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Hobbes's Use of the Bible in Leviathan in the Context of The Religious Liberty and Authority: Hobbes’s Use of the Bible in Leviathan in the Context of the English Civil War Takuya Okada UCL Mphil degree 1 I, Takuya Okada, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Abstract It has long been a great riddle why Hobbes expressed his bizarre view about Christian religion in Leviathan. This thesis is a serious attempt to explain it. The procedure followed is, in the first place, to identify the precise nature of arguments distinctive of Leviathan and of the new religious challenges Hobbes faced in Leviathan, and then to connect them with religious issues in the English Civil War. The issues identified are enthusiasm, “the Foole” in Chapter 15, and the toleration controversy. The first context investigated is several rational justifications for the authority of the Bible as a reaction to enthusiasm. Works by William Chillingworth, Edward Leigh, John Goodwin, Seth Ward and Henry Hammond are examined, and the originality of Hobbes’s view on biblical authority in comparison with them is clarified. It lies in Hobbes’s radical scepticism towards all forms of the pretended word of God as his solution to the political threat of enthusiasm, and in the correspondent certainty of his answer, the civil sovereign as the foundation of biblical authority. Clarification has been given of several layers of his scriptural interpretation underlying the conclusion, such as the philological investigation about revelation in the Bible in Chapter 36, the foundation of Moses’s authority in Chapter 40. This conclusion, in turn, lays a theoretical foundation for Hobbes’s eschatology in Chapter 38. The second context examined is the Anglican defences of toleration as part of the toleration controversy most relevant to Leviathan. The possible influence Hobbes and Jeremy Taylor had on each other concerning mutual toleration is shown, together with their originalities compared with Chillingworth. Moreover an explanation is supplied of some arguments specific to Leviathan as Hobbes’s reaction to the general toleration controversy. 3 4 Table of Contents Table of Contents ......................................................................................................... 5 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................... 6 2. Identifying religious contexts relevant to Leviathan ....................................... 21 3. Contexts of Leviathan ....................................................................................... 41 3.1. Controversy over Biblical Authority .......................................................... 41 3.2. Anglican Defences of Toleration ................................................................ 66 4. Leviathan ........................................................................................................... 88 4.1. De Cive and New Principles of Christian Religion in Leviathan ............. 88 4.2. Philological and Epistemological Refutation of the Enthusiasts: Chapter 36 ..................................................................................... 105 4.3. The Foundation of Biblical Authority in Leviathan ................................ 127 4.4. Practical Conclusions about Religious Liberty and Authority in Leviathan ............................................................................................................. 152 5. Conclusion........................................................................................................ 185 6. Bibliography .................................................................................................... 192 5 1. Introduction If our aim is to abandon our own standpoint and to regain that of the ancients, we cannot afford to discard all the elements which seem foreign to our own ways of thinking, any more than the historian of religion can afford to discard as ‘superstition’ beliefs and practices which educated people in the civilized world have outgrown. Rather we should fix attention on elements which strike us strange and unaccountable. We may find in them a clue to the attitude of mind we are trying to recover.1 Ⅰ Leviathan, written by Thomas Hobbes and first published in 1651, is today recognized as one of the classical works in social and political thought. The state of nature and the construction of the state through contracts, in particular, are renowned and often referred to. However, the latter half of Leviathan, Parts 3 and 4, where Hobbes treated Christian religion, is much less read or known.2 One modern edition of Leviathan omitting some of the 1 Francis Macdonald Cornford, Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought, ed. W. K. C. Guthrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 5. 2 The title of Part 2, “OF COMMONWEALTH” changes into “OF A CHRISTIAN COMMONWEALTH” in Part 3. Lev, 17: 254, 32: 576. The abbreviations for Hobbes’s works are as follows: EL: Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1969). References are to part, chapter, and section. DC: De Cive: The Latin Version Entitled in the First Edition Elementorvm philosophiæ sectio tertia de cive, and in Later Editions Elementa philosophica de cive, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). References are usually to chapter and section, but as with the editorial and supplementary materials, to page number. Unless otherwise mentioned, the following translation is used in the quotation. On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Lev: Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012). As for the text of Leviathan, references are given to chapter and page number, (e.g. Lev, 12: 174 refers to chapter 12 of Leviathan at p. 174 of this edition), but 6 arguments about Christian religion in it illustrates this.3 This situation indicates that the religious argument in Leviathan is hard to comprehend for a reader today. Even among scholars of Hobbes, it has frequently and long been described as “bizarre,” “idiosyncratic,” or “eccentric.”4 The aim of this thesis, therefore, is to explain why Hobbes developed the bizarre religious argument found only in Leviathan. Compared with Hobbes’s earlier works of political philosophy, The Elements of Law and De Cive, the idiosyncratic characteristic peculiar to Leviathan lies in the addition of new and utterly unconventional interpretations of the Scriptures. The enlargement of the scriptural interpretation means undermining one of the merits of De Cive, its brevity, in spite of the fact that even in Leviathan Hobbes still found some value in shortness.5 Moreover, probably what is most puzzling about the new interpretation in Leviathan concerns the difficulty with understanding its specific political relevance. Certainly, Hobbes’s own account in his Latin verse autobiography suggests the religious situation in the English Civil War as the background of Leviathan, by associating his writing of Leviathan with divine law and with the arrival of as with the introduction of this edition, references are given without abbreviations in the same way as other articles or books. 3 Leviathan, ed. Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 4 “It is still far from clear exactly what Hobbes was up to in systematically rewriting Christianity in such a radical, and occasionally downright bizarre fashion.” Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England, 1640-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 92; Richard Tuck, "The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes," in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 128; Nicholas D. Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity: A Quarrel of the Civil Wars and Interregnum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 164; Frank Lessay, "Hobbes's Protestantism," in Leviathan after 350 Years, ed. Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 266; Patricia Springborg, "Leviathan and the Problem of Ecclesiastical Authority," Political Theory 3, no. 3 (1975): 289, 97. 5 Lev, 31: 574. 7 Prince Charles in Paris, where Hobbes lived at that time.6 Nevertheless, it has still been a great riddle why it was necessary for Hobbes to write another work on theologico-political problem, Leviathan, despite the publication in 1647 of De Cive, which already included some religious arguments and interpretation of the Scriptures; in addition, the difference of the political conclusions about religious matters between the two works was not, at first sight, great enough to justify enlarging the religious and interpretative argument so expansively. In the case of Part 4 of Leviathan, Hobbes specified, at least to some extent, his political adversaries: Presbyterians, Catholics, and to a much smaller extent Anglicans. However, as for Part 3, it is not clear even what type of political adversaries and arguments Hobbes had in mind and was responding to with the new discussions presented there. As a result, while in Part 3 there are a number of arguments specific to Leviathan, their political significance remains unclear. Therefore, this thesis will mainly focus on the religious argument peculiar to Leviathan, especially Part 3. Examining The
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