How to Write Scripture -- on Hobbes and authority and writing

How to Write Scripture: Words, Authority, and Politics in Thomas HobbesAuthor(s): Tracy B. StrongSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 128-159Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343950 .

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How to Write Scripture: Words, Authority, and Politics in Thomas Hobbes

Tracy B. Strong

Roma locuta, causafinita. -Canonical slogan

For words are wise mens counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the mony of fooles, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other Doctor whatsoever, if but a man.

-THOMAS HOBBES, Leviathan

It should not be surprising if we cannot discover true causes, and the way in which they act or are acted upon, seeing we can know the true causes only of the things we make with our own hands and minds and since, of all the things which God has made, we can make none of them.

-MARIN MERSENNE, Harmonie Universelle

Introduction

It is ironic that the most famous portion of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is not writing, but a picture, the frontispiece engraving. It was almost cer-

This paper has been given in a number of incarnations in different places. My thanks to the listeners and the questioners at each of them. I have also profited from discussing and defending it at length with my students Ted Miller, Keith Bybee (who provided invalu- able research help at an early stage), and Alberto Pefiades. My friend J. Peter Euben gave generously of his learning and time to try to show me the error of my ways. My thanks to him, although I fear he was less successful than he might have wished.

Critical Inquiry 20 (Autumn 1993) ? 1993 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/93/2001-0008$01.00. All rights reserved.

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130 Tracy B. Strong Scriptural Politics in Thomas Hobbes

tainly executed by the Parisian engraver, Abraham Bosse, who, with Hob- bes's help, revised a drawing by the well-known Czech emigre Wen- ceslaus Hollar, also a friend of Hobbes. The engraved version depicts the Leviathan as a great giant, towering over a well-organized landscape. The

giant's body, but not his head, is made up of distinguishable individuals, all turned away from the viewer and toward the body politic. In the fore-

ground of the landscape is a walled city containing as its central public building a large cathedral sitting atop a hill. The streets are rectilinear. In the valleys surrounding the city are a number of other, smaller towns, not apparently walled, each also containing a church. A single and soli-

tary house sits on a hill to the left of the major town, almost at its height. Underneath the landscape portion of the picture are two hierarchies of

panels, ten in total: on the left, the emblems and practices of civil society, all centered around the use of force; on the right, the parallel signs for a church. The two sets of panels are linked by a curtain on which is written the title, author, and publisher of the book that links them. Over every- thing, above even the crown of the figure of the Leviathan, is a citation from Scripture, in Latin, "There is no power over earth than compares to him." When there is, I might say, no difference between the word and the power, then we will have, as the verse from Job concludes, "a creature without fear ... king over all the sons of pride" (Job 41:33-34).

The history of this frontispiece is interesting. The original version by Hollar was probably intended for a manuscript presentation copy to Charles II. The landscape and the towns are much less defined. The body of the giant is composed of fairly similar heads only, rather than the up- per torsos and heads differentiated from each other not only in line draw-

ing but in dress (and thus status) that appear in the published version. The face of the giant has been said to resemble Oliver Cromwell, Charles I, Charles II (all of the preceding with additional facial hair), and Hobbes himself. In the manuscript version the heads face outward toward the reader; they face inward in the printed version. The solitary house on the left is lacking in the manuscript, as is, importantly, the citation from the Book of Job.'

Tracy B. Strong is professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, and is editor of Political Theory. His most recent book is The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time and Space (1990). His Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary is currently in

press.

1. See Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbrown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic

Title-Page in England, 1550-1660 (London, 1979), pp. 221-22. They argue that the face is Hobbes's. From a physical point of view this seems more likely than the competing candi- dates, Cromwell and Charles II. It also makes sense, I shall argue, in terms of the intention



Critical Inquiry Autumn 1993 131

I think it no accident that Hobbes chose to place Scripture over ev-

erything and to face the component individuals toward the giant, for the written word of an author whose intentions could not be called into

question, when read and understood rationally, afforded to Hobbes the

paradigm case of the foundations of authority. Not only can the original Scripture-the Bible-no longer provide a solution to humans' earthly problems (if it ever could), but, worse, humans continue to think that it should. The evidence was all around Hobbes that the Bible would not be in itself the basis of an answer, but something like the Bible might. It is of course true that "Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words";2 but they would not be covenants were they not words (as opposed, say, simply to being force). Hobbes's task was to find an equivalent in the civil realm for Scripture and to guarantee the actuality of that authority in each member of the commonwealth.

To accomplish this, Hobbes sought to translate the understanding of the written word of God that characterized the community of believers of early Protestantism into the basis of a political system resting on human equality and law. Protestantism potentially made available a new understanding of political authority; but by Hobbes's time it was only beginning to work out how to realize such authority in the political world. The key lay in finding an equivalent in politics for Scripture, that is, a written document that, when taught, allowed each person severally access to the same authority without anyone ever being able to claim that she or he knew what the author intended. How can we develop an authority that exists on and for this earth yet has no earthly author? The task that Levia- than performs is the writing of an actual Scripture.3

To deal with the question of Scripture, one must, perforce, deal with that of religion, a topic so overworked in Hobbes scholarship that it was for a period of years simply set aside. Every possible position seems occu- pied. Judgments range from Francis Campbell Hood, who claimed to find a "divine politics" in Hobbes, through Howard Warrender, who saw Hobbes as a proponent of natural law, to Leo Strauss, for whom Hobbes

of the book. For a discussion of the authorships see Keith Brown, "The Artist of the Levia- than Title-Page," British Library Journal 4 (Spring 1978): 24-36. There is a good discussion of many of these issues (though not of the orientation of the faces) in M. M. Goldsmith, "Hobbes's Ambiguous Politics," History of Political Thought 11 (Winter 1990): 639-73, who gives convincing reasons why Brown is probably wrong in his claim that the face is that of Charles II.

2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesi- asticall and Civill, ed. Richard Tuck (1651; Cambridge, 1991), chap. 17, p. 117; hereafter abbreviated L.

3. Stanley Cavell has made the compelling case that one should read Thoreau's en- deavor in Walden in the same vein. See Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (New York, 1972), pp. 14ff. I might note that Cavell epigraphs his book with a citation from Luther's Table Talk, which starts, "For all our life should be baptism."




was a cleverly self-protective atheist.4 Different refutations for each of these positions are available, and the reader has at his or her disposal almost any conceivable combination.

Hobbes does advance some clear public positions on theological questions. God, he says, "is by all Christians confessed [to be] incompre- hensible, ... he is like nothing that we can think on."5 We never, then, apprehend God or his will directly; at best we will have an "image" of

representation, not an "idea" of it. In Leviathan, chapter 39, he says that he understands a church to be "a company of men professing Christian Reli-

gion, united in the person of one Soveraign; at whose command they ought to assemble, and without whose authority they ought not to assemble" (L, p. 321). He goes on to indicate that there can be no universal Church because there is in the world a multiplicity of commonwealths. As all commonwealths have both ecclesiastical and civil power, there can be no single source of universal religious doctrine; the Roman Catholic church threatens to make civil philosophy impossible. In the third chapter of the appendix to the Latin edition of Leviathan, Hobbes indicates that before the conversion of Constantine the Church had no authority of decision in a political sense.6

None of this strikes me as necessarily helpful. For most commentators it seems to raise modern questions of church-state relations as if these were alternative forms of authority, one based on a transcendental source, the other, instrumental. But this is not Hobbes's dichotomy.7 What no one has really explored is why all of these interpretations are

4. See Francis Campbell Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 1964); How- ard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation (Oxford, 1957); and Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Genesis, trans. Elsa Sinclair (Chi- cago, 1952). The break in this impasse was probably begun for political theorists by J. G. A. Pocock, "Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes" (1970), Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago, 1989). See also David

Johnston, The Rhetoric of "Leviathan": Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton, N.J., 1986), and Patricia Springborg, "Leviathan and the Problem of Ecclesiasti- cal Authority," Political Theory 3 (Aug. 1975): 289-303. By now the last two books of Leviathan are unavoidable.

5. Hobbes, "Considerations of the Reputation of T. Hobbes," in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols. (1839-45; Aalen, 1966), 4:426; hereafter abbreviated EW See also "The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance," EW, 5:436: "We ought not to dispute of God's nature; he is no fit subject of our philosophy."

6. See Hobbes, Leviathan, trans. and ed. Fran;ois

Tricaud (Paris, 1983), p. 777; my trans.; hereafter abbreviated LL.

7. This is recognized by Johnston, The Rhetoric of "Leviathan," and by Patrick Neal, "Hobbes and Rational Choice Theory," Western Political Quarterly (Dec. 1988): 635-52. It is also a reason that whatever the merit that the rational-choice approach to Hobbes has, it cannot be that it gets Hobbes right, something recent commentators in this vein are recog- nizing. See for example Gregory Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton, N.J., 1986).




possible-and why Hobbes feels, indeed insists repeatedly, that he is in no way self-contradictory or unclear.8

Of more interest, however, are Hobbes's objections to Descartes's third Meditation. Descartes, with the help of Friar Marin Mersenne, had circulated the Meditations in manuscript to a number of people to obtain the "strongest possible" sets of objections to the new work. These were

published with the Meditations and Descartes's rebuttals. The third Medi- tation ("The Existence of God") drew seven out of Hobbes's fifteen objections. They all focused on Descartes's use of "idea" in relation to God. The gist of Hobbes's attack was that we cannot rest the authority of God

upon an "idea" that would supposedly be innate. However, Hobbes says, when we can "rationally infer" something we can give it a name "without

having an idea of it." To require that we have an idea of something separate from the thing itself would generate levels of reality, which Hobbes

suggests cannot "admit of more or less."9 As I discuss below, the logic of Leviathan is premised on both a differ-

ence and a parallel between God's and human creation. To understand this difference is to set aside the question of whether Hobbes was a believer and alternatively to examine his relation to matters religious. Luther and other early Reformers had elaborated a new notion of com-

munity and authority. Notoriously, they had not developed a complex or

dynamic political understanding adequate to their new social and reli-

gious considerations.10 They had, however, laid the groundwork for a new understanding of authority, one that Hobbes will translate into civil

philosophy. The issue will not then be how "serious" Hobbes was about

religion; it will be about what it means to try to transform the vision of

authority and human beings that Protestantism made available into a po-

8. As we shall see below, it will be necessary to proceed with caution in evaluating the claims made by Hobbes's contemporaries, let alone those made by the modern interpreters of his contemporaries. Hobbes complained bitterly about this. See for example Philosophical Rudiments concerning Governments and Society, in EW 2:xxiii, and especially "Considerations

upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners, and Religion of Thomas Hobbes," EW, 4:409-40. Some comments about this are made at the beginning of William E. Connolly's chapter on Hobbes in his Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford, 1988), pp. 16ff. Connolly's analysis, which I read after writing the first two drafts of this essay, has close relations to mine. He is concerned (see p. 39), however, with what would happen if God "dropped out." I think that Hobbes does not have to worry about that because an attitude toward God is structured into his politics and God will be preserved whether people want to or not. God may be dead, but our world lives on as it was without Him.

9. Ren6 Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1984-85), 2:129-30.

10. Luther's political thought and its problems are best analyzed in Sheldon S. Wolin's still-classic Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston, 1960). John Calvin contributes a new epistemology, but his political thought remains in its substance late medieval in nature, except for some of the material in the Commentaries on the Book of Daniel (1561) late in life.




litical doctrine." Put bluntly, Hobbes drew on the understanding of

Scripture that had developed especially with Lutheran Protestantism, and he conceived of Leviathan as accomplishing the same for political soci-

ety that Scripture had for the Protestant covenants.

Protestant Writing

In 1520, on 15 June, Pope Leo X issued a bull, Exsurge Domine, con-

demning forty-one theses taken from Luther's writings. Luther was called on to recant within sixty days or face excommunication. To make the

point more forcefully, Luther's books were ceremonially burned in Leip- zig. On 10 December 1520, outside of the gates of Wittenberg, Luther burned the papal bull. Excommunication followed on 3 January 1521 with Decet Pontificem. Luther responded by publishing several replies to the pope, the most important of which was a Defense and Explanation of All

of the Articles (1521). Luther was concerned to establish three major claims. First, he ar-

gued that "Scripture alone is the true lord and master of all writings and doctrine on earth." 12 The referent for authority, in other words, was not the will of God but only the available expression of God, God as He is

present to us in writing. Stephen Greenblatt refers to this as "the fetish- ism of Scripture preached by all of the early Protestants."13

Second, Luther wanted to demonstrate that "we have now the right to weaken the power of councils and to contradict their acts, also to pass judgment on their decrees and to confess boldly whatever we think is true,

11. Arrigo Pacchi, in a very interesting article, has argued that God is for Hobbes "a

general reassurance about the rationality of reality," "the hypothetical last term of human

reasoning" (Arrigo Pacchi, "Hobbes and the Problem of God," in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, ed. G. A. J. Rogers and Alan Ryan [Oxford, 1988], p. 183). This gives a slightly more Kantian and rationalist cast to the problem than I am comfortable with; but then, Kant comes out of the same Protestant tradition I am addressing here.

After finishing this essay I came across (thanks to Avrum Stroll) Aloysius Martinich, The Two Gods of "Leviathan": Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge, 1992). I cannot do justice here to this important volume. Suffice it to note that Martinich thinks Hobbes a Calvinist in theology, although not in Church organization (pp. 34, 63f.). From the point of view of the considerations in my essay, Martinich tends to confute authority and authorship (pp. 311ff.). This is an important book, which I think grasps very well the wrongheadedness of trying to separate religion from the (so-called) rest of the world when considering the

early modern period. See also the thoughtful review by Joshua Mitchell in the International Hobbes Association Newsletter 15 (Nov. 1992): 4, and his article "Hobbes and the Equality of All under the One," Political Theory 21 (Feb. 1993): 78-100.

12. Martin Luther, Defense and Explanation of All the Articles, trans. Charles M. Jacobs, vol. 32 of Luther's Works, ed. George W. Forell, gen. ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T Lehman (Philadelphia, 1958), pp. 11-12; hereafter abbreviated D.

13. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1984), p. 94; hereafter abbreviated R.




regardless of whether it is approved or condemned by any council" (D, art. 29, p. 80; emphasis added). Note here that Luther sees no contradiction between confessing what one sees as true and Scripture as "lord and master."

Finally, Luther was concerned that there be no earthly human au-

thority that could possibly claim to be the last word. This meant most

centrally the claims of the leaders of the Church. On the matter of the sale of indulgences, for instance, Luther suggests that the pope was in effect claiming the power to get people out of purgatory. "If you ask on what grounds he can do this, he says, 'I am pope.' But enough of this!" Luther continues, "The words of Christ expressly state that his authority is on earth, not above or beneath it" (D, art. 26, p. 75).

These various propositions all came together when Luther was called on to recant by Charles V before the diet in Worms. Luther attempted to make a complex and problematic distinction among various types of his

writings. Charles, or rather the sharp interrogating secretary, would have none of it and asked him to answer the question simply and clearly. Obvi-

ously nervous, Luther requested a day's postponement and the following day returned to read a written statement that ended, "I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, may God help me, Amen." 14

Luther's stance raised the problem of the relation between that which conscience found true and that which was true for the Church. He needed to reconcile the actuality of individual conscience with the existence of a church; he thus required that conscience generate a church rather than rely on the existence of one.15 His answer was to look not to what the Church said and had said but to locate the ultimate authority in the written word of God as it was available to humans, in Scripture. By being written it was not subject to human authority-and in any case, as Luther and later John Calvin persuasively argued, human authorities were many and often contradicted each other. Scripture stood there and

required understanding of each human being.16 God could not in any case be directly known.

When coupled with the argument that God's word had been ex-

pressed for everyone once and for all in Scripture, the question of human

14. Luther, "Luther at the Diet of Worms," trans. Roger A. Hornsby, vol. 32 of Luther's Works, pp. 112-13.

15. This is a general theme. See Lord Falkland, "Discourse of the Infallibility of the Church of Rome," cited in John Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (1874; Hildesheim, 1966), 1:157ff. and esp. 1:160.

16. On the matter of an object requiring an understanding of us, see Tracy B. Strong, "Nietzsche's Political Aesthetics," in Nietzsche's New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics, ed. Michael Allen Gillespie and Strong (Chicago, 1988), pp. 157ff.; Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York, 1969), chap. 8; and Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," Artforum 5 (June 1967): 12-23.




authority gave rise to a dilemma that was clearly formulated by the secre-

tary of the diet: if the only way to confute someone who contradicts the "common understanding" of the church is by reference to the written word of God, then "we will have nothing in Christianity that is certain or decided." 7 Should conscience be the final ground on which the text of the Scripture was read, the secretary was unable to imagine anything other than an anarchic set of interpretations.

To the claim that this led to anarchy Luther and Calvin replied that if human beings looked into their consciences honestly and deeply enough (we post-Kantians might say "critically") when they read Scrip- ture, they would find there an approach to the unrealizable truth of God. Others were on earth to help one look, for honesty toward oneself was difficult and tenuous. In the end, though, human beings could only, and must, rely on their consciences, that is, on what they found themselves

required to acknowledge and say-thus Luther's stance. The only correc- tive for conscience was the written word of the Scriptures, which all humans could read and to which all human beings might, if honest, gain access. 18

The problem posed by the Reformation has to do with the authority that an existing text can have for a conscience. Protestantism phrases the

question of authority as the general question of what it means to read and find a text available.19 I say "available" here because it is clear in Luther that this is not a matter of "interpretation."20 Luther does not think that what he is offering is an interpretation of the Scripture, nor is he asserting that he must be right. "Who knows?" he expostulates, "God

may have called me and raised me up [to be everybody's teacher]. They

17. Luther, "Luther at the Diet of Worms," p. 113. 18. In what follows I speak rather loosely of Protestantism and Catholicism. I am fully

aware of the differences, even radical differences, among various forms of Protestantism and of the often only superficial apparent unity of Catholicism deriving from its signal doctrinal center. One might think of the axis of difference between the two as articulated

along this opposition between apparent pluralism and apparent centralism. In this I differ somewhat in my reading of Protestantism from Tuck, "The Christian Atheism of Thomas Hobbes," in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. David Wooten (Oxford, 1992), pp. 111-30. Tuck is quite right that the Reformers ("as systematised by Calvin," which presupposes as solved some of what Tuck should find to be a problem) "did not countenance a wholly individualist interpretation of Scripture" (p. 119). He takes this to be an easily solved matter. I take it to be a tension consequent to a whole new understanding as to how a text can stand in its readers.

19. Here there is the basis for arguing with Hanna Pitkin's claim that Hobbes is concerned with political, not aesthetic, matters. That separation is too easily drawn, I think. See Hanna E Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley, 1972), pp. 23ff.

20. We might think of the Protestant view as thinking of Scripture as a computer man- ual. In reading it we are trying to figure out what it means, not give an interpretation of it. The presumption is that in the end it means one thing only; we will naturally work with others, some more experienced at reading than we are; we will know that we have read it

correctly only in particulars--that is, when what we are trying to do actually happens.




ought to be afraid lest they despise God in me" (D, p. 8). When Luther suggests that he will recant when his opponents show him-that is, make available to him-what in the Scripture confutes him, he is suggesting that he will have to come to find something in his conscience that he has not seen before. He will himself have to find "provocation," in Emerson's terms, that is, be called forth before he can find the way or reason to change his mind.21 This is what William Tyndale, in 1525, called "the literal sense" of the Scripture, the sense of confidence that the meaning of the Scripture stands in front of us and that "interpretation" is a way of avoiding that directness (see R, p. 100).

The emphasis of the above is on the corporeality of the human understanding of the Scripture. It is as incarnate, limited, thrown-on-this- earth human beings that we encounter God's word, and we can and should only encounter it as embodied creatures. There is no other way; there is no special part of the human being that is somehow privileged in its access to God's word. A Scripture-based theology is necessarily this- world oriented.22

If this were true, however, Protestantism gave rise to a vexing question. What was the status of the soul, especially after death? If the soul had and retained a kind of independent immortal existence apart from the body-say, that it went to purgatory-it was then clearly the most important, perhaps the only important part of the person. It would be the "more" in the "more or less" that Hobbes claimed could not charac- terize reality, and in that case it would seem silly to say that nothing that humans did could affect its status. Roman Catholic belief held that with the death of the body most souls went to purgatory from which, after an appropriate period, they were released to heaven and into the sight of God. Through good works, souls still on earth could assist their own fu- ture lot as well as that of those already departed. Once in heaven they could intercede with God for souls yet on earth; this in turn legitimated various practices of the church that enhanced the efficiency of heavenly intervention. At the Last Judgment the soul would be rejoined to the body, but until then the necessity and importance of the interventionist church was obvious.

To hold a contrary position that reaffirmed the finality of Scripture (which had to be read by living bodies), the Reformers had to develop an understanding of the soul that linked it more firmly with the body. They needed to argue that no such hierarchy of intervention was possible and that the only access to God's word as a human individual occurred during

21. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Divinity School Address," in vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 83.

22. This is the point made by Amos Funkenstein, "The Body of God in Seventeenth- Century Theology and Science," in Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, 1650-1800, ed. Richard H. Popkin (Leiden, 1988), p. 168.



23. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (1845; Grand

Rapids, Mich., 1989), bk. 3, chap. 25, sec. 6, p. 267. I owe a great deal to the excellent discussion of it in Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, Mass., 1972).

24. See Calvin, Psychopannychia (1542), in vol. 3 of Tracts and Treatises, ed. Thomas F. Torrance (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1958), pp. 419ff.

25. Luther, Notes on Ecclesiastes (1573), trans. Jaroslav Pelikan, ed. Pelikan and Hilton C. Oswald (St. Louis, 1972), p. 150; cited in Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton,

p. 31. 26. Mersenne, for instance, in the second set of "Objections" to the Meditations thinks

it important that Descartes confront the issue of the mortality of the soul (which Descartes, of course, rejects since he needs a noncorporeal cogito). See The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2:91ff. See the excellent discussion by Johnston, "Hobbes's Mortalism," History of Political Thought 10 (Winter 1989): 647-63. I come to a different version of Johnston's conclusion that Hobbes's mortalism is designed to undercut the Church's hold. This is true

only if one means the Catholic church and those Protestants (admittedly a strong majority) who had not embraced mortalism. It is not the Church but particular doctrines to which Hobbes objected.


the lifetime of each person. What then, however, happened to the soul after the death of the body? A satisfactory account had to be developed in order to retain the directness of each individual's link to the truth of the Scriptures.

Calvin solved the problem with a slight modification of the doctrine of predestination. At death, the souls of the nonelect go directly to hell and those of the elect go directly to heaven. In both of these states, however, the soul enters a kind of static state such that "the final result is

suspended till Christ the Redeemer appear."23 Predestination avoided the problem of human action affecting already departed souls. This re-

quired, however, the acceptance of predestination. Other Reformers, lacking the rigor and severity of Calvin, adopted

different solutions, and Calvin early on found himself arguing against them.24 These men, called mortalists, stretch from Luther to the Anabap- tists and, as we shall see, to Hobbes. They believed that the soul either

slept or died at death and did not return to its "natural" form until the Last Judgment. Those who believed the soul only slept were the psycho- pannychists, and among them was Luther, who wrote that after death souls are "asleep and do not feel anything at all. The dead lie there without counting days or years; but when they are raised, it will seem to them that they have slept for only a moment."25 The other, more radical, mor- talist position was that of the thnetopsychists, who believed that the soul died with the body, that it was but the animating force, and that it would in turn be resurrected with the body. Among these men we find Milton and Hobbes.

The controversy over mortalism was part of the more general problem of authority. To the degree that the soul was immortal and neither

slept nor died, a substance existed that escaped the laws of the earth.26

Many Protestants, eager to find at the bottom of human existence only a




direct relation of each individual to God's Scripture, had trouble with the notion of a soul that had, as it were, independent existence, even if this existence lasted only from the death of the body to the Last Judgment.

Hobbes and the Word

With these preliminaries I now want to argue that Hobbes takes over a Scriptural sensibility of authority from the early Reformers on this matter. This is not a claim that Hobbes was (or was not) "religious." I am not

arguing that Hobbes "was" a (crypto-) Lutheran but rather that he

thought about civil authority in the manner in which early Protestants had thought of authority in religious matters." For civil philosophical reasons he even adopts (as we shall see) a radical thnetopsychist position precisely because of his sense of the relation between the two realms that the Leviathan dominates. This in turn is directly related to the importance of the written word for his understanding of authority and to his

understanding of the place of politics and religion in a commonwealth. Hobbes will thus appear much less of a mechanist than he is often pre- sented to be.28

To return briefly to Bosse's engraving, the escutcheon for the commonwealth described in this book is formed by both panels: it is "ecclesi- asticall and civil." From the beginning Hobbes intends a commonwealth to unite two kinds of power that are now regrettably separate. Indeed, his vision of a commonwealth necessarily includes these two kinds of

power.29 In fact, all the frontispieces to Hobbes's books show similar struc- tures of two panels or figures on opposite sides of the bottom of the page, unified by a panel or single figure over them.30

27. A claim such as that of Stephen Holmes-"By wrapping himself in a religious man- tle, the monarch can acquire a bit of divine legitimacy" (Stephen Holmes, "Political Psychol- ogy in Hobbes's Behemoth," in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed. Mary G. Dietz [Law- rence, Kans., 1990], p. 142)-would thus seem simply to impose the modern categories of the secularized portion of our culture on other times. Nor can it be said, with James Farr, that "Hobbes sought to use Scripture to confirm his rationalism, his natural philosophy and his political philosophy of absolute obedience" (James Farr, "Hobbes and the Politics of Biblical Interpretation," in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, p. 175).

28. Recent work on Hobbes also tends in this direction. See, among others, Pocock, "Thomas Hobbes: Atheist or Enthusiast? His Place in a Restoration Debate," History of Politi- cal Thought 11 (Winter 1990): 737-49.

29. It may be worth recalling here that in 1542 Henry VIII had declared to his council: "We as head and you as members, we are conjoined and bound together in one body politic" (quoted in Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political

Theology [Princeton, N.J., 1957], p. 228). Also worthy of note is Hobbes's fascination with

bringing opposed elements together into a single representation. Compare the frontispiece to his 1628 translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War (rendered as The His-

tory of the Grecian War in EW). 30. For reproductions (though no discussion of this issue) see History of Political Thought

11 (Winter 1990). Worthy of note is the claim by Cornelis Schoneveld that the frontispiece




Let us notice now the terms under which the introduction places us. The parallel is between art and nature. Hobbes thinks that whereas nature is God's art, man's art is an imitation of God's art. The product of man's art is not natural, however, but artifice, especially the artificial man that is the Leviathan. God makes man, it appears, by speaking words, that is, "pronouncements." Man makes the artifice of civil society differently, by "pacts and covenants.""31 Hobbes, in fact, makes it clear in the first chapter that this book will owe little to natural origins-"To know the naturall cause of Sense, is not very necessary to the business now in hand" (L, p. 13)-except for what can be given as a short summary of what he has written elsewhere. And he ends the book with a declaration that at last he can get back to matters of natural philosophy, where conclusions of- fend no one and are to all men's profit and pleasure.32 But the book is not written without reference to natural philosophy: the first fifteen chapters are all questions of natural philosophy. Only its eventual subject matter (the "accidents of politic bodies") falls into a different realm. From

chapter 16 on, the questions of natural philosophy will be transformed and resolved by "pacts and covenants." How these can accomplish for the

political and social world the same things that God accomplished by His

pronounced word (accessible to us as writing in Scripture) for the natural world is the subject matter of the book as a whole.33

The claim that the social and human world (as created by and in Leviathan) is different from but parallel to that of nature was not in the seventeenth century uncontroversial. Anthony Ascham notes that "plain reason shewes us, that Naturall and Mathematicall causes have more cer- titude than Civill: For Nature is alwaies uniforme and alike, in its opera- tions.... But Civill or Humane actions proceeding from a mutable and various Principle, [the will] cannot alwaies be alike or uniforme." 34 It also flew directly against what would in 1660-61 be the statutes of the Royal

to the original quarto edition of De Cive (1642) shows that "on earth the choice between chaos and order is temporal and not administered by a superior power but by the book whose title is between them" (Cornelis W. Schoneveld, "Some Features of the Seventeenth-

Century Editions of Hobbes's De Cive Printed in Holland and Elsewhere," in Thomas Hobbes: His View of Man, ed. J. G. van der Bend [Amsterdam, 1982], p. 126).

31. For a good discussion of the seventeenth-century sense of covenant, contract, pact, pactio, conventio, see Glenn Burgess, "Contexts for the Writing and Publication of Hobbes's Leviathan," History of Political Thought 11 (Winter 1990): 675-702. Note that the Latin version of this section of the introduction has pactibus et conventibus, which in French gives pactes et conventions (see LL, p. 6)-quite a different tone than the English.

32. This is more complicated than it looks. See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J., 1985), and the discussion below.

33. This paragraph owes much to several discussions with my student Alberto Pefiades. 34. Anthony Ascham, Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments (1649), p. 5. My

thanks to Robert Westman for lending me his copy.




Society, whose stated purpose was to "improve the knowledge of naturall

things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanick practices, Engynes and Inventions by Experiments-(not meddling with Divinity, Metaphys- ics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetorick, or Logick)."35 The Royal Society may have enjoined its members not to "meddle" in order to preserve itself immaculate from a realm in which it thought it could only know controversy. It was Hobbes's contention that true (if necessarily controversial) knowledge of politics was possible, even if such knowledge could not remain immaculate.36 (Hobbes, of course, was never asked to

join the Royal Society despite his considerable reputation as a natural

philosopher both in England and on the Continent.) In this context, the chart of the derivation of the forms of knowledge

that Hobbes elaborates in chapter 9 is remarkable for both the privilege and the self-contained quality of civil philosophy. Its style is remarkably like the curriculum books that were in general use at Oxford and Cam- bridge during Hobbes's time.37 But the actual organization is not at all normal. Science-"that is, knowledge of Consequences; which is called also Philosophy"-immediately contains two main divisions: natural and civil. Natural philosophy ramifies down through as many as eight levels to arrive at no less than eighteen separate sciences: "Philosophia Prima," geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, geography, engineering, architecture, navigation, meteorology, sciography (consequences of the light as opposed to the motion of the stars), astrology, optics, music, ethics, poetry, rhetoric, logic, and "the Science of Just and Unjust" (L, p. 61). The list is remarkable for its parallel derivation of not only the areas that the Royal Society thought proper for their attention but also those areas they deemed to be the arena of meddling (such as ethics and poetry). Civil philosophy, on the other hand, is given a status equal to the entire realm of natural philosophy even though it is (only) about the rights and duties of the sovereign and the subjects.38

35. Quoted in Martha Ornstein, The R6le of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1928), pp. 108-9n.; cited in Arnold A. Rogow, Thomas Hobbes: Radical in the Service

of Reaction (New York, 1986), p. 202. See also Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-

Pump. 36. Shapin and Schaffer's conclusion in Leviathan and the Air-Pump that Hobbes was

right about the political nature of science (p. 344) is thus only half the story. Not even civil

philosophy can be exempted from power, even if it is the source of power. It is worth noting that there are considerable differences between the Latin and English versions of chapter 9 (see below). Most important is the prominence given civil philosophy and the disappear- ance of the sections allocated to history-presumably something that Behemoth (1668, pub. 1679) was designed to remedy. See LL, pp. 79ff.

37. Compare this with the descriptions of course books given in William T. Costello, The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass., 1958).

38. This chapter is the first place in Leviathan that Hobbes gives favorable mention to

philosophy or philosophers. The three previous mentions (chapters 3, 4, and 8) refer only to "deceived," "puzzled," and "abstruse" philosophers. In general, Hobbes avoids the use of philosophy almost as if he is not quite sure what to call his enterprise in Leviathan. This




There are then two modes of knowing for Hobbes, with one signal difference between them. The one is natural or mathematical and is, as he says in the dedication of Humane Nature, "free from controversy" (EW, 4:xiii).39 The second kind of knowledge, of which Leviathan is to be possibly the first example, is knowledge in which profit and pleasure inter- vene. About such knowledge there will be controversy; here, truth will be arrived at in a manner that encompasses such controversy. In this form, humans have a tendency to recede from correct definitions

when their interest requires it, and setting themselves against reason, as oft as reason is against them: Which is the cause, that the doctrine of Right and Wrong, is perpetually disputed, both by the Pen and the Sword: Whereas the doctrine of Lines, and Figures, is not so; because men care not, in that subject, what be truth, as a thing that causes no mans ambition, profit, or lust. [L, chap. 11, pp. 73-74]

Note that for Hobbes it is distinctly not the case, as some have claimed, that civil philosophy is a "sub-department of physics" or that it is a subcategory of natural philosophy at all.40 It is important to remember, however, that for both forms of knowledge the model of how truth is arrived at is geometry, which Hobbes in Leviathan claims is "the onely Sci- ence that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind" (L, p. 28). The difference has to do only with the possibility and source of contro-

versy.41 How may we achieve this science, that is, its equivalent in civil philos-

is perhaps so because in chapter 46 he defines philosophy as that which is not derived from authors, which the existence of the commonwealth must manifestly be.

39. That the encounter with Euclid in Paris was the turning point in Hobbes's life seems to be the central contention of Rogow's somewhat psychoanalytically oriented Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes is not uncritical of Euclid, however; see note 46 below.

40. The quotation is from Ryan, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences (New York, 1970), p. 15. This passage is also cited in Tom Sorell, "The Science in Hobbes's Politics," in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, p. 69; see also p. 72. Ryan also mentions without specific citation similar

problems in J. W N. Watkins, Hobbes's System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of Philosophical Theories (London, 1965)-who argues that Hobbes's method, drawn from Pad- uan science, among other things, "determined the shape of his civil philosophy" (p. 66)- and Goldsmith, Hobbes's Science of Politics (New York, 1966). The relation of Hobbes to Pad- uan science has recently been called into serious question; see, importantly, Donald W. Han- son, "The Meaning of 'Demonstration' in Hobbes's Science," History of Political Thought 11

(Winter 1990): 587-626, for a summary of the argument and a convincing resolution. What is central here is that Hobbes always sought to differentiate the status of principles from the status of the proof. On axioms in Euclid, see Hobbes, Elements of Philosphy, in EW, 1:82, and Six Lessons to the Savillian Professors of the Mathematics, in EW, 7:225.

41. This is then a modification of Richard Rorty's claim that Hobbes "had no wish to

distinguish what he was doing from something else called 'science'" (Richard Rorty, Philoso-

phy and the Mirror of Nature [Princeton, N.J., 1979], p. 131). It was all science to Hobbes.




ophy, which is clearly Hobbes's intention? The method is described in the introduction:

There is a saying much usurped of late, That Wisedome is acquired, not by reading of Books, but of Men. Consequently whereunto, those persons, that for the most part can give no other proof of being wise, take great delight to shew what they think they have read in men, by uncharitable censures of one another behind their backs. But there is another saying not of late understood, by which they might learn truly to read one another, if they would take the pains; and that is Nosce teipsum, Read

thyself" which was not meant, as it is now used, to

countenance, either the barbarous state of men in power, towards their inferiors; or to encourage men of low degree, to a sawcie behav- iour towards their betters. [L, p. 10]

The most stunning part of this declaration of intention on Hobbes's

part is his translation of nosce teipsum. It clearly means "know thyself," yet for Hobbes this is pointedly and immediately given as "read thyself." Indeed, he goes on to suggest that such reading will cause the characters of our character to become "legible." 42 Reading oneself is then Hobbes's model for knowledge-that is, having a text and finding that text in oneself, much as Luther held that the truth of the Scripture had to be found in oneself. The claim that true knowledge of the self was possible is a task that philosophy set itself in response to the skepticism of Montaigne and others.43

How can this happen, that I find a text in myself, that I (know that I) am a text? How then can I know that you have found the same text, and that we have thus found each other, that this text is the same author-

42. In a very interesting article, Gary Shapiro has noted these same passages and ar-

gued that "in the text-oriented world of the Renaissance, then, Hobbes rejects the authority of books in general but fails to escape from the metaphysics of the book altogether" (Gary Shapiro, "Reading and Writing in the Text of Hobbes's Leviathan," Journal of the History of Philosophy 18 [Apr. 1980]: 149). This may be true, but, as I am arguing here, Hobbes's concern with text is best placed in the context of Protestantism and not the Renaissance. The relation between the two is a matter addressed but not solved by Quentin Skinner, among others. Marshall Missner argues that Hobbes has two methods, "prudence" (in which we read ourselves) being at odds with "science" (Marshall Missner, "Hobbes's Method in Leviathan," Journal of the History of Ideas 38 (Oct.-Dec. 1977): 606-21). This seems to me to be true only if one takes Hobbes's intention to be "scientific" in a restricted and post- Hobbesian sense.

43. See Tuck, "Hobbes and Descartes," in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, pp. 29-30. Compare Hobbes's discussion in The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand T6n- nies (Cambridge, 1928), pp. 17-18: "As it is with beggars, when they say their paternoster, putting together such words, and in such manner, as in their education they have learned from their nurses, from their companions, or from their teachers, having no images or concep- tions in their minds answering to the words they speak" (emphasis added). Thanks to Ted Miller for this reference.




ity and our common community? Hobbes is aware that reading is no easy matter. In the appendix to the Latin edition he writes,

Natural law is eternal, divine and inscribed only in human hearts. But there are very few men who know how to examine their own heart and read what is written there. Thus it is from written laws [that is, from laws that have authority behind them] that men know what they must do or avoid. [LL, p. 700]44

The internal writing that is in each of our hearts is hard to read. Humans thus need external written laws, derived from a true reading of our hearts, in order to know what it is in their hearts to do. Such laws make the heart easier to read--user-friendly, as it were. Only on some occasions will the writing in our hearts be obvious, and then it will have shown already in action:

It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that Nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this Inference, made from the Passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by Experience. Let him therefore consider with himself, when taking a journey, he armes himselfe. ... Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? [L, chap. 13, p. 89]45

To have written (and thus shared) laws that would be read clearly by all, humans will first have to come together. In order to understand

precisely how, we must first look at Hobbes's understanding of spoken language. His account of speech places it in the context of printing and

writing. Its functions are to record our understanding of the present, to make possible a past, and to develop relations with one another. While it is true that speech was once God-given, in that He was first author of

speech, it was lost with the fall of the Tower of Babel. Therefore, Hobbes

characteristically argues, such speech as men have now is not God-given but that which need has taught them. Speech is now therefore a response to purely human needs. In order not to entangle ourselves in words- "as a bird in lime-twiggs" (L, chap. 4, p. 28)-we must, as in geometry, begin by settling definitions. The beginning of speech is agreement on definitions.

Hobbes here makes an important move: in drawing the comparison

44. See also the end of chap. 4 of LL. 45. Similar sentiments are in the "Preface to the Reader," De Cive, in EW, 2:xv. It is

possible to read hearts. Hobbes praises Sir William Cavendish (1505?-57), to whom he dedi- cates his translation of Thucydides' "The History of the Grecian War," saying, "No man better discerned of men" (EW, 8:iv). Johnston appears to read this passage as referring to

Thucydides in his The Rhetoric of "Leviathan," p. 5.




to geometry he suggests that science is God-given and that it depends on human beings all agreeing on the correct definition of words. He puts to-

gether matters that we moderns have subsequently separated. There is a definite sense that human agreement is a necessary and central part of the establishment of truth. In this sense we would say that he is a conven- tionalist, but he is also saying that human beings agree on correct definitions. In this sense he accepts the independent notion of truth and is an essentialist. He also indicates that the set of circumstances that permits arrival at correct definitions is itself God-given, and he thus appears as a theist of some kind. These are all the positions on Hobbes and religion that I identified above, except that for Hobbes these are all coherent. Note that all three would also be true of an early Protestant understand-

ing of how to read Scripture. Underlying all this is his claim that he is

going to do for the commonwealth what God did for geometry. In one of his responses to the Oxford professors who were attacking his mathematics and geometry, Hobbes writes,

Of arts some are demonstrable, others indemonstrable; and demonstrable are those the construction of the subject whereof is in the power of the artist himself, who, in his demonstration, does no more than deduce the consequences of his own operation. The reason whereof is this, that the science of every subject is derived from a precognition of the causes, generation, and construction of the same; and consequently where the causes are known, there is place for demonstration, but not where the causes are to seek for. Geometry therefore is demonstrable, for the lines and figures from which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves; and civil philosophy is demonstrable, because we make the commonwealth ourselves.46

What we make we can know (so does God know the world, but not we, God). How does Hobbes attempt this demonstration? His opposition to metaphorical uses of language is well known and commented on (see L, chap. 8). (The same opposition to metaphor is found in early Protes- tants like Tyndale in relation to Scripture.)47 But the comments almost always take the form of noting that it is ironic that a writer apparently so

opposed to figures of speech produced one of the most powerful figures of speech himself in Leviathan.48 These commentators, however, miss an

46. Hobbes, Six Lessons to the Savillian Professors of the Mathematics, in EW, 7:183-84; emphasis added. Funkenstein (in an unpublished paper) and Tom Sorell ("The Science in Hobbes's Politics," p. 71) have recently reminded us that God knows the world because He made it, and so also will we know that which we have made.

47. Even though Tyndale acknowledges that one finds in Scripture "proverbs, simili- tudes, riddles, or allegories, as all other speeches do," he goes on to insist that the meaning of these "is ever in the literal sense" (quoted in R, p. 101).

48. See Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory (Los Angeles, 1970), p. 33: "Despite Hobbes's admiration for the austerity of geometry, the imprint of fancy was




essential point. Hobbes's opposition to metaphors has to do with thefoun- dations of science and not with words in general. His example in his discussion of science is drawn from geometry: "If the figure showne be a circle, then any straight line through the Center shall divide it into two equall parts" (L, chap. 9, p. 60).49 A definition, for him, cannot be metaphorical, for then it would not be literally true. The foundations of human knowledge de-

pend on human agreement on correct definitions; such agreement in turn produces "significant speech" (see L, chap. 1) and subsequent correct reasoning, "method" (see L, chap. 20).50 Hobbes writes, "he that Rea- soneth aright in words he understandeth, can never conclude an Error" (L, chap. 46, p. 458). Understanding a word depends on making and

sharing in its correct definition. It is thus necessary for God to be hidden or absent from us if true civil philosophy is to be possible. In this Hobbes shares a Protestant attitude toward Scripture.51 Take for example the fol-

lowing passage from Luther's pamphlet attacking the antihumanist, Lou- vain theologian Latomus for using synecdoche, that is, for letting the whole stand for the part:

Let us replace [this usage] with ... ordinary common sense and ... truth itself.... In no writings, least of all the divine, is it right in mere whimsy to grasp at figurative meanings. These ought to be shunned and the pure simple, original sense should be sought ... Wouldn't there otherwise be a Babel of words and languages in the world? Silence would then be better than speech.52

everywhere to be seen." For a discussion of the achievements of metaphor in Hobbes, see Michael Walzer, "On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought," Political Science Quarterly 82 (June 1967): 191-204; rpt. in The Self and the Political Order ed. Strong (New York, 1992), pp. 64-76.

49. In his discussions of Euclid, Hobbes is always careful to insist that principles and axioms are not part of a proof. See Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, in

EW, 1:82 and Six Lessons

to the Savillian Professors of the Mathematics, in EW, 7:225. 50. See Hanson, "The Meaning of 'Demonstration' in Hobbes's Science," p. 587. 51. Johnston quite correctly notes (against, among others, Raymond Polin, Hobbes,

Dieu, et les hommes [Paris, 1981]) that it is wrong to think of the theology in Leviathan as a kind of sweetening of the strong medicine of the secular argument. ButJohnston, like Tuck, fails to realize the range of what Christians were arguing about. He writes that "the radical- ism of his reinterpretation of Scriptures was simply one element in a larger design: to transform his readers into more rational and predictable beings" (Johnston, The Rhetoric of "Leviathan, " p. 137). This may be a consequence of Hobbesian political theory, but I do not think it was Hobbes's intention. The insistence on this-worldliness and corporeality in both Hobbes and early Protestants made mortalism an intellectually attractive doctrine. Johnston wants to read Hobbes back into the late Middle Ages (see for example ibid., p. 139 n. 9); I read him as responding to a problem posed by his contemporaries-a problem he understood better than most. I should add thatJohnston's book is consistently interesting and that he takes Hobbes's relation to religion as an integral part of his thought. See also Johnston, "Hobbes's Mortalism."

52. Luther, "Against Latomus," trans. George Lindbeck, in vol. 32 of Luther's Works, p. 167.




No matter what Hobbes's religious beliefs were, his approach to the question of the relation of metaphor to basic principles is structurally quite consonant with early Protestantism.

The model of method, geometry, is thus a remarkable practice. It is

God-given, but for its operation it depends on explicit human agreement. It is conventional, and it makes error impossible for him who but practices it. "For who is so stupid," asks Hobbes, "as both to mistake in Geome-

try, and also to persist in it, when another detects his error to him?" (L, chap. 5, p. 35).53 So will it also be with civil philosophy. Hobbes, in fact, held up publication for a while in order to get matters so correct that refutation would be impossible. It is worth remembering here that the

speech by God in the Book of Job that ends with the citation Hobbes uses on his frontispiece begins with God as geometer:

Then the Lord answered Job out of the tempest: Who is this whose ignorant words cloud my design in darkness? Brace yourself and stand up like a man; I will ask questions, and you shall answer. Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations? Tell me, if you know and understand. Who settled its dimensions? Surely you should know. Who stretched this measuring-line over it? On what do its supporting pillars rest? Who set its corner-stone in place, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted aloud? Job 38:1-7]

God-given geometry is the model of and for power to which none on earth compare. Geometry is what God does, and it makes possible rule over the "sons of pride." It is often claimed that Hobbes wished to provide a deductive rather than an experimental proof-in natural philosophy as well as in civil philosophy. This, however, is a distinction that fails to bring out what was at stake in the relation of his "geometrical" approach (language and method) to the establishment of an authoritative conclusion. Here the recent book by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer is of great help.54

Hobbes became involved in a long and angry debate with Robert

53. This claim on Hobbes's part is at the root of why he was unwilling to back off his claims in De Corpore to have squared the circle. A good summary of this whole episode is

given in Rogow, Thomas Hobbes, pp. 194ff. Hobbes eventually produced twelve different

proofs that he had squared the circle; part of the opposition to him appears to have been

politically motivated, and it is clear that his principal opponents, John Wallis and Seth Ward, both Savillian Professors at Oxford, chose to attack his geometry in order to discredit his social and political authority.

54. See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump. I am indebted to the review

essay by Bruno Latour, "Postmodern? No, Simply Amodern! Steps towards an Anthropol- ogy of Science," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 21 (Mar. 1990): 145-72, and thank him for making a prepublication draft available to me.




Boyle over the air pump and the vacuum that Boyle claimed to have produced with his apparatus. It is sometimes thought that this was simply a matter of Hobbes clinging to an outdated medieval horror vacui and once again pigheadedly attempting to maintain the impossible. This, however, is a surprising conclusion given Hobbes's opposition to Aristotle and Scholasticism; it also misses the central issue. It is, in any case, not what Hobbes said, as the Dialogus physicus de natura aeris makes perfectly clear.55

One can approach the quarrel with Boyle through the arguments on which Leviathan rested and from which Hobbes thought it would draw its

authority. In the "Review, and Conclusion" that ends the English version of Leviathan, Hobbes indicates that "all truth of doctrine" depends on the

following elements. First, it rests on either reason or Scripture, which have in common that their credit does not depend on "any writer." Second, truth of doctrine rests on right and is not established as are matters in law, where

facts depend on witnesses. Third-and here I condense a number of similar points-it owes nothing to its antiquity (see L, p. 490).

1) The easiest point for a modern is the last. Most of us believe that the antiquity of a practice is not in itself a reason for accepting its correct- ness. It is worth noting here that this argument has its origin in the attacks on the Roman church made by the early Reformers. Calvin in

particular made in the dedication of the Institutes of the Christian Religion exactly the same argument that Hobbes takes up: if one were to rely on ancient authority and practice, chaos would result since those authorities and practices all contradict each other.56

2) Whereas the last point is aimed at faulty religious argument, the second is aimed at faulty secular argument; it opposes the grounding of claims on opinion. Facts (such as those produced by experiments) cannot be a basis for right, even if, as Hobbes did argue, agreement on them could be a mode of decision making once right was established.57 But the

argument against witnessing extended for Hobbes to any field that claimed to be a science in which knowledge could be firmly established, including the realms of natural philosophy. Thus for Hobbes, Boyle posed a threat not so much in his claim about the existence of a vacuum but in his claim that the existence of anything could be established experi- mentally.58 Boyle argued that opinion, reported observation-by people

55. The point was about authority. Hobbes writes: "Whoever you are, who searches for

physics, that is, the science of natural causes, not within yourself but in the books of the masters, you are to be warned lest you understand too little or you do not rightly reckon what you understand" (Hobbes, Dialogus physicus de natura aeris, trans. Schaffer, in Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, p. 348; see also ibid., pp. 115-31).

56. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, pp. 10ff. 57. Whatever Boyle established by his experiments, it could not be, as Shapin and

Schaffer show in Leviathan and the Air-Pump, the basis of a philosophical claim. 58. In Seven Philosophical Problems and Two Propositons of Geometry (1662), Hobbes argues

that "no experiment made with the engine at Gresham College, is sufficient to prove that




of good reputation59-was not only adequate but was the proper way to establish the scientific basis of a particular claim. Indeed, Boyle extended this claim to an argument for "virtual witnessing," the position that one had only to know what would count as observation of a "correct" result.

By claiming that truth could be established by public or semipublic confirmation-is the space of the laboratory public if it is supported by public funds?-Boyle, according to Hobbes, was opening the door to another challenge to the authoritative establishment of civil philosophy. As

Shapin and Schaffer write,

In Hobbes's view the elimination of vacuum was a contribution to the avoidance of civil war. The dualist ontology deployed by priests spoke of existents which were not matter: this made men "see dou- ble" and resulted in the fragmentation of authority which led inexo- rably to chaos and civil war.60

3) The first point is the most interesting. For Hobbes there is a formal

parallel between truth arrived at by reason (as in Leviathan) and truth arrived at by Scripture. The author is of no significance for understanding in either. Reason is simply the "adding and subtracting" of agreed on givens. It goes astray as soon as it relies on authority (see L, pp. 31-33). The

Scripture is also for Hobbes a book that has no author, at least no earthly author. It is therefore a book that can only be read and to which the intentions of the author can be of no concern. It is, we might say, our (the reader's) book, since the author (God) is unknowable. It is thus also a book that cannot be metaphorical, at least not at the most basic level, since metaphor cannot be at the basis of a correct understanding, and the one thing we know about Scripture is that it is correct, if anything is. The claims made for a literal understanding of the Bible have to do with the nature of a text, not the nature of God.

Hobbes, even in Behemoth, is willing to accept the dangers of the avail-

ability of the translated Scripture. To A's claim that "after the Bible was

there is, or that there may be vaccum" (EW, 7:22-23). The claim is about the relation of

experiments to authoritative truth. This is not to say that Hobbes was opposed to experimental science. John Aubrey records that he took courses in chemistry and undertook dissections. See John Aubrey, Brief Lives and Other Selected Writings, ed. Anthony Powell (Lon- don, 1949), p. 244. See also Noel Malcolm, "Hobbes and the Royal Society," in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, pp. 46ff. Hobbes was opposed to the idea of experiment establishing the basis of science.

59. Shapin has shown in an unpublished paper how the only results that Boyle ever

disputes in the records of his experiments are ascribed to unnamed helpers and never to (named) gentlemen.

60. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, p. 108. It is worth recalling that Hobbes's opponents attacked his geometry, his theology, and his civil philosophy.




translated into English, every man, nay, every boy and wench, that could read English, thought they spoke with God Almighty," B responds,

Did not the Church of England intend it should be so? What other end could they have in recommending the Bible to me, if they did not mean I should make it the rule of my actions? Else they might have kept it, though open to themselves, to me sealed up in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and fed me out of it in such measure as had been requisite for the salvation of my soul and the Church's peace.61

Indeed, "the Enemy" leads us astray "First, by abusing, and putting out the light of the Scriptures" (L, chap. 44, p. 418).

Hobbes cannot accept that truth rests upon a particular human au-

thority, anymore than Luther could accept that the pope might act so as to release souls from purgatory. Hence truth depends neither on the his-

tory of human practice, nor upon confirmation, nor yet on its author, as

long as that author is a human being. My point here is that Hobbes's

understanding of scientific, or, indeed, of civil truth, is structured very much along the same lines that the great Reformers used to discuss the relation of individuals to the Bible. Bruno Latour purposefully oversim-

plifies the complexities of the medieval period to make an important point when he writes that "the dual loyalty of the old medieval society- God and the king as two parallel and harmonious crowns-is no longer possible if everyone may appeal directly to God."62 Hobbes takes up and resolves this; it is the political challenge of Protestantism.

Hobbes is quite clear in distinguishing periods during which the relations of church and state (as we would now put it) were different. In the period prior to the coming of Christ there were no particular problems. The Jews were a special and solitary case in which God actually became the civil monarch of a particular people; Hobbes reads the Ten Commandments as the laws given by the king (see L, chap. 42, p. 356; LL, p. 761). There followed a period after the Ascension and prior to the conversion of Constantine during which the only power of the apostles

61. Hobbes, Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England, ed. T6nnies

(Chicago, 1990), pp. 21-22; see also p. 54. Compare here to Erasmus: "I would that even the lowliest women read the Gospels.... And I would that they were translated into all the

languages" (Erasmus, The Paraclesis, in Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writ-

ings, trans. and ed. John C. Olin [New York, 1965], p. 97; also quoted in R, p. 106). Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (New York, 1986), cites only the first part of the passage quoted from Hobbes in a suggestion that Hobbes would prefer to have the

Scripture centrally controlled. I would rather think that George Kateb is right in seeing Hobbes as a liberator; see George Kateb, "Hobbes and the Irrationality of Politics," Political

Theory 17 (Aug. 1989): 355-91. Here it is interesting to note that when Hobbes's opponent Seth Ward preached a sermon "Against Resistance to Lawful Powers" to the king in 1551 he attacked Hobbes. See the discussion in Malcolm, "Hobbes and the Royal Society," p. 57.

62. Latour, "Postmodern?" p. 168.




was to proclaim the kingdom of Christ, which they manifestly could not do through the exercise of "commandment or compulsion." Hobbes is

willing even to argue (in a manner he will generalize to postconversion situations) that if a sovereign were to command someone to disavow his or her belief in Christ, such an act would belong to the sovereign, not to the person doing it and that no sin would have been committed (except by the sovereign).

For Hobbes-as, I might add, with Augustine-it is after the advent of Christian sovereigns that the relation of "commandment and compulsion" to belief becomes important.63 Richard Tuck wants to conclude that with the writing of Leviathan Hobbes becomes a "Christian atheist" and a

proponent of a civil religion of the kind Tuck identifies with Rousseau and the French Revolution.64

This argument seems to me unnecessary. Tuck, having discovered that Anglican theologian Henry Hammond in 1651 refers to Hobbes as a "Christian atheist," seems to assume that it was easier in the seventeenth

century to get Hobbes right than it is now.65 The identification with Rous- seau (itself characteristic of a generation of English scholarship) is made much more complex by Rousseau's reference to Hobbes as an auteur chre'- tien whose particular greatness consists in having known how to rejoin both parts of the eagle.66 Tuck's reading rests on the establishment of a contradiction between De Cive and Leviathan, something that Hobbes is at

pains to deny in the "Review, and Conclusion."67 A clue here is given by Tuck's claim that Hobbes had in his earlier work imposed "constraints on

63. At the time of Moses the king of the Hebrews was God Himself. Joel Schwartz notes

correctly that the kingdom of God as exemplified by the Hebrews was not Hobbes's model; see Joel Schwartz, "Hobbes and the Two Kingdoms of God," Polity 18 (Fall 1985): 7-24.

64. See Tuck, "The Christian Atheism of Thomas Hobbes," pp. 111, 129. In the Latin

appendix (not cited by Tuck), however, there is material indicating that religion is necessary for people to keep their oaths (LL, p. 761).

65. The school of interpretation associated with Cambridge University historians

Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, and others has greatly enhanced our understanding of texts

by insisting that they be placed in linguistic and historical context. There is, however, a

tendency in their writings to conclude that contemporaries, prima facie, got, for example, Hobbes right. Thus Hobbes's reputation for atheism is a strong indicator to Skinner that Hobbes was an atheist. Yet not only do these historians differ among themselves (see, for instance, Pocock, "Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Hobbes") but contem-

poraries of Hobbes differed also. See Burgess, "Contexts for the Writing and Publication of Hobbes's Leviathan," p. 702: "It is not impossible ... for all of Hobbes's contemporaries to have been wrong" (about the meaning of Leviathan) in that they read him as a theorist of the 1650s and not the 1640s.

66. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (1762; Har- mondsworth, 1968), bk. 4, chap. 8, p. 180. The English school to which I refer includes writers like R. S. Peters, Hobbes (Westport, Conn., 1975), and Cranston, The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754-1762 (London, 1991), esp. pp. 302-22.

67. In any case, the chronology appears to be highly confused. Tricaud argues (con- vincingly) that the Latin version was written prior to the English one. If that is so, then there is much more of a developmental relation between De Cive and the two versions of




himself in deference to traditional Christianity." The main example he gives is the doctrine of mortalism mentioned above in discussion of Lu- ther and Calvin. For Tuck, this goes to the "very limits of what was possible within the civil religion that Hobbes took to have established in 1650."68

It is clear that Hobbes espoused a radical thnetopsychist position in Leviathan. In chapters 38 and 44 he argues that the soul dies with the body. "The Soule in Scripture," he notes, "signifieth alwaies, either the Life, or the Living Creature; and the Body and Soule jointly, the Body alive" (L, chap. 44, p. 425).69 In the appendix he even suggests that the only people who really argue for the imperishability of the soul are "philosophers, masters of whom, as far as I can see, the Holy Scripture has no need" (LL, p. 733; see also LL, p. 776). (Note how this too ties in with

my argument about interpretation.) Hobbes's position, however, while

certainly a distinctly minority view in the seventeenth century, is not

wildly heterodox.70 Indeed, it is a logical nonpredestinarian position available to those who must insist that salvation depends on grace alone.71 It is a position taken by various elements in Anglican, Presbyterian, and Independent confessions. It is in general associated with a reaction against a Greek (or Neoplatonic) body-spirit dualism and among its pro- ponents contemporary with Hobbes we find the Puritan Milton, the Anglican Royalist Thomas Browne, and the Leveller and Baptist Rich-

Leviathan. When we add to this Tuck's claim that "Hobbes had actually written up his general philosophy in almost as detailed a form as his civil philosophy by 1641" (Tuck, "Hobbes and Descartes," p. 16), the matter becomes so hard to separate out that it may be the wrong approach. The translation of De Cive now appears pretty clearly not to be by Hobbes; for the opposite opinion, see Warrender's introduction to his translation of the Latin text, De Cive (Oxford, 1983).

68. Tuck, "The Christian Atheism of Thomas Hobbes," pp. 121-22. Martinich, in The Two Gods of "Leviathan," pp. 262-66, argues that Hobbes's view was not evidence of an antire-

ligious attitude. Quentin Skinner, in "Thomas Hobbes and the Nature of the Early Royal Society," Historical Journal 12 (1969): 217-39, suggested that religious heterodoxy was a reason for Hobbes's exclusion from the Royal Society. See also Shapin and Schaffer, Levia- than and the Air-Pump, pp. 131-39.

69. Johnston, The Rhetoric of "Leviathan, " p. 143, holds that Hobbes "comments neither

upon the nature of the soul nor upon the meaning of its immortality," which is quite wrong. 70. Tuck is on stronger ground in his other point, namely, that the parallel Hobbes

establishes between Moses and Jesus in Leviathan (chaps. 16 and 41) is beyond the pale of

any acceptable Christianity. However, Hobbes withdraws this as an error in the appendix to the Latin edition of Leviathan (LL, p. 775) as well as in his responses to Bishop Bramhall. See Hobbes, An Answer to a Book Published by Dr Bramhall called the "Catching of the Leviathan,"

EW, 4:316-17: "It is I that catched myself, for saying instead of by the ministry of Moses, in the person of Moses."

71. Johnston, in "Hobbes's Mortalism," sees a much greater divide here than do I. Versions of mortalism were around from the time of Luther and, as I have tried to show, for good theological reasons.




ard Overton. Among more recent theologians, the doctrine has found favor with Karl Barth, Anders Nygren, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr.72

It is not clear whether Hobbes adopted thnetopsychism because it was the one Christian doctrine of the soul consonant with his materialist

metaphysics and centralist politics or because his politics flowed from his beliefs about the soul. It does not seem necessary to resolve the order, for it is clear that this position fits very easily inside a position that a wide

range of Protestants found intellectually compelling. It is, incidentally, also in this vein that one should understand Hob-

bes's opposition to Descartes. Hobbes criticizes the Cartesian development (in the second Meditation) of the cogito from the act of thinking to "a spirit, a soul, an understanding, a reason." While Hobbes would be perfectly happy to accept the formulation that he is a thing that thinks- that is, a body-he resists Descartes's move to self-consciousness by arguing that Descartes would thereby commit himself to an endless regress. These moves are made in De Corpore in 1640, but they are central to the notion of sovereignty as an artificial soul, existent only when the Levia- than is animate, which Hobbes outlines in the introduction to Leviathan.73 As noted above, knowledge of the internal self is in principle as possible (and no more difficult) for Hobbes as is that of the external world.

What is central here is the way in which Hobbes takes over the doctrine of Scripture associated with this branch of Protestantism and makes it central to his notion of civil authority. Echoing Luther, Hobbes even says in the Latin appendix that it "is not my custom to give an understanding of Holy Scripture for someone other than myself" (LL, p. 731).74 The point is not that any interpretation goes but that each must find

72. Much of the information in this paragraph comes from Burns, Christian Mortalism

from Tyndale to Milton. 73. Hobbes's key objection is as follows: "For it does not seem to be good reasoning to

say: I am exercising thought, hence I am thought; or I am using my intellect, hence I am intellect. For in the same way I might say, I am walking, hence I am the walking." Hobbes goes on to

carefully "distinguish a subject from its faculties and activities, i.e. from its properties and essences." Note that its activities are its essences; this is part of Hobbes's continuing refusal of any dualism. Hobbes thinks that Descartes expels the occult from his understanding of matter but not from his understanding of the mind. The passage cited may be found to-

gether with the rest of Hobbes's "Objections" and Descartes's replies in the second volume of Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T Ross, 2 vols. (1931; Cambridge, 1979); the passage quoted above is from 2:61. See also Rogow, Thomas Hobbes, pp. 145-48, and Lucien Jaume, Hobbes et l'Ftat reprisentatif moderne (Paris, 1986), pp. 100ff.

74. Ryan sees that for Hobbes "each man must make up his mind for himself" but thinks this must mean that "authority stands in the way of the growth of knowledge." No Protestant could have thought that. Ryan also recognizes the role of "social discipline" in

arriving at truth (Ryan, "Hobbes and Individualism," in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, pp. 84, 87). I am not sure that this is unrelated to authority.




him- or herself in Scripture. The individualistic basis is as much here as it is in Hobbes's insistence that each individual covenant with every other individual to establish the commonwealth.

In Leviathan, chapter 40, Hobbes suggests that Scriptures, "since God now speaketh in them, are the Mount Sinai; the bounds whereof are the Laws of them that represent Gods Person on Earth." He goes on to

suggest that we may gaze upon them, but that "to interpret them; that is, to pry into what God saith to him whom he appointeth to govern under him, and make themselves Judges whether he govern as God comman- deth him, or not, is to transgresse the bounds God hath set us, and to

gaze upon God irreverently" (L, p. 326). In chapter 43, as he develops this argument, Hobbes will point out that Christians do not know but only believe, the Scripture to be the word of God, and that the reason they believe this is that they are taught it "from their infancy" (L, chap. 43, p. 406). For Protestants, the great advantage of the scriptural basis of au-

thority is its apparent lack (or at least the unavailability) of an author. Hence it was authoritative precisely because it had no author. The reli- ance on grace alone as a path to salvation insured that all earthly author-

ity could and must be seen as concentrated in the realm of civil authority. The problem for Hobbes was how to establish civil authority such that it shared the quality of Scripture, that is, made itself available to humans without the quality of being authored. It is no problem that we are taught the Scripture from infancy-indeed, were we not, Scripture could never

hope to have authority. (We learn grammar-it is available to us-from

infancy; that is the basis of its authority.) The difficulty in human affairs is that there is as yet no equivalent to

God's Scripture. Humans have continued to think that God's Scripture carries ultimate weight. The fact that it manifestly does not and cannot is the sign that we are presently the authors of our own discontents. The dissolution of God's language with the Tower of Babel was the end of a

language that attached men to God rather than to their parochial and individualized needs. Hobbes goes to great lengths in chapter 35 ("Of the Signification in Scripture of the Kingdome of God, of Holy, Sacred, and Sacrament") to extend his argument of chapter 12. There he had con- tended that the only earthly kingdom that might be thought the kingdom of God was that of the Hebrews under Samuel, in which, tellingly, the

people chose God to be their king. In the later chapter, Hobbes is quite explicit that God's kingship does not derive from the power that God

naturally has (His "ordinary title") but "in a special manner," by their

"own consent, and covenant." This kingdom ended effectively when the Hebrews sought to have a king, in the words of 1 Samuel 8:5, "like all the

peoples." There is thus nothing divine available for civil philosophy, no

present text that establishes the "public" that Hobbes sees as the equivalent to the "holy" (L, chap. 35).




Authority and the Word

It is in this context that we must now read the chapter on authors and authorization. Leviathan is developmental. The sixteenth chapter75 comes at the very end of Hobbes's section "Of Man" and clearly marks and makes possible the transition to the next section, "Of Common-wealth." It also comes after two long chapters on the laws of nature, one of the

major thrusts of which is to indicate that these laws (the science of which is moral, not civil, philosophy) are properly understood as laws only if we look at them from God's perspective. Laws exist only when someone has the right to command; but we know from above that there is no realm on this earth at present in which God has the right to command, no

people having covenanted with him since the Jews. Who then can have such a Godlike right on earth at this time in history?

The material in chapters 1 through 15 deals only with man in his natural capacity, not as a civil being. Civil beings are persons for Hobbes, a word not used until the middle of the fifteenth chapter. Hence all of the understandings that are elaborated in the first part of the book are insufficient in and of themselves to provide a basis for earthly authority. The problem is to establish earthly authority without an earthly author but also without having recourse to those authorities, such as God, who

manifestly were not sufficient for solving problems on this earth. Hobbes's solution, as I shall now try to develop it below, is to take over the notion of authority present in the Protestant understanding of

Scripture and make it available without a transcendental referent. Put

briefly, the problem is to establish an earthly authority that has no available author. This is why politics must be art so that the public realm confronts us without raising the question of its authorization and authorship, of its authority.76 It is thus that representation--that is, the creation of human artifice-is central to and makes possible the move from natural to civil philosophy.

By chapter 13 it is important to note that we are still not capable of civil philosophy. (We are still, Hobbes says here, in the realm of sin, not

75. This chapter has been the occasion of much commentary since it became the central text for Hanna Pitkin's analysis of representation in Hobbes some twenty-five years ago. It is also the subject of a problematic analysis in David P. Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 1969), pp. 120-77. Pitkin's analysis has been criticized or extended by Clifford Orwin, "On the Sovereign Authorization," Political

Theory 3 (Feb. 1975): 26ff., with an exchange with Pitkin following ("Comment on Orwin," pp. 45-49; "Reply to Pitkin," pp. 50-52). See also Jaume, Hobbes et l'Vtat representatifmoderne, pp. 82-106.

76. Contrast Michel Foucault: "We have no authority and that is precisely our author-

ity" (Liberation 967 [30 June-1 July, 1984], p. 22). The next development in this path is Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation, trans. W. Lowrie (1847-48; New York, 1966), esp. pp. 116-18. For a consideration, see Strong, "Nietzsche's Political Aesthetics."




crime, when we break the laws of nature [see LL, p. 760].) This chapter establishes the equality of human beings in a very particular way. It is not that human beings are equal but that in the state of nature they repeatedly make themselves equal only to and in terms of each other. "Though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another ... the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable" that the weakest will not find a way to make himself the

equal (L, pp. 86-87). In the state of nature men are unable to move from the fact that they are constantly making themselves equal to an actual real-

ity of being equal. The equality that characterizes them and is exemplified in the various laws of nature described in chapters 14 and 15 binds them

"inforo interno." It is only when obligation occurs "inforo externo" that we in fact are equal (L, chap. 15, p. 110). Hobbes's task here is to develop an

understanding that takes obligation out of the realm of intent without

deindividualizing it. This is the focus of the now-celebrated chapter 16, which establishes authority by means of an argument about representation.

The arguments of chapter 16 are by now familiar to most, but it will still be necessary to recall some of the emphases. This chapter introduces the definition of a person. A person is not, as Hanna Pitkin was one of the few to take seriously,77 the same as a human being but is instead a being understood in terms of having control over his or her words and deeds. Being a person then has nothing to do with mental states or intentions. It is simply what happens when judgments are made about the

ownership of actions and words. If my actions are considered by another to be my own, then I am a natural person; if they are thought to stand for, to "represent," another, then I am an "artificial" person, artificial because the "I" that is identified by the observation of these particular actions is constructed by and for the performance of said actions.

How is that artificial person constructed? Hobbes observed that some artificial persons, such as stage actors, or Cicero in rehearsal of his legal cases (in which he took on the roles of his adversary and the presiding judge), are simply that-their personhood is not their own, but it is not

necessarily "owned" by anyone else. Here I think that Pitkin is slightly wrong in her critique of Hobbes on stage actors. Hobbes is in fact, I think, rather clear that something cannot be my own without thereby being, that is, belonging to, someone else. In the Latin appendix he explains that a "person" is simply the face turned toward another (see LL, p. 746).78

77. See Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, p. 15. 78. This section of the appendix elaborates the arguments of chapter 16 and is an

indication that it is highly likely that Hobbes wrote the Latin version prior to the English, as Tricaud and Hood argue. It is worth comparing this entire account with the brilliant

analysis in Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge, 1986).




The most important consequence of this notion of person is that it is

quite opposed to any (probably ecclesiastical) understanding of personhood as the essence or substance of an individual. And, in human terms, this also applies to God. God, insofar as He is anything other than

being, that is, is available to humans on earth, is an artificial, that is, represented, person in Hobbes's terms:

Our Saviour therefore, both in Teaching, and Reigning, represen- teth (as Moses did) the Person of God; which God from that time forward, but not before, is called the Father; ... For Person being a relative to a Representer, it is consequent to plurality of Representers, that there bee a plurality of Persons, though of one and the same Substance." [L, chap. 41, p. 322]79

The paragraph in chapter 16 on representatives as and of the true God is juxtaposed to the paragraph on the representative of idols. The idol paragraph ends with a clear delineation of the authority behind such

representations--it is the state.80 The true-God paragraph contains no such sentence. This is not a source of confusion, it seems to me, nor, as some have read it, an attack on the Christian religion. It is rather an indication that true religion, in which there is no humanly available presence of the authorizing deity, provides the model for the commonwealth.

This said, it is important to remember that the act of authorization is made by each individual to each other individual and not by "the people" or any kind of collectivity.8' Most centrally, sovereignty results from my ability to find myself in you, and you in me. Sovereignty is artificial and owes its existence to an authorization that each individual has to make to each other.

To this act of authorization, however, is added a covenant. The func- tion of the covenant is to make it impossible for each individual ever to

stop, of his or her own volition, authorization.82 It is not so much that authorization happens and that people relapse into impotence; it is that the covenanting authorization is constant, cannot be recalled, and thus cannot be a problem.

The sovereign-the Leviathan-is then a (written) text of which each individual is the author, but it is a text for which the author is no

longer available. It is in fact the language of civil association, of politics itself. It is a mistake--admittedly one that Hobbes sometimes appears to license-to speak as if the sovereign were an "ordinary" or natural per-

79. I am conscious here of a general influence of Jaume, Hobbes et l'tat reprisentatif moderne, pp. 82ff.

80. This is another reason why Tuck's argument about civil religion must be off-base. 81. See Polin, Politique et philosophie chez Thomas Hobbes (1952; Paris, 1977). 82. "For those men that are so remissely governed, that they dare take up Armes, to

defend, or introduce an Opinion, are still in Warre" (L, chap. 18, p. 125).




son. He, she, it is the text in which we can at the same time find ourself and each other.83 That is, in setting up the Leviathan we have represented ourself to our self. This is a "mortal God." (Here one should remember that Christ was the representation of God on earth for Hobbes and that He was a mortal God.) The sovereign is our representative: our self represented to ourself and thus available to our self. The absolute certainty of the sovereign is of a kind with the certainty that Luther had that he had found himself in the Scripture. This is why for Hobbes liberty and authority are possible only together. We are only free when we obey our self, and we are only able to do that if there is a Leviathan.84

But this places a very different emphasis on the status of Leviathan as a book. Leviathan is often read as a justification for absolutism. It is

nothing of the kind, at least no more than Protestantism was. Leviathan is the Scripture necessary to the understanding of sovereignty that Hobbes has established. It is precisely because the vision of the sovereign is so similar to that of the Protestant vision of God that this sovereignty needs what God gave-a writing through which each individual could encounter him- or herself more as an embodiment of (civil) truth. (This is, incidentally, why there is explicitly no need for a "noble lie" in Hobbes and

why Hobbes is perhaps the most egalitarian of all theorists.) Hobbes can thus write that we are each the author of each of the acts of the sovereign and are responsible for each of the acts of the sovereign as our own. This move is the equivalent of the fallen state of men in Protestantism. The covenant puts us in a state of political sin and makes us capable of receiv-

ing grace. When Thomas Jefferson wrote and the others accepted the Declara-

tion of Independence, they held the truths therein to be "self-evident."

By the end of the eighteenth century it was (barely) possible for self- evidence to be an authoritative claim; only with romanticism did it receive its fullest development. Hobbes, writing over one hundred years before Jefferson, has no such expectation.85 The truths of Leviathan, while perhaps written on our hearts, are hard to read. Therefore, a text(book) is needed. Stephen Greenblatt has noted that in "the early period of print culture the book could have a special kind of presence that perhaps no

83. For more considerations of this act as central to politics, see Strong, The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time and Space (Notre Dame, Ind., 1990), chap. 1.

84. There is a formal parallel between a church and a sovereign established in chapter 33 (see also the frontispiece), noted by the phrase that both are "united in one person, their

Soveraign" (L, p. 268). It is significant that this phrase does not occur in the Latin; it repre- sents the major achievement of Hobbes's later civil philosophy (see LL, p. 416).

85. These were ideas in the air at the time. See Ascham, Of the Conditions and Revolutions in Governments, in the preface to the new edition (1649): "There are certaine seasons for our

comprehending some certaine truths, which we cannot understand nor digest, till we arrive to that Age which is particular to them" (unpag.).




manuscript ever had.... [It was] among the primary sources of self-

fashioning" (R, p. 86). The sovereign is not to use Leviathan as a hand- book, in the manner of the "Mirror of Princes" literature, as if Hobbes were a kind ofJulia Child of politics. He is to have it taught in the univer- sities. This desire for Leviathan to become the standard text for all is remarkably similar to the status that the printed Scripture had for Pro- testantism. In Leviathan, Hobbes wrote a civil philosophical Scripture that complements natural philosophical doctrine and parallels what God did in making the world for us. It is an achievement worthy of the respect that his introduction suggests is due. No wonder the individuals who make up the body of the Leviathan face inward toward the giant in the edition destined for public use. The giant is the text. The resemblance of the face of the giant to Hobbes would then be intended; his is the head that has made this text available, even though we all have it in ourselves.

There was, I noted, on the left part of the frontispiece a single, solitary house. I like to think it was Hobbes's house.



How to Write Scripture -- on Hobbes and authority and writing

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