From the start of his long literary career, Hobbes took an interest in ‘atheism’. In the first piece of work he ever published, the scholarly preliminary essay to his translation of Thucydides (1629), he noted that Thucydides ‘might see enough in the religion of the heathen to make him think it vain and superstitious, which was enough to procure him the opinion of an atheist in the opinion of the people’.Footnote 1 By August 1646, when he was appointed a tutor to the exiled prince of Wales, he had himself acquired a not dissimilar reputation; the presbyterian Robert Baillie noted that ‘the placeing of Hopes [sic] (a professed Atheist, as they speak) about the Prince as his teacher, is ill taken’.Footnote 2 Hobbes seems to have been relaxed about such talk; the pious Roman Catholic William Joyner, a member of the exiled royal household, would later recall that ‘Mr Hobs, with whom I was much acquainted, tooke no exceptions in being estimd a Atheist unles it were with malice.’Footnote 3
There were, then, non-malicious ways of calling somebody an ‘atheist’, at least in the context of friendly conversation. In Hobbes's own case, the attitudes referred to appear to have been fairly superficial. In 1647, he fell dangerously ill and was visited by the Laudian John Cosin. Fifteen years later, he was confident that he had made a favourable impression. As his Apology (1662) told Charles II, ‘for my Religion, when I was at the point of Death at St Germains, the Bishop of Durham [Cosin] can bear witness of it, if he be asked’.Footnote 4 His posthumously published autobiography supplies the fullest version of what happened. He had been visited, he wrote, by his Catholic friend Mersenne, who
spoke for some time about the Roman church's power of remitting sins; to which he [Hobbes] said ‘Father, I have long ago disputed all these things with myself. It will be tiresome to dispute the same things now’ … A few days afterwards, Dr John Cosin the bishop (later) of Durham came to him, and offered himself to him as an intercessor to God. When he had thanked him, he said ‘so long as you take the lead in prayers according to the rite of our church’. This was a great sign of his reverence for the episcopal discipline.Footnote 5
It should be stressed that Cosin (who was well known to the king, and who would live till 1672 without repudiating the whole story) was something close to an ideal witness: a principled anti-ErastianFootnote 6 high churchman who could not reasonably be suspected of any sympathy with Hobbism.Footnote 7 Moreover, he was in a good position – more so than anyone before or since – to gauge the extent of Hobbes's piety. He would have read the service from the Book of Common Prayer known as ‘The Visitation of the Sick’, a service that gave Laudians the opportunity to justify the hearing of confessions.Footnote 8 The occasion would thus have been shaped by the Prayer Book rubric, which told the minister to list ‘the Articles of our Faith’ as they were summarized in baptism ‘that you may know whether you do believe as a Christian man or not’; the response was ‘all this I steadfastly believe’. After eliciting this formula, Cosin's task was ‘to examine whether he be in charity with all the world’. Cosin would then have offered Hobbes the opportunity to make a special confession of any particular sins that troubled him; if he chose to accept this option, the Prayer Book then instructed ‘the priest’ to use the words ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath left power with his church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in him, of his great mercy forgive thee thine offences: And by his authority committed to me, I absolve thee from all thy sins.’Footnote 9
If Cosin was favourably impressed by his response to this interrogation, there is good reason to believe that Hobbes did more than mumble the responses. But we also have some first-hand evidence that he was temporarily, at least, a relatively conventional believer. In 1668, a private letter requested his reaction to a marvel: a girl who refused to eat or drink, but showed considerable zeal and knowledge of the scriptures. Hobbes commented that ‘I my self in a Sicknes, have been without all manner of Sustenance, for more then 6 weeks together … Nor do I much wonder that a young Woman of clear Memory hourely expecting death, should bee more devout, then at other times. 'Twas my own case.’Footnote 10 What makes this personal testimony particularly impressive is that his casual statement was either dangerous or embarrassing: it was hardly in his interests to tell the authorities that his devout behaviour in 1647 had been in any way atypical; but he also had friends who would rather have believed that he had sustained his contempt for the church and the clergy.
His biographer John Aubrey, for example, recorded two different versions of what happened. He referred to the meeting with Cosin, but he also jotted down a rather different anecdote:
Elizabeth, viscountesse Purbec. When Mr. T. Hobbes was sick in France, the divines came to him, and tormented him (both Roman Catholic, Church of England, and Geneva). Sayd he to them ‘Let me alone, or els I will detect all your cheates from Aaron to your selves.’ I thinke I have heard him speake something to this purpose.Footnote 11
The inconsistency between these stories no doubt reflects a difference in their functions – the Cosin story exculpated Hobbes from the grave charge of atheism proper; the Purbeck story captured his stylish anticlerical bravado – and Aubrey may well have intended them for different audiences. But he did not discount the truth of either. The challenge for historians is to explain why both were simultaneously credible.
I
Hobbes seems to have believed in ‘God’, perhaps in a God who wanted to be worshipped; he certainly disapproved of most ‘religion’, including virtually all forms of Christianity. Surprisingly few of his earliest and best-informed readers accused him of denying God's existence.Footnote 12 This article sets out to disentangle the link between his ‘God’ and his ‘religion’, and in so doing to cast light upon the character of seventeenth-century English unbelief.
A natural way of starting would be to link his thought with some kind of identity or standpoint (such as ‘Socinianism’ or ‘Calvinism’) that his contemporaries recognized as something that could motivate a deviant attitude. Unfortunately, his ideas fit awkwardly into such categories. Though his ideas have some Socinian features, he insisted on asserting the divinity of Christ;Footnote 13 though he associated his position with an old-fashioned form of Calvinism, he preached what any Calvinist would term a ‘works religion’ (he argued that salvation is contingent on ‘obedience’, that is, on an ‘endeavour’ of the will).Footnote 14 But there is no inaccuracy and no anachronism in saying that he was an ‘atheist’; this was a term, as we have seen, that he himself accepted. It may be best, then, to begin with an analysis of ‘atheism’.
In a much-quoted essay on the subject, Francis Bacon made a famous declaration:
It is true, that a little Philosophy inclineth Mans Minde to Atheisme; But depth in Philosophy, bringeth Mens Mindes about to Religion: For while the Minde of Man, looketh upon Second Causes Scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and goe no further: But when it beholdeth, the Chaine of them, Confederate and Linked together, it must needs flie to Providence, and Deitie. Nay, even that Schoole, which is most accused of Atheisme, doth most demonstrate Religion; that is, the Schoole of Leucippus, and Democritus, and Epicurus. For it is a thousand times more Credible, that foure Mutable Elements, and one Immutable Fift Essence, duly and Eternally placed, need no God; then that an Army, of Infinite small Portions, or Seedes unplaced, should have produced this Order, and Beauty, without a Divine Marshall.Footnote 15
As we shall see, Hobbes probably shared this opinion. He also certainly agreed with Bacon that ‘atheism’ was caused by ‘superstition’.
‘Of atheism’, which made its first appearance in the 1612 edition of the Essays, was printed just before ‘Of superstition’. The latter shockingly implied that ‘atheism’ is the lesser evil:
Atheisme leaves a Man to sense, to Philosophy, to naturall piety, to lawes, to reputation, all which may be guides unto vertue, though Religion were not: but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute Tyranny in the minde of men. Therefore Atheisme did never perturbe states; for it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no further: and we see the times inclined to Atheisme, as the time of Augustus Caesar, and our owne times in some Countries, were, and are, civill times.Footnote 16
Superstition disturbs social order by introducing a new motive force – it ‘bringeth in a new Primum Mobile that ravisheth al the spheres of government’ – with definite democratic implications: ‘the master of Superstition is the people’. But this in turn encourages ‘atheism’, if only by encouraging hypocrisy among the church's leaders, for ‘in al superstition, wise men follow fooles; and arguments are fitted to practise, in a reversed order. There is no such Atheist, as an Hipocrite, or Imposter: and it is not possible, but where the generality is superstitious, many of the leaders are Hipocrits.’Footnote 17 He went on to give a short account of the ‘causes of Atheisme’, which he listed as ‘divisions in Religion; scandall of Priests; and learned times; specially if prosperous’.Footnote 18 Needless to say, all these disposing factors were obvious features of early Stuart England.
In the revised edition of 1625, Bacon introduced some interesting changes to these thematically connected pieces. He added a passage to ‘Of superstition’ which shows that his dictum that ‘wise men follow fooles’ referred to the rationalizations of Catholic practices that had been offered by ingenious schoolmen; this passage replaced his earlier remarks about hypocrisy and atheism.Footnote 19 He also made two alterations to ‘Of atheism’. The first is a new passage that follows his remark that ‘none deny that there is a God, but those for whom it maketh that there were no God’. A genuine speculative atheist, whose atheism was nothing more than a sincere disinterested opinion, would have, he suggested, no reason to spread such ideas; but in fact,
it appeareth in nothing more, that Atheisme is rather in the Lip, then in the Heart of Man, then by this; That Atheists will ever be talking of that their Opinion, as if they fainted in it, within themselves, and would be glad to be strengthned by the Consent of others.Footnote 20
‘Atheists’ were not, in other words, particularly rare, nor (more surprisingly, perhaps) were they particularly secretive; but it was absurd to take them seriously. Bacon's second additional passage reveals the true object of his antipathy:
The Contemplative Atheist is rare; a Diagoras, a Bion, a Lucian perhaps, and some others; and yet they seeme to be more then they are; For that, all that impugne a Received Religion, or Superstition, are by the adverse Part, branded with the Name of Atheists. But the great atheists, indeed, are Hypocrites; which are ever Handling Holy Things, but without Feeling. So as they must needs be cauterised in the End.Footnote 21
As readers may have noticed, the idea that religious hypocrites are the true ‘atheists’ had previously been located in ‘Of superstition’. It is no surprise, then, that the passage continues (as in the 1612 ‘Of superstition’) by laying out the ‘causes of Atheisme’ – ‘Divisions in Religion’, ‘Scandall of Priests’, and ‘Learned Times’ – to which he now added ‘Custome of Profane Scoffing in Holy Matters’.Footnote 22
What is most helpful about Bacon's essays is their articulation of three fairly common assumptions that helped, between them, to create a gap between antipathy towards ‘religion’ (considered as a local cultural practice) and denial of the deity's existence. First, Bacon took the standard line that atheism was not so much a theory as a degrading kind of wish-fulfilment: a product of the hope there is no God.Footnote 23 He may have been a little more unusual in treating it as a deviant way of talking, whose sources are more cultural than intellectual, but at all events, he shared the view that ‘atheists’ are known as much by attitudes and behaviour patterns as by a perverse propositional belief. Secondly, and in consequence, these deviant attitudes are a response to bad religious practice: some people are wrongly suspected of being atheists because they correctly reject a false religion; others are tempted into atheism – reject the true religion – because of various superficial scandals (‘divisions in Religion’; ‘scandall of Priests’; ‘scoffing in holy matters’) associated with religious truth. Where the atheist is sane and educated, a logical implication of this picture is that the atheist is the true religion – wrongly, but largely understandably – as a variety of ‘superstition’. This was doubtless one reason why Bacon believed that atheism is bred by ‘learned times’; the superstitions followed by the Many encourage irreligion in the Few.
Thirdly, the cure for the disease is anti-Aristotelian natural science. The casual reader of ‘Of atheism’ might well suppose that Bacon was some kind of atomist; his point that a fragmented world of ‘portions and seeds unplaced’ requires an intelligent designer was naturally taken up by Christian atomists like Hobbes's philosopher friend Pierre Gassendi.Footnote 24 But he appears to have preferred a rather different theory. In a short undated treatise called ‘Thoughts on the nature of things’,Footnote 25 he criticized philosophers, especially atomists, who confined their explanations to ‘inactive principles’, by which he meant ‘those which tell us of what things are made up and consist, but not by what force or in what manner they come together’.Footnote 26 Such principles were ‘of no effect towards the accomplishment of works, the mutation of bodies, or the direction of motions’.
As ‘matter’ cannot be created or destroyed (except by divine intervention), all perceptible changes in objects – ‘generation, corruption, augmentation, diminution, alteration, carriage to place (latio ad locum)’ – are ‘nothing else than the works and effects of motions’;Footnote 27 the categories just mentioned are simply a convenient classification of those ‘works’. Though certain objects, as a whole, appear to be at rest (in Baconian terms, the whole is free of latio ad locum), there is no such thing as ‘simple and absolute rest’ in either the whole or the parts of any body.Footnote 28 In a theory of this general character – in which ‘motions’ serve the function of Aristotelian forms – there is little if any distinction between a God who is known as a First Mover and a designer God who is responsible for order. As we shall see, just such a theory was actually worked out by Thomas Hobbes.
II
The purpose of this article is not to show that Bacon ‘influenced’ Hobbes (although the two men knew each other well and Hobbes translated several of his essays),Footnote 29 but to use Bacon to elucidate the character of Hobbes's ‘atheism’. At a rather general level, there are, however, parallels between their philosophical approaches. In one obvious respect, the chancellor provoked a reaction; the very vehemence with which Hobbes attacked the idea of compiling facts in natural ‘histories’ suggests that he saw Bacon's method as a reigning orthodoxy. But there were also deep affinities. Both distinguished the ‘mathematical’ from the ‘dogmatic’, both emphasized the utility of true philosophy, both sought to purge their thinking of teleology, and both appealed to ‘motions’ as a substitute for ‘forms’. By Hobbes's own account, the great idea on which his thinking ultimately rested was that the difference between sensations is really just a difference between motions:
if material things and all their parts were simultaneously still, or else were always moved with the same motion, the distinction between all things would be taken away, and (by consequence) all sensation; and therefore that the cause of all things was to be sought in the diversity of motions.Footnote 30
Hobbes claimed to have had this insight in 1629 or 1630, but failed to commit his new ideas to paper till 1637, the probable date of the so-called ‘Short Tract’. The Short Tract had some features that were discarded in his later thinking, but its most salient elements for present purposes were reproduced in later treatises.Footnote 31 Three of these elements appear particularly important. First, he took it as axiomatic that ‘That, whereto nothing is added, & from wch nothing is taken, remaines in the same state it was.’Footnote 32 It follows from this principle that ‘Nothing can move it self’, but the latter point was buttressed with a further argument:
Suppose (if it be possible) that A can move it self. this must be by active power in it self (else it moves not it self, but is moved by another) & seing it self is allways applyed to it self, it shall … move it self allways. suppose then that A have power to be moved towards B, [here a small diagram depicts a straight line BAC] then shall A move it self allways towards B. Likewise suppose (as we may) yt A hath power to be moved towards C; then shall A move it self allways towards C. and so shall allwayes move it self contrary wayes, wch is impossible.Footnote 33
Here the bland words ‘as we may’ conceal the rather large assumption that A has no intrinsic directional tendencies: an unmoved body cannot move because it would have an equally good reason for moving in the opposite direction (we will come back to this strange principle).
Secondly (and in consequence), the Tract advanced a theory of causation requiring that an Agent (‘that which hath power to move’)Footnote 34 touch a Patient (‘that which hath power to be moved’).Footnote 35 These powers are ‘accidents’; as they cannot subsist by themselves, they necessarily inhere in something self-subsistent (in Hobbesian terminology, a ‘substance’). When ‘Agent’ meets with ‘Patient’, the result is necessarily a motion; as a necessary cause is ‘that, wch cannot but produce the effect’ while a sufficient cause is ‘that, wch hath all things requisite to produce the effect’,Footnote 36 it is true by definition that a sufficient cause is necessary: ‘a sufficient cause cannot but produce the effect because it hath all things requisite to produce it’.Footnote 37 This means that ‘the definition of a Free Agent, to be that wch, all things requisite to worke being putt, may worke, or not worke, implyes a Contradiction’.Footnote 38
Thirdly, the ‘act of sense’ is a motion caused by its external object; the ‘Act of Understanding’ is a subsequent recreation of that motion by the brain. As the recreated motion is what is known to Hobbes as a ‘Phantasma’, ‘we are sayd to understand a thing, when we have the Phantasma or Apparition of it’.Footnote 39 This was the first appearance of the radical idea that understanding is itself a motion. In his later works, however, he dropped the idea of a motion recreated by the brain. The elements of law (1640) was to assert that ‘Images or Conceptions’ would survive ‘if a Man could be alive, and all the rest of the world anihilated’.Footnote 40 Although such conceptions are actually nothing but motions, they can outlast the stimulus that first gave rise to them, like ‘standing water put into motion by the stroke of a Stone’.Footnote 41 Thus the experience that Hobbes called ‘imagination’ (or sometimes ‘phantasy’) was simply ‘Conception remayning, and by little and litle decaying from, and after the Act of Sense’.Footnote 42
These principles may seem remote from Hobbesian religion, but they are indispensable for grasping the theory of language that ultimately shaped his view of God. From 1640 onwards, Hobbes consistently believed that the distinctive feature of the human intellect is the manipulation of the marks that we call ‘names’, which are in essence tags by which conceptions are retrieved, ‘by wch we recall into our minde, some Conceptions of the thinges, to wch we give those names or appellations’.Footnote 43 To ‘understand’ a given name is simply to ‘recover those Conceptions, for wch the name was ordayned’ (a task much complicated by the consideration that names which are shared by a number of things ‘are not alwayes given to all the particulars … for like Conceptions, and Considerations in them all’).Footnote 44 But at all events, human mastery of names makes it possible to combine them ‘by the help of this little verbe is or somethinge equivolent’ into the affirmations or negations that are technically known as ‘Propositions’.Footnote 45 It is only propositions that can be ‘true’ or ‘false’, and all propositions formed out of intelligible names fall into one of these two categories:
In every proposition, be it affirmative or negative, the latter Appellation either comprehendeth the former, as in this Proposition. Charity is a virtue. The name of virtue comprehendeth the name of Charity … or else the later AppellationFootnote 46 comprehendeth not the former. as in this proposition. Every man is just. The name of just comprehendeth not every Man; for unjust is the name of the farre greater part of men.Footnote 47
It follows from all this that propositions would be true (or false) even if (as Hobbes initially suggested) the universe outside the brain had been annihilated;Footnote 48 propositions are not relations between things, but only between the motions we call conceptions (a name is no more than a means of retrieving a motion). In the passage just quoted, the motion that we tag as ‘charity’ must necessarily include the motion tagged as ‘virtue’; motions/conceptions form a taxonomic hierarchy in which motions corresponding to a genus must be combined with further, differentiating, motions to make motions corresponding to a species. De corpore helpfully explained that the motion tagged as ‘man’ includes the motions that we tag as ‘body’, ‘animal’, and ‘rational’.Footnote 49 In short, a proposition is ‘true’ when the motion that is labelled by what precedes the copula includes or coincides with the motion that is labelled by what follows. Though we can mouth a formula that happens to be ‘true’, we can be said to ‘know’ a proposition only when truth is matched by ‘evidence’, that is, when we achieve what Hobbes describes as ‘the Concommitance of a man's Conception, wth the words that signifie such Conception’.Footnote 50 To ‘know’ that grass is green is to detect the motion-tagged-as-green within the more complex motion-tagged-as-grass (this is one way of explaining why God, who has no parts, is not a possible object of our knowledge).Footnote 51
As should be becoming apparent, the heart of Hobbes's theory is not an account of what is but only of the motions we call knowledge. In his critique of Thomas White's De mundo (1642–3), he was at pains to emphasize that there may be some entities (entia) that fall outside the scope of human knowledge: in Hobbesian terminology, not every ens has esse.Footnote 52 The esse of an entity, the features we can grasp, is no more than the aggregate of all its ‘accidents’, which are those motions that befall (accidere) its substance in such a way as to affect the way it ‘is conceived’ (concipitur). When esse is considered as something generated in a motionless substratum, it is in general described as ‘form’.Footnote 53 There may be certain entia that cannot be ‘conceived’: that cause no perceptible motions to which a verbal label can be fixed. Such entia are indefinable: ‘since then it is not permitted to philosophy to pronounce or dispute about those matters which exceed human grasp, let us define imaginable ens only, omitting the definition of ens which is not imaginable and which is usually called incorporeal substance’.Footnote 54 The important word here is ‘imaginable’. It tends to be taken for granted that the severely mechanistic physics that Hobbes had outlined in the Short Tract's opening section could motivate his view of human beings. But this is surely to invert the logic of his thinking. By his own account, his first and greatest insight involved the connection of ‘motions’ with sensation; to put the matter crudely, it was his view of sense and understanding that ultimately conditioned his theory of everything else. The Short Tract's opening principles are really nothing but presuppositions dictated by limits on what we can ‘imagine’. Take, for example, the Tract's claim that ‘nothing can move itself’, a claim supported by the argument that unmoved entities would have an equally good reason for motion in the opposite direction. The argument re-surfaces within De corpore, but a revealing variant (concerned with time, not space) can also be found in the pamphlets against Bramhall, where Hobbes presented it as an assertion about the contours of ‘imagination’:
that a man cannot imagine any thing to begin without a cause, can no other way be made known, but by trying how he can imagine it, but if he try, he shall finde as much reason (if there be no cause of the thing) to conceive it should begin at one time as another, that [is], he hath equal reason to think, it should begin at all times which is impossible, and therefore he must think there was some special cause, why it began then, rather than sooner or later; or else, that it began never, but was eternal.Footnote 55
Leviathan put the same idea in casual layman's terms: ‘it is peculiar to the nature of Man … upon the sight of any thing that hath a Beginning, to think also it had a cause, which determined the same to begin, then when it did, rather than sooner or later’.Footnote 56 Hobbes had no argument to show that this ‘peculiarity’ reflects the way things are.
III
We are now in a position to consider the so-called Hobbesian ‘proof’ of God's existence. Hobbes introduces the whole theme as follows: ‘forasmuch as … by all names we ought to have some meaning and Conception, It followeth in the next place, to consider what thoughtes and Imaginations of the minde we have, when we take into our mouthes the most blessed name of God.’Footnote 57 Such thoughts are necessarily extremely minimal: ‘for as much as God Almighty is incomprehensible, it followeth that we can have noe conception or Image of the Deity … excepting onely this, That there is a God’.Footnote 58 The passage that follows is simply an account of how we come to have acquired that minimal conception:
For the effects we acknowledge naturally doe necessarily include a power of theire producing, before they were produced; and yt power presupposeth somethinge existent, that hath such power. And the thinge so existing wth power to produce, if it were not Eternal, must needes have bene produced by somewhat before it; And that againe by something else before that: till we come to an eternall. that is to say, to the first Power of all Powers, & first Cause of all Causes. And this is it wch all men call by the name of God, implying Eternity, Incomprehensibility, and Omnipotency. And thus all men that will consider, may naturally know, that God is. though not what he is. Even as a man though borne blind, though it be not possible for him to have any Imagination what kinde of thinge is fire. yet he cannot but knowe that something there is, that men call fire, because it warmeth him.Footnote 59
Much obviously turns here on what is meant by ‘know’, but it will be noted that ‘God is’ is not a proposition, and therefore not, in Hobbesian terms, a possible object of ‘knowledge’.Footnote 60
In the ‘Objections' to Descartes, composed in 1641 for printed publication, Hobbes carefully re-stated his position. He stressed that ‘there is a great difference between imagining (imaginari), that is, having some idea (idea), and conceiving (concipere) with the mind, that is, gathering by reasoning that some thing is (esse) or some thing exists (existere)’.Footnote 61 On this view, we have no ‘idea’ of God. Moreover, Hobbes's view of ‘reasoning’ resolved the cloudy notion of ‘conceiving’ into manipulation of our imaginings:
Now what should we say if perhaps reasoning is simply joining and chaining together of names or labels by means of this word ‘is’ (est). Then we would gather nothing at all by reason about the nature of things, but only about their labels, i.e. whether or not we are joining together the names of things in accordance with the agreements which we have arbitrarily made about their meanings. If this is the case, as it may be, reasoning will depend on names, names on the imagination (imaginatio), and imagination perhaps (as I believe) on the motion of bodily organs.Footnote 62
If reason joins together propositions, then it is powerless to show that anything exists. Hobbes reverted to the image of the blind man and the fire to explain that the term ‘God’ is a place-holder for something that is prior to all causes. The blind man has experience of the effects of fire, but ‘has absolutely no idea or image (ideam vel imaginem) of fire that shows itself to his mind’.Footnote 63 The same applies to a man who ‘recognises that there must be some cause of his images or ideas, and another prior cause of that cause, and so on; he is finally led to the stopping point or supposition (finem vel suppositionem) of some eternal cause’.Footnote 64
‘God’ is, then, no more than a ‘supposition’. The major Hobbesian treatises that touch on metaphysics – his critique of White's De mundo and De corpore itself – explicitly reject the alternative claim that there cannot be an infinite succession.Footnote 65 But suppositions play a useful role in ordinary human calculations, and often yield reliable results;Footnote 66 by Hobbes's own account, much of his physics – including his proudest achievement, his materialist optics – consists in plausible hypotheses.Footnote 67 It is relevant here that the task of the First Mover was not just to provide the world with an initial jolt. As we have seen, the motions that Hobbes needed to explain were catch-all explanations for every kind of ‘form’; they were complex yet stable vibrations, accounting for the largely stable differentiation that is an obvious feature of sense-experience. In consequence, the First Mover that every human being is prone to postulate is simultaneously a Designer.
If Hobbes's principal concern had been with undermining atheism, he would, no doubt, have laid more stress on this consideration; he certainly took it for granted, in De cive, that ‘wonder at natural events’ is one of the sources of the belief that God is ‘the invisible manufacturer (Opifex) of all visible things’.Footnote 68 Of course, this kind of wonder is not ‘philosophy’ (at least as Hobbes austerely understood it), but there is evidence to show that he not only shared the sentiment, but thought that anyone sensible would do so. De homine (1658) quite casually remarks that if more specialized investigators (to whom he left the task) ‘were to look adequately at all the mechanisms of generation and nutrition and not see that they had each been set up and ordered by some mind (mens) to their several functions, they should certainly be judged to be mindless (sine mente) themselves’.Footnote 69
It is hard to believe that this statement was an insincere remark intended to mislead his Christian critics. There is no evidence that Hobbes felt physically threatened by the republican authorities who governed England when he published it; there is much evidence, from many sources, that he lived in fear of burning in the Restoration years, especially in the later 1660s. If he thought of what he said as a sop to the clergy, he could have found occasion to make comparable remarks in many later controversial writings. But Hobbes said nothing similar until the final pages of the last book that he published in his lifetime, the somewhat miscellaneous scientific dialogue he called Decameron physiologicum (1678). By this point, it was surely clear that the bishops had decided to ignore him. Yet this was the moment he chose to advance a scientific theory that postulated God's own intervention. Apparently spontaneous generation of various types of plant and animal was best explained, he thought, by the presumption that God had acted to infuse a ‘virtue’ in the earth (the method he had also used when he originally created them):
if the Earth produce living Creatures at this day, God did not absolutely rest from all his Works on the seventh day, but (as it is Cap. 2. ver. 2.) he rested from all the work he had made. And therefore it is no harm to think that that God worketh still, and when and where and what he pleaseth. Besides, ‘tis very hard to believe, that to produce Male and Female, and all that belongs thereto, as also the several and curious Organs of Sense and Memory, could be the work of any thing that had not understanding.Footnote 70
Not only did Hobbes believe in a Designer, but the Designer's work was not yet done.
IV
Hobbes seems to have believed, then, in a God who was responsible for order. Not much necessarily follows from such a conclusion. He might after all have conceded (as Hume would later do), that ‘the Cause or Causes of Order in the Universe probably bear some remote Analogy to human Intelligence’, while stressing that the analogy ‘affords no Inference that affects human Life, or can be the source of any Action or Forbearance’.Footnote 71 God certainly played little part in Hobbesian moral thinking. It is true that laws of nature are not strictly speaking laws unless they are conceived of as his precepts, but they are encoded, as ‘theorems of reason’, within the structure of the universe, in ways that require no further intervention.Footnote 72
In other words, ‘God’ plays a marginal role in Hobbes's picture of the natural world and even in the human science of ethics. In politics, however, Hobbes was required to reckon with ‘religion’, that is, the practices through which the deity is ‘honoured’. His earliest political works, The elements (1640) and De cive (1642), were responses to the long political crisis that started when the Scots defied their bishops. It was therefore not surprising that The elements explained that sovereigns ‘ought to establish the Religion they hould for best’ and that ‘the government of Bishops, hath a Divine Patterne’.Footnote 73
King Charles's political troubles were just an illustration of the general difficulty that God's law might clash with and over-ride the sovereign's.Footnote 74 One way of addressing the problem would be to absorb religion into reason. There are signs that Hobbes was tempted by such a strategy: The elements states, for example, that ‘there is no Law of naturall reason, yt can be against the Law Divine; for God Almighty hath given reason to a man, to be a Light unto him … notwithstandinge the opposition, and affronts, of supernaturalistesFootnote 75 now adayes, to rationall, and Morall Conversation’.Footnote 76 But Hobbes in general took a different tack, stressing that Christianity is founded upon ‘faith’, that is, that it consists of propositions that we believe because of their proponents. The effect of this decision was to divert attention from the content of belief to the personal qualifications of those who are believed: in this case, ‘the holy men of Gods church succeeding one another from the tyme of those that saw the wondrous workes of God Almighty in the flesh’.Footnote 77 In doing so, he left himself with no criterion by which to criticize their revelations. It is true that exegesis of the book that they transmit reveals that the one belief required for salvation is the fundamental dogma that ‘Jesus is the Christ’ but this is a contingent fact about the sacred texts; Christianity is in principle dogmatic. In any case, the fundamental doctrine had relatively extensive ramifications, including – ‘wch I desire by the way to have noted against the new Sect of Arrians’ – Trinitarian orthodoxy.Footnote 78
Hobbes did, however, see a place for reason in shaping communal religious practice. To honour God quite simply is to recognize His power, but there are natural ways of doing so: it is natural to make use of appropriate ceremonies and to avoid such insults as ‘to neglect prayer. to speake to him extempore, to come to Church slovenly, to adorne the place of his worship lesse then our owne houses’.Footnote 79 This attitude was of course to be expected in the writings of the early 1640s, when he was defending Charles's form of high-church Anglicanism, but there is reason to suppose that it was his sincere opinion; he reproduced it in Leviathan (1651), which was published at a moment when the country was under the control of puritans.Footnote 80 He may have been being quite truthful when he subsequently claimed that he sought out a traditional Prayer Book service at this low point in the Church of England's fortunes.Footnote 81
Hobbes cared, in other words, how God was worshipped. He also cared about religious language. One of the ways we worship God is by the use of verbal ‘attributes’. These attributes are purely honorific. God can safely be said to ‘exist’ (though as we cannot specify the mode of that existence, the statement involved is not a proposition, and is neither true nor false), but The elements held that other characteristics that we attribute to the deity ‘are such as signifie either our Incapacity, or our Reverence’.Footnote 82 For example, the assertion that God is a ‘spirit’ is no more literal than the claim that God possesses ‘Sense, & understanding’; it is a ‘Signification of our Reverence who desire to abstract from him all Corporeal Grossnesse’.Footnote 83 But talk of God as ‘spirit’ can also be thought of as positively offensive. Given that our ‘conception’ of a spirit is really a conception of something imperceptible but spatially extended, the expression ‘Spirits Supernatural’, which ‘commonly signif[ies] some Substance, without Dimension’ is not just metaphorical but contradictory; a spirit by definition takes up place.Footnote 84
The Hobbesian believer thus faces a dilemma: either the Bible's claim that ‘God is spirit’ is an unsatisfactory use of language or else it implies that God's mode of existence is spatial. In The elements, Hobbes prudently refrained from taking the discussion any further, but he offered an adventurous suggestion. Though Christians ‘acknowledge’ that spirits exist, they cannot be said to ‘knowe’ it, that is, to have ‘naturall Evidence of the same’, because ‘Spiritts we suppose to be those Substances which worke not upon the Sense, and therefore not Conceptible’. But something not ‘Conceptible’ is not necessarily ‘Incorporeall’, that is, without ‘dimensions, and quantity’. The Bible's discussion of spirits and of angels repeatedly makes use of words that ‘doe consignifie Locallity’. Hobbes concluded that
to me therefore it seemeth, that the Scripture favoureth them more who hould Angels and Spiritts for Corporeall, then them that hould the contrary. And it is a plaine Contradiction in naturall discourse, to say of the Soule of man, that it is Tota in toto and tota in qualibet parte Corporis grounded neither upon Reason, nor Revelation.Footnote 85
As we shall see, aversion to the term ‘incorporeal substance’ was a consistent feature of his thinking. It has an interesting analogue in his dislike of talk of a nunc stans. In his critique of Thomas White, he claimed that White's rejection of the possibility of an actually infinite succession (White's primitive First Mover argument) involved denying God's eternity.Footnote 86 On Hobbes's view, White's argument is evidently mistaken: the fact that an infinity is not conceptible is simply a fact about the human mind; it has no bearing on the way things are. But errors such as these have consequences; they lead us on to speak of God in inappropriate ways that may indeed encourage atheism. De corpore's version of the point concluded with a most revealing comment:
from this absurdity therefore they run into another, being forced to call Eternity Nunc stans, a standing still of the present Time, or an abiding now. But why should Eternity be called an Abiding Now, rather then an Abiding Then? Wherefore there must either be many Eternities, or Now and Then must signifie the same. With such Demonstrators as these, that speak in another language, it is impossible to enter into disputation.Footnote 87
To assert God's omnipresence in space and time is not to make an error or to use a metaphor, but to fail to communicate at all.
Concern with what we are to say is prominent in De cive, a work whose most distinctive theological remarks concern the language to be used in worship, that is, in acts encouraging obedience to God by spreading an opinion of His power (God himself derives no benefit from worship). An object of worship must possess ‘existence (existentia), for there can be no will to honour [that is, to regard as powerful] him who we do not think to be (esse)’.Footnote 88 God must also be treated as in some sense external to the world: Hobbes disapproved of those philosophers
who have said that God is the world itself, or the soul (that is, part) of the world … for by that name, ‘God’, is understood ‘the cause of the world’; but in saying that ‘the world is God’, they say, ‘there is no cause of the world’, that is, ‘God does not exist’.Footnote 89
Like the comparable passage in Leviathan itself, this paragraph has no bearing on whether, or in what manner, God exists; its sole concern is with the kind of language that can properly be used to do him honour.Footnote 90
Rational God-talk would be minimal: the one conception we can form of God is of a cause anterior and external to the world that wields a continuing and overwhelming power: ‘reason dictates a single meaningful name of God's nature, “existent” (existens), or simply “That he is” (Quod est), and one of his relation to us, that is, “God”, in which is contained “King”, and “Lord”, and “Father”’.Footnote 91 But this minimal religion is virtually unknown; in practice, virtually all human beings have worshipped ‘spectres or phantoms’, using idols.Footnote 92 The origin of ‘true worship’ is God's self-revelation to Abraham, a revelation Abraham accepted because of his faith ‘that the one whose voice and promises he had heard was God’.Footnote 93 From this point on, religion was a matter of ‘faith’, not of reason; it consisted in assertions we have chosen to accept because of confidence in their proponent. Authentication and interpretation of God's will as revealed to the prophets was a matter for the sovereigns who succeeded Abraham as legislators for the Jewish state.Footnote 94 Scope for interpretation was not, however, completely limitless; whatever their rulers instructed them to do, the subjects of the Jewish state were bound to refrain from sacrifice to idols, while Christian believers were similarly forbidden to deny the fundamental doctrine that ‘Jesus is the Christ’.Footnote 95 Moreover, Hobbes continued to reserve a number of pious actions to the clergy. Unless the sovereign was himself ordained, he was not to baptize, ordain ministers, consecrate bishops, or excommunicate and reconcile.Footnote 96 Hobbes even went so far as to suggest that churches possessing the apostolic succession should be regarded as ‘infallible’ in matters ‘necessary to salvation’.Footnote 97
Leviathan abandoned the idea that clergymen have special powers denied to a lay sovereign, but it did not abandon the fundamental structure of his theology. Its treatment of the concept of religion is found in a significant location, near the conclusion of Part One, ‘Of man’. This means that the work's discussion of the topic precedes the famous treatment of man's condition in the state of nature; it shows Hobbes regarded religion as a pre-political fact, a part of the material that those who set up commonwealths must work with. His intellectual starting point appears to have been the simple observation that only human beings have religion and therefore that ‘the seed of Religion, is also onely in Man’.Footnote 98 This seed was the urge ‘to be curious in the search of the causes of their own good and evill fortune’, allied to the propensity we have already mentioned ‘upon the sight of any thing that hath a Beginning, to think also it had a cause’.Footnote 99 Hobbes set a very high value on this curiosity. Although it is a passion that develops out of fear – ‘anxiety for the future time, disposeth men to enquire into the causes of things’ – it is subsequently exercised for pleasure; it is ‘love of the knowledge of causes’,Footnote 100 a ‘singular passion’, unique to human beings, that ‘by a perseverance of delight in the continuall and indefatigable generation of Knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnall Pleasure’.Footnote 101
The relationship between fear and love of knowledge makes possible an interesting distinction between enquiries driven entirely by fear and others partly motivated by the pleasure intrinsic to knowledge-acquisition. The search for causes could engender ‘a perpetuall feare, alwayes accompanying mankind in the ignorance of causes, as it were in the Dark’, which ‘must needs have for object something’.Footnote 102 This was the origin of polytheism, but monotheistic religion ‘may more easily be derived, from the desire men have to know the causes of naturall bodies … than from the feare of what was to befall them in time to come’.Footnote 103 The monotheistic believer thus had a different motive from the mere idolater. But the ‘Naturall seed’ of both kinds of religion was a short list of human weaknesses: ‘Opinion of Ghosts, Ignorance of second causes, Devotion towards what men fear, and Taking of things Casuall for Prognostiques.’Footnote 104 Moreover, the founders of religions ‘have done it, with a purpose to make those men that relyed on them, the more apt to Obedience, Lawes, Peace, Charity, and civill Society’.Footnote 105 The ease with which religions are developed explains why even pagan legislators ‘have in all places taken care’ to associate their arrangements with ‘the dictates of some God, or other Spirit’ and to prescribe religious ceremonies.Footnote 106 Anyone who examines this process can see that revealed religion is ineradicable; its seeds ‘can never be so abolished out of humane nature, but that new Religions may againe be made to spring out of them, by the culture of such men, as for such purpose are in reputation’.Footnote 107
Particular religions can, however, be replaced; as they rest on faith, not reason, they can be undermined by anything that undermines the credit of their leaders. Such things included ‘the enjoyning of a beliefe of contradictories’, hypocritical and self-interested conduct, and failure to support their claims by means of miracles.Footnote 108 In conclusion, he believed, ‘I may attribute all the changes of Religion in the world, to one and the same cause; and that is, unpleasing Priests.’ He added that this generalization applied ‘not onely amongst Catholiques, but even in that Church that hath presumed most of Reformation’, that is, the Church of England.Footnote 109
V
By 1651, then, Hobbes's ‘faith’ had probably failed. But he did almost nothing to adapt his attitudes to the presumed beliefs of England's rulers. In a much-quoted passage, he did suggest that he approved ‘the Independency of the Primitive Christians to follow Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, every man as he liketh best’; but only so long as ‘it be without contention, and without measuring the Doctrine of Christ, by our affection to the Person of his Minister’.Footnote 110 As no one has ever supposed that the English Republic was free of theological contention, it is difficult to see this as endorsing the practice of religious toleration. Moreover, Hobbes continued to maintain that God should be worshipped ‘in Publique, and in the sight of men: For without that, (that which in honour is most acceptable) the procuring others to honour him, is lost.’Footnote 111
If this principle were taken seriously, part of the duty of a Christian ruler was to ‘procure’ the general population to offer God a uniform public worship. In consequence, ‘where many sorts of Worship be allowed, proceeding from the different Religions of Private men, it cannot be said there is any Publique Worship, nor that the Common-Wealth is of any Religion at all.’Footnote 112 A sovereign who recognized a need to worship God was thus obliged to organize a public liturgy. But even a sovereign indifferent to ‘worship’ would have a natural motive for summoning his subjects to church. It was the natural duty of the sovereign to set apart places and times at which the people ‘may assemble together, and (after prayers and praises given to God, the Soveraign of Soveraigns) hear … their Duties told them’.Footnote 113 Hobbes took it for granted that ordinary people ‘receive the Notions of their duty, chiefly from Divines in the Pulpit’; this was the principal reason that ‘the Instruction of the people, dependeth wholly, on the right teaching of Youth in the Universities’, that is, on proper training for the clergy.Footnote 114
His programme thus required a ‘Christian Politics’. Irrespective of what he personally believed, some form of Christianity was likely to persist, but the collapse of the existing church allowed him scope for reinterpretation. In some ways, his revisions were quite conservative. Christianity as he presented it continued to be a religion based on ‘faith’: sincere belief that ‘Jesus is the Christ’ was still a precondition for salvation.Footnote 115 He went out of his way to assert that Jesus is God when it was quite unnecessary to do so.Footnote 116 If a generalization can be ventured, the changes that he introduced were not, as it were, philosophically driven; Christian doctrine as Hobbes understood it did not succumb to mechanistic science. The pressure on theology was basically political in nature.
Political anxieties explain why he denied that there were minimal fundamental doctrines (prohibition of idolatry for Jews; profession of Jesus's status for a Christian) that could require disobedience. A Christian was to be allowed ‘the licence that Naaman had’ (permission to bow down in the Temple of Rimmon).Footnote 117 The church lost its position as the only guarantor of the reliability of fundamental doctrine, in part because the process of laying on of hands (cheirotonesia) was deemed to refer to holding up of hands; ordination became a process of election.Footnote 118 Even the clergy's sacramental powers (which De cive had reserved to the ordained) could all be exercised by any sovereign.Footnote 119 He also took steps to neutralize the Bible. Following a hint first given in De cive (recounting the discovery of Deuteronomy and its acceptance as law by King Josiah), the problem of the authority of Scriptures was redescribed in the political form: ‘By what Authority they are made Law?’Footnote 120 As Hobbes gave an account of this process for every book within the usual canon, he found himself, almost by accident, committed to a corrosive textual criticism.Footnote 121
Lastly, Hobbes wished to rule out threats to state authority arising from the appearance of a ‘prophet’ who might gain credibility by working miracles. He could hardly deny that there had been biblical figures who brought a message from the deity; and he conceded that the right to judge prophetic status had been ‘allowed to every one of the people’.Footnote 122 But his strategy for coping with this problem was not to deny that miracles could happen. Instead, he chose to emphasize that the defining purpose of any miracle was to impress some chosen audience. Strictly speaking, it must be ‘a work of God, (besides his operation by the way of Nature, ordained in the Creation,) done, for the making manifest to his elect, the mission of an extraordinary Minister for their salvation’.Footnote 123 A miracle is not simply an event of which we have no natural explanation; it must evoke a sense of awe as well. Thus the first rainbow was a miracle ‘because the first; and consequently strange … But at this day, because they are frequent, they are not Miracles, neither to them that know their naturall causes, nor to them who know them not.’Footnote 124 We still have no idea how ‘a man, or other Animal, engenders his like … yet because 'tis usuall, it is no Miracle’.Footnote 125 If we suspect a miracle has occurred, we should make every effort to find a possible natural explanation, but in the end we ought to ‘have recourse to Gods Lieutenant; to whom in all doubtfull cases, wee have submitted our private judgements’.Footnote 126 ‘In these times’, such phenomena are virtually unknown,Footnote 127 perhaps because of the advance of scientific theory, but scientific theory does not entitle us to rule out supernatural intervention – it simply impedes a subjective sense of wonder. There is no appeal here to a presumption that God restricts himself from intervening or that the age of miracles has ceased.
These features of Leviathan are perfectly consistent with a ‘Baconian’ account of Hobbesian irreligion. Although it is hard to believe that Hobbes had ‘faith’, his ‘atheism’ – his want of faith – was not so much a function of his philosophy as a reaction to ‘unpleasing priests’. The same can be said of perhaps the most outrageous of all his heterodox opinions: his denial of the existence of a separable soul and his treatment of the Almighty as corporeal; even here, it is mistaken to assume that he was driven by ‘materialism’. As we have seen, the germ of the idea can be located in The elements, where it was part of a critique of obfuscatory language. The elements had pointed out that things that do not ‘worke upon the Sense’ (are not ‘Conceptible’) need not be understood as being ‘Incorporeal, meaneing thereby without dimensions, and quantity.’ It noticed that biblical language on the subject in general connotes ‘Locallity, & Locallity is Dimension, And whatsoever hath dimension is body, be it never so subtile.’ In this context, he also objected to the scholastic phrase tota in toto et tota in qualibet parte (the whole in the whole and the whole in every part) which asserted the soul's omnipresence in the body.Footnote 128
Hobbes's antipathy to talk of spirit can be explained in several different ways; it goes without saying that he feared appeals to immediate inspiration.Footnote 129 But his primary objection to the idea of non-extended substance had more to do with cultural politics – with an attack on the prestige of the clergy's nonsensical jargon – than with the bogey of ‘enthusiasm’. It is often supposed that denying the existence of the soul was really an attack upon the church's most powerful sanction (if there were no immortal soul, there was nothing to be tortured after death). But though Leviathan denies that the torments of hell last forever, it does not deny the existence of post mortem punishments.Footnote 130 The essence of Hobbes's objection lay in his views about appropriate language; that is why the offensive phrase ‘incorporeal substance’ is introduced and criticized in Chapter Four, ‘Of speech’, where Hobbes compares it to ‘round quadrangle’ as an example of a phrase involving a flat contradiction.Footnote 131 In the Latin Appendix he published in 1668, Hobbes fully accepted the obvious implication that this was ‘either to deny that God exists or to affirm that God is a body’.Footnote 132 But such an observation tells us nothing about God; it simply explores the parameters of language, within which ‘existence’ is meaningless or spatial. There is no reason to suppose that Hobbes was retracting his earlier insistence that anything we say of God is strictly honorific. His statement was consistent, though, with his opinion that ‘enjoyning of a beliefe of contradictories’ has a tendency to undermine religion.Footnote 133
Hobbes's last word on this subject is found in another late pamphlet, his Answer to Bramhall, a work that just post-dated the Appendix:Footnote 134
He that holds that there is a God, and that God is really somewhat (for Body is doubtless a real Substance) is as far from being an Atheist, as is possible to be. But he that says God is an Incorporeal Substance, no man can be sure whether he be an Atheist or not. For no man living can tell whether there be any Substance at all, that is not also Corporeal. For neither the word Incorporeal, nor Immaterial, nor any word equivalent to it is to be found in Scripture, or in Reason.Footnote 135
People who use such language fall into ‘Atheism by consequence’; the contradictory language that they use ‘makes God to be nothing at all’, but out of this that ‘God is a Spirit Corporeal and infinitely pure, there can no unworthy or dishonourable consequence be drawn.’Footnote 136 Here, as elsewhere, the focus is on what people say.
VI
If this interpretation is broadly accurate, then it is wrong to think of Hobbes as a ‘materialist’; he had no reason to deny that unimaginable things might nonetheless exist. Moreover, he appears to have taken for granted the force of an appeal to Design. Although there is no way of knowing if the Designer God takes a continuing interest in our behaviour, it would be prudent to accept the possibility. In any case, the natural incentives implanted in the universe's structure include not just incentives to set up commonwealths, but also to buttress the sovereign with ‘religion’. The problems arise when religion has off-putting features arising from the power of the clergy; these are, as Bacon had implied, the roots of ‘atheism’. Leviathan is anti-atheistic in seeking to correct the flaws of Christianity – the opportunities it gives to clericalism, enthusiasm, and bad philosophy – by reinterpretation of the Bible.
In other words, Hobbes had good reason for thinking God exists, and even for supposing that God wills us to institute a faith-based mode of worship. His positively courageous defence of liturgy (given the circumstances of the early 1650s) suggests that he also recognized criteria by which such forms of worship should be guided. In the absence of instructions from the sovereign, his personal preferences, then, were for a ceremonial religion, for something not too far, in other words, from the pre-Revolution Church of England. Of course, sincere acceptance of God's wish to be worshipped-in-line-with-local-norms can easily become sincere acceptance that local religious claims are simply true. When Hobbes was being visited by Cosin, it seems unlikely he himself could tell the difference.
