Love and Fear of an Inconceivable God

Abstract

Abstract Hobbes advances the radical view that no human passion—no emotion, feeling, sentiment, or affective attitude, including love, fear, hate, and the rest—can genuinely be directed toward an inconceivable being such as the deity. Moreover, even if passions directed toward God were possible, other texts imply and even openly argue that the traditionally valorized religious passions of love and fear of God would be improper. In this chapter I document and examine these arguments problematizing passions that purport to take God as their object. I argue that Hobbes avoids any genuine commitment to God-directed passions, even when it comes to the honor and worship that we are rationally required to show toward the deity. He also radically redefines the sort of ‘love’ and ‘fear’ that we owe to God, and thereby presents us with an intellectualized form of religious devotion purged of sentiment and performative faux-sentiment.