transcendently powerful being, while polytheistic or animistic religions would involve fear of more localized powers. Partisans of divine love might demur,⁷ but there is nothing necessarily subversive or irreligious in defining religion as a particular kind of fear. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” is not a countercultural statement.⁸ Nevertheless, it might seem strange for Hobbes himself to define religion this way. That is because he both classifies fear as a kind of passion—i.e., as a physiological and emotional reaction to a conception of an object—and also argues in Elements of Law that, since God is inconceivable, it is impossible to experience any such passion or “affection to Godward” (EL 11.11). As we have also seen, other texts also raise doubts about passions that are putatively directed toward God, and in the later De Homine Hobbes redefines both the ‘love’ and ‘fear’ of God required by proper piety altogether, so that they are no longer understood as any kind of God-directed passion, emotion, sentiment, or affective attitude, but rather simply a disposition to obey the rational precepts of natural law. (See Chapter 5, Sections 5.2 and 5.6.) So it might seem odd for Hobbes to define religion as a kind of fear in L 6.36: 86, given that he appears to have enduring doubts about the possibility (and perhaps also about the propriety) of our experiencing any genuine passions directed toward God at all. To be clear: the threat here is not specifically to my own expressivist interpretation of Hobbes’s natural theology, or to my emphasis on the honorific rather than descriptive function of revealed religion and scriptural practice in Hobbes. Both of these could stand with or without literal fear of God. (See Chapter 2, Section 2.4 and Chapter 5, Section 5.5.) But the emphasis on fear in L 6.36: 86 does present a puzzle for any reading that takes Hobbes’s critique of religious passions seriously, as my overall reading does (see Chapter 5, Sections 5.2–5.4). And if it is agreed that Hobbes regards the great cause as beyond the reach of human passions, then commentators who favor an irreligious interpretation ⁷ Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 2 vols. (London: R. Royston 1678), ii. 664–665. For commentary, see Jasper Reid, “The Common Consent Argument from Herbert to Hume, Journal of the History of Philosophy 53 (2015), 401–434: 410. ⁸ Hobbes quotes the scriptural passage (Psalms 111:1, Proverbs 1:7, 1:9, Ecclesiasticus 1:16) in connection with his L 6.36: 86 definition at L Appendix 3.9–10: 1232, and refers to it again at AB 13. As Curley and Malcolm point out in their editorial apparatuses to Leviathan, Hobbes’s own citation seems to confuse Ecclesiastes with Ecclesiasticus (see Malcom at L 1233 note z, and Curley’s remark in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. with Introduction and Notes by Edwin Curley (Hackett: Indianapolis, 1994), 542 note 16).

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might seize upon his emphasis on fear in L 6.36: 86 and interpret it as a sly insinuation that no human religion can actually be about this remote and inconceivable being, whatever theists might like to believe to the contrary. Instead (it might be said) the subversive implication of Hobbes’s definition is that human religions can only be concerned with more readily imaginable objects of fear, and hence are stuck in kind of idolatry of the conceivable. After all, Hobbes is clear that the religious imagination can be inventive, and that our “perpetuall feare, alwayes accompanying mankind in the ignorance of causes, as it were in the Dark, must needs have for object something” (L 12.5: 166). He also holds that unscrupulous and self-deceiving priests can encourage this impulse, setting themselves up as intercessors between laity and the spectral world, and frightening their congregations with “empty names; as men fright Birds from the Corn with an empty doublet, a hat, and a crooked stick” (L 46.18: 1082; compare also L 45.1–2: 1012–1014). Commentators who advocate an irreligious interpretation might then press the hypothesis that, for Hobbes, human religions can only be about this anxietyconjured mundus imaginalis, with the thoughts and passions of believers attaching only to the febrile inner parade of “as many Gods, as there be men that feigne them” (L 12.6: 166; see also 11.26: 162). I have argued in this study that this kind of conspiratorially irreligious reading of Hobbes is not persuasive. It offers no plausible explanation of the great weight of texts and systematic philosophy elaborating our rational duty to acknowledge and publicly honor (i.e., worship) a great cause behind the humanly comprehensible world. It leaves too much detailed and apparently irony-free argumentation unaccounted for, and in its readiness to divine esoteric messages between the lines of Hobbes’s texts is perhaps in danger of conjuring spectral visions of its own. But if we reject the irreligious interpretation, how might we reconcile Hobbes’s emphasis on fear in the L 6.36: 86 definition with his commitment to a rational and laudable form of religion that is genuinely focused on the inconceivable great cause? I see four possible strategies. The simplest solution would be to suppose that Hobbes changes his mind, and that by the time of Leviathan he has abandoned his earlier position that the great cause is beyond all human passions. After all, the argument for that conclusion is explicitly presented only in Elements of Law, which Hobbes had circulated in 1640 but may never have approved for publication (though it did appear in print 1650). It is possible that by the time of Leviathan (1651) Hobbes had come to hold that fear could attach to a being that we cannot directly picture or conceive—perhaps indeed a being that we can refer to in relational terms, as the unknown x that caused the humanly comprehensible world to exist, even while we cannot frame any conception of its intrinsic nature. In my chapter on Hobbes’s treatment of love and fear of God, I canvassed this interpretive possibility, and connected it to his admission in the later De Homine (1658) that “anything can be feared even though it be not conceived of” just so

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long as it is “said to be” worthy of fear (DH 12.4). However, as I also noted, other parts of De Homine suggest that Hobbes’s doubts about the possibility of human passions being directed toward the inconceivable great cause did most likely endure into this later period—in which case they would presumably also have been operative when he composed Leviathan. (See Chapter 5, Sections 5.2 and 5.6.) Overall, then: while this first strategy of reconciliation is possible given the various texts we have, it runs against the grain of the circumstantial evidence. The second strategy would be to argue that, while humans passions such as fear perhaps cannot strictly take God as their object, still, we might be able to describe humans as ‘fearing’ this great cause in a looser sense. Certainly, humans can fear future events that ultimately trace back to the hand of the great cause. And humans can come to appreciate this cosmological etiology behind the events that they fear, if only schematically, and therefore attribute future evils to the activity of the great cause. Hobbes tells us that All men are of the opinion that there is an invisible something or invisible things, from which (accordingly as they are favourable or unfavourable) all goods are to be hoped and all evils are to be feared. (DH 12.5)

Strictly speaking, the things “to be feared” here are the future evils themselves— adverse future events or circumstances that we presumably can imagine or envisage, in keeping with Hobbes’s position that fear of something is a response to a mental image of that thing. Nevertheless, in such a case perhaps we might also be said to ‘fear’ God in a looser sense, insofar as we judge that the envisaged evils are attributable to the activity of God, the “invisible something” that ultimately stands behind them. A prisoner languishing in the Tower might fear the blow of the headsman’s axe, but she might also fear the minister who would orchestrate the writ of execution. The parallel is not exact, since the great cause is inconceivable in a way that even a reclusive minister working behind the scenes is not. But it points to a kind of indirect sense in which we might be said to fear the less vividly imaginable anterior causes of a dreadful event. In this way, a Hobbesian religion centered on the inconceivable great cause might be said to involve “[f]eare of power invisible” (as required by the L 6.36: 86 definition), just so long we are willing to relax the strict definition of ‘fear’ and permit this extended but still intelligible indirect usage. A third strategy would be to appeal to the fact that in the later De Homine Hobbes redefines the ‘fear’ that we owe to God in entirely non-passional terms, apparently divesting it of all emotional, affective, or sentimental content whatsoever. Explicitly in this later work, to fear God is nothing more than to be disposed to follow the laws of nature. No actual passion—no physiological-emotive response to a conception—is required. In De Homine Hobbes also provides a similarly non-passional redefinition of the ‘love’ that we owe God, as he had

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previously in Elements of Law and De Cive—and this indeed was one of our reasons for thinking that Hobbes’s doubts about God-directed passions continued beyond Elements of Law into the period of these later works. (See Chapter 5, Section 5.6.) So at least by the lights of De Homine, the ‘fear’ that we owe God is not actually a passion at all, and a Hobbesian form of religious practice could therefore satisfy the L 6.36: 86 definition of religion, if only in this nominal way, without involving any genuine passion directed to Godward. A fourth strategy might also be employed, perhaps in conjunction with the second or the third just mentioned. We are rationally required to show publicly that we honor God—and one key way to do this is so signify outwardly that we fear him. Just as we ought to call God good, wise, and eternal not from a desire to describe but to honor, so we ought to call him fearful, terrible, awful. “To shew any signe of . . . feare of another; is to Honour; for . . . to feare, is to value”—which is to say, to give an affirmative assessment of that person’s power (L 10:24 136; see also L 31.29: 568; and on valuing, see L 10.16–17: 134–136). So whether or not it is possible to actually experience fear of this inconceivable object, we ought to talk and act as if we fear the great cause. The performance does God honor, and so a Hobbesian religion will certainly enjoin us to reverently demonstrate our ‘fear’ of the great invisible power behind the humanly comprehensible world, even if genuine fear is impossible on account of its inconceivability. These strategies of reconciliation save the textual phenomena. But I concede that they involve some interpretive labor. On the face of it, Hobbes’s emphasis of fear in L 6.36: 86 is surprising given his doubts about whether one can literally fear an inconceivable God, and while the proposed strategies each enable us to avoid textual incoherence, this last feature of the Leviathan definition does not make for as effortless a fit with the rest of my interpretation as the other two aforementioned features, its relativization of the distinction between religion and superstition to civil sufferance, and the requirement that true religion requires the neither too hot nor too cold accuracy of our theological imaginings. However, it is important both to keep the L 6.36: 86 definition in perspective and to interpret it in its proper context. First context. The L 6.36: 86 definition appears in the middle of Hobbes’s physiology-cum-psychology of human appetites and aversions in chapter 6 of Leviathan, i.e., “Of the Interiour Beginnings of Voluntary Motions; commonly called the . And the Speeches by which they are expressed.” Like most of the early chapters in Part 1 of Leviathan (“Of Man”), chapter 6 is devoted to a descriptive anatomy of the impulses behind human discourse and behavior. Here Hobbes certainly speaks to the origins of religion in human nature. But he has nothing to say in this chapter about the possible rationality or justification of religion, or about the character of religious practice when it is properly controlled by reason. Indeed, it is important to note that the L 6.36: 86 definition appears a full five chapters before Hobbes’s first mention of the rational case for belief in a great cause behind nature—a case that is based in a

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“profound inquiry into natural causes” (L 11.25: 160) and a kind of disinterested cosmological curiosity that is, explicitly, driven not by fear and the urge to appease the anthropomorphically imagined local spiritual powers behind natural phenomena, but rather requires humans to reason fearlessly, “without thought of their fortune; the solicitude whereof, both inclines to fear, and hinders them in the search of the causes of other things” (L 12.6: 166). The definition also appears 25 chapters before Hobbes’s detailed analysis of the forms of worship that are rationally due to this great cause—which is to say, his account of the rational obligations of natural religion (chapter 31, “Of the     ”). Here in chapter 6, Hobbes’s characterization of religion conveys no connotations of fitness, propriety, or rationality: it is purely descriptive rather than prescriptive or evaluatively freighted, and his account focuses simply upon the original natural-historical causes of the religious impulse in human nature. Indeed, the L 6.36: 86 definition finds a close echo in Hobbes’s subsequent natural-historical thesis that our human “Feare of things invisible, is the naturall Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion; and in them that worship, or fear that Power otherwise than they do, Superstition” (L 11.26: 162, emphasis added). The L 6.36: 86 definition emphasizes this original “seed” (or causal basis) of religion in human nature, i.e., our fear of invisible power. But Hobbes will have more to say about the eventual fruit of this seed when it is watered with reason, cultivated with disinterested cosmological curiosity, and freed from any shadowy overgrowth of phantasmagoric specters. Now perspective. L 6.36: 86 presents what is by some margin Hobbes’s bestknown definition of religion. Best-known, no doubt, partly because it appears in Part 1 of Leviathan, the most-read part of his most-read work; but perhaps also partly because of its enticingly provocative cast. Commentators who favor an irreligious interpretation often draw attention to this passage, with its delicious implication that Christianity is only a religion by public permission (which implication I accept is intended), and what is often thought to be its air of impiety and matter-of-fact irreverence (which I deny is intended). However, it is not the only definition of religion that Hobbes provides, nor the most representative of his usual theoretical approach. There is also a definition in De Homine, a work that was written in Latin as the companion volume to De Cive and De Corpore as the final part (in the order of publication if not of synthetic exposition) of the canonical statement of his system collectively titled Elements of Philosophy. In comparison with the crisis-prompted, urgently produced, and engagé English Leviathan of 1651, it is reasonable to regard De Homine as more particularly intended for scholarly posterity and the wider Latin-reading Republic of Letters, even if De Homine ultimately drew relatively little attention, and it was Leviathan that defined Hobbes’s reputation for future generations. As I see it, to offer a reading of Hobbes’s philosophy of religion that plays up the definition in Leviathan while ignoring that in De Homine, as certain advocates of the irreligious

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interpretation are wont to do, is rather like presenting an interpretation of Machiavelli’s political philosophy that looks only to The Prince while neglecting the Discourses, or an account of Smith’s social theory that considers only The Wealth of Nations and ignores The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Such readings run the risk of distortion. My suggestion is not that we should throw out the L 6.36: 86 definition in favor of the definition in De Homine, any more than I would propose that we should skip The Prince and study only the Discourses. As I have shown, the interpretation of Hobbes’s philosophy of religion that I advance in this book not only accommodates the L 6.36: 86 definition (including the issue of fear, in one way or another), but also dissolves the two well-known puzzles that commentators have raised about this passage. This is not something that I have seen in other readings that take Hobbes to be sincerely pious rather than covertly irreligious, and I regard it as an advantage of my overall interpretation.⁹ Rather than neglecting either definition, our objective should be to explain them both, and to understand how it is that Hobbes could endorse each in its respective context.

8.3 The Definition of Religion in De Homine The definition in De Homine opens chapter 14, “Of Religion.” Here Hobbes writes that: Religion is the external worship of men who sincerely honour God. Moreover, they sincerely honour God who believe not only that He exists, but also that He is the omnipotent and omniscient creator and ruler of all things, and further, that He is by His own will the distributor of prosperity and adversity. Therefore religion as such (that is, natural) consists of two parts; whereof one is faith (or the belief that God exists and that He governs all things), the other is worship. (DH 14.1)

⁹ Martinich, who reads Hobbes as a sincere Christian, argues that Hobbes may not actually have intended to endorse the definition in L 6.36: 86, with its scandalous consequence that Christianity is not a religion but a superstition in any commonwealth where its tales are not publicly allowed. Rather, Hobbes was speaking sardonically, and offering an ironic comment on those who use these terms in a tribal and parochial fashion, valorizing their own practices as ‘religion’ and abusing alien practices as ‘superstition’ (Martinich, Two Gods, 57–58, Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 81, 236–237, and Hobbes (New York: Routledge, 2005), 188–190). But this reading fits poorly with the rhetoric of the surrounding text, in which Hobbes is presenting a catalog of definitional analyses of the various species and subspecies of passion: it would be surprising if Hobbes abruptly inserted a sardonic criticism of an incorrect use of some term in the guise of one more definition amidst all his other uncontroversially sincere definitions. It should also be noted that Martinich offers this sardonic interpretation as a way of avoiding reading the definitions of L 6.36: 86 as either (i) hinting at an underlying conspiratorially irreligious position, or (ii) as involving a “philosophical blunder” (Hobbes, 190). But with my interpretation we can avoid each of these consequences while still taking the passage at unironic face value.

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Religion is characterized here as an outward honor-giving performance by those who sincerely revere God, a public display of our private regard. The universal form of religion that is prior to any culturally specific embellishments—i.e., “religion as such (that is, natural)”—can therefore be distinguished into “two parts,” one of which comprehends its public, outer aspect, the other, its private, inner dimension. The outer signs and external display are “worship.” The inward attitude of honor behind that outer performance is “faith,” and this—given Hobbes’s position that “Honour consisteth onely in the opinion of Power” (L 10.48: 142)¹⁰—can be identified with the conviction that there is a being of overwhelming power behind the great frame of nature: “the belief,” as Hobbes puts it in DH 14.1, “that God exists and that He governs all things.”¹¹ Two paragraphs further into the chapter, Hobbes will also make it clear that the civil state can properly supplement this basic “natural piety” with further creeds, doctrinal avowals, and ceremonial practices (DH 14.3. 14.4). These supplementary words and actions also serve to demonstrate honor before God, but only by convention, being in themselves arbitrary (DH 14.9). In this definition, ‘religion’ is addressed specifically toward the great cause itself, and not more widely to any kind of invisible power that we might posit as the proximate cause behind this or that particular natural phenomenon. This narrowing of scope in the De Homine definition indicates (I suggest) a kind of prescriptive valence that is absent in the more accommodating L 6.36: 86 definition. In De Homine, any religion worthy of the name must focus on the great cosmological divinity, God properly so called, and not simply whatever provincial powers might be imagined responsible for the wind or the harvest, the lake or the glade. On this definition, the cults of the gentiles are not really religions at all, at least not so long as they remain genuinely polytheistic rather than disguised ways of honoring the one creator God in its different manifestations. In the second sentence of DH 14.1, Hobbes tells us that in order to sincerely honor God one must “believe not only that He exists, but also that He is the [i] omnipotent and [ii] omniscient [iii] creator and [iv] ruler of all things, and further, that He is [v] by His own will the distributor of prosperity and adversity” (emphases ¹⁰ “To honour God internally in the heart, is the same thing that we ordinarily call honour amongst men: for it is nothing but the acknowledging of his power” (EL 11.12). For further examples of Hobbes extending this analysis of honoring to the case of God see L 45.12: 1028 and AB 16–17, and for discussion see Chapter 5, Section 5.5. ¹¹ This usage and definition of ‘faith’ (as “the belief that God exists and that He governs all things”) should be distinguished from another usage and definition that Hobbes sets out in AW 26.4 and DCi 18.5, in which faith is belief in a proposition based on confidence in the good reputation of the source testifying to its truth. Hobbes himself registers the difference between these two uses just two paragraphs after the DH 14.1 definition: “faith, save for our belief that God hath made and rules all things, because it concerns things that are placed beyond the grasp of human nature, is opinion which ariseth from the authority of the speakers.” The first kind of faith might of course be grounded on testimony and hence faith in the latter sense. But it need not be, as God’s existence is also amenable to proof through natural human reason (El 11.1, DCi 2.21, 14.19 note, AB 14).

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added). But in the next sentence the list of mandatory articles of faith has contracted simply to “the belief that [God] exists and that He governs all things” (emphases added). Which is it? And whence does “religion as such (that is, natural)” derive such articles in the first place? But there is no deep puzzle here. Given Hobbes’s treatment of religious discourse, it is not surprising that the list of attributes that natural piety requires us to assign to God readily contracts or expands. As usual, the language of divine perfections—of ‘omnipotence,’ ‘omniscience,’ and talk about the exercise of God’s ‘will’—is being employed honorifically rather than descriptively. What is required is that we believe that God is appropriately given such laudatory titles and spoken of in this kind of honor-conveying language, not that we believe that this inconceivable and incomprehensible being is literally omniscient, or literally wills anything. If I can be forgiven for banging the well-worn drum again, Hobbes is consistent across his published and unpublished works that any talk about God’s perfections is properly only honorific. (See Chapter 2, Section 2.1 and Chapter 6, Section 6.5.) Moreover, Hobbes is clear that to sincerely honor someone or something inwardly in the heart is simply to regard it as more powerful than oneself—an analysis that he explicitly extends to the honor due to God. So although DH 14.1 is written in such a way that it need not offend even the most literal-minded realist about the divine attributes, sincerely honoring God does not actually require that we form truth-apt beliefs about his omniscience, the disposition of his will, and the rest, though of course it may require that we speak in this manner for honor’s sake. We have already seen that my interpretation can accommodate the L 6.36: 86 definition of religion as a kind of fear of invisible power conforming with conventionally approved tales. And I have considered why, in his descriptive anatomy of the passions driving human behavior, Hobbes might have been moved to give a such a natural-historical, non-prescriptive definition—one that emphasizes the original causes of the religious impulse in human nature and admits of animistic and polytheistic as well as monotheistic forms. However, with its emphasis on outward worship expressing sincere inward honor toward the one real divinity, the definition of religion at DH 14.1 is more consonant with Hobbes’s usual way of theorizing about religion. That should not be surprising. While the definition in Leviathan appears in an incidental way in a taxonomic analysis of the various subspecies of love, desire, and fear in a chapter otherwise unconcerned with religion, the definition in De Homine opens an entire chapter examining the proper forms of religious practice. As one might then have expected, the latter definition proves more representative of Hobbes’s usual treatment of religion as a rational and laudable behavior, the appropriate reaction to the recognition that there is a great cause of overwhelming power behind the humanly comprehensible world. It is in keeping with the accounts of worship and devotion throughout his works, including the basic framework of honorific speech and action mandated by natural human reason in Elements of Law, De Cive, and

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Leviathan (EL 11.12, DCi 15.9, 15.14–15, L 31.8: 560–562, 31.29–36: 568–570). When supplemented with the account of civil religion in the subsequent paragraphs of De Homine chapter 14 (DH 14.4, 14.9), it matches the picture in De Cive, Leviathan, and Behemoth of the civil state as creating new ways of honoring God by legal fiat (DCi 15.16, L 31.37–38: 570, B 167). In fact, the definition in De Homine might be read as a summary recension of the prescriptive account of religion that runs through Hobbes’s works, both in its requirement that we acknowledge a great cause behind nature that is a proper object of honor (“faith”), and in its requirement that we show outward signs of that inner assessment (“worship”). For instance, consider the account of piety that Hobbes deploys in Of Libertie and Necessitie (published in 1654, but composed in 1645) when arguing that one can admit the truth of determinism without jeopardizing one’s religious virtue. [P]iety consisteth onely in two things: one, that we honour God in our hearts, which is, that we think as highly of his power as we can (for to honour any thing is nothing else but to think it to be of great power.) The other is, that we signifie that honour and esteem by our words and actions, which is called cultus, or worship of God. He therefore that thinketh that all things proceed from Gods eternal will, and consequently are necessary, does he not think God omnipotent? Does he not esteem of his power as highly as possible? which is to honour God as much as may be in his heart. Again, he that thinketh so, is he not more apt by external acts and words to acknowledge it, than he that thinketh otherwise? Yet is this external acknowledgement the same thing which we call worship. So that this opinion [i.e., determinism, the doctrine of neceessity] fortifies piety in both kinds, external and internal. (OLN 36–37)

As the duplicate anatomy here confirms, ‘piety’ in Of Libertie and Necessitie is just another word for what Hobbes calls ‘religion’ in DH 14.1: the outward behavioral display of an inner attitude of honor toward God—or, in other words, the outward behavioral display of belief in God’s surpassing power. So both in the systematic treatises and here in the middle of engaged dialectic, Hobbes’s account of piety and religion squares with the prescriptive, polytheism-excluding definition of religion presented in De Homine. I therefore regard the De Homine definition as capturing Hobbes’s usual employment of the word, and also as capturing his settled and consistent view of what this recognizable kind of devotional human behavior properly is, which is to say, his view how it ought to operate, and of how it would operate if controlled by reason and purged of any fantastical and superstitious imaginings.¹² Hobbes can adopt this usage consistently with his

¹² Consistent with this, Hobbes might also endorse the further thesis that this is how devotional behavior does generally operate in monotheistic cultures such as seventeenth-century England. Whether that thesis is true or not will depend the degree to which popular devotional practice in

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offering a different definition of the word elsewhere for its employment in different contexts, as he does in L 6.36: 86 where we get the non-prescriptive, polytheismaccommodating definition—a fear-emphasizing, natural-historical definition that identifies its object, a complex mental state or behavior, by way of its causal origins in our anxious concern for the future coupled with our (possibly fantastical, but in any case publicly permitted) imaginings of invisible power. Among their various differences, the definition in Leviathan frames its object—which we might call ‘religionFEAR’—as a certain subspecies of fear, whereas fear makes no appearance in the definition of what we might call ‘religionCOSMOLOGICALWORSHIP’ in De Homine.¹³ At the same time, the definition in De Homine is itself perfectly consistent with worshippers literally fearing the inconceivable great cause (if such fear is indeed possible), as also with their talking and acting as if they fear God in order to show him honor. In summary: Hobbes offers two definitions of the word ‘religion.’ These definitions are not co-extensive, but there is no genuine inconsistency between the two of them, for each is employed in a different context, and each has a different kind of human mental state or behavior as its object. ‘Religion,’ in other words, is said in two ways. The account of Hobbes’s philosophy that I have advanced in this book accommodates and explains each definition in its respective context. Of the two definitions, the one in De Homine, with its prescriptive insistence on a form of worship expressing honor toward the one great cosmological divinity, best encapsulates Hobbes’s usual theoretical approach to religious topics.

such cultures is actually (rather than merely nominally) focused on the great cause behind nature, and whether it is actually expressive of inward honor toward this surpassingly powerful being. In Hobbes’s time, there was of course a critique of the established system of devotional practices from a more radically reformed perspective, expressing the concern that those practices were not in fact adequately God-centered, but sunk in an idolatry of surplice, rood screen, and Laudian mummery. Likewise, traditional forms of provincial folk practice were criticized by both Anglican and more radically reformed thinkers as being mired in a quasi-Romish polytheism of cult saints and feast days, and in animistic superstitions of sacred place. (For further discussion of the question of whether seventeenthcentury Christian practice satisfies Hobbes’s prescriptive model of religion, see Chapter 9, Section 9.6.) ¹³ It is true that Hobbes goes on in the latter part of DH 14.1 to assert that one who has “faith” in the defined sense cannot fail to try to “obey [God] in all things” and to direct thanks and supplications toward him, in which behavior is “contained the love and fear wherewith we are commanded to love God” (emphasis added). So ‘faith’ entails ‘fear.’ However, as that ‘containment’ relationship already suggests, and as the next paragraph DH 14.2 makes explicit, Hobbes is not talking about ‘love’ or ‘fear’ in the usual sense of these words, but rather simply about a disposition to obey God’s commands, which is to say, a disposition to obey the laws of nature. (See also DH 14.5, and for discussion Chapter 5, Section 5.6.)

9 Inward and Outward Atheism In the previous chapter I considered Hobbes’s definitions of religion. I now turn to his philosophical treatment of atheism and irreligion, which presents a kind of reciprocal inverse image of the definition of religion presented in De Homine (1658). That is true, notice, even though his more detailed discussions of atheism and irreligion appear in a range of different works—mainly in De Cive (1642), The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656), and in the appendix added to the Latin Leviathan (1668): a fact that provides further confirmation, if any were needed, of the status of the definition in De Homine as a representation in miniature of Hobbes’s wider philosophy of religion. Recall the prescriptive, polytheism-excluding definition of religion in De Homine, which was examined in some detail in the previous chapter: Religion is the external worship of men who sincerely honour God. Moreover, they sincerely honour God who believe not only that He exists, but also that He is the omnipotent and omniscient creator and ruler of all things . . . Therefore religion as such (that is, natural) consists of two parts; whereof one is faith (or the belief that God exists and that He governs all things), the other is worship. (DH 14.1)

Here Hobbes defines religion as an outward performance reflecting an attitude of inward honor toward God. As we have seen, this attitude of inward honor just is the belief that there exists a great cause of overwhelming, awe-inspiring power.¹ That inward attitude of honor, or inner belief, drives the desire to display our veneration through outward signs, including the use of honorific language (‘omnipotent,’ ‘omniscient,’ ‘ruler,’ and so on) and reverence-signifying ceremonies. Hobbes therefore regards “religion as such” as composed “of two parts”: “faith,” the inward attitude or belief, and “worship,” the outward display. A failure to live in accordance with the essential minimal requirements of religion must therefore consist either in an absence of faith or in an absence of worship. Sure enough, Hobbes recognizes and distinguishes each of these basic forms of irreligion.

¹ See Chapter 5, Section 5.5 and Chapter 8, Section 8.3.

Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion. Thomas Holden, Oxford University Press. © Thomas Holden 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871329.003.0009

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In what follows, I survey these two varieties of irreligion and Hobbes’s understanding of their relationship. Although Hobbes regards a lack of faith—or inward atheism, as I shall call it—as a failure of right reason, in other respects he is (perhaps surprisingly) non-judgmental about it, and advances arguments that place this sort of inward unbelief beyond the reach of moral assessment, natural law, divine positive law, and regulation by the civil state. The failure to worship— or outward atheism, as I shall call it—is a different matter and is properly persecuted by the civil sovereign. In the final section of the chapter, I survey the evidence regarding Hobbes’s view of how common inward atheism actually is and his place in the seventeenth-century debate over the putative common consent of humanity in the existence of God.

9.1 Inward Atheism Hobbes’s use of the word ‘atheism’ and its cognates is closer to our own than that of many of his early modern contemporaries. Nevertheless, some caution is called for. Hobbes resists the widespread sixteenth- and seventeenth-century employment of ‘atheism’ as a term of abuse applied, often quite indiscriminately, to opinions that the speaker regards as theologically improper—or, by extension, to opinions that the speaker regards as entailing a theologically improper position (‘atheism by consequence’), or even to a lifestyle or behavior that might be taken to reveal some theologically problematic belief or attitude (‘practical atheism’).² Charges of ‘atheism’ went back and forth in many theological disputes regardless of whether any party plausibly doubted God’s existence, with the expression of opprobrium appearing in exchanges between Catholic and Protestant, Arminian and Calvinist, and Laudian, Presbyterian, and Independent. Milton’s rebel angels do not seem to deny God’s existence, but they are all the same an “Atheist crew.”³ In this vituperative usage, as Bacon puts it, “all that Impugne a received Religion, or Superstition, are by the adverse Part, branded with the Name of Atheists.”⁴ Hobbes not only avoids this abusive employment, but explicitly rejects the more broadbrush applications of the term as uncharitable—for “this Atheism by consequence ² A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 19–25, Thomas Holden, Spectres of False Divinity: Hume’s Moral Atheism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9–11, D. C. Allen, Doubt’s Boundless Sea: Skepticism and Faith in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964), 1, David Wootton, Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 4–5, Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, tr. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1982), 131–145. ³ John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: New American Library, 1968), 184 (book 6 line 370). ⁴ Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Moral, ed., Michael Kiernan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 52–53.

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is a very easie thing to be fallen into, even by the most Godly men of the Church” (AB 130–131; compare also HE 449–454: 352–353). In Hobbes’s own primary employment, the term ‘atheism’ signifies something only about one’s convictions regarding the existence of God (i.e., the existence of a surpassingly powerful great cause behind nature), not about one’s convictions regarding any further theological or moral question, or about the logical consequences, intended or unintended, of one’s other opinions for the existence of God. So far this is more in line with our own twenty-first century usage. But in Hobbes’s usual employment, ‘atheism’ signifies simply the absence of faith—i.e., a failure to believe in the existence of God—which gives Hobbes’s usage a somewhat wider scope than it has in our own modern employment (DCi 15.2, L 31.2: 554, L App 2.36: 1204, L App 2.38: 1206, AB 14–15, 131). Hobbes draws no practical or taxonomic distinction here between the positive denial that there is a great cause and the mere absence of affirmative belief, but rather categorizes any failure to accept God’s existence under the label of ‘atheism’—including those that reflect a failure to consider the question in the first place, and those that reflect the sort of conscious suspension of belief that, following T. H. Huxley’s terminological innovation, we might now describe as a form of ‘agnosticism.’ Inward atheism (i.e., a lack of faith, a failure to believe in God’s existence) might of course also show itself in outward atheism (i.e., a failure to show outward signs of that belief in words and actions, a failure to worship). Sometimes Hobbes’s employment of ‘atheism’ conveys a suggestion of both the internal and the external forms of irreligion bundled together, or even focuses simply on the outward behavioral display (though it is possible that in such moments Hobbes is taking the inward dimension to be understood) (DCi 15.19). But most of the time inward atheism, the lack of belief, provides the controlling meaning for Hobbes’s usage of the term.

9.2 Three Arguments for the Protected Status of Inward Atheism Hobbes regards inward atheism as a failure of right reasoning (DCi 14.19 note), and consistently treats it with disdain and hostility. Nevertheless, like any private opinion, it enjoys a certain protected status in his moral and political system. Consistent with his treatment of other private beliefs, it cannot be regarded as a willful error. Nor does it violate any laws of nature. Nor does it fall under the jurisdiction of the civil law. Nor could the state persecute it, even if it wanted to. First of all, there is (what we might call) the argument from involuntariness. For Hobbes, beliefs in general are not under voluntary control. They are not subject to the will in any direct way; nor, as a result, are they responsive to sanctions, threats, or commands. It follows that none of our beliefs can fall under the jurisdiction of

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either the natural or the civil law, and hence that none of them can be unjust. As we saw in Chapter 7, “the inward thought, and beleef of men, are not voluntary, nor the effect of the laws, and consequently fall not under obligation” (L 40.2: 738; see also L 26.42: 444, L 42.11: 784 EL 35.2). And we can no more owe a duty to God to believe in the existence of something than we can owe it to human law: our “beliefe and interiour cogitations, are not subject to the commands, but only to the operations of God”—i.e., subject only to God’s causal activity, as are all events in the great deterministic system of nature (L 26.41: 444; and for discussion, see Chapter 7, Section 7.4). Hobbes also presents a further argument for the more specific thesis that inward atheism does not violate natural law in particular. Call this the argument from the difficulty of proving God’s existence. In a footnote added to the second edition of De Cive (published in 1647), he considers the charge that since the laws of nature are simply the dictates of reason on practical matters, and since, by Hobbes’s own admission, God’s existence can be shown by natural human reason, it follows that atheists, in failing to follow reason, “sin against the law of nature, and therefore are guilty of . . . injustice” (DCi 14.19 note). Hobbes replies by distinguishing between easy and obvious theorems of reason that are discoverable, at least in their summary form, by any ordinary person (DCi 3.26, L 15.35: 240), as against theorems that disclose themselves only with persistent and precise application by more able thinkers. The canonical laws of nature governing moral conduct belong in the former category, the proof of God’s existence through natural human reason in the latter.⁵ Although the natural principles of justice and injustice are disclosed by a process of reasoning, it is important to Hobbes that they be (near enough) universally accessible, obvious, and open to all who will reflect. But the knowledge that there is a cause of surpassing power behind the great frame of nature is available only to those who are able to reflect on the great regress of causes in a sustained and sufficiently disinterested way, and, in particular, can avoid being distracted by self-interested hopes and fears, which typically cause us to stop short with more proximate, anthropomorphically imagined powers, polytheistic divinities and animistic forces that we might hope to influence in our favor. This is one reason why, for Hobbes, most theists do not know that God exists on the basis of rational proof, but only believe it in the light of human testimony.⁶ ⁵ “As for my contention that God’s existence can be known by natural human reason, this must not be taken as if I thought that all men may know it—unless one thinks it follows that because Archimedes discovered by natural reason the proportion of a sphere to a cylinder, any of vulgar could have done the same” (DCi 14.9, translation slightly adapted from Tuck and Silverthorne). ⁶ “[I]t is evident, that the ordinary cause of beleeving that the Scriptures are the Word of God, is the same with the cause of beleeving of all other Articles of our Faith [TH: which presumably includes the existence of God, insofar as that is contained in the first of the 1571 thirty-nine articles], namely, Hearing of those that are by the Law allowed and appointed to Teach us, as our Parents in their Houses, and our Pastors in the Churches” (L 43.8: 93).

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Hobbes also has an argument for the more narrowly specific thesis that inward atheism is beyond the jurisdiction of the civil law, which we might call the argument from imperceptibility. Here the decisive premise is that inward atheism is a private mental state with no necessary connection to public speech and action. Like any other private belief, it is hidden from the gaze of the civil magistrate, and therefore lies beyond the reach of human law. Hobbes applies the point explicitly to beliefs about religious matters, arguing that while all subjects must conform in external religious practice with the mandates of the civil law on pain of breach of the civil covenant, a believer with unorthodox convictions may nevertheless hold to whatever system of thought he likes in private. In “his actions . . . [and] discourse with other men” he should not observe any religious teaching “contrary to the Laws already established.” However, “he may without blame, beleeve his private Teachers, and wish he had the liberty to practise their advice; and that it were publiquely received for Law” (L 42.43: 822). Hobbes might have supported this assertion by appealing again the argument from involuntariness. But instead we get the new argument appealing to imperceptibility: internall Faith is in its own nature invisible, and consequently exempted from all humane jurisdiction; whereas the words, and actions that proceed from it, as breaches of our Civill obedience, are injustice both before God and Man. (L 42.43: 822)⁷

The argument would plainly apply to inward atheism as much as any other private religious conviction: any privately held belief is “exempted from all human jurisdiction” on account of its inscrutability, even while outward behavior and worship is subject to control by the civil state. Although the texts just quoted are drawn from Hobbes’s consideration of the proper treatment of nonconformist religous belief in the 1651 Leviathan, he explicitly extends the point to inward atheism in the appendices of the 1668 Latin edition.⁸ And the protection of private belief is also reaffirmed in De Corpore, with its injunction that we must not confuse “the rules of religion, that is, the rules of honouring God, which we have from the laws, [with] the rules of philosophy, that is, the opinions of

⁷ Similarly, “Beleef, and Unbeleef never follow mens Commands, for they cannot know whether we believe or not, and if they knew, they could not change us” (L 42.11 Latin variation: 784–785). ⁸ “To err, to be deceived, or to have a wrong opinion is not a crime in itself; nor can an error become a crime so long as it is confined to a person’s heart. For who is the informer who will denounce him, and who is the witness on whose testimony will he be convicted?” (L Appendix 2.32: 1202, ‘B’ speaking). “[N]othing can be the object of an accusation other than something said or something done. But what deeds will serve as evidence of atheism? For what deed have you heard of so wicked or impious that a similar deed has not been committed at some time by people who not only are not regarded as atheists, but are even professed Christians? So no one can be judged an atheist on the basis of his deeds. Nor in any way can he stand accused on the basis of something he has said, whether in speech or in writing, unless he has directly denied that God exists” (L Appendix 2.36: 1204, ‘B’ speaking).

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private men” (DCo epistle dedicatory). The outward display of worship (or the “honouring [of] God”) is inescapably public, and the state therefore properly controls this aspect of religion. But the dimension of inward faith, or the lack thereof, is not a matter for the civil law.⁹

9.3 The Argument from Ignorance of the Lawgiver In De Cive, Hobbes adds a further argument to the effect that atheism—meaning inward atheism, or so I shall argue—cannot be a violation of God’s laws, given that it involves a failure to admit the existence of the putative lawgiver in the first place. Call this the argument from ignorance of the lawgiver. I devote a little more attention to this argument, which has received little commentary in the literature, but which amounts to Hobbes’s lengthiest and most explicit consideration of the normative character of inward atheism (at least once we include an explanatory footnote added in the second edition) and thereby, through inversion, of the normative character of faith. In fact, both the original statement of the argument in the first edition of De Cive (1642) and the explanatory footnote added in the second edition (1647) present various puzzles for the interpreter, and Hobbes’s reasoning here could stand some clarification. The original passage in the 1642 edition runs as follows: Now if in fact what is not contrary to any law is not a sin [peccatum], and if there is no law which is not a command of the holder of sovereignty, and if no one holds sovereign power which has not been conferred upon him by our consent, how can one be said to have committed a sin by asserting that God does not exist or that he does not govern the world, or by vomiting some other blasphemy over him? For [the atheist] will say that he has never submitted his will to God’s will because he has been of the opinion that God does not exist. And though his belief was wrong, and hence would also be a fault, it would have to be numbered among the sins of imprudence or ignorance, which cannot rightly be punished. This defence, it seems, will have to be admitted to the extent that a sin [peccatum] of this kind, though monstrous and damnable, should still be classed among the sins of imprudence [ad peccata imprudentiæ]. (DCi 14.19)

⁹ For discussion of Hobbes’s defense of the protected status of a private belief and the inner life, see Alan Ryan’s influential essay “Hobbes, Toleration and the Inner Life,” in The Nature of Political Theory, ed. David Miller and Larry Siedentop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 197–218). See also Richard E. Flathman, Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, Individuality, and Chastened Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 150–154, Edwin Curley, “Hobbes and the Cause of Religious Toleration,” in Patricia Springborg, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 309–334, Arash Abizadeh, “Publicity, Privacy, and Religious Toleration in Hobbes’s Leviathan,” Modern Intellectual History 10 (2013), 261–291.

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In the footnote appended to this passage in the 1647 edition, Hobbes reports that “[m]any critics have taken me to task” for this refusal to classify atheism as a violation of divine law, with some charging that he did not here show himself “a keen enough adversary” of unbelief (DCi 14.19 note). However, as he points out in the 1647 note, he did go on immediately in the original edition to argue that even if atheism is imprudent and ignorant rather than unjust, nevertheless “to excuse [atheism] on the grounds of imprudence or ignorance is absurd.” Both “God himself [and] kings appointed by God” may still “punish” the atheist in the following way: not as a subject is punished by a king on the ground that he has not kept the laws, but as an enemy is punished by an enemy because he has refused to accept the laws; that is, by right of war, like the giants who battled the gods. (DCi 14.19)

In failing to acknowledge the existence of God, the atheist is like an outsider who never submitted to the sovereign and hence never became a subject of the civil state. Although such an outsider cannot properly be punished for any violation of the civil law, he may be treated as a hostile belligerent. I attend to the punishment of the atheist “by right of war” in a moment, and first consider the argument from ignorance of the lawgiver as presented in DCi 14.19. Hobbes’s reasoning is that if I do not believe that a certain lawgiver exists, I cannot then be blamed for failing to abide by that lawgiver’s commands. My error, at any rate, is one of ignorance, or a certain non-moral practical irrationality (or ‘imprudence,’ as Hobbes puts it). It is not a sin of injustice, or of reneging on any agreement to take orders from that lawgiver, for I made no such agreement in the first place.¹⁰ The argument can be considered an application of Hobbes’s wider view that legal obligation in general requires the subject’s consent or agreement to obey the lawgiver, which in turn requires that the subject understand that the lawgiver exists.¹¹ A couple of preliminary observations are required to understand the intended scope of the argument. First, we should note that Hobbes explicitly distinguishes

¹⁰ Hobbes presents a somewhat similar argument in An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall (1682), maintaining that atheism must be classified as a sin of ignorance rather than a sin of malice, since one cannot commit sins of malice against things that one does not believe exist. “I say Atheism is a sin of ignorance. . . . ’Tis agreed between [Bramhall and Hobbes], that right reason declares, There is a God. Does it not follow, that denying of God is a sin proceeding from misreasoning. If it be not a sin of ignorance, it must be a sin of malice. Can a man malice that which he thinks has no being?” (AB 14). ¹¹ “It is necessary to the essence of the law that two things be known to citizens: first what man or council has sovereign power, i.e., the right of making laws; second what the law itself says. For he who has never come to know to whom he is obligated or what his obligations are cannot obey, and is exactly as if he were not obligated” (DCi 14.11). “Knowledge of the legislator depends on the citizen himself; for without his personal consent and agreement, either explicit or implicit, the right of legislation could not have been conferred on anyone” (DCi 14.12). “Nothing is Law where the Legislator cannot be known” (L 26.16 marginal subheading: 426).

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between two uses of the word ‘sin’ (‘peccatum’) in De Cive: a narrower use implying injustice, moral culpability, and violation of law (DCi 14.17); and a wider use of the word that comprehends “everything done, said, or willed against right reason” and hence “all imprudent action, whether contrary to law, as to wreck someone else’s house, or not contrary to law, as to build one’s own house on sand” (DCi 14.16). The distinction explains the verbal peculiarity of Hobbes’s position that atheism should be classed “among the sins of imprudence,” and yet is not a sin at all in the sense employed at the start of our passage from DCi 14.19, where the question is one of violation of law.¹² “[D]ivine law”—i.e., law that comes from God rather than human sources—“is twofold: natural (or moral) and positive” (DCi 14.4). On the most plausible interpretation, Hobbes intends the argument from ignorance of the lawgiver to show only that atheism does not violate divine positive law—i.e., “that law which God has revealed to us through the prophetic word by which he spoke to men as a man; such are the laws which he gave to the Jews about their constitution and divine worship.” He does not aim in this argument to show that atheism does not violate divine natural law—i.e., “the law which God has revealed to all men through . . . natural reason” (DCi 14.4)—although he does endorse that further thesis for separate reasons.¹³ After all, the current argument turns on the claim that if one does not believe that a certain lawgiver exists, then it is not unjust to neglect that lawgiver’s commands. That reasoning would plausibly apply to the atheist’s situation with respect to God’s positive commands, but not with respect to the laws of nature, which are simply rational maxims of conduct discoverable by anyone who will reflect on his or her strategic interests of security and selfpreservation in this world: “natural precepts that are derived from just one dictate of reason, that presses on us our own preservation and security” (DCi 3.25, 3.26). Moreover, this restricted interpretation squares with Hobbes’s position that atheists may indeed live in accordance with the law of nature, as in Leviathan, where we get the clarifying statement that “Unbelief is not a breach of any of [God’s] Lawes; but a rejection of them all, except the Laws Naturall.” Or similarly, in a different completion of that same sentence in the 1668 Latin edition, “unbelief is not a breach of the divine positive laws [Legum Divinarum Positivarum], but a denial of them” (L 26.41: 444–445). Plausibly Hobbes means to establish this same restricted thesis in the argument from ignorance of the lawgiver as presented in DCi 14.19: the thesis that atheism does not involve an (unjust) failure to keep to God’s positive laws, but rather amounts to an (ignorant or imprudent) rejection of those positive laws in their entirety. ¹² In the later Leviathan, ‘sins’ are all injustices and contrary to some law, whether natural or civil (L 27.1: 452, and for discussion see Chapter 6, Section 6.3). ¹³ As we saw with the argument from involuntariness and the argument from the difficulty of proving God’s existence, and as Hobbes explicitly clarifies in the second edition footnote (DCi 14.19 note).

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Does this argument aim at showing only that an atheist’s outward behavior— for instance, in neglecting the Sabbath, or failing to pray toward Mecca—cannot violate divine positive law? Or is it addressed rather to inward atheism, the absence of faith, which might after all be hidden behind an outward acting along with the established forms? When introducing the argument from ignorance of the lawgiver, Hobbes asks us what kind of sin is involved in “asserting that God does not exist.” So here the question is whether we should understand this irreligious “asserting” (“affirmaverit”) as an external speech act, or merely an internal thought in the mind. Most likely, Hobbes is thinking (at least in the first instance) of internal belief, in which case the argument from ignorance of the lawgiver does apply to inward atheism, even when it remains a private state of mind disconnected from outward behavior. First, in the footnote appended to DCi 14.19, Hobbes explicitly identifies the atheist of this argument with “the fool” of Psalm 14 who “hath said in his heart there is no God.” That sounds like inward atheism, whether or not that utterance “in the heart” also happens to show itself in outward behavior.¹⁴ Moreover, the crucial premise driving the argument is the claim that the atheist “has been of the opinion that God does not exist” (emphasis added), which is itself a matter of internal belief and private faith (or lack of faith), not external speech and public worship. Of course, this is not to deny that the conclusion that inward atheism does not violate divine positive law might be invoked in order to excuse outward actions that are shaped by that inward unbelief. Having no belief that God exists, the atheist might also be excused for neglecting God’s positive laws regarding the Sabbath or the appropriate direction in which to pray. My hypothesis is therefore that Hobbes intends the argument from ignorance of the lawgiver to establish that inward atheism, while an error of ignorance or imprudence, does not violate divine positive law. But that result may also excuse the atheist’s neglect of God’s positive commands in external behavior. The unbelief itself and the neglect of more specific commands revealed by prophets and scripture involves no injustice from the point of view of God’s positive law: not believing in the source, and doubting the reliability of the messenger, the atheist commits no injustice in ignoring the message. Stepping back for a moment, we should register two peculiarities about the argument from ignorance of the lawgiver, at least as I have reconstructed it here. Each of these observations may help to explain why Hobbes did not bother to reproduce the argument in later works, even while continuing to endorse its crucial premise that legal obligation is impossible without knowledge of the lawgiver (L 26.16: 426). First, while the argument purports to show that the atheist ¹⁴ Even if Hobbes’s own variation of “[t]he Foole” in the later Leviathan—a figure who denies the existence of justice rather than of God—is characterized both as uttering a falsehood “in his heart,” and “sometimes also with his tongue” (L 15.4: 222).

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may be excused for neglecting God’s positive law, it does not of course suggest that the atheist has an excuse for neglecting the civil law of the earthly sovereign. But the civil law may well require the atheist to act along with the divine positive laws in any case—to respect the Sabbath, pray to Mecca, or whatever it might be. Here we should recall that Hobbes holds that humans at least typically hear about God’s positive laws (or supposed positive laws) only from other humans (L 26.40: 444, 43.8: 93, DH 14.3). And whether or not we believe in these testimonial reports of revealed law, we must (as a matter of natural and civil law) treat the civil state’s pronouncements about the divine positive laws as authoritative, at least when it comes to our outward speech and action if not our private inner beliefs (L 26.41: 444, 32.5: 578, 40.2: 738, DH 14.4, AW 26.5). So the atheist may have no excuse to ignore the Sabbath after all, at least not it is required by a civil law ratifying the divine. This point may render Hobbes’s argument from ignorance of the lawgiver somewhat otiose in many real world cases, even if it is technically true that the atheist commits no sin of injustice with regard to divine positive law itself. Second, we should emphasize that Hobbes’s entire discussion of the ignorance of the lawgiver argument is predicated on the assumption that God issues positive commands in the first place, which is most likely something that Hobbes is granting merely as part of his own as-if acting along with conventional pieties. According to the interpretation that I have advanced in this book, Hobbes holds that we have no rational basis for thinking of God as literally a lawgiver. Humans in fact know nothing at all about the attributes and actions of this inconceivable and incomprehensible being besides the bare fact that it relates to the world as a cause to an effect and has the overwhelming power required to have produced such a creation. In particular, we have no evidence to support such a hopelessly anthropomorphizing picture of the deity, which would require that God has a will, desires, knowledge, an interest in the behavior of human beings, and so forth. Moreover, given Hobbes’s epistemology of human testimony, reports of revelations of divine law are difficult to properly credit, and ought not to be believed without the performance of current miracles. (See Chapter 7, Section 7.2.) At the same time, natural human reason requires us to talk of the great cause as if it were a lawgiver in order to show that we revere and honor this mysterious but awesomely powerful being, as when we give it honorific titles such as “Divine Soveraign,” “Lord,” “Father,” and “supreme King of all the world and all the kings of the world” (L 31.7: 560, DCi 15.14, 15.19). Similar requirements of worship and honor require us to play along with whatever specific accounts of the (supposed) divine positive laws are established in the local religious culture or introduced in the civil law. (See Chapter 7, Section 7.5.) As always, there is an honor-expressing performativity behind Hobbes’s talk about God’s attributes and actions, and that includes whatever he might have to say about God’s positive commandments. We have seen that inward atheism is not unjust under natural or civil law. Nor (permitting my reading of the argument from ignorance of the lawgiver) can it be

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in violation of divine positive law. That still leaves Hobbes’s declaration that the atheist may nevertheless be treated as “an enemy” and “punished [punitur] directly by God or by kings appointed by God . . . by right of war” (DCi 14.19). I do not doubt that this is Hobbes’s authentic view. However, as he surely knows, it says nothing about the atheist that could not equally be said of any other person. Here I suspect that Hobbes is playing up the tough-sounding talk in order to mollify any censorious readers who might be unsettled by his view that inward atheism involves no injustice or moral culpability. It sugars the pill for his conservative readership perhaps, reminding us that even if this sort of atheist is not acting unjustly, he may still be treated harshly. But it says less about the particular exposure of the inward atheist than it might at first seem. Consider the issue from the perspective of the civil sovereign (or “kings appointed by God”). The civil sovereign may in fact harm or kill any human whatsoever “by right of war”—whether that human is a civil subject or an outsider, an inward atheist or a faithful believer. That is because the sovereign remains in the state of nature with respect to all humans, its own subjects included, as there is no higher power in nature that can force it to stand by contractual agreements that might qualify its natural right to all things (EL 20.13, L 18.4: 266–268). It follows that the sovereign retains its full right of nature and hence the right of war, the ability to inflict harm without injustice, against both subjects and outsiders alike. So, yes, the inward atheist may be arbitrarily harmed or killed by the sovereign simply as a consequence of the right of nature that accompanies irresistible power. But in this he is just like other subjects, living under a sovereign that may of course do whatever it likes without injustice. There is no special reason here why the atheist is prone to punishment.¹⁵ And what is said here of the civil sovereign goes equally for God himself, as we see when Hobbes addresses the question “by what right God dispenses good and bad to men” (DCi 15.6, L 31.6: 558–560). Hobbes’s answer is simply that God’s “right of afflicting” is a consequence of his overwhelming power: just as a human possessed of irresistible power would retain his entire right of nature to act at his own arbitrary discretion, so it is with the deity (L 31.5: 558). So here again, while the atheist may indeed be treated as an enemy and “punished directly by God” in accordance with “the right of war,” the same goes for all of us. That is why I regard Hobbes’s martial talk as more of a rhetorical gesture than a substantive concession to atheist-hunters. Certainly, the civil sovereign has the right to make war on inward atheists if it wishes. (Though the sovereign may find ¹⁵ Further, while the state has the right to treat atheists however it wants without any injustice, there is also the question of what it is wise or equitable for the state to do. In the 1668 Latin Leviathan, Hobbes suggests that the proper sentence would stop at banishment. “[A] man who denies that God exists, or plainly professes to doubt whether he exists or not, can be punished even if the method of punishment has not been specified by law—but punished by exile, as is also in accordance with natural equity. . . . [The atheist] should be banished from the commonwealth, not as a rebel, but as a public nuisance. . . . I do not see why he should be killed, when he might at some time be converted for his impiety” (L App 2.38: 1206).

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that more easily said than done: detecting private belief is no easier on the battlefield than it is in the courtroom.) But this is a fact about the civil state’s untrammeled right of nature, not a fact about the inward atheist’s distinctive exposure to persecution. And the same holds for God, if it indeed makes any sense to speculate in literal-minded terms about a God that is interested in human affairs, shows an interest in persecuting atheists, or who distributes any punishment besides those harms that flow from the natural system of causes (L 31.40: 572).¹⁶

9.4 Outward Atheism So much for inward atheism, the absence of faith. What about outward atheism, the failure to show external signs of belief that there is a surpassingly powerful great cause behind nature or, in other words, the failure to show external signs of an inward attitude of honor toward God?¹⁷ This absence of worship presents a second form of irreligion, one that concerns words and actions (or the absence of words and actions), and hence is both voluntary and publicly discernible. It therefore falls under the jurisdiction of the civil law, and a civil state that criminalizes it may hope to punish it with some degree of success. Hobbes holds that the civil state ought rationally to require some form of public religious worship from its subjects. “[S]eeing a Common-wealth is but one Person”—i.e., one artificial person, the multitude being united in virtue of their collective representation by the sovereign¹⁸—“it ought also to exhibite to God but one Worship; which then it doth, when it commandeth it to be exhibited by Private men, Publiquely.” This collective practice may be called “Publique Worship; the property whereof, is to be Uniforme” (L 31.37: 570; see also L 26.41: 444–448, DCi 15.15, DH 14.9). Some coordination of ritual, prayer, and liturgy properly demonstrates the reverence and awe that a united civil state and its people feel toward God. The particular forms of worship mandated do not matter so much, as any arbitrary practice may become honorific through convention so long as it does not conflict with the universally recognizable natural signs of honor. Perhaps “[t]he worship of some people will often be laughed at by ¹⁶ I grant that there is a distinction between subjects of a sovereign and enemies who have never submitted to that sovereign in the first place, and that Hobbes is appealing to this common sense notion in the final sentence of DCi 14.9: “the atheist is punished . . . by right of war, like the giants who battled the gods. For men are enemies to each other when they are not subject one to the other or to any common ruler.” But this distinction makes no difference to our normative question. Given its untrammeled right of nature, any sovereign may harm and kill subjects and enemies alike without injustice, as indeed the gods may similarly destroy both the giants and their own faithful worshippers. ¹⁷ On the identity of this belief with an inward attitude of honor to God, see Chapter 5, Section 5.5. ¹⁸ See L 16.13: 248, L 17.13: 260, and, for discussion, Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes on Person, Authors, and Representatives,” in Patricia Springborg, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 157–180.

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others,” but such is human chauvinism in the face of unfamiliar conventions showing honor. Setting aside the practices of the ancient Jewish kingdom, whose form of worship was “directly ordained by God, when He Himself was reigning,” the “ceremonies of other peoples were rational (some indeed more rational than others); but among all it was rational to use ceremonies established by civil law” (DH 14.9). A legal mandate establishing uniform civic worship is therefore appropriate state policy, simply on grounds of piety and the rational mandate that the commonwealth, like any other person, show proper reverence toward the awe-inspiring great cause behind nature.¹⁹ Hobbes also appears to hold that all states will in fact require some form of public worship. “There is no Nation in the world whose Religion is not established, and receius not its Authority from the Laws of that Nation,” he writes in Behemoth (B 167). And in Leviathan: “religion and the acknowledgement of divine power are commanded by law in every commonwealth” (L App 2.38: 1206). This might seem be an overstatement, at least if we regard the pagan commonwealths of the ancient world as failing to mandate religion in Hobbes’s prescriptive, non-polytheistic sense, rather than simply the worship of whatever provincial and sub-cosmological powers supposedly superintend the city, the seas, the harvest, or whatever it might be. However, Hobbes’s claim is at least a reasonable generalization about the commonwealths of Christendom and Islam in his own day. In any case, some such civil law prohibition on outward atheism is taken for granted throughout his system. So Hobbes holds that the civil state should and will dictate the particular devotional practices to be adopted in public worship. It will determine “the ceremonies and worship of God” through “civil sacred laws”, specifying, among the rest, “what beliefs about the deity are to be publicly taught; and with what words and rituals prayers are to be offered” (DCi 14.5; see also L 31.38–39: 570–572, DH 14.9). Obedience to these state-mandated outward forms is properly required of all subjects as a matter of our duty under the civil law, and outward atheism will be in straightforward violation of the civil sacred laws in the kind of culturally monotheistic, establishmentarian commonwealths that Hobbes envisages.²⁰

¹⁹ At the same time, a well-crafted religious establishment may also have practical advantages, helping to unify the people and tamp down on sectarian division among subjects of the civil state. For discussion see S. A. Lloyd, Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992) and Jeffrey R. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), chapter 1. ²⁰ Aside from being a duty under the civil law, compliance with the legally mandated forms of worship will also satisfy our individual rational duty to exhibit reverence before God in a publicly intelligible way, displaying our piety in ways that are understood in the local culture as giving God honor (DCi 15.17, DH 14.9; and for discussion see Chapter 7, Section 7.5).

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Is outward atheism also a violation of the laws of nature? The summarizing final passage of chapter 15 of De Cive (“On the Kingdom of God by nature”) might seem to suggest as much. The conclusion of all this is that, under the Reign of God by natural reason alone, subjects commit sin in the following ways: first, if they violate the natural laws . . . ; secondly if they violate the laws or commands of the commonwealth in matters pertaining to justice, thirdly, if they do not worship God κατά τά νόμιμα [i.e., according to the laws or conventions]; fourthly, if they do not confess among men by word and action that there is one God, most Good, most Great, most Blessed, supreme King of all the world and of all the Kings of the world, that is, if they do not worship God. This fourth offense in the natural Kingdom of God is . . . the crime of lèse-majesté against God. For it is a denial of God’s power, or Atheism. (DCi 15.19, first emphasis added)

Simply considering our responsibilities as disclosed by natural human reason and independently of any putative revelation or divine positive law (i.e., simply “under the Reign of God by natural reason alone”), Hobbes states that we would “sin” if we failed to “confess among men by word and action” our belief that there is a God deserving of all these great titles. This is plainly a condemnation of outward atheism, the failure to worship God in publicly observable ways and to show external signs of inner faith. And since Hobbes characterizes this behavior as a sin from the standpoint of “natural reason alone,” and damns it in strong terms as “the crime of lèse-majesté against God,” there is some temptation to read him here as presenting it as a moral infraction by the standards of natural reason, which is to say a violation of natural law. I think that this would be an overinterpretation. Hobbes regards outward atheism as lamentable, unreasonable, and boorish, but he does not regard it as violating any law of nature. First, we should recall that in De Cive a ‘sin’ (‘peccatum’) is not always a violation of natural, civil, or divine law. It may simply be a non-moral error, a failure of right reason regarding some question that is not subject to any law, as when one foolishly “build[s] one’s own house on sand” (DCi 14.16). The failure to publicly confess God’s existence “among men by word and action” may simply be a ‘sin’ in that weaker, non-moral sense—insensate and foolish, perhaps, but not a morally culpable offense under natural law. Second, we should recall that only a few pages previously in De Cive, Hobbes considered and explicitly rejected the thesis that inward atheism is a violation of the laws of nature (DCi 14.19 note), criticizing that position with his argument from the difficulty of proving God’s existence. But if inward atheism, the absence of faith, is no violation of the laws of nature, then it is difficult to see how outward atheism, the failure to show signs of inward faith, could be either. Of course, the civil law may require us to act along with some mandated outward worship, and subjects are obligated by

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natural law to keep to the civil law (hence the third of the sins Hobbes enumerates “under the Reign of God by natural reason”: the failure to “worship God κατά τά νόμιμα” [i.e., according to the laws or conventions]). But absent any such civil law, or in the state of nature, I do not see that someone who is not required to believe in God could be required to avow that he does. Third, in each of Hobbes’s systematic accounts of the content of the laws of nature, there is no mention of any requirement that we worship God, or indeed any mention of God at all (EL chapters 16 and 17, DCi chapters 2 and 3, L chapters 14 and 15). And at least one passage explicitly confirms that “Unbelief” need not involve the rejection of any of the “the Laws Naturall” (L 26.41: 444; quoted more fully in Section 9.3 above). Indeed, even the summarizing passage DCi 15.19 itself distinguishes the ‘sin’ involved in “violat[ing] the natural laws” (which is registered as the first kind of sin) from the ‘sin’ involved in failing to worship God (the fourth kind). So however foolish, irrational, or contemptible it might be, outward atheism does not violate any moral duty under the laws of nature, and “the fourth offense in the natural Kingdom of God” is better seen as a non-moral error, perhaps one presented by Hobbes in rhetorically exaggerated terms.²¹

9.5 Inward Atheism without Outward, Outward without Inward Inward atheism is clearly possible without outward atheism: one may lack internal faith, yet still go through the performative motions of worship. That is indeed the non-believer’s civil duty in any commonwealth that commands some form of public worship, and hence also her duty under the natural law that enjoins all subjects to stand by our contractual agreement to obey the civil law. Such external acting along does not of course satisfy Hobbes’s prescriptive definition of religion, for on that definition “Religion is the external worship of men who sincerely honour God” (DH 14.1, emphasis added). But it is all the state can ask from the atheist, whose private unbelief is after all non-voluntary and in any case not directly detectible. ²¹ Hobbes does also call outward atheism a “crime of lèse-majesté” in DCi 15.19. However, as he explains in some detail in the preceding chapter, “the crime of lèse-majesté” precisely is not a failure to abide by some particular law that a sovereign might issue, but rather a rejection the sovereign’s authority to make law altogether (DCi 14.20–22)—the kind of behavior that, as we have seen, makes the atheist “an enemy . . . like the giants who battled the gods” rather than a lawbreaker guilty of injustice (DCi 14.19). Moreover, Hobbes’s talk of a “crime of lèse-majesté” here in DCi 15.19 seems out of place in any case, since (by his own account) that particular crime involves not merely the rejection of a sovereign’s authority, but the reneging on a previous pact affirming one’s obedience (DCi 14.20). But neither inward nor outward atheism need involve any such betrayal of a previous pact. So I find Hobbes’s talk of a crime of lèse-majesté here mysterious, unless it is simply a hyperbolic metaphor directing a majestic form of abuse toward the outward atheist (while also perhaps showing the great cause appropriate honor).

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Is it possible to have outward atheism without inward atheism: the failure to worship even when one has faith? Pious smoke without inner fire is one thing; but can there be fire without smoke? The passage in De Homine in which Hobbes sets out his prescriptive definition of religion (DH 14.1) might suggest skepticism about this possibility. If one believes that a surpassingly powerful great cause exists (which is all one with having an inward attitude of honor toward that great cause), then why wouldn’t one publicize that belief or inward honor in outward worship? For he who believes [that “God exists and that He governs all things”] cannot not endeavour to obey Him in all things; neither can he not endeavour to give thanks in prosperity nor to utter supplications in adversity. (DH 14.1)

Here faith seems to necessitate the outward behavioral acknowledgment of that faith: one who believes in God’s existence “cannot not endeavour” to give these signs of belief through external words and actions. But perhaps Hobbes intends this as a rational necessity rather than a psychological necessity, as a fact about what one must do if one is fully rational, not a fact about a universal, psychologically unavoidable human compulsion. There is after all a difference between the state of inward faith and the condition of outward worship, and usually Hobbes suggests that it is reasoning (or the recognition of a rational “duty”) that gets us from the former to the latter (L 31.13: 564; compare also OLN 36–37). And whatever that reasoning process involves—whether it requires the application of a general maxim of self-interested rational prudence requiring us to publicly flatter the powerful, or (as I have argued instead²²) an understanding of the rationally appropriate expression of a disinterested, quasi-aesthetic reverence before a being of such transcendent cosmological power—we do sometimes fail to reason rightly. Hobbes makes this point when replying to Bramhall in The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance. Bramhall had objected to Hobbes’s definition of “inward piety” (i.e., faith) as nothing more than belief in God’s existence and power. For Bramhall, this was unacceptable as it makes inward piety “consist meerly in the estimation of the judgment,” leaving no room for the exercise of the will. If Hobbes’s account were granted, “what hinders but that the Devills should have as much inward Piety as the best Christians, for they esteem Gods power to be infinite, and tremble?”²³ Hobbes prevaricates a little when responding in The Questions, stressing that he does not allow that “the Devils” (or even “the Devil” himself) fully recognize God’s power, or can have “as much inward Piety as a Christian” (OLN 160–161, emphasis added). But he does concede Bramhall’s

²² See Chapter 2, Section 2.4. ²³ John Bramhall, A Defence of True Liberty from Ante-cedent and Extrinsecall Necessity (London: 1655), 120–121, criticizing OLN 36 (the relevant part of which was quoted in Chapter 8, Section 8.3).

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main charge: on Hobbes’s own account, the Devil does indeed have faith or inward piety, i.e., a belief in God’s existence and great power (albeit perhaps not “as much” inward piety as a Christian). Still, as Hobbes immediately goes on to point out, Bramhall is downplaying the crucial point that, despite the Devil’s ‘faith’ and his rejection of inward atheism, he remains an outward atheist. I said that two things concurr’d to Piety; one to esteem [God’s] power as highly as is possible. The other, that we signifie that estimation by our words and actions, that is to say, that we worship him; This later part of Piety [Bramhall] leaveth out; and then it is much more easie to conclude as he doth, that the Devils may have inward Piety. (QLNC 159)

The Devil is perhaps an unusual character. But the case confirms that Hobbes at least at allows the possibility that one may have faith and yet refuse worship, i.e., that one may reject inward atheism while embracing outward atheism. Hobbes would regard this combination of commitments as involved in some serious form of irrationality. Perhaps indeed it would only be possible with a truly fiendish pride. But humans can be irrational too—and prideful, distractable, preoccupied, or just plain stubborn in their principles. If Hobbes met John Stuart Mill in the Bardo, it would be interesting to see what he would make of Mill’s own explicit refusal to show obeisance before a transcendently powerful divinity, or to bestow honorific attributes upon it merely on account of its power.²⁴

9.6 How Common Is Inward Atheism? Before we leave the topic of Hobbes’s anatomy of religion and irreligion, it is worth our asking how widespread he imagines inward atheism to be (recalling that inward atheism comprehends not just the positive denial of God’s existence and power, but also agnosticism or any other absence of affirmative belief). This is not a question that Hobbes addresses in any direct way. But there is evidence suggesting that Hobbes might not regard it as such a rare condition. Certainly, there is no sense in Hobbes that affirmative belief in God’s existence has the status of the default or psychologically normal human conviction. Nor does he appear to view inward atheism as the exclusive preserve of intellectual scoffers at religion, or of the kind of highly educated elite that might have reflectively weighed the hypothesis of God’s existence before setting themselves against it. In fact, it is ²⁴ “Whatever power such a being may have over me, there is one thing he shall not do: he shall not compel me to worship him. I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go” (John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and of the principal philosophical questions discussed in his writings (Boston: W. V. Spencer, 1865), 131).

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plausible that, for Hobbes, many ordinary, unphilosophical people may lack the belief that there is a surpassingly powerful great cause behind nature—a God properly so called—if only through a failure to attend to questions about the great regress of causes or to frame such cosmological thoughts in the first place. Conventional recitations of God’s existence in the pews may not amount to much if the congregants’ thoughts do not match their words or fail to rise above the parochial projections of their own passion-distracted imaginations. And even if popular belief does generally track official catechism in Christian and other monotheistic cultures, the pagan cultures of the ancient world provide numerous examples of peoples who appear to lack any popular belief in or notion of a God properly so called. Certainly not many people know that God exists. Although Hobbes holds that “God’s existence can be known by natural human reason,” he clarifies that “this must not be taken as if I thought that all men may know it—unless one thinks it follows that because Archimedes discovered by natural reason the proportion of a sphere to a cylinder, any of vulgar could have done the same” (DCi 14.9).²⁵ God’s existence is not obvious, and it takes effort to discover. Hobbes goes on: I say therefore that although God’s existence can be known by some men by the light of reason, it cannot be known by men who are constantly in pursuit of pleasure, wealth or honour, nor by those who do not have the habit, the ability or the concern to reason correctly, nor finally by fools—which is where the Atheist belongs. (DCi 14.19 note)

Those who are preoccupied with everyday human life and those who either cannot or do not reason philosophically about the great regress of causes cannot know that God exists. Of course, such people might nevertheless believe such a thing if they are told it by their pastor, parent, or schoolteacher.²⁶ But even in a nominally monotheistic, great-cause-worshipping culture, one might wonder what proportion of the population have actually framed the abstract relational conception of a great cause behind nature, rather than just simply repeated formulaic expressions as required. Hobbes’s account of the anthropomorphizing bent of the imagination and the natural seed of religion in human anxiety suggest a kind of caution here. It is one thing to say that one believes in a great cause behind nature, but in practice the imaginations of humans are often bound up with this-worldly concerns rather than the empyreal posits of rational cosmology. Human thoughts about supernatural powers also naturally tend toward a system of more readily conceivable, approachable, and appeasable agents that are implicitly pictured as existing within the creation (L 11.26: 162, 12.6: 166, 12.23: 180). In a Christian age that might

²⁵ Translation slightly adapted from Tuck and Silverthorne.

²⁶ See note 6.

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perhaps include an anthropomorphically-envisaged Jupiter-like patriarch and son enthroned amidst the clouds, intercessors such as St. Mary and St. Peter, or local cult figures such as St. Cuthbert and St. Thomas à Becket—a press of spiritual powers that is not obviously identifiable with Hobbes’s God properly so called, the inconceivable and incomprehensible great cause that one comes to posit as the result of a “profound” philosophical “pursuit of causes” (L 12.5: 166). Certainly, it was common enough among early modern reformed intellectuals to regard popular forms of Catholicism not merely as idolatrous but functionally polytheistic; and even in reformed countries such as England the rustic folk religion beyond the educated world of court, university, and seminary could be viewed with similar suspicion. We should also recall Hobbes’s position that outward profession is distinct from inner belief. The former may proceed simply by rote, perhaps out of “fear of the laws . . . or from the automatic deference, which men give out of politeness to those whom they respect, and to others from love of peace” (DCi 18.5). And Hobbes holds that we are sometimes well-advised to go along with verbal formulae in religion without any conceptions or beliefs answering to the words uttered—“captivating our understanding to the Words” without “labour[ing] in sifting out a Philosophick truth by Logick, of such mysteries as are not comprehensible” (L 32.3: 578). To be clear: this is his recommendation for handling difficult passages of scripture “when any thing written therein is too hard for our examination” (L 32.3: 578). He does not say that we should be doing this sort of thing when it comes to the basic requirement of natural piety that we accept God’s existence. In his prescriptive, polytheism-excluding definition of DH 14.1, religion requires inward faith, which is a genuine belief in God’s existence, not merely a rote outward profession. Right reason moreover substantiates it. But Hobbes’s treatment of scriptural “mysteries” shows that he appreciates that people might habitually mouth a religious catechism without any genuine comprehension of what is said. Although Hobbes has this room to maneuver, ultimately his texts do not reveal any determinate view of the extent to which genuine faith as opposed to an outward acting along prevails in his own seventeenth-century Anglo-Protestant culture. But even if we were to stipulate that Hobbes does indeed regard most of his own countrymen and women as genuinely believing in a God properly so called, he would still view the pagan cultures of the ancient world as almost entirely lacking faith in the defined sense. While “the more sound of the Heathen Philosophers confessed” the existence of a great cosmological divinity behind the regress of causes (L 12.6 Latin version: 166–167), in Hobbes’s view this belief was no part of popular pagan culture. In his portrayal of the devotional culture of the ancient world, it was mired rather in an “absurd” animism and polytheism that could deify not just fire, wind, woods, rivers, lust, and rage but “a Crocodile, a Calf, . . . , an Onion, a Leeke” (L 12.13 marginal heading: 172; L 12.15–16: 172, see also L 44.11: 968). He cites at length from Diodorus Siculus’s

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account of the various cult practices of the Gauls, Persians, Egyptians, Chaldeans, Indians, and Ethiopians, and concludes in summary that “the Diuinity . . . of those heathen people was nothing but idolatry” (B 232). Pagan cultures that have no investment in a monotheistic cosmological divinity responsible for the great frame of nature are atheistic in Hobbes’s sense, the etymological awkwardness of ‘polytheistic atheism’ notwithstanding. A polytheistic belief in supernatural powers that operate as part of the overall system of the creation (including, as it might be, Olympus, Asgard, or the City of the Gandharvas) is not belief a in God properly so called. Taking the wider anthropological view then, the absence of faith (or “the belief that God exists and that He governs all things”) is not perhaps so unusual. And if we put Hobbes’s dismissive remarks about ancient polytheism alongside his pessimistic account of the anxiety-driven origins of religion and the parochial and anthropomorphizing tendencies of the human imagination, it seems likely that he would reject any claims that human beings universally or even generally admit the being of a God properly so called. This was a controversial position in the context of seventeenth-century theorizing about religion and religious anthropology. Philosophers such as Francis Bacon, Herbert of Cherbury, and Ralph Cudworth took the alternative view that belief in a monotheistic creator God is near-universal across human cultures, with Herbert and Cudworth going on to argue from this putative consensus gentium to God’s existence.²⁷ According to Bacon, the practices of “even [the] Barbarous People [of America],” as he put it, show that they “have the Notion [of God], though they have not the Latitude, and Extent of it. So that against Atheists, the very Savages take part, with the very subtillest Philosophers.”²⁸ Bacon goes so far in maintaining the universality of faith as to assert that even the psalmist’s “Foole [who] “hath said in his Heart, there is no God” is not a true inward atheist, but rather merely someone attempting to rote-recite himself into believing that God does not exist, even in the face of his own stubborn convictions to the contrary.²⁹ Cudworth in particular argues in his True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) against the sort of non-monotheistic understanding of ancient cultures

²⁷ Cicero’s De Natura Deorum comprehends a discussion of the consensus gentium argument that was influential among early moderns (Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, tr. Horace C. P. McGregor (London: Penguin, 1972), section 1.44 and 2.5). For useful discussion of Herbert and Cudworth, and the wider tradition of the consensus gentium argument in early modern philosophy, see Jasper Reid, “The Common Consent Argument from Herbert to Hume, Journal of the History of Philosophy 53 (2015), 401–434. Hobbes never explicitly addresses the consensus gentium argument, but contemporary readers invested in the debate would have understood that his account of the reality of ancient polytheism and of the difficulty of arriving at the hypothesis of God properly so called constitutes an objection to it. ²⁸ Francis Bacon, Essayes, 52. ²⁹ “The Scripture saith; The Foole hath said in his Heart, there is no God: It is not said; The Foole hath thought in his heart: So as, he rather saith it by rote to himselfe, as that [which] he would have, than that he can throughly beleeve it, or be perswaded of it. . . . Atheisme is rather in the Lip, then in the Heart of Man” (Bacon, Essays, 108–109).

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advanced in Leviathan. According to Cudworth, the appearance of nonmonotheistic civilizations in the ancient world and as reported in traveler’s tales from far-flung native cultures is merely superficial, with the pagans’ multiple ‘divinities’ turning out to be either so many manifestations of one great deity, or merely the angel-like subordinate ministers of one properly monotheistic suzerain.³⁰ Read in this wider seventeenth-century context, Hobbes’s insistence in Leviathan and Behemoth on the prevalence of genuinely non-monotheistic animism, idolatry, and polytheism in the ancient world amounts to a rebuke of the assimilationist strategy of monotheistic radical interpretation (L 12.13–20: 172–178, B 226–232). His position here anticipates that of thinkers such as Pierre Bayle, who argues that atheistic cultures and non-monotheistic idolatry dominated in the ancient world, most extensively in Continuation des Pensées diverses (1704) and Résponse aux questions d’un provincial (1706),³¹ and David Hume, who maintains that “polytheism or idolatry was . . . the first and most ancient religion of mankind” in his Natural History of Religion (1757) while classifying ancient polytheists as “pretended religionists [who] are really a kind of superstitious atheists, and acknowledge no being, that corresponds to our idea of a deity.”³² Bayle and Hume would call more witnesses from pagan antiquity in support of the indictment, and would also extend the argument to take in travelers’ reports of remote modern cultures. But Hobbes had made the basic point about ancient polytheism already, striking the first major blow against the consensus gentium argument, and advancing the first early modern case for the cultural normality of atheism in his (and Hume’s) polytheism-including sense.

³⁰ Hobbes is never mentioned by name in Cudworth’s 400-page chapter on this topic, though his presence is discernible on many pages. Cudworth summarizes the main line of argument in this chapter as follows: “[I]n way of an Answer to the Atheistick Objection, against the Naturality of the Idea of God, as including Oneliness in it, from the Pagan Polytheism, have we largely proved, that at least the Civilized and Intelligent Pagans, generally acknowledged One Sovereign Numen, and that their Polytheism was partly but Phantastical, nothing but the Polynomy of one Supreme God, or the Worshipping him under different Names and Notions according to his several Vertues and Manifestations. And that though besides this they had another Natural and Real Polytheism also; yet this was only of Many Inferiour or Created Gods, Subordinate to One Supreme . . . Uncreated” (Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 2 vols. (London: R. Royston 1678), i. 631). ³¹ Pierre Bayle, Oeuvres Diverses, 4 vols. (The Hague: 1737), iii. 329–330, 925–930, and for discussion, Reid, “The Common Consent Argument,” 403, 405, Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2006), 73–74. ³² David Hume, “The Natural History of Religion,” in A Dissertation on the Passions; The Natural History of Religion: A Critical Edition, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), 34, 44 (sections 1.1 and 4.2; see also sections 1.2–5, 4.1, and 4.7). Similarly, it “may justly be asserted” that “idolators [are] atheists” (David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion and other Writings, ed. Dorothy Coleman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 37 (part 4 paragraph 4)).

10 Consequences and Reception Is it not possible that man is able to weave his ideas of God just as purposefully as the spider does its web for the purpose of catching flies? Or, in other words: can there not exist beings who would admire us on account of our ideas of God and immortality in just the way we admire the spider and the silkworm? Georg Lichtenberg, Notebook L (1796–1799) As Hobbes sees it, religious practice is not properly an attempt to represent the nature of the great cause. However elaborate or minutely symbolic, it serves rather only as a way of signifying how much we honor this awesomely powerful being, putting our reverence on outward display. The same is true of religious speech, including not just the customary set-pieces of liturgy, prayer, and paternoster, but the entire discourse of natural and revealed theology. Such talk is not properly an attempt to depict a hidden reality, but a new and purposive creation of our own. This revisionist treatment of religious practice and speech shows itself across Hobbes’s writings. We see it in his transmutation of religious language and recasting of the divine attributes and actions as so many honorifics. We see it in his indifferentism about forms of worship, in his conventionalist assessment of the authority of scripture, in his excising of systematic theology, and in his preference for a civil religious policy that promotes uniform outward worship without opening windows into men’s souls. More concretely, it is apparent in his general statements of the honor-expressing function of religious practice and speech in Elements of Law, Anti-White, De Cive, Of Libertie and Necessitie, Leviathan, and An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall, and confirmed in his various particular applications of that theory across multiple works. Within the domain of natural religion, we have Hobbes’s expressivist account of the kind of religious talk that is sanctioned by our common human reason, with its naturally (i.e., nonconventionally) honorific vocabulary of anthropomorphic and metaphysical perfections. In numerous specific cases in both didactic and dialectical contexts, Hobbes handles not just talk about God’s wisdom, knowledge, justice, and goodness in an expressivist manner, but even attributes such as eternity, partlessness, motionlessness, and God’s status as first cause of all. Although commentators sometimes interpret his treatment of one or more of these attributes in descriptivist terms, I do not see that Hobbes himself ever theorizes in this way—and indeed he explicitly warns against this sort of descriptivist backsliding in all the Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion. Thomas Holden, Oxford University Press. © Thomas Holden 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871329.003.0010

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relevant works. (See Chapter 2, Section 2.1, Chapter 3, Sections 3.3–3.5, and Chapter 6, Section 6.5.) Of course, he will sometimes speak of this or that divine attribute or action without pausing to remind us that the ascription is not to be understood as descriptive or truth-apt. But that is how honorifics work and is no evidence of a lapse into descriptivism. (See Chapter 2, Section 2.6.) We also saw Hobbes’s honor-expressing understanding of religious speech and practice applied in his handling of ritual actions and public ceremonial. Such outward performances display our reverence through natural signs, but also through culturally specific devotional forms that are rendered honorific by convention. Notably, this includes any discourse around scripture and revelation, with the Bible itself having authority for us only in the honorific sign system underwritten by local culture and law. (See Chapter 7, Sections 7.4–7.6.) Hobbes’s reframing of religious practice was also apparent in his account of prayer, which properly serves (he explains) not as an attempt to influence the great cause in our favor, but only to exhibit of our regard for its surpassing power, even where our prayers are petitionary rather than adorational in surface appearance. (See Chapter 2, Section 2.4.) Overall, Hobbes’s revisionist, honoremphasizing approach to religious topics is not just consistently ratified in his official discussions of religious speech and language, but deployed and redeployed across specific theological questions with all his usual energy, application, and cussed systematicity. By way of a conclusion, in this final chapter I offer some remarks on the more philosophically provocative consequences of Hobbes’s treatment of religion, including its implications for the relationship between philosophy and theology, for our understanding of religion as fundamentally a matter of performance and display, and for the question of indifferentism about forms of worship and religious toleration. I also say something about the place of the interpretation of Hobbes’s philosophy of religion advanced in this book as against the reception of that philosophy in the seventeenth century and in the more recent commentary.

10.1 The Partition of Theology and Philosophy One feature of Hobbes’s philosophy of religion that deserves special attention is its partition of theology and philosophy. The two disciplines have had a long relationship, if not always an equal and harmonious one. Hobbes’s account annuls the association and enforces a strict separation between the two parties. Under the new arrangement, theological doctrine, articles, and creeds have nothing to do with truth, or falsehood, or any attempt at genuine representation. This kind of talk is performative, honorific, and ceremonial, the quasi-discursive but descriptively epiphenomenal face of our honor-expressing system of observances. Theology might take on the appearance of metaphysics or of history, but our

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assent to its statements is not properly tethered to truth or belief. Its norms of assertion are not evidence, descriptive accuracy, or logical entailment, but only the honorific import of its expressions within our natural and conventional sign systems. To put the point in terms of Hobbes’s own anatomy of religion (DH 14.1), theology is simply part of our ‘worship’—i.e., our reverence-displaying outward behavior—while ‘faith’ properly so called—i.e., the truth-apt inward belief required by religion—is reduced merely to the conviction that there is indeed a great cause of surpassing power and hence a being worthy of such adoration. As Hobbes sees it, the confused theoretical intermingling of theology and philosophy has distorted the both of them, going back at least as far as the early years of Christianity. The first doctors of the Church, . . . endeavoured to defend the Christian faith against the Gentiles by natural reason, [and] began also to make use of philosophy, and with the decrees of Holy Scripture to mingle the sentences of heathen philosophers; and first some harmless ones of Plato, but afterwards also many foolish and false ones out of the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle; and bringing in the enemies, betrayed unto them the citadel of Christianity. From that time, instead of the worship of God, there entered a thing called school divinity. (DCo epistle dedicatory)

In this way, a pseudoscience awash with absurdities (EL 25.9, L 46.15–23: 1076–1086, B 183, HE 17–24: 305–307) became entrenched in the Church and eventually in the universities (L 44.3: 958, 46.14: 1076). But quite apart from the particular deformities of the scholastic “Aristotelity” that dominated the universities of Hobbes’s day (L 46:13: 1074; see also EL 28.8, B 129, 161–164), any such philosophical treatment of theological topics confuses religious speech with the language of description, logic, and evidence, and thereby encourages a kind of pseudo-philosophical disputation over the supposed truth and proper interpretation of religious statements. “Divinity disputers” breed conflict over questions of worship, a potentially delicate topic for believers committed to honoring the deity in time-tested and culturally recognizable ways (B 302; see also HE 801–828: 397–400). In this way the adulterate and scholasticized form of theology “hath raised an infinite number of Controversies in the Christian World concerning Religion, & from those Controversies Wars” (DCo epistle dedicatory).¹ But all such theological disputation is entirely wrong-headed. It asks about the ¹ Hobbes also maintains that one of the major causal factors in the discrediting of religious systems in general, and of the pre-Reformation Church in particular, is this sort of adulteration of the rules of worship with “the teachings of physics” (as in the Catholic accounts of transubstantiation and freewill), and hence—priests and church doctors “hav[ing] no scientific knowledge of natural things”— “absurd propositions” and “contradictory language” (DH 14.13, see also L 12.25: 182).

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truth-value and logical consequences of what are properly only honorific ways of talking, and seeks rational justifications for modes of worship that are, quite properly, at bottom, merely the result of arbitrary convention and esprit de corps. To ward against this confusion and drive away such poisonous “ChurchPhilosophy” (B 291), Hobbes urges us, recall,² to distinguish between the Rules of Religion, that is, the Rules of Honoring God, which we have from the Laws, and the Rules of Philosophy, that is, the Opinions of private men; & to yield what is due to Religion to the Holy Scripture, and what is due to Philosophy to Natural Reason. (DCo epistle dedicatory; compare also L 31.33: 568)

So one lesson of Hobbes’s account is that religion and philosophy each have their separate jurisdiction, and that the two must be kept firmly distinct. Religion presents us with “Rules of Honoring God,” which “we have from the Laws,” at least in any state with a legal religious settlement—and presumably also from natural piety and any religious cultural convention that is consistent with the civil law. In Hobbes’s seventeenth-century England, that requires our “yield[ing] what is due to Religion” to the Christian scriptural tradition as interpreted by the stateapproved authorities.³ Philosophy, on the other hand, is a matter for “the Opinions of private men,” and, since it aims at truth and accurate representation, is properly subject to criticism and correction under the principles of natural human reason. In addition to urging the general separation of theology and philosophy, Hobbes also offers specific guidance as to we how should proceed when our philosophical speculations might appear to contradict the assertions demanded of us by religion. Even without the particular corrupting influence of school divinity, it seems that religion might require us to affirm statements that are facially at odds with our scientific and philosophical understanding of the world, as in Hobbes’s own examples when scripture indicates that Earth does not move, or tells us that Jesus cast out demons (L 8.26: 120). Faced with such cases, Hobbes might have reminded us of his distinction between the outward profession of doctrine, which can be required as part of our worship, as against inward belief, which cannot. (See Chapter 7, Section 7.4 for discussion.) And in L 8.26: 120 he does emphasize that our overall acting along with the narratives of scripture is

² For my original discussion of the passage from De Corpore’s epistle dedicatory, see Chapter 7, Section 7.2. ³ Compare also AW 26.6: “it must not be thought that articles of faith are [philosophical] problems; they are laws, and it is inequitable for a private individual to interpret them otherwise than as they are formulated. For a private person to call for a re-examination of matters that have once and for all been settled and determined by the authority of the Supreme Power is absurd and directly counter to the reasons for the Church’s peace and unity.”

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properly in the service of worship and obedience, not philosophical instruction in truth-apt propositions.⁴ Such an approach to revealed ‘truths’ is indeed simply an application of the same general approach to religious language that we have seen in Hobbes’s treatment of the discourse of natural piety across the traditional theistic perfections. But there is still the question of whether we should continue to openly affirm our philosophical beliefs in ways that might appear to contradict theological assertions—maintaining, in philosophical contexts, that the Earth does in fact move, or that there are no demons. Here Hobbes offers us another kind of response, one that helps alleviate the awkwardness and possible appearance of hypocrisy in our affirming statements in theological contexts that we would deny in philosophical contexts. He suggests that we might say that the problematic theological statement is true, but also say that, since it would contradict natural reason if its words were being used with their usual meaning, those words must instead be intended in some other unfamiliar sense, such that we cannot grasp exactly what is being said or how it is true.⁵ So if it is important to go along with certain affirmations in our theological discourse as if they were true, we may do so without having to suppress our philosophical opinion that—using words in their ordinary, non-theological sense—the Earth does move around the Sun, and there are no demons. A philosopher who proceeds in this manner “will not impinge upon the Church’s authority, which he acknowledges and conforms to.” But at the same time, “nor will he . . . philosophize less freely, being one who has been allowed to advance as far as correct reasoning leads him” (AW 26.7). In this way, one can philosophize honestly and openly (at least wherever the state permits it), while also affirming the ‘truth,’ if not always the comprehensibility, of whatever theological articles our religion may require.⁶

⁴ “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. Whether the Earths, or Suns motion make the day, and night; or whether the Exorbitant actions of men, proceed from Passion, or from the Divell, (so we worship him not) it is all one, as to our obedience, and subjection to God Almighty; which is the thing for which the Scripture was written” (L 8.26: 120). ⁵ “[A]s [a philosophical] investigation proceeds [the philosopher] will stumble upon a proposition that is not held by the Christian faith that seems to contradict a conclusion he has established earlier. He can infer (if he has previously reasoned correctly): ‘I do not understand under what meaning of terms that proposition is true.’ . . . This is the attitude both of a balanced mind and, as I have said, of one that reasons correctly. But he cannot conclude that it is false; for how can anyone know whether a proposition is true or false that he does not understand?” (AW 26.7, translation slightly adapted from Jones). ⁶ Hobbes urges a similar policy in De Cive and Leviathan. “For our eternal salvation we are obliged to accept a supernatural doctrine, which because it is supernatural, is impossible to understand.” But this does not impugn our liberty of philosophical opinion: “[T]hose who take the view that anything can be settled from obscure passages of scripture contrary to the common consent of men on names and things, are favouring the abolition of the use of language and of all human society with it . . . . In fact [such a person] is abolishing reason itself, which is nothing other than the examination of the truth formed by such consent” (DCi 17.28; see also L 32.4: 578 and L 34.4: 614).

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10.2 Religion as Performance and the Deliteralization of Religious Language Hobbes’s separation of theology and philosophy turns on his configuration of religion as almost entirely as a matter of worship, performance, and the expression of non-descriptive attitudes, rather than a matter of belief and truth-apt descriptive doctrine. As I have emphasized, Hobbes’s expressivist transvaluation of religious speech would have appalled most seventeenth-century theologians, and it is categorically rejected by realists about the divine attributes such as Descartes, Bramhall, Cudworth, and Leibniz. (See Chapter 2, Section 2.5.) Commentators who favor an atheistic interpretation of Hobbes might of course regard his advocacy of the expressivist theory as itself a kind of performance—as an attempt to sideline religion by ruling it outside the sphere of truth-apt discourse, but without any sincere underlying conviction that we ought in fact to revere the great cause and speak of it in honor-giving terms. To the contrary, I have argued that we should take Hobbes’s theory at his consistent, detailed, and oft-repeated word. On the pious expressivist interpretation that I favor, Hobbes is sincere in maintaining that we ought rationally to worship the great cause with honor-conferring words and actions, and in holding that this means both our employing the honorific language of natural piety and our joining in with the conventional forms of pious discourse that are established in our culture. Religious speech and philosophical speech remain both alike in dignity, however different in function and internal logic. The proposed interpretation presents us with a highly innovative reassessment of religious language, a kind of seventeenth-century expressivism and Wittgensteinianism avant les lettres. It is a mark of Hobbes’s originality in this area that we are left groping for such anachronistic comparisons in order to short-hand the nature of his intervention. The Annales school historian or today’s strong contextualist might view such a reading with suspicion. Could Hobbes really be so out of step with his contemporaries? But philosophers are not simply monads, each the living mirror of his or her peers. And the expressivist theory is there on the page, indisputably, in all the relevant works. Bramhall, Cudworth, and Leibniz understood it well enough, even if they could not approve it.⁷ A century later Hume would incorporate the theory into his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion

⁷ Bramhall and Cudworth each regarded Hobbes’s treatment of religious language as leading to atheism by implication, and, according to Cudworth at least, the implication was intended (John Bramhall, A Defence of True Liberty from Ante-cedent and Extrinsecall Necessity (London: 1655), 248–251, 252–253, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes his last animadversions, in the case concerning liberty, and universal necessity. With an appendix concerning The Catching of leviathan, or The great whale (London: Crook 1658), 422–425, 426–427, 547–548, Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 2 vols. (London: R. Royston 1678), i. 63–64). The passage from Cudworth is partially quoted above in Chapter 2, Section 2.5. For Leibniz’s criticisms, see G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil, ed. Austin Farrer, tr. E. M. Huggard (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 394, 398, 403.

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(1779, but first drafted in the 1750s), exploiting its power to save the phenomena of theistic discourse without thereby conceding a realist understanding of the divine attributes.⁸ It is only when it comes to revealed religion and the content of scripture that Hobbes is a little more circumspect in explaining his approach, and some work needs to be done to draw together the threads of what he has to say. One can appreciate his reasons for caution here, both external (the danger of blackballing and persecution) and internal (a genuine respect for the sacred texts of the ancient, culturally entrenched, and legally mandated Christian religion). But even here there is, remarkably, no subterfuge or indirection. As Hobbes explains, he professes the doctrines of his culture’s conventionally approved religion. At the same time, he is clear that profession need not entail belief, and that in any case the controlling purpose of this kind of talk is simply to honor God in culturally accepted ways. While he has recommendations as to how we might read and teach scripture in ways that “tend toward Peace and Loyalty” (L Review and Conclusion 14: 1139), he defers to the civil law for any final judgment. “[R]eligion [is] not philosophy, but rather in all states law; and on that account it is not to be disputed but observed” (DH 14.4).

10.3 Indifferentism about Forms of Worship Another significant feature of Hobbes’s philosophy of religion that has not been adequately appreciated is its deep indifferentism about forms of worship and religious doctrine. The only non-negotiable commitments of Hobbesian religion are (i) the conviction that there is an overwhelmingly powerful but otherwise incomprehensible great cause behind the humanly comprehensible universe (i.e., ‘faith’), and (ii) the requirement that we honor this mysterious being as best we can through words and actions (i.e., ‘worship’). This schema can be seen in the surveys of De Cive chapter 15 and Leviathan chapter 31, though it comes through most clearly in the prescriptive summary account of religion in De Homine chapter 14. Polytheistic forms of devotion are excluded, at least insofar as these ⁸ Or at least, Hume’s character Philo in the Dialogues endorses a suspiciously Hobbesian-looking version of the expressivist theory, and uses it to artful effect in undermining any descriptivist-minded account of the divine attributes. “[T]he original cause of this universe (whatever it be) we call G; and piously ascribe to him every species of perfection . . . . But . . . we ought never to imagine, that we comprehend the attributes of this divine being, or to suppose, that his perfections have any analogy or likeness to the perfections of a human creature. Wisdom, thought, design, knowledge; these we justly ascribe to him; because these words are honourable among men, and we have no other language or other conceptions, by which we can express our adoration of him. But let us beware, lest we think, that our ideas anywise correspond to his perfections, or that his attributes have any resemblance to those qualities among men” (David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion and other Writings, ed. Dorothy Coleman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 18–19 (part 2 paragraphs 3–4), emphasis added). For discussion, see Thomas Holden, “The Meaning of Philo’s Reversal,” Journal of the History of Philosophy (forthcoming).

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lack a commitment to one great cosmological divinity behind the apparent multiplicity of supernatural powers. But under Hobbes’s theory any honorexpressing sign system addressed to the great cause will qualify as a religion properly so called and would legitimately determine our worship if it enjoyed conventional acceptance in our culture and the license (or the mandate) of the civil state. So long as a system of devotional practices does not offend against the natural signs of honor that all humans recognize, any arbitrary conventional signs may be adopted—any concrete specification of actions and words in ceremonies, rituals, liturgies, sacred stories, holy books, articles, and creeds. Like all arbitrary signs of honor, the particular practices of human religions are deeply contingent— a matter of happenstance, historical accident, the vagaries of the civil law and the law of fashion. Here Hobbes is non-judgmental, permissive, and, in principle, ready to participate. Diarmaid MacCulloch remarks of Richard Hooker’s “massive” and “relentless defence of the exact shape of Queen Elizabeth’s 1559 Settlement of Religion” in the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (1593–1597, with later volumes appearing posthumously in 1648 and 1662) that “[a]fter reading it, one feels that if the parliamentary legislation of 1559 had laid down that English clergy were to preach standing on their heads, then Hooker would have found a theological reason for justifying it.”⁹ Hobbes’s own permissive theory would also have justified such Father William ceremonial, and, without waiting on internal theological rationalizations, could have produced the license in advance. Hobbes’s writings must of course be read in the context of his seventeenthcentury Anglo-Protestant religious environment. This immediate Christian background is often simply assumed in his texts, though it is also often made explicit. At the operative level, his practical proposals about religion are addressed to a reformed Christian audience on reformed Christian terms.¹⁰ But it is remarkable that at the foundations of his philosophy of religion, Hobbes is perfectly clear that he makes no presumption in favor of Christianity, and that his prescriptive account of religion would legitimize any conventionally approved, state-backed system of worship celebrating the great cause. He is clear that any devotional practice that goes beyond the universally recognizable signs of natural piety is thereby relying on arbitrary human conventions, a claim that obviously applies to Christianity as much as any other human religion. He is clear that we should only

⁹ Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (New York: Viking, 2004), 507. ¹⁰ Note however that even when arguing within a reformed Christian framework, Hobbes’s reasoning tends to be theologically accommodating and light on doctrinal commitments—expressing a kind of local indifferentism within the acceptable parameters of Anglo-Protestantism, we might say. Parkin plausibly argues that this is part of a conscious strategy on Hobbes’s part to enable “a variety of religious actors to think ‘Hobbesianly’ in articulating their religious doctrine,” in the hopes of promoting peace and security under the civil state (Jon Parkin, “Hobbes and the Future of Religion,” in Lauren van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass, ed., Hobbes on Politics and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 184–201: 198).

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venerate sacred texts in so far as they are approved by the state. He is clear that most Christian martyrs threw away their lives without good reason, and entirely explicit that if we lived under a regime that required non-Christian forms of worship or even the express renunciation of Christ, his theory would urge us to comply. (For these points, see Chapter 7, Sections 7.2 and 7.4–7.6.) As Hobbes might have predicted, these passages would be quoted back at him by indignant critics. He shows a remarkable candor and integrity in setting out the consequences of his theory so plainly, and in refusing to massage any of these opinions when his reputation came under sustained attack. Hobbes’s stubborn probity or simple bloody-mindedness in maintaining his hundred flowers theory of religious practice, and his refusal to give Christianity any special privilege not explicable in terms of its conventional establishment in his own culture, presents a problem for commentators who read Hobbes as a literal-minded Protestant committed to the unique truth of the Christian religion. But equally it seems to me to present a problem for those who read him as a covert atheist with P on his lips and not-P in his heart. The indifferentism of Hobbes’s theory at the foundational level does not translate into an argument for toleration at the practical. In principle, any monotheistic religion could gather conventional approval and thereby dictate the appropriate forms of worship: there is nothing unique here about Christianity or Protestantism. In that sense, Hobbes’s philosophy is accommodating and inclusive. But in practice, once some specific form of religion has been conventionally adopted in a commonwealth, it will shape which arbitrary practices show God honor and dishonor, and hence which kinds of devotion are admissible and inadmissible. While the private religious beliefs of subjects cannot be regulated (see Chapter 9, Section 9.2), subjects should not publicly dishonor God, and since all non-natural signs of honor and dishonor are determined by convention, nonconformist religious practices will show God dishonor if the commonwealth dictates as much. (See Chapter 7, Section 7.5.) The civil state properly makes the final decision about such matters and has every right to persecute those who fail to abide by the civil religious laws in their outward behavior, whatever those laws may be. (See Chapter 9, Section 9.4.) Hobbes’s philosophical position is perfectly consistent with a policy of religious toleration if the cultural and legal conventions incline that way; but it by no means requires it.¹¹

¹¹ As for the wisdom of religious persecution, Hobbes seems to regard it simply as a matter of cleareyed policy calculation in changing cultural and political circumstances. In Behemoth he argues that religious persecution can backfire, as the “Suppression of doctrins” may “vnite and exasperate” the persecuted minority and thereby increase their “malice and power” (B 188). But equally he argues that if Charles I had killed a thousand “seditious ministers” of the Presbyterian faction at an opportune moment, while this “had been (I confesse) a great Massacre,” it would have been a sound policy in order to stamp out sectarian incitements to war (B 231).

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10.4 The Reception of Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion How does the interpretation advanced in this book relate to the wider reception of Hobbes’s philosophy of religion? Systematic commentary on Hobbes’s philosophy of religion in the twentiethand twenty-first centuries largely divides into two factions. Either Hobbes is an atheist who hides his godless philosophy behind a play of pro forma pieties. Or he is a Christian who takes the claims of scripture seriously and has a realist understanding of at least some core cluster of the traditional theistic attributes. To be sure, not every modern scholarly interpretation fits the bimodal picture exactly. But overall, the polarization between the atheistic and the Christian interpretive camps is the most striking feature of the recent commentary, and by any standard a remarkably stark division in the interpretation of a philosopher’s stance on a topic to which that philosopher devotes so much time and attention. My own reading undermines both these rival interpretive positions, while also explaining the features of Hobbes’s writings that might seem to support the one or the other in turn. On the one hand, Hobbes totally rejects any realist-minded account of the divine attributes, or any attempt to expand in descriptive terms upon the bare admission of an inconceivable great cause that stands behind the humanly comprehensible world. Nor is it plausible that he regards Christian scripture, doctrine, and ceremonial as anything more than a human creation. This skepticism toward both realist-minded theism and any view of the Christian revelation as authentically divine might seem to support the hypothesis of an atheistic Hobbes—and on some expansive definitions of ‘atheistic,’ it will even secure it. However, at the same time, Hobbes holds that there is in fact a transcendentally powerful great cause, and he expresses his reverence toward it with natural and conventional signs of honor: by his own definitions, he has faith and exhibits worship, the two parts of natural piety. Moreover, he regards such faith and worship as rationally required. He also holds that the traditional theistic language of divine perfections is entirely justified, even if such talk is properly intended only to honor rather than to describe. And he holds that we should profess whatever scriptural narratives, sacred histories, articles, and creeds are required by the local conventions, demonstrating our reverence for the deity through the arbitrary but authoritative forms of the legally established religion even where inward belief cannot be warranted. For all Hobbes’s bold revisionism in the philosophy of religion, his account valorizes a pious adoration of the aweinspiring great cause behind nature and requires not just conformity with but a wholehearted and reverential participation in the local religious traditions. The seventeenth-century reception of Hobbes’s philosophy of religion was also a contested affair. As Parkin shows in compelling detail, the popular assumption that Leviathan immediately brought Hobbes a reputation for atheism is much too

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simplistic.¹² Hobbes’s theology in the earlier De Cive had struck some as strange, and Leviathan was regarded by various early readers as heretical and possibly blasphemous. But direct allegations of atheism only came later, and the popular view of Hobbes as an atheist did not take hold until the 1660s. Polemics against atheism were already a genre when Leviathan was published, but Hobbes’s theories make no appearance in works such as Walter Charleton’s The darknes of atheism, dispelled by the light of nature (1652) or Henry More’s An antidote against atheisme (1653).¹³ Early published criticism of Hobbes’s writings on religion tended rather to express exasperation or bewilderment at the paradoxical hodge-podge of Hobbes’s theology, the “rhapsody of heresies” in De Cive,¹⁴ or Leviathan’s “farrago of all the maddest divinity that was ever read.”¹⁵ In Leviathan drawn out with a hook (1653), the scholastic Aristotelian Alexander Ross claimed that Hobbes was recycling “the condemned opinions of old hereticks,” including those of the “Anthropomorphists, Sabellians, Nestorians, Saduceans, Arabeans, Tacians or Encratits, Manichies, Mahumetans.” For good measure, Ross also identified the author of Leviathan as a “Cerinthian,” a “Tertullianist and Audean,” an “Aetian, and Priscillianist,” “a Luciferian” “an Originist,” a “Socinian” and “a Jew”:¹⁶ Hobbes seemed to have some sort of theology in mind, even if it was a confused or a confusing one. Even when the public accusations of atheism mounted in the 1660s and beyond, many remained unpersuaded. The hunting of Leviathan in innumerable pamphlets and treatises over the next decade or so may have shaped public opinion, but not always the private opinions of philosophers.¹⁷ A critical but careful reader such as Edward Hyde in his A brief view of the dangerous and pernicious errors to church and state in Mr Hobbes’s book, entitled Leviathan (1676) might avoid any charge of atheism and concede that Hobbes’s treatment of natural religion contains “Expressions . . . which seem to have Piety and Godliness in them,”¹⁸ while nevertheless being scandalized at Hobbes’s indifferentism about forms of worship and his conventionalism regarding the authority of scripture.¹⁹

¹² Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 97–135. Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962) also remains a useful survey, though tending to overstate the popularity of atheistic interpretations in the 1650s and 1660s. ¹³ Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 134. ¹⁴ Baptiste Masoyer-Deshommeaux to Mersenne in 1642, quoted in Noel Malcolm’s “General Introduction” to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), i. 1–195: 43. ¹⁵ Henry Hammond to Matthew Wren, quoted in A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 24. ¹⁶ Alexander Ross, Leviathan drawn out with a hook, or Animadversions upon Mr. Hobbs his Leviathan (1653), ‘Preface’ and ‘To the Reader’. ¹⁷ Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 133–134, 411, and “Hobbes and the Future of Religion,” 188–191. ¹⁸ Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, A brief view of the dangerous and pernicious errors to church and state in Mr Hobbes’s book, entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), 186. ¹⁹ Hyde, A brief view, 194, 198, 302.

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At the end of the century, with the moral panic about libertine atheism still running hot and the godless Hobbist literally a stage villain,²⁰ the careful reader could nevertheless still find more responsible portrayals of Hobbes’s religious position. Hobbes was fortunate enough to have the following assessment appear in Pierre Bayle’s bestselling Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697), “the supreme publishing success of the Early Enlightenment.”²¹ Here, following upon a laudatory portrayal of Hobbes’s virtuous character, Bayle approvingly paraphrases from John Aubrey and Richard Blackbourne’s account of Hobbes’s religious position in their 1681 “Life of Hobbes”²² and amplifies it for posterity. ‘Come on then, tell me; it is a very minor question which I am striving to have you answer: What do you think about Jupiter?’²³ The answer [Hobbes] could have sincerely made, if we believe those who wrote his life, would have been this: that there is a God who is the origin of all things but who ought not to be circumscribed within the sphere of our narrow reason. He would have added that he embraced Christianity as it was by law established in England; but that he had an aversion to theological disputes; that he esteemed principally what tends to the practice of piety and sound morals, and that he habitually condemned priests who corrupted the simplicity of religion by mixing it with superstitious worship and a plethora of vague and worldly speculation.²⁴

It would be difficult to improve on Bayle’s précis of Hobbes’s religious position for its combination of concision with accuracy and insight, though I confess for completeness I would have liked to have seen an acknowledgment of Hobbes’s novel treatment of religious language. In any case, according to Bayle’s sympathetic distillation of Aubrey and Blackbourne, Hobbes believes that there is a God that stands behind the great frame of nature. At the same time, our efforts to “circumscrib[e] [this being] within the sphere of our narrow reason” are misguided, presumably because its attributes and actions are beyond human comprehension. Hobbes did not merely profess or conform to Christianity but

²⁰ Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 410–411. ²¹ Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford; Oxfoerd University Press, 2006), 67. ²² John Aubrey and Richard Blackbourne composed the “Vitae Hobbianae auctarium” that they published alongside Hobbes’s brief prose and verse autobiographies in Thomae Hobbes angli vita (1681). On Aubrey’s role in a work often credited simply to Blackbourne (or sometimes ‘Blackburn’), see Noel Malcolm, “Biographical Register of Hobbes’s Correspondents,” in Thomas Hobbes, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), ii. 777–919: 919. ²³ “Heus age, responde, minimum est quod scire laboro, De Jove quid sentis?” (Perseus, Satires 2.17). ²⁴ Pierre Bayle, Political Writings, ed. Sally L. Jenkinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 88–89 (from Bayle’s article on “Hobbes,” note ‘M’).

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“embraced” (“embrassoit”) it, though apparently he did so at least in part because that religion “was by law established in England”—an explanation that directs us not to inward belief but his duties under the conventional religious settlement. He had “an aversion to theological disputes” and an antipathy to theologians who would ornament “the simplicity of religion” with “superstitious” forms of worship and “worldly speculation.” All true enough, and perhaps even gesturing toward Hobbes’s distinction between two different kinds of literal-minded, descriptivist distortion of simple piety: the one fear-driven, anthropomorphizing, and low-brow (“superstition”); the other philosophical, scholastic, and high-brow (“a plethora of vague and worldly [“profanes,” i.e., natural-philosophical?] speculation”). Although he “embraced” the Anglo-Protestant confession in accordance with the civil law of England, this Hobbes does not place great emphasis on the systematic details of doctrine, “but esteemed principally what tends to the practice of piety and sound morals.” True again: Hobbes regards interpretive disputes over doctrines and articles of faith as misplaced, and his controlling concerns are instead our rational responsibility to express reverence, awe, and humility before the deity, along with our duty to obey the moral laws of nature, which obedience he equates with ‘love’ and ‘fear’ of God. Bayle’s summary of Hobbes’s religious thinking (and Aubrey and Blackbourne’s original contribution in their “Life”) constitutes something of a minority report when set against all the atheistic portrayals that defined Hobbes in the late seventeenth-century popular imagination. But on the merits, it is factual and judicious. Or at least, it corresponds entirely with the details of Hobbes’s texts and his religious position as I have interpreted it in this book. Hobbes might have approved Bayle’s useful sketch, and even if Bayle fails to mention Hobbes’s recasting of religious language—which does indeed seem to have been overlooked, ignored, or simply gone over the head of most early modern commentators²⁵—there is nothing in it that the pious expressivist need disown.

10.5 Conclusion In Middlemarch, Casaubon promises Dorothea the completion of an encyclopedic Key to All Mythologies, which, endlessly stalled, he is never finally able to deliver. Hobbes promises his readers, and delivers, a (mercifully more schematic) key to all religions: a unifying and vindicatory account of the common genealogical core of monotheistic forms of devotion in reflection on the regress of causes and a rational reverence before overwhelming power; together with a legitimating explanation, in abstract, of the multiplicity of historical incarnations

²⁵ But see notes 7 and 8 on Bramhall, Cudworth, Leibniz, and Hume.

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of monotheism with all their species-variation in practice and speech. (Less vindicatory, Hobbes also offers us a debunking genealogical explanation of animistic and polytheistic forms of devotion, tracing such superstitious varieties of worship to the credulous imaginings of the anxiety-driven human mind.) The heart of monotheism is the belief that there is a great cause of awe-inspiring power behind the humanly comprehensible world. That belief may come from education and indoctrination, but it may also come through natural human reason as we reflect disinterestedly on the regress of causes and grasp there must be some surpassingly powerful great cause behind the humanly comprehensible universe. The face of monotheism, once washed clean of feckless and disrespectful descriptive-minded theological speculation, is the expression of reverence, awe, and humility before this incomprehensible great cause. That expression may proceed both through the universal human sign system of natural piety (and hence, among the rest, the traditional theistic vocabulary of divine perfections) and also through the conventional signs of honor that have cultural purchase and legal approval in our society, including all the panoply of ritual, dress, feast days, scriptural tradition, and liturgical performance, whether Catholic, Reformed, Laudian, Jewish, Islamic, or whatever. While the mysterious object of our adoration is not itself a human construct, everything that we have to say about it, including all our intricate discourse of natural theology and scriptural doctrine, is properly only an expression of these natural and conventional human signs of honor. Hobbes’s vindicatory key to religion enjoins conformity with the established religious forms, but it does so on a radically new philosophical basis. However, the nature of his intervention has not been well understood. Some scholars have seized upon the outward Christian conformity, others upon the sense of mercurial double-talk and the air of detachment from doctrinal specifics in his theology. Both in his day and our own, Hobbes has been taken by some for a realist-minded Christian committed to the divine authenticity of the Bible, and by others for an atheist. Even where his key to religion is properly understood, certain commentators will take it to be functionally anti-Christian, or even functionally atheistic (‘atheism by consequence’), whatever intention Hobbes may have had to the contrary. But this is not how Hobbes himself sees the situation. For Hobbes, his theory validates theistic discourse and the reverential posture of natural piety, even while it de-literalizes religious language. As for revealed religion: Hobbes is skeptical about the divine authenticity of Christian scripture. Instead, his key to religion presents an entirely naturalistic account of monotheistic practice as a conventional human response to the recognition of a surpassingly powerful great cause behind nature. Among seventeenth-century theories about religion, it presents a remarkable vision of all human religions, Christianity included, as

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historically conditioned human artifacts. But all that is perfectly consistent with Hobbes’s own pious, sincere, and, by the lights of his own philosophy, rational participation in the established Anglo-Protestant confession of his upbringing— “the religion of the church of England,” which, according to a witness, Hobbes said “on his (as he thought) death-bed” he “liked best . . . of all other.”²⁶

²⁶ According to Aubrey’s report from John Cosins (John Aubrey, ‘Brief Lives,’ chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey between the Years 1669 & 1696, ed. Andrew Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), i. 353).

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. affections. See passions agnosticism 175 analogical theory of religious language. See religious language angels 68, 71n.12, 134 Anglicanism 7, 133–4, 148, 155–6, 205–8 Laudianism 7, 133–4 Aquinas, St Thomas 18, 21, 45–6, 62, 115n.19 argument from design. See teleological argument argument from ignorance 91–3, 97 argument from ignorance of the lawgiver 178–84 argument from imperceptibility 177–8 argument from inconceivability 84–9, 94–5, 97 argument from involuntariness 175–6 argument from natural right 112, 114–15, 124–5 argument from propriety 89–91, 97 argument from the authority of the civil state 152–4 argument from the difficulty of proving God’s existence 176 argument from the public nature of honoring 151–2 atheism 35–6, 173–4, 203–4 atheism by consequence 174–5, 199n.7, 207–8 definitions of 174–5, 184, 192–3 inward atheism 174–8, 189–93 outward atheism 184–7 rhapsodic atheism 32, 35–6, 59 semantic atheism 60–2 atheistic interpretations. See irreligious interpretations of Hobbes attributes. See divine attributes Aubrey, John 205–6 Augustine, St 109–11, 117 authorization 108–11 Bacon, Francis 174–5, 192–3 Bayle, Pierre 192–3, 205–6 belief distinguished from outward profession 141–7, 149–50, 157, 197–200 involuntary nature of 143–4, 175–6

Berkeley, George 13, 21–2 Blackbourne, Richard 205–6 Bramhall, John 23, 35, 104, 106–8, 114–15, 117–18, 199–200 Browne, Thomas 86–7 Bucer, Martin 117 Calvin, Jean 114–15, 117, 124 Charleton, Walter 203–4 commands 2, 99–100, 102n.22, 112–13, 125n.26, 182 conceptions 63, 84 corporeality. See divine attributes cosmological argument 40–55 psychological reading 47–50 Cudworth, Ralph 30–2, 60–3, 192–3, 199–200 Damrosch, Leopold 124 deism 36–7 deistic interpretations of Hobbes 1–2, 36–7 deity. See God demonstration 44–5 Descartes, René 30–3, 62–3, 74n.17, 85–7, 199 design argument. See teleological argument determinism 104–8 Devil, the 91n.14, 189 Diodorus Siculus 191–2 direct argument 112, 114, 124–5, 127n.30 divine actions 8, 120–3, 157 divine attributes 8, 11–12, 15–16, 30–2, 157 (see also religious language) atemporality 45n.10 author of human actions 53, 108–11, 115–23 corporeality 2, 15–16, 56n.20, 72–81 eternity 10, 45n.10, 53 existence 70, 77 expressivism about the divine attributes. See expressivism first cause 39–40, 42, 44–55 goodness 10, 23–4, 91–5, 103–4, 125, 130–2 incomprehensibility 9–10, 18–19, 33–4, 61–2, 78–9

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divine attributes (cont.) inconceivability 9–10, 33–4, 60–2, 64, 68–72, 82, 84–9, 161–2 incorporeality 68, 74–9 independence 54–5 infinitude 13–14, 17–18, 24–5, 54–6 justice 10, 23–4, 103–4, 124–5, 127–32 knowledge and wisdom 57–9 lawgiver 102n.22, 112n.14, 182 negative attributes 17–18 realism about the divine attributes 15–16, 30–2, 76, 161–2 will 20, 20n.22, 58, 112n.14, 123–4 Dort, Synod of 117 Duns Scotus, John 124 eternality 42–3, 53n.18 (see also divine attributes) Euthyphro dilemma 124 evil. See problem of evil expressivism 9–15, 17–18, 21–6, 49–50, 118–20, 128–30, 194–5 definition of 6–7, 11–12 descriptive vs. revisionary expressivism 21 pious expressivism 37–8, 145–6, 199–200 quasi-realism 24–6 faith 168–75, 177–8, 195–6 fear. See passions Frege-Geach problem 25–6 God actions of (see divine actions) attributes of (see divine attributes) definition of 4, 9–10, 32–3, 45–6, 50–1 intrinsic vs. relational character of 60–1, 64–5, 68–73, 81, 122–3, 161–2 reasons to honor God 26–30, 188 (see also worship) goodness 22n.23, 126–7 (see also divine attributes) Hammond, Henry 35–6, 134n.1, 204n.15 Hell 134 Herbert, Edward 192–3 honor 3–4, 10–14, 26, 52, 93–7, 135–6 honor as inward belief in power 12n.6, 93–7, 169–71 honoring as outward act (see worship; argument from the public nature of honoring) interested vs. disinterested honoring 26–8, 30n.31 Hooker, Richard 200–1 Hume, David 21–2, 192–3, 199–200

Huxley, T. H. 175 Hyde, Edward 203–4 iconoclasm 16–17 ideas. See conceptions images mental images as placeholders in thought 71n.12 prohibition in religious worship 33, 86 inconceivability. See divine attributes Independency 7, 133–4, 155–6 infinity 42–3 (see also divine attributes) irreligious interpretations of Hobbes 1–3, 15–16, 30–2, 101–2, 134–5, 199n.7, 203–5, 207–8 (see also atheism) criticisms of 34–6, 140–2, 163–4, 203 John of Damascus 18n.15 Joyner, William 35–6 justice 126 (see also divine attributes) language (see also religious language) deference to ordinary usage 111 expressivism (see expressivism) meaning 12n.6, 62–4, 111 Laudianism. See Anglicanism law 112 civil law 112, 160n.2, 175–7, 184–5 divine law 180, 182 laws governing religious practice 143–7, 184–5, 197, 202 (see also religious coercion) Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 30–2, 121n.24, 199–200 Lichtenberg, Georg 194 Locke, John 86–7 love (see passions) Luther, Martin 117 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 200–1 Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon) 16–17 Martinich, A. P. 125–6, 160n.2, 168n.9 martyrs 145–6 Masoyer-Deshommeaux, Baptiste 204n.14 Mersenne, Marin 30–2, 74n.17, 204n.14 Mill, John Stuart 189 Milton, John 104n.1, 174–5 miracles 137–8, 182 More, Henry 203–4 mysticism 37 names 63 indefinite names 71–2, 88n.12, 161–2 natural piety 34, 96–7, 130–1, 133, 154–5, 171–2, 203

 natural right 113–14 natural theology 14, 22–3, 39, 76–8 (see also religious language) necessity, doctrine of. See determinism negative theology. See religious language Ockham, William of 124 ontological argument 74n.16 panentheism 1–4, 55–6 pantheism 37, 76 Parkin, Jon 203–4 passions 11–12, 84–5, 86n.5, 163–4 fear 47n.13, 66, 82–3, 85–9, 97–101, 163–8 love 82–6, 89–91, 97–101, 165–6 hope 66, 87–9 passions directed toward God 82, 84–6, 101–2, 163–4 philosophy separation from religion. See religion pious expressivism. See expressivism power 26, 28–9, 93 prayer 29–30 adorational vs. petitionary 29–30 problem of evil 92 Pseudo-Dionysius 16–17, 21 quasi-realism. See expressivism. religion. See also worship animism and polytheism 27, 47n.13, 161–2, 185, 189–93, 200–1, 207–8 definitions of 159–62, 166–72 interpretation of folk religion 21–6, 171n.12, 189–93 religion as a virtue 144–5 separation from philosophy 135–6, 140, 143, 156, 195–8 true religion 161–2 religious coercion 179, 182–4, 202 (see also law) religious language 3–4, 21, 37–8, 194–5, 199–200 analogical theory of religious language 6–7, 18–20 language of natural religion 4–5, 9–26, 39, 51–5, 77–8, 103, 194–5 language of revealed religion 5–7, 156–7, 195, 199–200 metonymic religious language 19 negative theology 6–7, 16–18, 62

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ordinary usage of religious language 21–6 pious expressivism (see expressivism) religious persecution. See religious coercion religious toleration 202 revelation 143n.12 Ross, Alexander 104n.1, 160, 161n.4, 203–4 Schneewind, J. B. 125–6 scripture 3, 36–7, 101n.21, 133, 142–50, 157 Hobbes’s readings of scripture 134, 138, 155–7, 197–8 sin 106–11 definition of 112, 115–16, 179–80, 186–7 sin as a privation 115–17 Skinner, Quentin 34 Smith, John 86–7 Stoicism 1–2 substances 66–7, 73–4, 79–80 superstition 160, 166–7, 168n.9, 205–6 supposition 66n.8, 67 Taylor, Jeremy 104n.1 Taylor-Warrender thesis 112n.14 teleological argument 56–9 Templer, John 79–80 Tenison, Thomas 31n.34, 60n.1 Tertullian 79–80 theism 35–6 theistic interpretations of Hobbes 1–4, 35–6, 134–40, 203 Thucydides 158 Traherne, Thomas 86–7 voluntarism 103–4, 123–32 Wallis, John 33, 41–2, 78–9, 149–50 White, Thomas 115n.19 will 11–12, 123n.25, 175–6 (see also divine attributes) Wittgenstein, Ludwig 21–2, 199–200 worship 26–30, 32–3, 59, 95–7, 168–74, 187–9, 200–1 (see also law) arbitrary worship 152–3, 200–2 indifferentism regarding conventional forms of worship 133–6, 152–4, 161, 200–4 natural worship 152–3 (see also natural piety) public worship 135–6, 150–4, 160n.2, 177–8, 184–5 (see also argument from the public nature of honoring)