![[Thomas Hobbes]](3d066c17.jpg "Thomas Hobbes")
The reading this week is Leviathan parts 3-4; earlier sections of Leviathan are also relevant - especially the definition of religion in chapter 6, the passage on Livy and the cow at the very end of chapter 7, chapter 12 (Of Religion), and chapter 31 (which links the two halves of the book).
Philosophy purports to explain and give meaning to life and the world - or to show that they have no assignable explanation or meaning. It does this by offering reasons and arguments. Religion does the same kinds of things, but in very different ways. Are philosophy and religion compatible? Arguably, if philosophical explanations of things are valid, religious ones are redundant, unconvincing, or false. The relationship between philosophy and religion has interested and puzzled thinkers for centuries. In a Christian context, one fundamental series of questions goes something like this: we know (a Christian might say) that Christianity is true and that pagan religions are false; but how do we know this?; is it because the arguments for Christianity are more rational, better evidenced, and simply more convincing than arguments for other creeds?; if so, then any rational person will opt for Christianity rather than anything else; it follows from this that if people reject Christianity, it either hasn't been properly explained to them, or they haven't reasoned correctly (perhaps they've been unduly swayed by their emotions, and by their attachment to the customs of their country); but it's hardly fair that they be condemned to eternal perdition because they've made mistakes in reasoning; religion surely isn't just a matter of accurate arguing, and people surely don't get saved (or damned) just for being able to reason better than others; what saves is faith in God and obedience to Him, not ability to philosophize about Him; indeed, whether we reason well or badly is surely on its own irrelevant to whether we get saved (though if some moral failing or negligence is the cause of our poor reasoning, that might become relevant).
Different thinkers have taken different stances on the relationship between faith and reason, or between grace and nature. Some have held that reason is more or less irrelevant to (the Christian) religion; things like the existence of God and the divinity of Christ can't be proved or (if they can) the proofs are not known to most believers. What counts is faith - you get saved by having faith in Christ and believing certain doctrines that (as far as you know) are not rationally provable: This idea is known as fideism (from fides - the Latin for faith). One implication of this kind of opinion is that if God tells you to adopt some specific political arrangement then you should do so, however irrational it may seem to be (reason might suggest that we should elect the people who have political power over us, but if the bible says that the godly should rule whether or not they've been elected, then they have every right to do so; this principle is connected with antinomianism and was condemned at the Council of Constance in 1415).
A second approach - adopted in the early modern period by people like Hugo Grotius, various Socinians, and in England by some members of the Tew Circle - stressed the rationality of Christianity: God's existence can be proved and reason also points strongly in the direction of many Christian dogmas. This viewpoint was not so far from that adopted in the Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas, who famously reconciled grace and nature. Aquinas argued that reason could tell us a great deal about ethics and politics, but that faith perfected reason and was needed for salvation. Arguably, the Thomist (adjective from Aquinas) line features in Thomas More.
In the last few decades there has been a lot of debate on where we should fit Hobbes into the discussion outlined above. Hobbes stressed the rational foundations of his political theory, but some commentators have argued that these foundations are themselves underpinned by a belief in God: for instance, Hobbes says that laws have to be commanded by a sovereign; so what makes the laws of nature laws? surely, that God has commanded them. But Hobbes also says that everyone (including anyone who doesn't believe in God) is bound to keep the laws of nature; and this implies that the law of nature obliges independently of God. In some respects Hobbes seems to be a fideist, stressing the gap between faith and reason; in others, he seems to be like Aquinas, Grotius etc., telling us about what reason says on the subject of God. Many of Hobbes' contemporaries thought he was an atheist, but a number of modern scholars have claimed that he was a sincere Christian - perhaps a Lutheran, or maybe a Calvinist (it would be interesting if Calvin and Hobbes agreed!).
Whatever line we end up taking on Hobbes' religious beliefs, we need to explain why he devoted so much space in Leviathan to discussing religion and church-state relations. An important point here is that in the first two parts he claims that he has proved there must an absolute, unlimited, and indivisible sovereign in every state. From this it follows that the church cannot possess power that is independent from the state and its sovereign. Yet a central theme of the last two parts of the book is precisely that churches do not have independent power. Why did Hobbes argue for this at such length in the last half of the book if he had already proved it to his own satisfaction in the first half? One idea is that he spent so much time arguing from Scripture and from religious principles because he was a sincere Christian believer. However, some of the things he says in the last two parts have been seen as pointing in a different direction. Firstly, he is a materialist and applies material explanations to things like spirits and angels in chapter 34; can you be a Christian and a materialist at the same time? Secondly, he is very skeptical about miracles (chapter 37), and about claims that God has revealed his will to people in visions or dreams (chapter 36 and especially chapter 32). Although Hobbes does not spell this out, the last point is potentially very significant indeed, for if we cannot rely on claims by people nowadays to have had a revelation from God, why should we place any more reliance on the similar testimony of some ancient Jews whose claims to have received special communications from God are recorded in the bible. And linked to this is the further question of what is the bible (or Scripture). Why should I treat some and not other books as having special divine authority? Note that there is disagreement between Protestants and Catholics about just what books are canonical and which ones are apocryphal. How are we to resolve such disagreement? What rational grounds can I have for supposing that God inspired the writing of some books? Chapter 33 is highly relevant here.
Some key concepts and distinctions that Hobbes uses in parts 3 and 4 are counsel and command, and belief (or faith) and knowledge. To what uses does he put them? In the last part of Leviathan Hobbes argues that to further their ambitions the clergy have systematically concealed and distorted truths, with devastating effects on science, learning and scholarship. How do his attitudes here prefigure or differ from those characteristic of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century?
Edwin Curley's introduction to his edition of Leviathan (published by Hackett) and sources there cited;
my book on Hobbes, chapters. 5 and esp. 6, and sources there cited;
A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan - claims that Hobbes was an orthodox Calvinist;
Edwin Curley, "Calvin and Hobbes, or Hobbes as an orthodox Christian," Journal of the History of Philosophy, 34(1996):257-71 argues that he was not a Christian.
 |
|---|
|
