Hobbes on Religion and the Church between "The Elements of Law" and "Leviathan": A Dramatic Change of Direction?

Abstract

It has become something of an orthodoxy among Hobbes scholars to see a dramatic change in Hobbes's intellectual development in 1640s, that is, between earlier works The Elements ofLaw Natural and Politic (1640) and De Cive (1642) on one hand and (1651) on other. Various accounts have been given to explain these differences, dependent on issue at stake (rhetoric, methodology, political philosophy, theology, ecclesiastical polity), but what they have in common is their stress on radical character of Hobbes's turn of mind in that crucial decade of his exile. David Johnston, for example, has claimed that is an intensely polemical work that differs significantly in style and content from earlier works: dramatic change in literary form was connected with important changes in substance of his political theory, and [was] ultimately symptomatic of an underlying metamorphosis in his conception of nature and aims of political philosophy.1 He sees cause of this metamorphosis in Hobbes's growing realization that reason cannot assert itself. Most people are superstitious, gullible, and irrational, and these features are ingrained in them. Hence what Hobbes wants to do in is to initiate a cultural transformation by bringing people to see their own blindness, thereby leading men toward that enlightened, rational understanding of their own interests which he believes will form firmest foundation possible for a truly lasting commonwealth.2 Quentin Skinner too argues that Leviathan embodies a new and far more sense of what powers of unaided reason can hope to achieve.3 In his view this pessimism cleared way for a reappraisal of value of rhetoric, as well as a reconsideration of all leading elements in classical ars rhetorica. Thus in Hobbes endorsed the very approach he had earlier repudiated, presenting us with two different versions of same theory, but with two different and indeed antithetical theories, as well as with two correspondingly antithetical models of philosophical style.4 And while focusing more closely on Hobbes's religious and ecclesiastical views, Richard Tuck has argued in various publications that on religion Hobbes seems to have directly repudiated what he had argued in earlier works, and in doing so he pushed in a remarkably utopian direction.5 represented just an extension or a modification of arguments in De Cive, but their fundamental reversal.6 It is obvious that contains much new material, but I think this picture of Hobbes's radically new departure vis-a-vis The Elements and De Cive is fundamentally mistaken. Instead, I shall argue that there is much more continuity between three works than this picture suggests, and that many of reasons which have been adduced to explain this development are not valid. In this article I shall focus on Hobbes's position on religion and churchstate relationship in 1640s. In another, related article I have concentrated on Hobbes's views of reason and eloquence, criticizing pessimistic argument (as I have termed it) and how it has been used especially by Johnston and Skinner (for all their differences) in arguing that witnessed a reappraisal of value of rhetoric.7 In a sense it is easy to see why recent scholarship has stressed wide differences between views Hobbes expressed in his early works and Leviathan. Almost half of is devoted to religious issues, dismissing idea of any interpretative authority for Church, idea of natural eternity of soul after death, and traditional notions of purgatory and hell-- to mention only a few salient points. …