Jewish Political Studies Review Abstracts
Volume 4, Number 2 (Nos. 3-4) (Fall 5753/1992)
"Thomas Hobbes Confronts the Bible"
Thomas Hobbes was foremost among the seventeenth century
political philosophers who led the Western world across the fault
line separating classical from modern political philosophy. In
doing so, he, like his other colleagues, had to confront not only
classical political philosophy but the Bible. From the first of
his writings to the last he consistently confronted Scripture.
Reading Hobbes reveals both the ambiguity and the ambivalence of
his confrontation with the Bible. Hobbes wished to assault
orthodox or conventional Christian belief but at the same time is
drawn to the Hebrew Scriptures, not only because it is necessary
for him to confront it for the sake of his argument or because of
the Bible's own elemental and compelling power. His struggle
foreshadows and is even paradigmatic of that of modern man. This
article traces his confrontation with Scripture in Leviathan.
This essay is a critical exposition of Thomas Hobbes's
atheism, focusing on the natural-scientific and theological
foundations of his philosophy.
The most neglected aspect of Hobbes's attempt to solve the
theological-political problem is his reliance on divine
punishment of the iniquitous sovereign. By turning that matter
exclusively over to God or -- what comes to the same thing -- by
immunizing such a sovereign against accountability to his
subjects, Hobbes radicalizes a Christian motif and fragments what
for Aristotle had been an integral political whole. This essay
is about that fragmentation, with special attention to the text
in which Hobbes makes his intention partially clear -- his
discussion of King David's murder of Uriah the Hittite.
Hobbes elaborates a conception of the Messiah in his
political treatises that is unusual because it seems to combine
Jewish and Christian elements. He asserts that Jesus is the
Messiah in the sense of being the earthly king of the Jews as
well as the Son of God and king of heaven. To clarify Hobbes's
position and to highlight its strangeness, it is compared with
the views of Moses Maimonides and Blaise Pascal. Hobbes emerges
from this comparison as a spokesman for a kind of "Jewish
Christianity," whose purpose is not to return to the early Jewish
sects that embraced Jesus as a new Moses but to humanize the
Messiah and to redefine Christianity for a new age of secular
happiness. Hobbes thereby inaugurates a new kind of biblical
criticism which the Deists of the enlightenment era developed and
which continues today.
This essay expounds Hobbes's idea of Christianity based on a
reading of Leviathan as a whole. Among the conclusions are
these:
First, that Hobbes was profoundly concerned with the
religious questions spawned by the Reformation from start to
finish in Leviathan, and there provides his most extended,
elaborate commentary on Christian belief. The common neglect of
the third and fourth parts of Leviathan is a mistake, not only
because Hobbes himself believed them of fundamental importance to
his theorizing of the conditions for civil peace and spiritual
repose, but because the themes of the latter two parts are
present in the first two parts persistently. Leviathan may be
seen as a religious treatise and not only a work of political
philosophy.
Second, in Leviathan Hobbes has worked out a detailed
version of Reformed Christianity that is his own, based on his
own reading and interpretation of the Scriptures but also
informed by his familiarity with the major theological issues of
his era. He offers, for example, particularly in chapter 42, a
detailed refutation of the arguments of the leading Roman
Catholic spokesman, Cardinal Bellarmine, against the reformed
churches.
Third, the arguments of Leviathan are Hobbes's contribution
to dispelling the "terrors" and mystifications of religious
belief, as well as the "mysteries" of political authority. This
is neither to dispel belief itself, nor a denial that concern for
our destiny after death is significant.
Fourth, Hobbes shows how it is possible to harmonize
"reason" and "revelation," without depending on Aristotle,
insisting that it is the religious duty to do this. In his
religious humanism, Hobbes thus keeps at the center of his
thought this central question of reason and revelation posed by
the medieval tradition of the philosophy of the Schoolmen whom he
otherwise reviles for their "corruption" under the influence of
ancient philosophy. He seeks a Christianity purified of
extrinsic influences.
Fifth, Hobbes's proposals for seeking religious and civil
peace conjointly are such, he thinks, as to enhance the capacity
of individuals to take personal responsibility for civic and
spiritual virtue, consistent both with their inevitable
dependence on their own understanding and judgment, and with
their admitted need for reliable and unambiguous political
authority, leading to a new level of liberty and dignity, and to
a sophisticated appreciation for the importance of civil law.