Geoff Vaughan

Geoff Vaughan raises two main objections to my book, which prove to be objections as much to Hobbes as to me, since he thinks I give Hobbes more credit than he deserves on two points. The first concerns Hobbes's criticisms of Christianity. Vaughan says that I do not “deal with the thinness” of these criticisms. My response is twofold. On one hand, I do at certain points in my book step back and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Hobbes's critique of Christianity, and my evaluation includes indications of what I regard as the limits of Hobbes's arguments (see esp. 179–83). On the other hand, I do not think that Hobbes's critique is so thin. Even allowing some leeway for rhetorical exaggeration, Vaughan goes much too far, in my view, when he says that one will find in Hobbes “little more than what one finds from the village atheist sitting at the end of the bar.” There is a lot more in Hobbes than that. For instance, there is Hobbes's complex, multistage account of the problematic politics of the Bible (see 148–58), his critique of the extremism and irrationality of Christian morality, due in part to the historical circumstances in which Christianity arose (see 158–60), and his treatment of the problems of prophecy and miracles, which bear on the authority of the New Testament as well as the Old (see 160–79). These are just some examples of the arguments that one will find in Hobbes but that I am yet to hear from any of the atheists who frequent the bars in my village.

The second point on which Vaughan thinks I give Hobbes too much credit concerns the seriousness with which he took the fundamental questions of metaphysics. Vaughan objects to what he takes to be Hobbes's dismissive and flippant attitude toward metaphysics. Here, however, one must first be careful concerning the various possible meanings of the term “metaphysics,” a term which, as Hobbes himself points out (see Leviathan 46.14), can mean different things in different contexts or when flowing from different pens. If metaphysics means the study of “being qua being” or of abstract essences that transcend the physical realm, then it is true that Hobbes is dismissive of it, although not without offering serious arguments about why such paths are roads to nowhere. But if metaphysics means reflection on the truth about what is or on the fundamental character of the universe, understood as “the whole mass of all things that are” (Leviathan 46.15), then Hobbes should not be accused of dismissing it. Whatever snarly remarks Hobbes makes about the “insignificant speech” of the schoolmen, he is the author of De Corpore, which is, in its way, a profound meditation on the question of being, even if Hobbes would bristle at hearing it described in that way. Hobbes would prefer to have it described as a work of natural philosophy and first philosophy (Philosophia Prima is the title of Part II) rather than metaphysics in order to avoid nourishing the belief in supernatural entities; he also argues that the words “being” and “is” are more dispensable than earlier authors thought and offer no clues to deep mysteries or higher realms that can be rigorously studied. But he does not ignore questions regarding the foundations of philosophy, the character and permanence of what is, and the intelligibility of bodies as the fundamental constituents of the world. To say as Vaughan does that “Hobbes dismissed the metaphysical problems in order to get on with his political project,” and that “the real issue for Hobbes always comes down to the political,” is to ignore the role of De Corpore in Hobbes's corpus and of the questions it treats in his thought.

Paul Franco

Paul Franco expresses his doubts as to whether there is a critical intention behind Hobbes's discussion of the Bible in the second half of Leviathan. “I must confess,” he writes, “I am not entirely convinced by [Stauffer's] argument that there is a deeper, more atheistic intention behind beneath the civil theological one that other scholars have noticed.” Franco points out that there is a tension between ascribing to Hobbes the intention of providing a civic theology that supports his political philosophy and imputing to him the intention of attacking religion in a more radical way. When I discuss this matter in my book, I acknowledge—and let me acknowledge it again here—that there is a difficulty in this regard, because it is hard to combine a reinterpretation of scripture intended to make it more politically salutary, or at least less politically destructive, with an attempt to undermine belief in it altogether. But “hard” does not mean impossible. And it is precisely the genius of Hobbes's rhetorical approach in the second half of the Leviathan that it is such as to enable him to play checkers and chess at the same time. Thus, although I concede that there is some tension between Hobbes's two aims as I understand them, I do not think that tension is so great that he cannot pursue both at once, or even make them work together.

The way in which I understand not just the coexistence but the cooperation of Hobbes's two intentions is as follows. Beneath the rather transparent surface of Hobbes's ostensible good-faith interpretation of the Bible in the second half Leviathan runs an easily discerned project of reinterpreting scripture so as to make it compatible with the principles of natural reason that he presented in the first half of Leviathan. Many scholars have thus suggested that Hobbes is acting as politically-minded civic theologian in this part of the text, turning the Bible from persistent foe to potential friend of sensible and peaceful politics. I do not disagree with that common interpretation; I even offer a variant of it myself (see 132–38). But I do not think that it tells the whole story. The deeper and more interesting story, in my view, emerges as one reflects on the many passages of the Bible that Hobbes discusses, and as one asks oneself ever more pointedly as the dubious examples multiply whether those passages truly support or express “Hobbesian” principles. As I argue in my book (see esp. 138–39), it is precisely when Hobbes's surface arguments prove, on reflection, to be most questionable—in the sense that he suggests that biblical passages support views that they seem to oppose—that Hobbes is able to point some of his readers to his deeper arguments. To state the matter in a formula, Hobbes's surface contention that the teachings of the Bible agree perfectly with the principles of natural reason not only conceals but, by its evident implausibility, also reveals his deeper contention, which is the inverse or negation of the surface contention. Of course, the proof of the pudding of this interpretation is in the eating of it, and so I go on in my book to consider some “case studies”: Hobbes's account of the meaning of spirits in the Bible, his description of hell, his retelling of the story of the politics of the Bible, and his arguments about prophecy and miracles. Readers will have to decide for themselves whether my accounts of these matters vindicate my general interpretive suggestion regarding Hobbes's intentions.

Franco also calls into question what he says are some of my suggestions that “go well beyond the surface meaning of the text.” The first example he gives is of my interpretation of Hobbes's statement regarding the ineradicability of the seeds of religion. The statement in question comes near the end of chapter 12 of Leviathan, when Hobbes says that the seeds of religion “can never be so abolished out of human nature, but that new religions may again be made to spring out of them by the culture of such men as for such purpose are in reputation.” In the Latin Leviathan, as I note in my book, the phrase “by the culture of such men as for such purpose are in reputation” is replaced by si Cultores accesserint idonei (“if suitable cultivators emerge”). Even in the original English version, however, I do not think that this claim is as straightforward regarding “the ineradicable nature of religion” as Franco suggests. To say that the seeds of religion “can never be so abolished out of human nature, but that new religions may again be made to spring out of them” is not to say that there could never be a time without a fully formed religion. And in calling attention to the qualifying “so” and “may” in Hobbes's statement (as well as the “if” in the Latin version), I am not going beyond the surface meaning of the text so much as I am highlighting the precise, if somewhat ambiguous, meaning of Hobbes's words. Moreover, it is important to pay close attention not only to exactly what Hobbes says but also to where he says it. Hobbes's account of the causes of the dissolution of “formed religion” back into its seeds comes—and I think this is a striking fact—at the end of a chapter that is devoted to a debunking psychological analysis of religion and includes an indication of the problems caused by “divine politics,” that is, by biblical religion. This chapter, “Of Religion,” is immediately followed by Hobbes's own state of nature teaching in chapter 13, which is in a sense the starting point of Hobbes's wholly secular political philosophy (see my page 113). Finally, the statement in question is just one of many on which I base my suggestions about Hobbes's ultimate intentions regarding religion. As with other such statements, each is more telling as part of a broader picture than it may seem in isolation.

As for the so-called knots passage in chapter 47, it is true that I link Hobbes's apparent embrace there of Independency with his suggestion that a commonwealth without an established religion would be, at least in some sense, a commonwealth that is not “of any religion at all.” But it is Hobbes himself, in an earlier chapter, who described a commonwealth without a uniform “public worship” in that way, that is, as a commonwealth that is not “of any religion at all” (see 31.37). To put that formulation together with the knots passage is merely to connect Hobbes's own statements. Admittedly, I take the connection thus established and run with it, making use of a remark of Noel Malcolm about what it would mean for a commonwealth to be “in the fullest sense of the term” not “of any religion at all” (see 267ff.). But I do so on the basis of considerations that go beyond those in the knots passage and the earlier one with which I link it. I would readily grant—in fact, I issue this warning myself (see 265–67)—that one has to tread carefully in interpreting the knots passage for several reasons, the most obvious of which is that the qualified endorsement of toleration there is an anomaly in Hobbes's writings. That is why the only conclusions that I draw from that passage are that it confirms that Hobbes's Erastianism was more strategic or circumstantial than principled, and that it helps to make plausible the thought that Hobbes would welcome a development in which religion was not just kept in check by the sovereign but weakened over time. The ultimate end of such a development is hard to know with much certainty. But I offer a number of reasons, drawing from a wide range of passages in Leviathan and elsewhere, for thinking that Hobbes's ultimate hopes were far-reaching (see esp. 268–72).

Ioannis Evrigenis

Some of Ioannis Evrigenis's objections I have already addressed in my reply to Franco. Evrigenis shares Franco's doubts that there is a critical, debunking thread running through Hobbes's analysis of the Bible in the second half of Leviathan. Indeed, he states his reservations with less hesitation than Franco states his, because Evrigenis is convinced that Hobbes's sole aim regarding religion was “to subordinate spiritual authority to the sovereign so as to put an end to religious violence.” Rather than repeat what I said in response to Franco about how the pursuit of that aim can coexist in an uneasy but productive tension with the pursuit of a more radical one, let me mention only one further point that supports my suggestion that Hobbes's intentions go beyond the political one, narrowly conceived as the promotion of peace through the suppression of religious violence. It is a question whether Hobbes's interpretation of scripture would need to be as extensive, heterodox, and inflammatory as it is in order to serve that end well (see 138). For my part, I would go so far as to say that Hobbes could have served that end better had he not whacked so many hornets’ nests. By bringing up passages of the Bible that are starkly at odds with his principles, by mocking ecclesiastical authorities, and by challenging the authority of scripture itself through his arguments about prophecy and miracles, Hobbes brought all sorts of trouble upon himself. It is doubtful that he did so merely to make the Bible “conform to the needs of civil order,” as Evrigenis puts it. But, again, I acknowledge that one has to get into the details of some of the specific doctrinal issues —to engage in what Evrigenis calls “dust fights”—to see whether the general two-pronged framework that I propose holds up under scrutiny.

Since that is not possible here, let me focus on another issue on which Evrigenis and I disagree: Hobbes's thought and intentions regarding natural law. It is difficult to respond to Evrigenis's objections to my arguments on this matter, because I do not recognize my arguments in Evrigenis's account of them. Evrigenis says that I write “repeatedly” of “Hobbes's inability to see the inconsistency between natural law and natural right.” But that formulation does not capture my contention. In the passage to which Evrigenis points as an example (220–21), I argue that Hobbes was unaware of the moral judgment at the basis of his own position regarding the natural right to pursue self-preservation by any means necessary in the state of nature. I suggest that Hobbes did not see that his position implies, for reasons that are too complicated to be recounted here (but see 211–21), the existence of a certain kind of moral law even in the state of nature. To say that is not to accuse him of failing to see “the inconsistency between natural law and natural right.” In fact, in the very passage in question, I suggest that Hobbes's confusion regarding the basis of his view of natural right may have been caused in part by his anticipation of another kind of moral law—articulated by his laws of nature—that could be built on the premise that the fundamental moral fact about our condition is a natural right.

Nor do I argue that Hobbes thought that natural law exists “in name only” or dismiss “any serious role for natural law.” It is true that I argue that Hobbes usurped the traditional term “natural law” while transforming its meaning, and that I think that Hobbes's natural laws are, as he himself says they are, merely maxims of prudence by which men can attain peace and self-preservation. But that is not to say that they have no meaning or to deny that they have a serious role to play in Hobbes's thought. On the contrary, I devote a long subsection of my sixth chapter to a discussion of the moral outlook that Hobbes sought to cultivate through his doctrine of the laws of nature. The main reason, so far as I can tell, that Evrigenis thinks that I think that for Hobbes natural law exists “in name only” is that I do not accept, as he does, the view that Hobbes's laws of nature are divine laws.

As all scholars and many students of Hobbes will know, this is a matter of long-running dispute, the most familiar stage of which emerged with the so called Taylor-Warrender thesis and the counterarguments it provoked. I discuss both sides of the dispute and weigh in myself in the section of my book I just mentioned (see 222–27). Here let me limit myself to the following points. Evrigenis declares that I am “simply wrong” when I say that “far from basing his account of the laws of nature on the premise of divine legislation, Hobbes barely mentions God in the course of his extensive discussion of the laws of nature.” As the context of my remark indicates, by “his extensive discussion of the laws of nature,” I am referring primarily to Hobbes's direct discussion of the matter in chapters 14 and 15 of Leviathan. I do not think that anyone would contest that that is ground zero for understanding Hobbes's view of the laws of nature. In these two very long chapters, with eighty-four sections between them, Hobbes mentions God in only five places, and the first two mentions have no bearing on his understanding of the laws of nature (see 14.17, 14.23). In the third instance, Hobbes goes out of his way to deny that oaths to God add anything to the obligations already involved in promises or covenants between men (14.31–33), and, in the fourth, he argues that adherence to the laws of nature is rational even “taking away the fear of God” (15.4–8). The fifth and final instance is the most controversial, because, at the end of his account of the laws of nature, Hobbes says that the “dictates of reason” he has been discussing are not properly called laws, since they are mere “conclusions or theorems” concerning what conduces to self-preservation, unless they are considered “as delivered in the word of God,” in which case they should be regarded as laws in the strict sense (15.41). Not only do those who take the last part of this statement as an indication of the true basis of Hobbes's position face the challenge of explaining what it could mean to say that Hobbes's laws of nature, which mandate no service to God and aim at preservation rather than salvation (see 15.8), are “delivered in the word of God,” but Hobbes repeatedly denies that the laws of nature ought to be followed when they are adverse to one's own good or when they are not enforced by a human power. He also omitted the final proviso about God from the Latin text. As I point out in my book, had Hobbes intended that proviso to reveal the genuine basis of his entire moral teaching, it would have been very strange of him to drop it from the Latin text, as well as from the most direct restatement later in the English Leviathan of the conclusion of chapter 15, in which he again affirms that, outside of civil society, his laws of nature are “not properly laws, but qualities that dispose men to peace and to obedience” (26.8).

Bryan Garsten

Let me turn directly to the challenging set of questions that Bryan Garsten poses in the last three paragraphs of his review, especially in the penultimate one. The questions he raises concern Aristotle and Leo Strauss as much as they do Hobbes, which is reasonable because Garsten is right to suggest that one of the main aims of my book is to shed light on the difference between ancient and early modern political philosophy, and Strauss has done more than anyone else to reopen the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. Among the many aspects of Garsten's review that I appreciated is the wide lens through which he looked at my work.

But what about his questions? Before I address them, I would like to plead the confines of space to excuse the inadequacy of my response, lest I be forced to acknowledge the limits of my capacity to give satisfactory answers. I also want to make one broad point, which will structure my response. In thinking about whether a recovery of premodern rationalism is possible as a way of addressing various problems either created or left unsolved by modern rationalism, it is crucial to distinguish between the different problems at issue, because some of them may be more addressable than others.

First, there are the political problems caused by modern discontent and by the fanatical reactions to that discontent. As it seems to me, classical thought can play an important role in helping us to understand the character and dimensions of these problems, especially by providing an account of human nature that can illuminate the sources of both the discontent and the reactions to it. That is not to say, however, that classical thought offers us a political program for our time. To be sure, classical thought might be—I think it can be—politically valuable through its counsel and promotion of moderation, as well as through the help it can provide in freeing political prudence from its captivity to certain modern doctrines and expectations. But that does not amount, or even clearly point the way, to a political project. In fact, it is one of the great differences between classical political thought and modern that the classical authors, even in their own time, were not launchers of grand political projects.

Second, there is the question of what is best for philosophy itself. Garsten asks, by way of a summary of my account of Hobbes's criticism of Aristotle on the issue of abstract essences, whether Aristotle did not “create trouble for philosophy.” Hobbes certainly thought he did, although there is a certain ambiguity in his criticism of Aristotle that comes out also in what Garsten writes. On the assumption that Aristotle did create trouble, does it not make quite a difference whether he did so out of an “incipient religiosity” or through a problematic “rhetorical concession to superstition”? Hobbes leaves that question open (see Leviathan 46.18), as does Garsten (the phrases just quoted are his). But whatever the answer to that question, let me grant that the classical thinkers—I use the plural here because this could be said of Plato as well as Aristotle—held out certain notions that Christian theologians later turned into doctrines that became weapons in the arsenal of “the Kingdom of Darkness.” And let me grant that that development eventually posed a problem for philosophy as well as for politics, because classical philosophy was distorted as it was appropriated. Does that mean that the approach taken by Plato and Aristole was flawed? Perhaps. But perhaps it means only that, as a matter of its rhetorical self-presentation, philosophy always faces a difficult choice and that there was no perfect path to be followed. If the classical thinkers could look from their graves and see the fate of their thought in later centuries, I suspect they would be dismayed by some of the uses that were made of it. But they might well regard the price that was paid, not only as in some measure accidental or unpredictable, but also as less dear than the price exacted by the modern alternatives. Of course, it is hard to know; one can only speculate. But as the question applies to our time, I do not think that the gravest difficulty confronting a recovery of classical thought is that such a recovery might, once again, lead to a Scholasticesque theological appropriation of philosophy. And even if it did, I am inclined to think that would not be entirely a bad thing, since the old theologians, unlike most contemporary thinkers, at least shared the classical philosophers’ view of what the most important questions are. In this respect, the Kingdom of Darkness may have had more light in it than our modern cave.

If the threat of another theological appropriation of philosophy is not the gravest difficulty confronting a recovery of classical thought, what is? In my view, it is the simplest one: whether the classical texts, as a matter of substance rather than rhetoric, offer arguments that are still tenable and present a philosophic position that, on its merits, is superior to the modern alternatives. In the course of discussing Hobbes's indications that he suspected that Aristotle's own views differed from those of his Scholastic heirs, I point out that Hobbes seems not have followed a path that could have been opened up for him by that suspicion, namely, to examine Aristotle's own thought in a deep and thorough way to see whether it was more genuinely scientific than the outlook his dogmatic followers defended in his name (see 27–28). I agree with Garsten in regarding Strauss as a trailblazer on the path that Hobbes did not follow. In fact, I would say that the question at issue here, which extends beyond Aristotle, was the guiding question of Strauss's attempt to recover classical thought. The searching or questioning character of that attempt is not always adequately appreciated. As he explained in a 1940 lecture, “The Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” Strauss was drawn back to the ancients by the thought that if modern philosophy had run into serious trouble, and if its refutation of premodern philosophy was only an alleged refutation that had not been adequately examined, then “it is after all possible that the truth, or the right approach to the truth, has been found in a remote past and forgotten for centuries.”Footnote ¹ I like that remark of Strauss, not only because it captures the zetetic character of his own thought, but because it reminds those of us who are drawn in the same direction not to forget what a strange and unlikely proposition it is that we are entertaining in thinking that a return to a classical thought might be a worthwhile and even necessary philosophic endeavor. Yet, to speak for myself, my own studies of the classical view of human life, especially in its moral and political dimensions, and especially as compared to the views of moderns like Hobbes, has given me reason to take seriously the possibility that the classical authors might also have had a superior understanding of nature as a whole.