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Chapter 14 - “All the Maddest Divinity”: Religion in Leviathan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 July 2026

S. A. Lloyd
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Summary

When the Royalist cleric Henry Hammond passed judgment on Hobbes’s Leviathan shortly after it was published, he said it was a “farrago of all the maddest divinity that was ever read.” This chapter attempts to make sense of the apparent “farrago” of Leviathan’s religious and scriptural arguments. It identifies the full range of changes Hobbes made to these arguments from De Cive to Leviathan. It then divides these changes into three categories. First, some changes were philosophically necessary, for instance, to render Christian doctrine consistent with his materialism. Second, some changes were politically necessary. As Hobbes had seen clearly, people are willing to fight and die to defend their transcendent religious interests. Leviathan aims to make Christian doctrine consistent with civil peace by showing that, properly understood, God’s laws command civil obedience. For instance, Hobbes’s argument for a minimalist understanding of the doctrine of salvation is aimed at achieving this end. Finally, some changes were neither philosophically nor politically necessary. Hobbes’s mortalist account of hell and his unusual doctrine of the Trinity seem to fall into this category. The final section of the chapter explains them by appealing to trends in popular religious discourse as Hobbes was writing Leviathan.

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