Christian Burlesque? Thomas Hobbes's Scriptural Strategies

• In Event: Delimiting the Popular and the Political in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

Just under two-fifths of Thomas Hobbes’s De Cive (On the Citizen) (1642) deals with religious and scriptural issues. In Leviathan (1651), these issues take up more than half of the (longer) book. Much of this space is devoted to entirely new arguments about, for example, hell and the ultimate fate of the soul, the Trinity, and the word of God. These particular additions are especially puzzling. None of them were necessitated by Hobbes’s core philosophical or political arguments. All of them opened Hobbes to pointed criticisms. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon and Hobbes’s former close associate, accused Leviathan of exposing “Religion to the irreverent examination of dissolute persons, and prostitute[ing] the sacred mysteries of our faith.” Hobbes had “traduced the whole Scheme of Christianity into Burlesque.” Bishop Brian Duppa wrote that many of Hobbes’s doctrines were so wild and “unchristianly, that I can scarce have so much charity for him, as to think he was ever a Christian.” These sorts of reactions were widespread. Leviathan’s religious arguments lost Hobbes friends, opened him to condemnation, and eventually led to severe restrictions on what he could publish.

Why did Hobbes choose to assume these risks? Why did he choose to defend arguments that were not philosophically necessary but that were so personally costly? Part of the answer, we argue, can be found in Hobbes’s own statement of his motives. He wrote Leviathan, he says, because he had heard that the king’s enemies were interpreting Royalist defeats as evidence of God’s support for the Parliamentarian cause. Hobbes says that he “could not bear to hear such terrible crimes attributed to the commands of God.” He set his other work aside, determined to write something at once to “absolve the divine laws.” Yet he expressed similar motives when accounting for his decision to write De Cive. So, the addition of so many new and risky arguments to Leviathan cannot be explained by Hobbes’s expressed motives alone. We cannot explain a change with a constant.

Perhaps the changing political context in England may explain some of the developments in Hobbes’s religious arguments. Since Hobbes wrote De Cive, Parliament had abolished the episcopacy (1646) and executed Charles I for treason (1649). This would have opened new opportunities for religious argument. Hobbes thought that subjects are obligated publicly to adhere to religious practices and doctrines dictated by their sovereign. They must not, therefore, publicly advocate any theological or ecclesiastical positions that challenge those of their state. As Richard Tuck notes, with England’s religious settlement “unsettled” by 1651, Hobbes could “debate idiosyncratic interpretations of Scripture without being guilty of publicly disputing the doctrines established by his sovereign.” Hobbes could now “absolve God’s laws” with all the argumentative means at his disposal.

How did Hobbes choose which charges against God’s laws to target? This is the question on which our paper focuses. We know that Hobbes watched political and religious events in England closely from Paris. Hobbes also received (no doubt quite partisan) reports of the polemical arguments against England’s church and King from Prince Charles and other members of the court in exile. Finally, his own statement of his motives for writing Leviathan suggests that the book was a response to sectarian arguments that were inflaming conflict in England.

In our paper, we use computer-assisted text analysis to identify themes in the public discourse of Hobbes’s time and to examine how the prevalence of these themes changes over time. We show that several of Hobbes’s most controversial and unorthodox additions to Leviathan—his arguments about hell and the End of Days, his account of the Trinity, and his critical analysis of the authorship and dating of biblical books—track patterns of popular religious discourse in England. Hobbes focuses on the religious doctrines he does, in spite of the personal risks of doing so, because of their popular political importance.

Our paper makes a scholarly contribution by showing how we can explain Hobbes’s stated purpose in writing Leviathan by recognizing how some of his most puzzling and politically risky arguments track the very specific religious debates that fueled Britain’s bloody civil war. Our paper to makes a methodological contribution by showing how computer-assisted text analysis can give a more comprehensive and precise account of the arguments to which Hobbes was responding.

Authors

• Jacqueline A Basu, Stanford University

• Alison McQueen, Stanford University