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HOBBES'S CHANGING ECCLESIOLOGY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2018

ANDREW KENNETH DAY*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
*
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USAandrewday2019@u.northwestern.edu

Abstract

Readers of Hobbes have sought to account for differences between the arguments of his most influential texts. In De cive Hobbes (tepidly) endorsed apostolic structures of spiritual authority, while in Leviathan he at last unleashed his vehement anticlericalism. I argue that these disparities do not reflect an identifiable change in Hobbes's ideas or principles over time. Rather, the political context in which Hobbes composed his treatises drastically altered over the course of his writing career, and the Hobbesian theoretical significance of those contextual developments best accounts for some ecclesiological inconsistencies across his oeuvre. There was, throughout the brief and tumultuous period after the regicide during which Hobbes composed Leviathan, no sovereign power in England to whom he should defer, and consequently he acquired certain liberties that subjects in a civitas forgo. Those included the renewal of his right to wage a ‘war of pens’ against High Anglican episcopal power.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Jeffrey Collins, Daniel Kapust, and Quentin Skinner for their comments on and incisive criticisms of this article. For their generosity, encouragement, and advice, I am especially grateful to Mary Dietz, Loubna El Amine, and above all James Farr.

References

1 ‘For my life is not inconsistent with my writings: / Justice I teach, and justice I cultivate.’ My translation. For Hobbes's texts I use Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, Noel (3 vols., Oxford, 2012)Google Scholar (hereafter Leviathan); Hobbes, Thomas, On the citizen, ed. Tuck, Richard (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar (hereafter DC); and Hobbes, Thomas, English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. Sir Molesworth, William, iv (London, 1969)Google Scholar (hereafter EW).

2 See Skinner, Quentin, ‘Regarding method’, in Visions of politics, i: Regarding method (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 17Google Scholar, for development of this distinction.

3 See e.g. Burgess, Glenn, ‘Usurpation, obligation, and obedience in the thought of the Engagement Controversy’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986), pp. 515–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Skinner, Quentin, ‘Conquest and consent in Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy’, in Visions of politics, iii: Hobbes and civil science (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 281302Google Scholar.

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7 See Quentin Skinner, ‘Motives, intentions, and interpretation’, in Visions of politics, i, pp. 90–102, on this mode of explanation.

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9 DC, p. 216.

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20 See Collins, The allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, pp. 80–1.

21 Nauta, ‘Hobbes on religion and the church between “The element of law” and “Leviathan”: a dramatic change of direction?’, p. 592.

22 DC, p. 223.

23 It is debatable just how ‘unHobbesian’ this dualism is, though certainly it seems a violation of Hobbes's metaphysical monism.

24 Leviathan, pp. 774 and 836.

25 Ibid., p. 854.

26 DC, p. 208.

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31 Collins, The allegiance of Thomas Hobbes.

32 Leviathan, ii, p. 502.

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35 Leviathan, ii, p. 250.

36 Tuck established this likely timeline. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Tuck, p. xi.

37 Although not necessarily. See Tuck, Richard, The sleeping sovereign: the invention of modern democracy (Cambridge, 2016)Google Scholar.

38 See EW, p. 420.

39 Ibid., p. 414.

40 Ibid., p. 417.

41 DC, p. 135.

43 Ibid., p. 13.

44 Ibid., p. 13.

45 Ibid., p. 14.

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50 Leviathan, ii, p. 194.

51 Ibid., iii, p. 708.

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54 DC, p. 5.

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57 DC, p. 15.

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61 Baumgold, ‘The difficulties of Hobbes interpretation’, p. 839.

62 DC, p. 80.

63 Ibid., p. 15.

64 Leviathan, ii, p. 4.

65 Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Tuck, p. x.

66 Leviathan, ii, p. 6.

67 My italics. EW, p. 425.

68 DC, p. 172.

69 Quoted in Tuck, ‘The civil religion of Thomas Hobbes’, p. 126.

70 Collins, Jeffrey, ‘Thomas Hobbes, “father of atheists”’, in Hudson, Wayne, Lucci, Diego, and Wigelsworth, Jeffrey R., eds., Atheism and deism revalued: heterodox religious identities in Britain, 1650–1800 (Farnham, 2014), pp. 2544Google Scholar.

71 Quoted in Leviathan, i, p. 37

72 See Springborg, Patricia, ‘Thomas Hobbes and Cardinal Bellarmine’, History of Political Thought, 16 (1995), pp. 503–31Google Scholar.

73 Leviathan, iii, p. 854.

74 Quoted in ibid., i, p. 96.

75 Ibid., i, p. 99.

76 Webb, Simon, Aubrey's brief lives: omnibus edition (Langley, 2017), p. 160Google Scholar.

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80 DC, p. 96.

81 Ibid., i, p. 2.

82 Tuck, ‘The “Christian atheism” of Thomas Hobbes’, p. 129.

83 Ibid., p. 130.

84 See Collins, Jeffrey, ‘The church settlement of Oliver Cromwell’, History, 87 (2002), pp. 1840CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Collins, The allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, p. 7.

86 Ibid., p. 80.

87 Hobbes similarly criticized Constantine, Charles's analogue, for conceding interpretive authority to Catholic Fathers. See Hobbes, Thomas, Historia ecclesiastica: critical edition, including text, translation, introduction, and notes, ed. Springborg, Patricia (Paris, 2008), p. 403Google Scholar.

88 DC, p. 144.

89 Leviathan, iii, p. 708.

90 Ibid., iii, p. 1139.

91 Tuck, ‘The “Christian atheism” of Thomas Hobbes’, pp. 112–13.

92 Leviathan, iii, p. 1139.

93 Ibid., iii, p. 1139.

94 Hobbes elsewhere used the metaphor of vessels containing faith. See Hobbes, Historia ecclesiastica: critical edition, including text, translation, introduction, and notes, ed. Springborg, p. 403.

95 For an essay on Hobbes's hopes to craft a Christianity conducive to commonwealths, see Sarah Mortimer, ‘Christianity and civil religion in Hobbes's Leviathan’, in Martinich and Hoekstra, eds., The Oxford handbook of Hobbes, pp. 501–19.

96 See Abizadeh, Arash, ‘Hobbes's conventionalist theology, the trinity, and God as an artificial person by fiction’, Historical Journal, 60 (2017), pp. 915–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.