Leviathan

Having established the mechanisms and reasoning behind commonwealths in general, Hobbes now sets out to establish the contours of a Christian commonwealth. As such, he goes to great lengths to reconcile the often conflicted relationship between a civil sovereign’s power and God’s power. Given Hobbes’s rejection of the divine right of kings, this poses something of a challenge. To find ways to justify why sovereigns are at once elevated through a covenant with human subjects rather than God and yet also worthy of the same worship Christians pay to God, Hobbes provides a rigorous exegesis of the Old and New Testaments to support his claims. So while Part 1 reads mostly like a work of philosophy, and Part 2 like a political pamphlet, Part 3 reads like scriptural analysis or even literary criticism.

One of the biggest components of this argument is Hobbes’s claim that the kingdom of God, as understood in both the Bible and by contemporary Christians, exists on Earth. Because it is an earthly or temporal kingdom and not a spiritual one, its leader is a civil sovereign. Hobbes writes:

All the earth, as is said in the text, is God’s; but all the earth is not called holy, but that only which is set apart for his especial service, as was the nation of the Jews. It is therefore manifest enough by this one place that by the kingdom of God is properly meant a Commonwealth, instituted (by the consent of those which were to be subject thereto) for their civil government and the regulating of their behaviour, not only towards God their king, but also towards one another in point of justice, and towards other nations both in peace and war (274).

By this logic, Hobbes argues that while the Jews worshipped God as their deity, they obeyed Moses as their civil sovereign. This persisted through the ages, from high priests to properly named Jewish kings. Yet Hobbes does not consider Jesus a king in the proper sense, even though he literally quotes a biblical passage referring to Jesus as such. He tries to remedy this confusion by arguing that while Jesus will be a king upon his second coming, he is not yet a king of the temporal world during his lifetime. As evidence of this, Hobbes makes a great deal out of Jesus’s counseling of his followers to pay taxes to Caesar, thus upholding the civil laws of the land. His purpose for doing so, it would seem, is to anoint Emperor Tiberius—known in the Bible by the honorific “Caesar”—as a civil sovereign worthy of obedience, though he is what Hobbes and other contemporary Christians would call a heathen.

Yet Catholics and Protestants, both in Hobbes’s time and today, draw dramatically different interpretations from Jesus’s “Render unto Caesar” quote. Both groups view the quote as evidence that civil or temporal power is distinct from spiritual power. Catholics, however—or at least those who follow the Gelasian doctrine of the fifth century—believe that spiritual priestly power is superior to earthly civil power. Thus, they believe the pope must not be subordinated to civil sovereigns in matters pertaining to the spiritual. Protestants, on the other hand, tend to favor the separation of church and state, a concept credited to John Locke. Hobbes takes things a step further. In his view, because power must be absolute and undivided, there can be no spiritual or papal power aside from that which is allowed by the sovereign.

From this, the reader begins to see that Hobbes’s true aim in situating civil sovereigns as God’s top lieutenants is to strike a broadside against the Catholic Church. Although various territories of Prussia were the first to formally adopt Protestant faiths at the state level, by the 17th century England was at the center of the Protestant Reformation, particularly with respect to the relationship between civil and papal power. In 1534, just 17 years after Martin Luther famously nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the castle church door, the Church of England renounced papal authority and formally separated from the Catholic Church. This came about after Pope Clement VII refused to grant English King Henry VIII an annulment from Catherine of Aragorn so he could marry Anne Boleyn. Aside from arguably sordid circumstances regarding the separation, Hobbes would argue that as civil sovereign, Henry VIII had absolute authority to assert his superior position of authority over any religious leaders of the Catholic Church, up to and including the pope.

Yet in going to such lengths to use scripture to justify his civil and political philosophies, Hobbes commits acts of rhetoric that many of his contemporaries—Catholic or otherwise—deemed heretical. Given Hobbes’s clear belief in Jesus Christ as the holy savior of humanity, it may seem ludicrous to modern readers to learn that Hobbes was frequently branded an atheist. For example, Anglican theologian John Bramhall—no friend to Roman Catholics—wrote in his response to Hobbes titled The Catching of Leviathan that the teachings found in Leviathan were likely to lead readers down to path to atheism. To this, Hobbes responded that “atheism, impiety, and the like are words of the greatest defamation possible,” proving that at least in public, Hobbes took his Christianity seriously. (Hobbes, Thomas. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury; Now First Collected and Edited by Sir William Molesworth. London: Bohn. 1839-45.)

Yet given that “atheism” was commonly used to refer to believers in God who nevertheless held views contrary to accepted Christian doctrine, the accusation is not entirely unwarranted. Regardless of the rigor with which Hobbes presents his biblical exegesis, one cannot ignore that he interprets scripture in a way that supports his own theoretical conclusions, which he admits come from nature and reason. So by refusing to either separate natural knowledge from religion or make it subordinate to religion, Hobbes effectively renders the Bible into nothing more than another piece of evidence in his grand theory of the natural world, a fairly clear example of heresy, at least in his era. Many argue this is why Hobbes’s political philosophy is so much more influential than his scientific philosophy, at least compared to that of his contemporary Robert Boyle of the Royal Society, who kept science and religion separate.

Therefore, the contradiction between obeying God and obeying a civil sovereign remains for many readers, no matter how many details Hobbes cherry-picks from scripture. Indeed, 21st-century scholars still fiercely debate the sincerity of Hobbes’s belief in God, or at the very least his sincere belief that his philosophy can be reconciled with scripture. In a journal article in History of Political Thought, historian Greg Forster sums up each side of the argument:

One side claims that the natural-law doctrine of Leviathan cannot work without a sincere belief in God, and Leviathan’s theology is sincerely intended to support it. The other side insists that the natural-law doctrine is intended to replace religious ethics and that the theology is insincere. (Forster, Greg. “Divine Law and Human Law in Hobbes’s Leviathan.” History of Political Thought. Summer 2003.)

Unfortunately, Forster cannot provide a clear answer as to which camp is correct, probably because the question is more complicated than this binary argument makes it out to be. He concludes that while the arguments made by the “insincerity” camp are inadequate, Hobbes’s interpretation of scripture is flawed in that there is nothing in the Bible to support his claim that the first natural law of self-preservation is tantamount to God’s law. In other words, to evaluate the sincerity of Hobbes’s belief in God by his theological writing is to presume too much about the internal life of a man who has been dead for over 300 years. At the same time, the reconciliation Hobbes attempts to strike between scripture and his own theory of civil covenants is, at the very least, questionable.