Hobbes, Behemoth, Church-State Relations, and Political Obligation
Filozofski vestnik Volume/Letnik XXIV • Number/Številka 2 • 2003 • 205-222 HOBBES, BEHEMOTH, CHURCH-STATE RELATIONS, AND POLITICAL OBLIGATION J o h a n n R Som m erville This essay is about Hobbes’ ideas on church-state relations and political obli gation, especially as they are expressed in Behemoth. It has been said that Be hemoth “appears to sit oddly with the rest of the Hobbes canon .” 1 A leading purpose o f this essay is to com pare w hat Hobbes says there with the views he propounded in Leviathan, and, indeed, in his other writings. Many of the is sues that Hobbes addresses in Behemoth also feature in other works which he wrote during the last two decades of his life. For example, he discusses the na ture of heresy in Behemoth and also at length in the Appendix to the Latin Leviathan, in his Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws, in An Historical Narration concerning Heresy, and in the Historia Ecclesiastical The latter book is especially close to Behemoth, though it is in Latin verse, not English prose. In some ways, Behemoth can be seen as a continuation of, or a sequel to the Historia. In the Historia, Hobbes chronicles the cheats of power-hungry priests from the earliest times to the Lutheran Reformation. 1 Fritz Levy, “The background of Hobbes’s Behemoth," in Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks, eds., The historical imagination in early modern Britain. History, rhetoric, and fic tion, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1997), 243-66, at 243.
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