Hobbes on Religion and the Church between The Elements of Law and Leviathan : A Dramatic Change of Direction?

It has become something of an orthodoxy among Hobbes scholars to see a dramatic change in Hobbes's intellectual development in the 1640s, that is, between the earlier works The Elements of Law Natural and Politic (1640) and De Cive (1642) on the one hand and Leviathan (1651) on the other. Various accounts have been given to explain these differences, dependent on the issue at stake (rhetoric, methodology, political philosophy, theology, ecclesiastical polity), but what they have in common is their stress on the radical character of Hobbes's turn of mind in that crucial decade of his exile.

David Johnston, for example, has claimed that Leviathan is an intensely polemical work that differs significantly in style and content from the earlier works: "this dramatic change in literary form was connected with important changes in the substance of his political theory, and [was] ultimately symptomatic of an underlying metamorphosis in his conception of the nature and aims of political philosophy." ¹ He sees the cause of this metamorphosis in Hobbes's growing realization that reason cannot assert itself. Most people are superstitious, gullible, and irrational, and these features are ingrained in them. Hence what Hobbes wants to do in Leviathan is to initiate a "cultural transformation" by bringing people to see their own blindness, thereby leading "men toward that enlightened, rational understanding of their own interests which he believes will form the firmest foundation possible for a truly lasting commonwealth." ² Quentin Skinner too argues that "Leviathan embodies a new and far more pessimistic sense of what the powers of unaided reason can hope to achieve." ³ In his view this pessimism cleared the way for a reappraisal of the value of rhetoric, as well as a reconsideration of all the leading elements in the classical ars rhetorica. Thus in Leviathan Hobbes endorsed "the very approach he had earlier repudiated," presenting us "not with two different versions of the same theory, but with two different and indeed antithetical theories, as well as with two correspondingly antithetical models of philosophical style." ⁴ And while focusing more closely on Hobbes's religious and ecclesiastical views, Richard Tuck has argued in various publications that on religion Hobbes "seems to have directly repudiated what he had argued in the earlier works, and in doing so he pushed Leviathan in a remarkably utopian direction." ⁵ Leviathan represented "not just an extension or a modification of the arguments in De Cive, but their fundamental reversal." ⁶

It is obvious that Leviathan contains much new material, but I think this picture of Hobbes's radically new departure vis-à-vis The Elements and De Cive is fundamentally mistaken. Instead, I shall argue that there is much more continuity between the three works than this picture suggests, and that many of the reasons which have been adduced to explain this development are not valid. In this article I shall focus on Hobbes's position on religion and the church-state relationship in the 1640s. In another, related article I have concentrated on Hobbes's views of reason and eloquence, criticizing the "pessimistic argument" (as I have termed it) and how it has been used especially by Johnston and Skinner (for all their differences) in arguing that Leviathan witnessed a reappraisal of the value of rhetoric. ⁷

In a sense it is easy to see why recent scholarship has stressed the wide differences between the views Hobbes expressed in his early works and Leviathan. Almost half of Leviathan is devoted to religious issues, dismissing the idea of any interpretative authority for the Church, the idea of the natural eternity of the soul after death, and the traditional notions of purgatory and hell—to mention only a few salient points. In addition, he presented a highly unorthodox interpretation of the Trinity. These...