Mortal God Research Articles

From I Samuel 8 to Genesis 1: Towards a Political Theology of Difference

ABSTRACT One way of understanding Political Theology is as the reading of modern political concepts as secularized theological concepts, influentially promoted by Carl Schmitt. Chief among theological concepts secularized into modern politics, for Schmitt, is God, whose rule translates, through the writings of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes into modern sovereignty. For Hobbes, the sovereign is a “mortal God,” and God’s rule over Israel is the only ancient political model worthy of emulation. While scholars have increasingly engaged the role of theology in modern political thought, there has been little reckoning with the particular Judeo-Christian notion of God – an overlord alluded to in gendered terms – that is the prototype for modern sovereignty. This understanding of God has shaped and limited the modern political imagination, inviting understandings of sovereignty as domination. This article explores the possibility that visions of politics or sovereignty absent domination, being pursued in our time, would be enriched by – and may indeed require – an expansion of our theological imagination.

Transubstantiation, Absurdity, and the Religious Imagination: Hobbes and Rational Christianity

Abstract This article evaluates the political implications of Thomas Hobbes’s extensive treatment of religion by taking up the motif of the Eucharist (and accompanying doctrine of transubstantiation) in Leviathan. Hobbes holds out transubstantiation as an exemplar of absurdity and an historical outgrowth of Christianity’s inauspicious meeting with pagan practices. At the same time, Leviathan contains allusions to eucharistic imagery in its narration of the generation of the “Mortal God,” the commonwealth, as the incorporation of a civil body. These conflicting sentiments are illustrative of a wider tension running through Hobbes’s thought. Although Hobbes’s repudiation of superstition is well-known, it stands in stark contrast to Leviathan’s treatment of Christianity as an exemplar of “true” religion. The varied allusions to eucharistic doctrine illustrate how proper use might be made of a persistent “natural religiosity.” Both in its consonance with reason and its political logic, Christianity remains a politically constructive expression of “power invisible.”

Pugh, Syrithe (2021). Euhemerism and Its Uses. The Mortal Gods. Routledge studies in Renaissance and early modern worlds of knowledge, 19. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge

Pugh, Syrithe (2021). Euhemerism and Its Uses. The Mortal Gods. Routledge studies in Renaissance and early modern worlds of knowledge, 19. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge

Keeping Up with Caputo: Of Specters and Spooks—Transcendence and Happiness in Caputo’s Radical Theology

This essay serves two purposes. First, it wants to introduce readers to John D. Caputo’s Radical Theology by way of his recent Specters of God (2022) in which his radical theology truly comes to fruition. The essay provides in this introduction through elucidating this recent work and by pointing to earlier discussions of similar themes and figures in Caputo’s corpus. It will be shown that Caputo’s work is a genuine contemporary search for transcendence, asking all the right questions at the right time. Recently, for instance, Caputo is asking what becomes of the human search for meaning if this entire cosmos is destined to fade away in a Big Crunch. Second, this essay wants to critically address some remaining unclarities in this radical theology. It is to be noted, for instance, that at crucial stages Caputo repeats some aspects of the thought of divinity in theism that he nonetheless says he wants to overcome; at these stages, then, ‘God’ is allowed to be an exception to the worries of the world after all. This essay, too, wants to investigate Caputo’s rather enigmatic insistence of the possibility of joy and happiness in a mortal, finite world that would celebrate only a finite, mortal God. That finitude, instead of lasting and eternal salvation, serves as the very condition of possibility of true joy is an unexamined axiom running through Caputo’s recent works. In this regard, this essay wants to point to both the beauty but also the frailty of this thought.

Religion and Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great was religiously both a man of his time and the catalyst for change in the pattern of Greek religious life. He accepted the ubiquity of divine presence in the world and participated actively in the practice of Greek paganism, but he was also imbued with his own importance which evolved over time into a belief in his own divinity. This belief and the desire for such recognition led to the worship of Hellenistic kings as mortal gods.

How Many Types of Justice are in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan?

The article examines the problem of the multiplicity of justice in Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. The Leviathan combines at least two understandings of justice; the civil one is connected with the keeping of covenants, while the natural one is a law of nature. We demonstrate that monistic views reducing civil justice to natural justice or natural justice to civil justice are as inadequately justified as denying justice at all. Hobbes uses two terms for justice, justice and equity. The latter is natural and binds the sovereign, while the former is created by the sovereign so that the sovereign is not accountable to the principle of justice. The natural poly-semantism of justice postulated in Leviathan finds its solution in the power of the sovereign, which sets the limits of semantic uncertainty and teaches his subjects what justice is. The case of Hobbes’ Foole shows that any definition of justice that goes against the definition of the sovereign will be interpreted as unacceptable. At the same time, there is a possibility for a number of other types of justice. Due to the introduction of the global and eschatological contexts, we get two types of natural justice (pre-civil and international), four types of civil justice (two local-civil and two global-civil), and one global theological (eschatological) justice. This number of conceptions can be considered in a contensive unity, because of the theological foundation of theorizing about justice in Leviathan due to the coincidence of natural and divine laws and the understanding of the commonwealth as a mortal God.

Craniofacial reconstruction of Raphael Sanzio from Urbino: Face and features of a “mortal god”

Forensic anthropology aims at identifying human remains when the skeleton represents the last recourse for forensic evaluation. Facial reconstruction is a multidisciplinary technique combining anatomical, anthropological, artistic and graphic principles to reconstruct the living appearance based on the morphology of the skull for recognition or identification purposes.The alleged skeletal remains of Raphael Sanzio were recovered in 1833 in the Pantheon in Rome, together with the corpses of some of his disciples. This research, on the five-hundredth anniversary of his death, aims at confirming, through 3D facial reconstruction using a manual computerized technique, that the plaster cast of the cranium engraved following Raphael's exhumation and now stored at the Museum “Casa Natale di Raffaello” in Urbino, definitively belonged to the great artist.Comparison of our reconstruction with Raphael's self-portraits resulted in their total superimposition on the profile of the “divine painter”.When completed, the approximation was also compared with a controversial painting “Portrait of a man”, by Sebastiano del Piombo.This research provides, for the first time, the concrete proof that the skeleton exhumed from the Pantheon in 1833 belongs to Raphael, paving the way for possible future molecular studies for further validating his identity.

Modern state as mortal god.

Prisoners are confined in the name of the state as the holder of the monopoly of coercion and violence. To delegitimize religion as a political factor, the modern European state has often been upgraded to a divine authority, endowed with sovereign, that is: unlimited power. For Hobbes, this state was an answer to the “state of nature”, a state of permanent threatening violence, where everyone has a “right to everything”. His sovereign state even has the right to punish and kill innocent citizens if he thinks it is necessary. However, as a citizen I do not have to obey when the sovereign wants my death. Both Hobbes and Hegel defend the state, inclusive its roguish behaviour. Is “rogue state” perhaps a tautology? Remarkable, also twentieth-century scholars like Schmitt and Kahn defend this state: in a dangerous world, we have to be prepared for the exceptional situation. Kafka points to the societal and psychological roots of our roguish behaviour – the gap between our self-caressing (collective) self-image and our treating of others, especially strangers and people in prison. It is very tempting and pleasant to get judgmental and to encourage the mortal god (the state) to judge people.

Mortal Gods: Divine Associations of Humans as an Urban and Neighbourhood Phenomenon

Mortal Gods: Divine Associations of Humans as an Urban and Neighbourhood Phenomenon

The Leviathan Crucified. A Critical Introduction to Jacob Taubes’ “The Leviathan as Mortal God”

Jacob Taubes has written the present text on the Leviathan as mortal god as an introduction to the volume on “The Prince of this World – Carl Schmitt and the Consequences.”1 This is the first volum...

Правительство и государство: два типа мышления

The opposition between the State and the Government is traditionally considered as one of the principal problems of the Modern Political Philosophy. The Government in this pair usually means the natural Institution that grows from the nature self of the human society, which requires an administration. The classical example of such nations which have a Government instead of the State, according to the author, is the United States and Great Britain. In the first case, the real Sovereign is the People, in the second — the Crown. In compliance with it, the State is the artificial organism, which appeared for the first time in Europe in the middle of XVII century. The author analyses the Government and the State as two diverse modes of thinking the Political things. He deduces the Government’s logic from the Roman civitas, while the State’s logic, according to him, is the heir of the Greek polis, as Aristotle described it. The author emphasises that the Government usually practices the natural religion, whereas the State creates its own, political one. In its higher form, such religion has only one superior god, and this is the State itself (Thomas Hobbes defined the State as a “mortal god”).

Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes, Written by Ted H. Miller

Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes, Written by Ted H. Miller

The Mortal God. Does Globalization Imply “the End of the State”?

El articulo critica, desde una perspectiva neoinstitucionalista y estrategico-relacional, la hipotesios de que la globalizacion implica la erosion o la desaparcion del Estado. Se analiza en primer lugar las funciones, estructuras y evolucion del Esatdo liberal alnl estado regulador. Y en segundo lugar, se revisa la naturaleza del sistema neoliberal de Estados en la era global. Se argumenmta que el proceso en juego es el de cracion de nuveo estatismo neoliberal de raiz autoritaria.

Leviathan as Mortal God: On the Contemporaneity of Thomas Hobbes

Leviathan as Mortal God: On the Contemporaneity of Thomas Hobbes

The Beast and the Sovereign according to Hobbes

obviously thought politics with metaphors relating politics to bestiality and monstrosity: in De Cive, a man is a wolf to a man, and two of his major political books are entitled with the name of a biblical monster, Leviathan and Behemoth. Did Hobbes mean that political problems emerge from a natural violence of men and that the political solution to these problems must be found in sovereign violence? This contribution tries to demonstrate that these references do not outline any natural human ugliness but a double bind of culture and society (which is organized and developed for natural reason but thanks to artificial means). For human reasons, the historical development of human life separates this life from humanity in two ways—politics and history turn humanity into monstrosity and divinity (a man is also a god to a man and Leviathan is also a mortal god), and Behemoth means that historical violence is a cultural product. (...)

Immortalisingthe Mortal God Hobbes, Schmitt, and the Ambivalent Foundations of the Modern State

Immortalisingthe Mortal God Hobbes, Schmitt, and the Ambivalent Foundations of the Modern State Prof. Dr. Samuel Salzborn Abstract In international discussions on the theory of state, the “Leviathan” functions as a symbol of the strong, autocratic, omnipotent State. This article will show how such an equivalence in fact negates the ambivalences seen in Thomas Hobbes’ book “Leviathan”, implicitly pointing instead to Carl Schmitt’s proposed interpretation: whereas Hobbes frames the mythological figures of the Leviathan and the Behemoth as symbols of ambivalence, Schmitt reframes them as symbols of identity. Following the hereby proposed thesis, it would be highly productive for broader political theoretical discussions to take the symbols of the Leviathan and the Behemoth as seen in state theory and reconstruct them within the framework of a critical text analysis applied to Hobbes and Schmitt, thereby reinvigorating their interpretative power in current debates on the State’s role and function. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/rhps.v3n1a9

The Body Politic “is a fictitious body”

Thomas Hobbes once wrote that the body politic “is a fictitious body”, thereby contrasting it with a natural body. In this essay I argue that a central purpose of Hobbes’s political philosophy was to cast the fiction of the body politic upon the imaginations of his readers. I elucidate the role of the imagination in Hobbes’s account of human nature, before examining two ways in which his political philosophy sought to transform the imaginations of his audience. The first involved effacing the false ideas that led to sedition by enlightening men from the kingdom of spiritual darkness. I thus advance an interpretation of Hobbes’s eschatology focused upon his attempt to dislodge certain theological conceptions from the minds of men. The second involved replacing this religious imagery with the fiction of the body politic and the image of the mortal God, which, I argue, Hobbes developed in order to transform the way that men conceive of their relationship with the commonwealth. I conclude by adumbrating the implications of my reading for Hobbes’s social contract theory and showing why the covenant that generates the commonwealth is best understood as imaginary.

Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes. By Ted H. Miller. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. 344p. $74.95.

Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes. By Ted H. Miller. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. 344p. $74.95.

The Power of Words. Political and Theological Science in Thomas Hobbes

Far from being only an insincere homage to the spirit of his time, Hobbes’s concern for theology is a consequence of his political individualism. Irrespective of God’s real existence, in order to answer the ‘Foole’ and to assure legitimation and obedience to Leviathan, calculating reason is not enough, as individual faith in God and in the binding force of His law of nature is required. In Leviathan II, chapter XXXI, the correspondence between the earthly king, i.e. the mortal god, and the immortal God proves to be the starting point for a new political theology, conceived as a practical science for the needed order of peace in this unique, material world. The divine image of sovereignty, embodied by Almighty God, is the beginning and the end of an immanent, sacred history of salvation that resembles a utopian tale, not in an attempt to oppose or overturn the present political order, but to solve the problems of modern political rationality by means of theological imagination.

Book Review: Mortal Gods: Science, Politics and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes

Book Review: Mortal Gods: Science, Politics and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes