An escape from the tension between justice and liberty was provided by Thomas Hobbes's radical renunciation of the ancient idea of a cosmos where human reason has access to indisputable knowledge. In his attack on Aristotelianism, Hobbes ruthlessly spelled out the implications of living in a Christian universe. By pursuing St. Augustine's rejection of the pagan universe to its logical conclusion, Hobbes unequivocally replaced the concern with law as a link to divinity and an instrument of education with a picture of law as man's only resource against violence in a world that has no anchor to indisputable truth. By exploring the postulates and implications of this picture of law, Hobbes defined a new set of questions and opened the modern discussion of law.

His account of law rests on a division of the universe into two wholly separate domains: a world of concrete contingent being, which men inhabit, confronting another wholly alien world of infinite being, God the Creator. This picture of the universe – which explains the novelty in Hobbes's conception of law – is a radical departure from the ancient and medieval conception of human beings as products of matter informed by God's reason. Instead, Hobbes's human being is a creature made by God out of nothing, not according to any pattern, but as God in his infinite power willed. As this God is a Creator, and not an intelligible principle, the reason of man cannot in any way penetrate His ideas.