Christian Burlesque?

Thomas Hobbes’s Scriptural Strategies

Jackie Basu and Alison McQueen Stanford University APT 2019

[Leviathan] introduces a corruption of manners in the minds of men, and exposes Religion to the irreverent examination of dissolute persons, and prostitutes the sacred mysteries of our Faith, the Incarnation of our blessed Lord and Saviour, the Trinity, the Sacraments, the precious pledges of our Salvation, to a Philosophical and Mathematical inquisition; and under the notion of translating proper and significant words and terms, in the understanding whereof all Learned men have agreed, into vulgar and common Language, which no terms of any Art ever admitted, hath in truth traduced the whole Scheme of Christianity into Burlesque, and rais’d conceptions of it, very much inferiour to the sublime importance of that profession which must carry us to Heaven. -Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon1

[Leviathan is] a farrago of all the maddest divinity that ever was read, and having destroyed Trinity, Heaven, Hell, may be allowed to compare ecclesiastical authority to the kingdom of fairies. -Henry Hammond2

[Hobbes] doth not conform his notions to Scripture, but wrests it, and makes it to speak that which God never intended. -George Lawson3

Introduction

Thomas Hobbes devotes more space to religion in Leviathan than he does in any of his previous political works. Many of his theological arguments and scriptural interpretations are entirely new to Leviathan. They were also controversial. Hobbes’s new arguments about the nature of hell, the Trinity, and the authorship of the Bible gave new fodder to his enemies and new

1 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and Pernicious Errors to Church and State, in Mr. Hobbes’s book, entitled Leviathan (London, 1676), 200 2 Henry Hammond to Matthew Wren (1651), in “Illustrations of the State of the Church During the Great Rebellion,” The Theologian and the Ecclesiastic 9 (1850), 294-5. 3 George Lawson, An Examination of the Political Part of Mr. Hobbs his Leviathan (London, 1657), 161.

2 fears to his friends. As the forces of orthodoxy gathered strength, Hobbes would be accused of heresy, largely on the basis of these new arguments. Yet none of these new arguments are philosophically necessary—they are neither necessitated by Hobbes’s materialism nor required to bolster his case for absolutism. So, why did Hobbes add this new material? Why did he risk so much to make these controversial new arguments?

For analytic interpreters of Hobbes, these questions rarely arise. Analytic philosophers tend to focus on the secular philosophical arguments for absolutism in the first half of the book.

On their view, Hobbes’s religious arguments are there merely to confirm that the philosophical arguments are compatible with Christian doctrine.4 When we read Hobbes today, they suggest, we can treat the scriptural arguments as a sideshow to the philosophical main attraction.5 Yet, as we shall see, this interpretation is at odds with Hobbes’s own statement about his motives, which foregrounds the religious aims of the work.

For Straussian interpreters, Hobbes’s religious arguments are mere cover for atheism. On this view, Hobbes’s atheism can be inferred from a close reading of his philosophical and theological arguments.6 Recognizing that these beliefs were likely to open him up to persecution,

Hobbes used the scriptural arguments in the second half of Leviathan as a kind of rhetorical shield.

4 For instance, see: David P. Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 178-9; Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 362-3; John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard/Belknap Press, 2007), 25-9. 5 Two exceptions to this analytic trend are A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); S.A. Lloyd, Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 6 Edwin Curley, “‘I Durst Not Write So Boldly’ Or How to Read Hobbes’s Theological-Political Treatise,” in Hobbes e Spinoza: Scienza e Politica, ed. Daniela Bostrenghi (Naples, 1992), 512, 572-93; Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1950), 198-99; Leo Strauss, “On the Basis of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” in What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Chicago, 1988), 170-96.

Charges of atheism were a serious matter in the seventeenth century, and many thinkers went to great lengths to conceal their true views. But it is not clear that Hobbes was one of these thinkers. If he were, he would have remained silent on controversial issues or stuck to very conventional arguments. He did neither. He publicly defended highly inflammatory views on the most fraught debates of the day—on the fate of the soul, the nature of hell, and the kingdom of

God.7 He knew these arguments were “mostly [likely to] offend,” but he made them anyway in order to refute those who would “impugne the Civill Power.”8

Both analytic and Straussian readers of Hobbes share a tendency to focus almost entirely on Leviathan. And this is a tendency shared by other leading contemporary Hobbes scholars, such as Aloysius Martinich and Sharon Lloyd, who do see the religious arguments of Leviathan as central to the philosophical aims of the work.9 While their attention to Hobbes’s engagement with scripture is welcome, Martinich and Lloyd do not consider what we might learn about Hobbes’s religious arguments by comprehensively examining the ways in which they change over time.

Hobbes’s religious and scriptural arguments evolve markedly over the course of his major political works—Elements of Law (1640), De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651). The changes

7 See also Lloyd, Ideals as Interests, pp. 17-18; Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 44-45. 8 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), dedication, 4-6. All subsequent citations to Leviathan will take the following form: L [chapter], [page(s)]. Of course, to show that Hobbes was more willing to risk persecution than the covering interpretation allows is not to suggest that he was not an atheist or that he did not have other reasons for concealing his beliefs. Hobbes argued that subjects should not publicly advocate positions that challenge those of the sovereign and that subjects are obligated publicly to adhere to religious practices and affirmations dictated by the sovereign. See L 46, 1100-2 and L 31, 570, respectively. Because the existence of God was part of the public theology of Hobbes’s England, his principles committed him to affirming it, regardless of his own private beliefs. See Arash Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology, the Trinity, and God as an Artificial Person by Fiction,” Historical Journal 60, no. 4 (2017), 917; Kinch Hoekstra, “Tyrannus Rex vs. Leviathan,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2001), 434; Kinch Hoekstra, “The de Facto Turn in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” in Leviathan after 350 Years, eds. Tom Sorrell and Luc Foisneau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 54. 9 Martinich, Two Gods of Leviathan; Lloyd, Ideals as Interests. Neither focuses on the deeply polemical (as opposed to philosophical) nature of the project of absolving God’s laws.

4 from De Cive to Leviathan are especially stark. Hobbes devotes much more space to scriptural arguments across these texts. He amends some of his earlier arguments and vastly expands others.

Intellectual historians, like Richard Tuck and Jeffrey Collins, who take seriously Hobbes’s stated aim to respond to the political and religious disputes of the English Civil War, have started attending to the changes in Hobbes’s scriptural arguments. However, as we will argue in section

1, their efforts have tended to be narrowly focused on changes in Hobbes’s arguments about church-state relations.

We agree with Tuck and Collins that attending to changes in Hobbes’s religious arguments gives us a fuller picture of his aims and strategies. We depart from these interpreters in casting our net more broadly to systematically identify the full range of changes that Hobbes makes.

Hobbes tells us that he began writing Leviathan in Paris after he got news from the young prince

Charles and his entourage that the king’s enemies were interpreting recent 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.”10 So, Hobbes began writing

10 Thomas Hobbes, “Vita [Verse],” in Opera Philosophica Quae Latine Scripsit Omnia, ed. William Molesworth, vol. 1 (London, 1939), xcii. I adopt Quentin Skinner’s translation here. See: Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 330–31. Noel Malcolm has argued that we ought not to take Hobbes’s statement about the circumstances of Leviathan’s composition “at face value.” Hobbes’s account of his motivations occurs in his verse and prose autobiographies, both composed in the 1670s. Evidence from his correspondence and that of his close friends suggest that he did not begin concerted work on Leviathan in 1646, but rather three years later. Malcolm argues that after the Restoration, Hobbes’s “dominant motive was to show that he had always been a consistent and passionately loyal defender of the Stuart monarchy. The suggestion… that his concern to refute the claims of the rebels was somehow linked to the arrival of the Prince in Paris is thus open to some doubt.” Noel Malcolm, Introduction, vol. 1 of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 10-11. See also: Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 18-20. That Hobbes might, writing years later, have fudged the precise chronology of his work on Leviathan is quite plausible. That his account of his motivations was clouded by a desire to establish his royalist credentials with the restored Stuarts is less so. The consistency between his account of his motivations in the preface of De Cive and those he retrospectively expressed about Leviathan point against the retrospective fudging of his motivations. Also, Hobbes’s desire to curry favor with Charles II was uneven, at best. As Kinch Hoekstra notes, Hobbes presented the restored king with a copy of Leviathan, “a work which concludes with a doctrine of de facto

Leviathan in response to broad patterns in public discourse, reported to him by visitors. The influence of such broad patterns of public discourse on a thinker’s writing is inherently hard to track. We would not, for instance, expect to see a thinker cite particular sources for these discourses or use overlapping wording. After all, he may not have enough granular information to associate particular authors or phrases with specific arguments. He just has a broad thematic sense of what is being said in his country. This is the sort of broad sense that Hobbes himself suggests he had of the religious discourse in England.

Taking his own remarks as our starting point, we consider the changes he made to the religious arguments in Leviathan in light of changing patterns of public discourse in mid- seventeenth-century England. In order to do this, we use automated text analysis to identify broad themes in public discourse and to examine the prevalence of these themes over time. Our method allows to capture patterns at the same scale at which they would have been reported to Hobbes in

Paris. We find that three of Hobbes’s most puzzling and controversial 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. [This version of the paper only includes discussions of hell and the End of Days, and the Trinity. A future version will include a discussion of Hobbes’s critical assessment of biblical authorship in light of popular discussions about the word of God].

The paper proceeds as follows. In section 1, we identify the full range of changes that

Hobbes made to the religious arguments in Leviathan and evaluate influential explanations for these changes by Richard Tuck and Jeffrey Collins. In sections 2 and 3, we describe our textual

legitimation anathema to most royalists… Even if Hobbes miscalculated the reception, it was not the miscalculation of one who was trying to curry favor by espousing principles he thought would be pleasing to his patrons.” Hoekstra, “Tyrannus Rex vs. Leviathan,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82, no. 3–4 (2001): 445, n. 66.

6 corpus and our approach to the empirical analysis of a large corpus of seventeenth-century English texts. In section 4, we present our results and our interpretation. Section 5 concludes.

1. From De Cive to Leviathan: Contextualist Explanations

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.11 What does Hobbes use this extra space in Leviathan to accomplish?

In some cases, he amends arguments that he had made in De Cive.12 For example, while in both De Cive and Leviathan Hobbes concludes that a Christian commonwealth and a church are the same entity, his arguments for this conclusion differ in the two works. In De Cive, the political upshot is that the sovereign is head of the church but does not necessarily represent it or speak on its behalf. In Leviathan, the sovereign represents and speaks on behalf of the church, just as the sovereign speaks on behalf of the commonwealth.13

In other cases, Hobbes expands arguments from De Cive. For example, he develops his treatments of Abraham, Moses, and Christ as political figures. Chapter 40 of Leviathan (“Of the rights of the Kingdom of God, in Abraham, Moses, the High Priests; and the Kings of Judah”)

11 These calculations are done using rough word counts. In order to come up with these figures, I have classed the following chapters as dealing with scriptural and religious questions in the two works: 4, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18 in De Cive and 12, 31-47 in Leviathan. 12 The work of pin-pointing places of change and continuity in Hobbes’s major political works has been made much easier by Deborah Baumgold’s three-text edition of these works. Deborah Baumgold (ed.), Three-Text Edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Political Theory: The Elements of Law, De Cive and Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 13 Compare: Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen (De Cive), ed. Richard Tuck, trans. Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chapter 17, sections 19-22, pp. 219-22 with Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chapter 39, pp. 730-34. All subsequent references are to these editions. Future references to De Cive will take the following form: DCv [chapter].[section], [page(s)]. Future references to Leviathan will take the following form: L [chapter], [page(s)]. For an analysis of the changes in Hobbes’s church-state identity thesis, see Johan Olsthoorn, “The Theocratic Leviathan: Hobbes’s Arguments for the Identity of Church and State,” in Hobbes on Politics and Religion, eds. Laurens van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 20-28.

7 recycles much of the material from chapter 16 of De Cive (“Of His government by the old covenant”). Both chapters discuss the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants, as well as the political and spiritual authority wielded by Abraham and Moses over the Israelites. However, in Leviathan,

Hobbes develops his discussion in important ways. In De Cive, he argues that Abraham’s subjects did not sin in obeying him as their civil sovereign. In Leviathan, Hobbes adds the stronger claim that they were obligated to obey Abraham and were justifiably subject to punishment if they did not.14 In De Cive, Hobbes argues that the Sinai covenant inaugurated a Kingdom of God on earth.

In Leviathan, Hobbes adds an argument that Moses’s authority derives from the consent of the

Israelites.15 In Leviathan, Hobbes is also at greater pains to stress the authority that Moses wielded over the prophets.16 We see a similar pattern in Hobbes’s discussions of Christ in the two works.

He recycles much of the material from De Cive, but also adds to his treatment of Christ as a political figure (his office, his kingdom, and his consistency with worldly law).17

Most strikingly, Hobbes adds a wealth of entirely new material to Leviathan. His most substantial additions include the following:

• A naturalistic account of the origins of religion (chapter 12);

• A discussion of the principles of Christian politics: their sources, the role of reason in

apprehending them, and the means through which God conveys them (chapter 32);

• A critical analysis of the Bible that questions standard accounts of the authorship and dating

of some of its books (chapter 33);

• An examination of the nature of angels and the composition of spiritual beings (chapter

34);

14 Compare DCv 16.6-7, 190-91 with L 40, 736-38. 15 Compare DCv 16.8-9, 191-92 with L 40, 738-40. 16 Compare DCv 16.13, 195-96 with L 40, 742-46. 17 Compare DCv 17.1-4, 203-4 with L 41, 760-72.

• A discussion of the content of the word of God and a critical assessment of prophetic

authority (chapter 36);

• An analysis of the causes, frequency, and purpose of miracles (chapter 37);

• A revisionist account of heaven, hell, and the ultimate fate of the soul (chapters 38 and

parts of 44);

• A systematic and lengthy refutation of arguments for autonomous ecclesiastical authority

that includes a highly unorthodox interpretation of the Trinity (chapter 42);

• And a multi-chapter examination of religious and scriptural error and those who benefit

from its continued promulgation (chapters 44-47).18

What accounts for these striking changes? Hobbes’s expressed intentions in making his religious and scriptural arguments remained relatively constant between De Cive and Leviathan.

In the preface to the revised edition of De Cive (1647), he says that he was compelled to write the work because “it happened that my country, some years before the civil war broke out, was already seething with questions of the right of Government and the due obedience of citizens, forerunners to the approaching war.” Among those arguing against the sovereign authority of Charles I were preachers, confessors, and casuists who tried to show that their rebellious doctrines “were consistent with the Word of God.” Hobbes wrote De Cive, at least in part, to “show that the right of sovereigns over citizens…is not in conflict with the holy Scriptures.”19 As we saw in the introduction to the paper, Hobbes later gave a very similar account of his motives for writing

18 While occasional sentences and isolated paragraphs in chapters 12, 33, 34, 36, and 42 of Leviathan recycle material from De Cive (and sometimes from Elements of Law), the overwhelming bulk of these chapters is entirely new material. All of the material in chapters 32, 37-38, and 44-47 is entirely new. 19 DCv preface,12.

Leviathan. After hearing about the religious arguments swirling among Parliamentarians in

England, he resolved to “absolve the divine laws” of the charge that they justified rebellion. 20

The changes in Hobbes’s arguments across these two works cannot, then, be easily explained by change in his expressed motives.

Some have tried to explain these changes instead by a change in Hobbes’s political and religious allegiances. Richard Tuck argues that Hobbes moves from conventional Royalist

Anglican positions in Elements of Law and De Cive to an outright attack on clerical power in

Leviathan. The reason for this change, Tuck argues, is that Britain’s political situation had changed dramatically by the time Hobbes wrote Leviathan. Episcopacy had been abolished and the king had been executed. Hobbes now had an opportunity to shape a new political and religious settlement.21

Jeffrey Collins accepts much Tuck’s contextualization of the changes to Hobbes’s arguments, but contests the characterization of the changes themselves. He also points out— rightly—that Tuck’s account rests heavily on one or two passages, which are at odds with the dominant thrust of Hobbes’s arguments.22 Collins argues that Hobbes’s hostility to entrenched clerical power was clear even in his earlier works, but that it deepened over time. As the political and religious situation evolved in England during the 1640s, argues Collins, Hobbes’s motive to defend civil sovereignty against its clerical challengers increasingly allied him with

20 Hobbes, “Vita [Verse],” xcii. 21 Richard Tuck, “The ‘Christian Atheism’ of Thomas Hobbes,” in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, eds. Michael Hunter and David Wootton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 111-30; Richard Tuck, “The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes,” in Political Discourses in Early Modern Britain, eds. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 120-38. 22 Jeffrey Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: University Press, 2005), 67-9

Parliamentarians seeking a new religious settlement. By the time he wrote Leviathan, Collins argues, Hobbes found his closest bedfellows were the Cromwellian Independents.23

For Collins, this shift in Hobbes’s allegiance explains his apparent endorsement of

Independency in Leviathan—an endorsement that seems puzzling, given his persistent worries about the destabilizing potential of religious pluralism.24 The main weakness of Collins’s position is that it rests heavily on a single ambiguous passage.25 If read as an endorsement of Independency, the passage is at odds with the dominant thrust of Hobbes’s arguments in Leviathan and his later condemnations of the Independents.26 Finally, while Collins’s argument may account for

Hobbes’s vastly expanded refutation of arguments for ecclesiastical authority in Leviathan, it does not fully account for the other changes in his theological arguments.27

Yet Collins is surely right that the changing political context in England explains 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 up 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,

23 Independents advocated multiple, free-standing congregations, as opposed to a uniform national church. The Erastian Independents, with whom Collins argues Hobbes allied himself, supported a national church structure and state-training of clergy, on the one hand, and the devolution of governance decisions and choice of ministers to local congregations, on the other. 24 For Hobbes’s apparent endorsement of Independency, see L 47, 1116. 25 For doubts about whether the passage is a clear endorsement of Independency, see: Arash Abizadeh, “The Radical Hobbes,” Political Theory 37, no. 5 (2009): 709; Teresa Bejan, “Difference without Disagreement: Rethinking Hobbes on “Independency” and Toleration,” Review of Politics 78, no. 1 (2016): 2-6; Alan Cromartie, “Review of Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 58, no. 3 (2007): 580; James Farr, “Atomes of Scripture: Hobbes and the Politics of Biblical Interpretation,” in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed. Mary G. Dietz (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1990): 189. 26 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), 414-15; Johann Sommerville, “Hobbes and Independency,” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 59, no. 1 (2004): 170. 27 At times, Collins suggests that Hobbes’s theological positions (e.g. on hell) simply matured. Collins, Allegiance, 31. But he gives no account of what prompted this.

11 therefore, publicly advocate any theological or ecclesiastical positions that challenge those of their state.28 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.”29 He could now “absolve God’s laws” with all the argumentative means at his disposal.

How did Hobbes know which charges against God’s laws to target? He watched political and religious events in England closely from Paris. For instance, in a 1641 letter to William

Cavendish, Hobbes reveals that he was following Parliament’s efforts to dismantle the episcopacy and had read a copy of an anti-episcopal petition.30 Given Hobbes’s intense interest in political events in Britain, we can safely assume he read other petitions and pamphlets as well. But, as we have already seen, 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.31 Hobbes characterizes these as broad reports of public discourse. Finally, Hobbes’s own statement of his motives for writing Leviathan suggests that the book was a response to sectarian arguments that were inflaming conflict in England.32

28 See L 31, 570 and L 46, 1110-12, respectively. See also: Arash Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology, the Trinity, and God as an Artificial Person by Fiction,” Historical Journal 60, no. 4 (2017), 917; Hoekstra, “Tyrannus Rex vs. Leviathan,” 434; Kinch Hoekstra, “The de Facto Turn in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” in Leviathan after 350 Years, eds. Tom Sorrell and Luc Foisneau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 54. 29 Richard Tuck, “The ‘Christian Atheism’ of Thomas Hobbes,” in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, eds. Michael Hunter and David Wootton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 128. 30 Thomas Hobbes, “Letter to William Cavendish, third Earl of Devonshire, from Paris (1641),” in The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 1, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 120. 31 Hobbes, “Vita [Verse],” xcii. 32 While we think that Hobbes’s choice of targets was determined by his (partial and mediated) sense of popular discourse in England, it is no doubt true that the particular arguments in pursuing these targets were influenced by thinkers and ideas on the Continent and within his particular circles in Paris. Our paper is simply focused more on explaining ends (Hobbes’s targets), rather than means (the particular sources of his arguments).

2. The Textual Corpus

We chart these patterns by examining a textual corpus drawn from the Thomason Tracts, a collection of over 22,000 texts printed between 1641 and 1661 in England and held at the British

Library. Collected by the seventeenth-century London bookseller, George Thomason, the collection consists of pamphlets, newspapers, broadsides, and books from the English Civil War and Protectorate Periods. Popular printing flourished in this period because of the breakdown of state and church censorship in the early 1640s. Thomason’s collection is a record of the momentous effects of this change. The works range from scholarly tracts, including some of Hobbes’s own, to popular sermons and local reports. While the entire collection has been digitized as images, the

Text Collection Partnership (TCP) is still in the process of digitizing the collection as fully searchable text. This work is necessarily slow. Due to variation in early modern printing, these materials cannot be digitized through optical character recognition (OCR), but must instead be manually transcribed.

At the time we began our analysis, 9164 texts from the corpus had been digitized as searchable text. These digitized texts form our corpus. How representative is this corpus of the

Thomason Tracts as a whole? TCP has not prioritized the digitization of texts from any particular period or by authors with any particular political or religious affiliations. Early in its digitization efforts, the TCP prioritized attributed works, biasing the digitized corpus somewhat against anonymous works. They have now remedied this problem. When we began our work, the proportion of works by anonymous authors that had been digitized as searchable text (54%) exceeded the proportion of total works digitized (42%). The TCP has consistently prioritized the digitization of shorter works (broadsides and pamphlets of five pages or fewer). This means that longer and serial works are underrepresented in our corpus.

3. Empirical Analysis

In order to identify topics (or themes) in this corpus, we used a probabilistic topic model that employs latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to derive word clusters.33 LDA does this by “using a generative statistical process that begins by assuming that each document in a collection of documents is constructed from a mix of some set of possible topics. The model then assigns high probabilities to words and sets of words that tend to co-occur in multiple contexts across the corpus.”34 This is an unsupervised model, which means that we did not specify in advance which themes to look for. The model “discovers” the themes by collecting “distributions of co-occurring words” and then returning them “in a manner that allows us to examine, assess, interpret, and intuit what they all have in common, that is, their shared theme.”35

These methods have been used by social scientists examining political texts,36 literary scholars working with large corpora of poetry and novels,37 and historians analyzing trends in newspaper articles.38 However, with one exception, these methods have not been used by political theorists or historians of political thought.39 We think these methods can be very useful for

33 David M. Blei, Andrew Y. Ng, Michael I. Jordan, “Latent Dirichlet Allocation,” Journal of Machine Learning Research 3 (2003): 993-1022; Thomas L. Griffiths and Mark Steyvers, “Finding Scientific Topics,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 101 (April 6, 2004): 5228-35; Mark Steyvers and Thomas L. Griffiths, “Probabilistic Topic Models,” in Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis, eds. Thomas K. Landauer, Danielle S. McNamara, Simon Dennis, and Walter Kintsch (Mahwah, NJ: Edrlbaum, 2007), 427-48. 34 Matthew L. Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 123. 35 Jockers, Macroanalysis, 123. 36 Justin Grimmer and Brandon Stewart, “Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts,” Political Analysis 21, no. 3 (2013), 267-97. 37 Jockers, Macroanalysis; Lisa Rhody, “Topic Modeling and Figurative Language,” Journal of Digital Humanities 2, no. 1 (2012), http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-1/topic-modeling-and-figurative-language-by-lisa-m-rhody/ 38 David Newman and Sharon Block, “Probabilistic Topic Decomposition of an Eighteenth-Century American Newspaper,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 57, no. 6 (2006): 753-67. 39 Lisa Blaydes, Justin Grimmer, and Alison McQueen, “Mirrors for Princes and Sultans: Advice on the Art of Governance in the Medieval Christian and Islamic Worlds,” Journal of Politics 80, no. 4 (2018): 1150-67.

14 contextualist historians of political thought. These scholars seek to understand the contexts in which important works were produced. In reconstructing these contexts, interpreters examine other political works of the period, as well as popular writings, like pamphlets, newspapers, and sermons.40 Given the sheer volume of contextual materials, particularly for thinkers writing in the early modern period onward, it can be challenging for interpreters to recognize general trends. We think that computer-assisted methods like topic modelling are well-suited to help contextualist scholars overcome this challenge. These methods are not a replacement for close textual reading.

Rather, they complement it. They allow us better to contextualize core political texts by drawing our attention to trends and patterns that we might otherwise miss.

3.1 Data collection and preparation

We obtained our corpus of mid-seventeenth-century English texts through Stanford

University’s Social Science Data and Software group. We also collected metadata for each text, including a) author; b) document title; c) publication year; d) city of publication; e) unique bibliographic identifier.

Because early modern English does not have standardized spelling conventions, it was necessary to mitigate some of the variation in spelling present in the original documents. Alistair

Baron has developed a software tool known as VARD2 to normalize early modern English spelling. VARD2 was used by the Distant Reading Early Modernity (DREaM) group at McGill

University to generate a dictionary of 80,676 spelling normalizations. We used the DREaM dictionary to normalize our own collection of texts.

Using the STM library in the statistical software R, we processed the texts further:

40 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

1. textProcessor: set to lowercase, removed stopwords, numbers, and punctuation, stemmed

words.

2. prepDocuments: removed words from the vocabulary if they appeared in less than 10%

of the documents.

3.2 Choosing the number of topics

To get a broad sense of the number of topics to use in the analysis, we ran the searchK function. This function assesses models with varying numbers of topics according to a variety of diagnostic properties such as exclusivity, semantic coherence, heldout likelihood, and bound.

When run six times, the function output suggested an array of models in the range of 50-70 topics.

Given this baseline, we constructed 11 topic models, ranging from 45 to 69 topics. Validating the output of these models by eye, we selected the 53-topic model as that which best captured the array of topics at play in the corpus while retaining topical coherence.

3.3 Modelling

Topic modelling overview:

1. Assuming K (in our case, K = 53) topics, and the corpus vocabulary V, each topic k in K

can be represented as a distribution over the terms V.

2. Given these K topics, each defined by a distribution over the terms in the vocabulary, we

assess the distribution among topics of each document’s content. For each document, every

word is ascribed to a single topic based on the probability of finding that word in that topic.

As such, each document can be represented as a distribution over topics, based on the

proportion of its words that come from each of the K topics.

3. We used latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to infer both (1) the word distribution in each

topic; and (2) the topic distribution of each document.

3.4 Output

The model produces an NxK matrix, where N is the number of documents, K is the number of topics, and each cell indicates the proportion of the words in document n which belong to topic k. Because we are interested in observing the variation in topic prevalence over time, we calculated the average topic prevalence of the documents in each year. The resulting 21xK matrix serves as the basis for our plots.

4. Selected Results and Interpretation

We estimate 53 topics or themes with our model. We summarize these themes, in descending order of prominence, as well as the most common words associated with each theme in Figure 1. We also described and labelled each theme. McQueen, who has more knowledge of the historical period, read the texts associated with each theme. For two themes that seemed less coherent, both authors independently read the relevant texts, compared our individual descriptions, and jointly produced a final description.

Figure 1: Themes in the Thomason Tracts

The most prominent themes in the corpus concern the political conflicts of mid-seventeenth century England (e.g. topics 1, 5, and 6) and the course of the war (e.g. topic 2). Almost half of

18 the themes (25) are religious or theological nature. This is hardly surprising, given the prominent place of religious debates during the English Civil War and its aftermath.41

Three sets of findings are especially interesting when considered alongside the new material that Hobbes added to Leviathan. Three of Hobbes’s changes proved especially controversial: (1) his treatment of hell, the Last Days, and the ultimate fate of the soul in chapters

38 and parts of 44; (2) his discussion of the Trinity in chapter 42 (foregrounded in chapters 16, 33, and 41); and (3) his critical analysis of the Bible, which questions standard accounts of the authorship and dating of some of its books, in chapter 33. None of these textual additions were necessitated by Hobbes’s core philosophical or political arguments. All of them opened Hobbes to pointed criticisms.

Our contention is that Hobbes might have thought he had good reason to address these issues, given the increasing emphasis on each of these three issues in English popular discourse leading up to the time during which he was writing Leviathan (1649-1650). While Hobbes’s knowledge of English popular discourse was mediated and partial, he was surely aware of the broad themes being discussed. Our thematically-focused approach works at the right level of analysis to capture this.

In the remainder of this section, we address the first two of these controversial changes—

Hobbes treatment of hell, the last days, and the ultimate fate of the soul, and his account of the

Trinity. [In a subsequent version of the paper, we will add a section that addresses the third change—his critical analysis of the authorship and dating of parts of the Bible].

4.1 Hell, the End of Days, and the Ultimate Fate of the Soul

41 See, for instance, John Morrill, “The Religious Context of the English Civil War,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 34 (1984): 155-78.

In Leviathan, Hobbes offers an entirely new account of hell. Images of hell and eternal damnation loomed large during the English Civil War. Preachers drew on the threat of hell and the unending torment of the soul to strengthen the resolve of their political allies. From the earliest days of the Long Parliament, preachers were invited to deliver sermons to the House of Commons.

Those sermons of which the House approved were then printed and issued for public consumption.

The first of these sermons was delivered by Cornelius Burges, rector of St. Magnus, London

Bridge, on the morning of November 17, 1640. Burges took as his text Jeremiah 50:5–“They shall aske the way to Zion with their faces thitherward, saying, Come, and let us joyne our selves unto the Lord in an everlasting Covenant that shall not be forgotten.”42 If any of the Parliamentarian listeners proved unwilling to undertake the demands of such a covenant, God would abandon him.

“Nothing but fury [would be] powred out, upon such a wretch; not a blessing shall descend upon him, not a cure shall escape or go by him; not only himselfe, and posterity, but his very name…shall all be cast out of the world, as out of the midst of a sling...Although the whole

Kingdome be safe, and all others in it be in peace, yet he and his house shall perish; the line of

Confusion shall be stretched out over him, hell and damnation shall be his portion.”43

The afternoon’s preacher, Stephen Marshall, sounded a similar note. For those unwilling to walk the path of God, hell and damnation awaited. Marshall asked his Parliamentarian listeners how they would they would like to be greeted by God at the Day of Judgment. If they carried out

God’s will and used their power to continue the work of the Reformation, they would “be Gold” and God would glorify them. But if they neglected or wavered in their duty, they would be “Straw and Stubble.” God would greet them as a “devouring fire” and completely consume them. The

42 As quoted in Cornelius Burges, The First Sermon…November 17, 1640 (London, 1641), 3. 43 Burges, First Sermon, 48.

20 choice was clear: “hard it will be to be damned; impossible it will bee to bee saved, unlesse with full purpose of heart you turne to God, and become new creatures.”44 Such threats of eternal torment would echo through the public sermons of both Royalists and Parliamentarians, as each side lamented their defeats and celebrated their triumphs.45

Hobbes had long recognized the role that terrifying accounts of hell and the Day of

Judgment play in encouraging subjects to disobey their civil sovereigns. In order to see why, consider the relative seriousness of the threats that the two relevant parties can make. God wields the threat of eternal damnation, while our sovereign can only threaten us with mortal death. When the dictates of preachers threatening eternal damnation conflict with those of the sovereign, who can only threaten death, the prudent believer may well choose death and salvation over life and damnation. For, as Hobbes puts it, “no one can serve two masters, and the one to whom we believe that obedience is due, under fear of damnation, is no less a Master than the one to whom obedience is due through fear of temporal death, but rather more.”46 When subjects are convinced that God’s laws demand rebellion against the civil sovereign, the threat of worldly sanctions may be insufficient to secure obedience. In such cases, the commonwealth risks being thrown back into anarchy.

While Hobbes acknowledges this problem in Elements of Law and De Cive, he only offers his revisionist account of hell and the End of Days in Leviathan. He argues that hell is not a condition of everlasting torment. Rather, we will all die a corporeal death. Upon Christ’s return to earth, our bodies will be resurrected and we will be judged. The righteous “shall have their

44 Stephen Marshall, A Sermon Preached Before the House of Commons…November 17, 1640 (London 1641), 39. 45 For the broader historical and European context of these visions of hell, see: C.A. Patrides, “Renaissance and Modern Views of Hell,” The Harvard Theological Review 57, no. 3 (1964): 217-236; David P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 46 DCv 6.11, 80. See also EL 26.10, 162.

21 bodies suddenly changed, and made spirituall, and Immortall.”47 However, the sinners will not be subjected to eternal torments. Their punishment will simply be to undergo a second death. Hobbes cites those passages of the Bible that refer to unquenchable fire, weeping, and gnashing of teeth, but concludes that the pain mentioned there is metaphorical. It is a metaphor for “a grief, and discontent of mind, from the sight of that Eternall felicity in others, which they themselves through their own incredulity, and disobedience have lost.” Upon witnessing the felicity of the elect, each wicked man will suffer a second death “after which hee shall die no more.”48 It is inconceivable,

Hobbes adds, that a merciful God “should punish mens transgressions without any end of time, and with all the extremity of torture, that men can imagine, and more.”49

This still leaves Hobbes with the challenge of dealing with those parts of the Bible that suggest that the fires and torments of hell are everlasting. He responds that they are endless because there will be a perpetual supply of the damned. He makes the unorthodox argument that the damned will continue to propagate after the resurrection—presumably they have some time to kill whilst waiting in line for the final judgment—and that the children that result from these encounters will likewise be damned.50 In short, on this account, biblical references to everlasting torments are not meant to suggest that such punishment is everlasting for any particular person, but rather that the generations of the damned will be perpetually replenished.

This is a strange argument. It is certainly scripturally questionable about it, as Hobbes’s numerous critics pointed out. Alexander Ross, the former chaplain-in-ordinary for Charles I, wrote that Hobbes’s vision of hell was “a doctrine well beseeming the school of Mahomet, not of

47 L 44, 990. 48 L 38, 716-18. 49 L 44, 990. 50 L 44, 992-94.

Christ.”51 Other Royalist Anglicans like Henry Hammond and John Bramhall had similarly angry responses, as did the Presbyterian George Lawson.52 Luke Fawn and a group of other Presbyterian booksellers asked Parliament to suppress Leviathan, in part because of his account of hell.53

Hobbes might have thought such criticisms worth bearing for a religious argument that he deemed philosophically necessary. But that is not clearly the case here. As David Johnston has shown, it is unlikely that Hobbes thought that his mortalist account of hell was logically entailed by his metaphysical materialism.54 There is also an air of desperation about Hobbes’s account of hell. Throughout his political works, Hobbes had maintained that God’s laws demand civil obedience—that the requirements of faith coincide with the requirements of obedience. Yet the very inclusion of this deflationary account of hell betrays doubts about the happy coincidence between faith and obedience. In taming the threat of hell, Hobbes seems to be allowing for the possibility either that God’s laws may demand rebellion or that there are a sufficient number of people who think that they do. Instead of denying that God’s laws authorize revolution, he attacks the claim that the threat of hell offers sufficient reason to act in accordance with the divine laws in such cases.

However, even if we set such concerns aside, the best that can be said for this line of argument is that, if successful, it merely levels the playing field between prophets and preachers on the one hand, and the civil sovereign, on the other. Both are now only capable of threatening death in exchange for disobedience. On the best reading of the argument, then, Hobbes is back in a position which he has consistently tried to avoid—one in which the godly and the sovereign can

51 Alexander Ross, Leviathan Drawn Out With a Hook, (London, 1653), 73. 52 See Parkin, Taming, 102, 190, 192. 53 Luke Fawn, A Beacon Set on Fire (London, 1652), 241-5. 54 David Johnston, “Hobbes’s Mortalism,” History of Political Thought 10, no. 4 (1989): 649-55.

23 make equally threatening claims upon us. We suggest that his reason for persisting in such a dubious line of argument is not primarily because he finds it logically or scripturally sound. It is rather because of the importance of the polemical intervention that the argument makes possible.55

The argument is a response of last resort to those worried about how to square their political obligations with the fate of their souls at the End of Days.

Why does Hobbes offer a scripturally dubious, philosophically unnecessary, and predictably inflammatory doctrine for the first time in Leviathan? Our analysis suggests that

Hobbes might have had good reason to think that the question of hell and the ultimate fate of the soul was especially pressing. His revisionist account tracks a growing focus on hell, the fate of the soul, and the Last Judgment in popular English discourse. Three of our themes address these issues:

• Theme 21 (Dissenter Theology and Eschatology) includes sermons and theological

tracts by Quakers and other dissenting Christian sects. Millenarian texts announcing

the imminent end of the world (as foretold in the Book of Revelation) are heavily

represented here.

• Theme 30 (Death and the Fate of the Soul) addresses questions of death and the

ultimate fate of the soul. It includes sermons and philosophical meditations on death,

discussions of the relationship between sleep and death, and analyses of the doctrine

of soul sleep (which held that one’s soul entered an intermediate state of

consciousness in the time between one’s bodily death and one’s resurrection at the

End of Days).

55 These paragraphs draw on Alison McQueen, “Absolving God’s Laws” (manuscript) and Alison McQueen, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 131-32.

• Theme 44 (Apocalypse and Revelation) includes apocalyptic sermons and treatises

on the Book of Revelation, the second coming of Christ, the condemnation of sinners

to hell, and the salvation of the elect.

Taken together, these themes include frightening visions of the End of Days and meditations on the ultimate of the soul. The apocalyptic prophecies range from the vengeful portents of Henry

Burton (1578-1648), a radical Puritan whose Laudian foes are cast as the Whore of Babylon, to

George Foster’s (####-####) visions of a violent egalitarian reckoning at the hands of a leveling

God.56 These dark visions were only to be expected in such “unquiet hard times.”57 A pamphleteer credited only as J.O. urged his readers to make the “provision for the safety of our souls” their

“chiefest work,”58 whilst a lyric purporting to be written by Charles I in the days before his execution wondered about the ultimate fate of the King’s soul. Would Charles “perish in [God’s] power” for having “cherisht war and strife”? Or would God mercifully receive the King’s soul in heaven?59

In the case of each of these themes, there is an upward trend in these discussions in the late

1640s-1650, as Hobbes was writing Leviathan (see figures 2, 3, and 4). The changes in Hobbes’s

Leviathan track the increasing prominence of these themes in the public discourse of his time.

56 George Foster, The Sounding of the Last Trumpet (London, 1650), 17. 57 J.O., The Souls Excellency (London, 1648), 19. 58 J.O., Souls Excellency, 19. 59 The King’s Last Farewell to the World (London, 1648[9]), 1.

Figure 2: Emphasis on Dissenter Theology and Eschatology over time, 1641-1661

Figure 3: Emphasis on Death and the Fate of the Soul over time, 1641-1661

Figure 4: Emphasis on Apocalypse and Revelation over time, 1641-1661

4.2 The Trinity

In Leviathan, Hobbes also adds an entirely new account of the Trinity, the Christian doctrine that God is at once one substance and three persons (the Father, the Son, and the Holy

Ghost). Explaining the triune God is one of the most challenging problems in Christian theology.60

60 Some of these challenges are logical ones, while others are theologico-linguistic ones. To see the logical challenge, we have only to reduce the doctrine to its fundamental propositions, articulated in the Athanasian Creed (c. 500 AD) and nicely summarized by A.P. Martinich: (1) There is one and only one God. (2) The Father is God. (3) The Son is God. (4) The Holy Spirit is God. (5) The Father is not identical with the Son. (6) The Son is not identical with the Holy Spirit. (7) The Father is not identical with the Holy Spirit. How does one square (1), (2), and (3), on the one hand, with (5), on the other? How does one square (1), (2), and (4), on the one hand, with (7), on the other? The theologico-linguistic problem concerned the consensus that had emerged from the Nicene through the Athanasian Creeds about how to characterize and translate the triune formula. The

Attempts to offer a consistent and coherent account of the Trinity have historically risked charges of heresy—from Arianism (which denies that Jesus Christ is God) to Sabellianism (which denies that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are distinct persons) to tritheism (which denies that there is one God). Protestantism inherited the challenges and the risks of heresy posed by the Trinity.

While the Reformers had done away with much of the accreted weight of Catholic tradition and the doctrine of transubstantiation, they kept the Trinity. But the foundational Protestant commitment to sola scriptura put the doctrine under additional pressure, as there is no explicit reference to the Trinity in the New Testament.61

With the breakdown of church and state censorship in the early 1640s, Anti-Trinitarian arguments became more common. Some English anti-Trinitarians drew on the Socinian arguments circulating on the Continent. But the most powerful arguments in the arsenals of prominent

English anti-Trinitarians like Paul Best (1590-1657) and John Biddle (1615/16-1662) appealed to familiar Protestant commitments—“the sufficiency and clarity of the Scripture” and anti- clericalism.62 Parliament imprisoned them for their anti-Trinitarian views and in the Blasphemy

Act of 1648 made denial of the Trinity punishable by death. Best was sentenced to death, but was released and pensioned off to a quiet retirement. Biddle was exiled to the Scilly Isles, eventually released, imprisoned for a final time and died in jail.

formulation that the post-Nicene Church Fathers had settled upon was “three persons [hypostases] in one essence [ousia].” The problem was that both hypostasis and ousia were plausibly Latinized as “substantia,” leading to the absurd formulation: “three substantiae in one substantia.” For the logical problem, see: A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 204- 5. For brief summaries of the theologico-linguistic problem, see Glen Newey, “A Profile in Cowardice? Hobbes, Personation, and the Trinity,” in Hobbes on Politics and Religion, eds. Laurens van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 180-1; Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 34; and Thomas Hobbes, Appendix to the Latin Leviathan, in Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chapter 1, 1142-1189. Hereafter, references to the Appendix will take the following form: LLA, [chapter], [page(s)]. 61 1 John 1 is often read as an intimation of the triadic understanding of God, but it does not put forward an explicit doctrine of the Trinity. 62 Mortimer, Reason and Religion, 160.

On the heels of Best and Biddle came more serious challenges to the doctrine, as radical groups like the Ranters resisted the notion that divinity was restricted to the persons of the Trinity.

While they did not formally deny the Trinity, they claimed that God inhered in all creatures.

Collapsing the distinction between God and his creation had troubling moral implications: “if all things in God were good, pure, and light, then no quotidian activities—no matter how despicable they may seem to the human beholder—were sins.”63 These views were seen as an ontological and moral assault on the doctrine of the Trinity and prompted the Rump Parliament’s Blasphemy

Act of 1650. It was in the midst of these politico-theological upheavals that Hobbes decided to offer his own account of the Trinity.

Like his account of hell, Hobbes’s doctrine of the Trinity is unorthodox, to say the least.

He argues that God was personated, or represented, three times—first, by Moses; second, by Jesus

Christ, the son of God; and third, by the apostles and their successors.64 Insofar as he has been thrice personated, God is three persons. This means that “God the Father, as Represented by

Moses, is one Person; and as Represented by his Sonne, another person; and as Represented by the

Apostles, and by the Doctors that taught by authority from them derived, is a third Person; and yet every Person here, is the Person of one and the same God.”65

63 Paul C.H. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 114. 64 L 16.12, 248. 65 L 42.3, 776. This is a complex account in at least two ways. First, Hobbes’s account of the Trinity shares an underlying theory of personation with this account of political representation and authorization in chapter 16 of Leviathan (where he explicitly makes the connection to the personation of God). This theory of personation is, at times, ambiguous. For various attempts to resolve this ambiguity, see: Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,” Journal of Political Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1999): 1-29; David Runciman, “What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State,” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 268-278; Arash Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology.” Second, while Hobbes’s account offers an answer to how God might be three, it is less clear how he thinks God can also be one. One possibility is that because, at any given time, God is represented by a unified representative, he is one. For, “it is the Unity of Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One” (L 16.13, 248). However, this solution has the strange implication that God is only one at a specific time during which he is being personated and only three over the entire period during which he was thrice personated. This would mean that God is one only synchronically and three only diachronically.

In what sense do Moses, Jesus, and the Apostles and their successors represent God?

Hobbes’s theory of political personation and representation reveals his shocking answer. Some persons are represented “truly.” That is, they can “own up” or take responsibility for what the representative says and does in their name. They can also authorize the representative to act on their behalf. Consider the example of a rational adult person who, having been charged with a crime, authorizes a lawyer to represent him. When the lawyer speaks and acts on behalf of her client, her words and deeds are not properly her own—they do not reflect her own reasons, interests, and passions. Rather, her words and deeds are her client’s, who, as a rational adult, is responsible for them. The client, not the lawyer, is the owner or author of those actions. However, other persons are represented “by fiction.” That is, they cannot “own up” or take responsibility for what the representative says or does in their name. They cannot be authors.

Why might a person be unable to “own up” in this way? First, the represented person may be an inanimate thing, like a church, a hospital, or a bridge. A hospital may be represented by an overseer. But the hospital as such cannot take responsibility for the words and deeds of the overseer, for “things Inanimate, cannot be Authors.”66 Nor can the hospital authorize the overseer to act on its behalf. Rather, a board of governors, which has authority to procure the maintenance of the hospital, authorizes the overseer to speak and act on the institution’s behalf. In this case, overseer represents the hospital by fiction. Her words and deeds are attributed to the hospital, even though the hospital cannot own up or take responsibility of them. The words and deeds are the hospital’s by virtue of a fiction.

Second, the represented person might be an irrational agent, like a child, a fool, or a madman. Irrational agents may speak and act. However, because they are irrational, they cannot

66 L 16.9, 246.

30 be held responsible for their words and deeds. An orphaned child may be represented by a guardian. But the child can neither take responsibility for the words and deeds of the guardian nor authorize the guardian to act on their behalf. Until they have use of their reason, children “can be no Authors.”67 Rather, the state, which has the authority to provide for the maintenance of children, authorizes the guardian to act on behalf of the child. The guardian’s words and deeds are attributed to the child, even though the child cannot own or take responsibility for them. The words and deeds are the child's by virtue of a fiction.

Third, the represented person may be an idol or God. An idol may be represented by a priest. But the idol, as a “meer Figment of the brain” can neither take responsibility for the words and deeds of the priest nor authorize the priest to act on its behalf. “Idols cannot be Authors; for an Idol is nothing.”68 Rather, the state, which has authority over religious matters, authorizes a priest to speak and act on the idol's behalf. The priest’s words and deeds are attributed to the idol, even though the idol cannot own or take responsibility for them. The words and deeds are the idol’s by virtue of a fiction.

Hobbes’s account of God’s personation follows directly on the heels of this discussion, suggesting that Hobbes views the personation of God as an example of representation “by fiction.”

Hobbes does not explicitly write that God cannot be an author. But given his repetition of the claim in each of the previous examples, the phrase is audible in his silence.69 Moses, Jesus, and the

Apostles and their successors represent God by fiction. If God cannot authorize them to speak and act on his behalf, who does? The answer is clearest in the case of Moses. When the Israelites say to Moses “Speak thou with us, and we will hear, but let not God speak with us lest we die,” they

67 L 16.10, 248. 68 L 16.11, 248. 69 Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology,” 927.

31 authorize Moses to represent God’s will to them.70 The upshot of Hobbes’s account is that God is thrice personated—by Moses, Jesus, and the Apostles and their successors—at His people’s, not

His, behest.

Hobbes’s doctrine of the Trinity opened him to angry critics. George Lawson gave voice to the general view when he claimed that the doctrine “deserves no answer but detestation.” It was, he contended, “blasphemous” and devoid “not onely of divine but human learning” and ought not to be “suffered amongst Christians.”71 Critics pushed three primary lines of attack. First, some critics claimed that the conceptual apparatus of the account was unsound. Hobbes’s definition of

“person” and his theory of personation did not reflect the plain sense of scripture and was completely absent from any church’s confession.72 Second, Hobbes’s account seemed to historicize the Trinity. The persons of the Trinity came into being at particular times as historical representatives of God. By implication, argued Hobbes’s committed foe John Bramhall, “there was a time when there was no Trinity.”73 If Hobbes is right, Bramhall warned, neither the Trinity nor its three persons are eternal.74

Third, Hobbes’s account risked multiplying the persons of the Trinity. It was crucial to

Hobbes’s argument for state authority over religion that civil sovereigns, who sit in “Moses seat,” represent God’s person on earth.75 If representing God is sufficient for membership, then, as

70 Exodus 20: 18-19; L 40.#, 740. As Abizadeh rightly notes, Hobbes does sometimes suggest that God authorizes Moses directly via revelation to speak on his behalf. However, as Abizadeh notes, L 16.12 strongly implies that God cannot be an author in this way. Hobbes's silence in L16.12 and his references to God's authorization elsewhere may just have been his way to “avoid dishonouring God” by drawing attention to capacities that he plainly lacks on Hobbes’s account. See: Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology,” 927. 71 Lawson, Examination, 202. This condemnation was not universal. The Independent William Rand found things to appreciate in Hobbes’s doctrine of the Trinity. See: Parkin, Taming, 100. 72 The former criticism was made by John Templer (d. 1693) while the latter was put forward by William Lucy (1594- 1677). See Parkin, Taming, 284. 73 John Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes his last animadversions (London, 1657), 474. 74 Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology,” 930. 75 L 41.#, 776. See also: L 40.#, 744.

Alexander Ross quipped, it is not a Trinity but “a Legion, or rather innumerable persons.”76 Hobbes was ultimately willing to bite the bullet on this final objection.77 However, the elevation of sovereigns came at the cost of the demotion of Christ, as Bramhall eagerly pointed out.78 In the face of criticism and worried about heresy charges, Hobbes made some strategic retractions to his account of the Trinity in the text of the Latin Leviathan and defended those parts of it which remained in the lengthy appendix to that work.79

In offering his own unusual account of the Trinity, Hobbes waded into a thorny theological debate that had already inspired blasphemy laws and that would open him to criticism and accusations of heresy. While his account of the Trinity is logically entailed by his political theory of personation and representation, his philosophical project in no way required him to pursue these entailments. He had argued for similar conclusions in the Elements of Law and De Cive without ever offering an account of the Trinity. Why does he risk critical ire and accusations of heresy to defend this doctrine for the first time in Leviathan?

Here again, Hobbes’s otherwise puzzling focus tracks important contextual developments.

Focus on the Trinity was increasing as Hobbes was working on Leviathan (see Figure 4). Theme

29 (The Trinity) addresses this issue. It includes writings by prominent anti-Trinitarians like John

Biddle80, defenses of the Trinity by high Calvinists like Francis Cheynell (1608-1665) and Puritans

76 Alexander Ross, Leviathan Drawn Out With a Hook (London, 1653), 54-5. For similar criticisms, see: John Bramhall, Castigations, 474; Thomas Tenison, The Creed of Mr. Hobbes Examined (London, 1670), 40-2. 77 Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology,” 932. 78 Bramhall, Castigations, 475-6. 79 Hobbes’s reactions in the LL and his defense of his doctrine in the LLA are interesting. In both, he takes himself to be responding to the criticism that he had implied that Moses was a member of the Trinity and issues a rare mea culpa. However, as Noel Malcolm notes, “no critic had seriously accused [Hobbes of this] in print.” See: Malcolm, Introduction, 157. Glen Newey conjectures that this is a diversionary tactic that allows Hobbes to “present himself as concessive on a comparatively minor count while sticking to radical heterodoxy in a much larger adjacent field.” See: Newey, “Profile in Cowardice,” 179. 80 John Biddle, XII Arguments Drawn Out of Scripture ([London], 1647).

33 like Nicholas Estwick (c. 1584-1658) and Matthew Poole (1624-1679)81, and a high-pitched debate about the Trinity between anti-Trinitarian John Knowles (c. 1625-1677) and his dogged antagonist

Samuel Eaton (1596-1665).82

Figure 4: Emphasis on Apocalypse and Revelation over time, 1641-1661

There is an upward trend in discussion of the Trinity starting in 1648 and continuing past the time at which Hobbes completed Leviathan. Hobbes’s decision to add his controversial account of the Trinity tracks the increasing salience of this challenging doctrine in English public discourse.

81 Francis Cheynell, Truth Triumphing over Errour and Heresie (London, 1646); Nicholas Estwick, Pneumatologia: or, A Treatise of the Holy Ghost (London, 1648); Matthew Poole, BLASFHMOKTONIA: Blasphemer Slaine with the Sword of the Spirit (London, 1653). 82 Samuel Eaton, A Friendly Debate on a Weighty Subject (London, 1650).

While Hobbes would have been sympathetic to the hostility toward clericalism of anti-

Trinitarians like Biddle, he would have worried about more radical arguments that God inheres in all of us. In explaining the Trinity—in subjecting the doctrine to reason and interpretation—

Hobbes deprives clerics of one of the mysteries of faith that they use to bolster their power. But in specifying the range of God’s possible representatives, Hobbes closes off the more radical possibility of an egalitarian distribution of divinity.

5. Conclusion

We have argued that three of Leviathan’s most puzzling and politically risky religious arguments track the very specific debates that fueled Britain’s bloody civil war. This is suggestive—though certainly not conclusive—evidence that Hobbes tailored his thematic focus religious discourse on the ground. In addition to providing additional support for contextual accounts of Hobbes’s changing arguments, we hope that our paper 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.