Mortal God: The Religious Imagination and The Making of The Leviathan

Abstract

The most famous work of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, was greeted by his contemporaries with a fierce hostility. It was claimed that Hobbes had reduced “every thing in the whole world that is good” into power, gutted precious theological concepts of any content, and produced a set of political doctrines fit only to promote tyranny. In the almost four-hundred years since, Hobbes has become part of the proverbial political furniture. Certainly, he is famed for an unrelenting materialism and a strident absolutism, but he is also recognized as the quasi-founder of many, now familiar, liberal concepts. This dissertation is an effort to rediscover an older Hobbes; to unearth the depths of the transformation that his contemporaries recognized in his work, and to do so with a particular focus on Hobbes’s employment of man’s “religious imagination.” If Hobbes’s trademarks are absolutism and fear, the complementary role played by “power invisible” has often been overlooked. In this dissertation, I argue that—like many who came before and after him—Hobbes discovered that his political principles would be most secure if they were firmly planted within a dogmatic or religious tendency in man. The result is a thoroughgoing integration of the sacred and the secular, the religious and the political. While this has been recognized to varying degrees by scholars to this day, it has also been tempered by an acute awareness of Leviathan’s acerbic critique of clerics and a general sense that, on balance, Hobbes was no friend to religion. Notwithstanding that criticism, a thoroughgoing analysis of just how Leviathan employs man’s natural religiosity (and Christianity more specifically), in the service of its political project, remains wanting. To this end, two major contentions form the core argument of this dissertation. The first is that Hobbes offers a far more scientific vision for constructing a Commonwealth than has usually been supposed. If the series of statements regarding natural religiosity, honor, power, projection and grace, are pieced together, the concrete possibility of creating a “Common Power” emerges. The Leviathan, State, or “Artificial Man,” may be seen as truly being made through the compounding of individual wills and judgments in man’s imagination. What the mutual covenant formalizes is the existence of what is perceived as an omnipotent force, demanding of obedience by a rational necessity. The rationale of power brings into being a shared epistemic standard of justice, while preserving and even augmenting liberty, and so makes the institution of a “Mortal God” possible. The second major contention is that the religiously inflected nature of the Commonwealth’s creation makes better sense of (and indeed, is illumined by) the second half of Leviathan. Hobbes’s explication of scriptural narratives may be understood as an historical demonstration of the principles outlined in the first parts of the work. The Kingdom of God is achieved where God is taken to be sovereign in a Commonwealth; and those who serve as his vice-regents exercise rule only indirectly, that is, as mere representatives of God (or the Mortal God). Rather than do away with a divine sanction in politics, Hobbes inaugurates a vision of legitimacy and consent tied to the omnipotence and necessity of an all-powerful state. Christianity emerges as the religion most compatible with reason, and God remains accessible only by a rational representation in history, one that enthrones the promises attached to scientific pursuit and artifice aimed at the securing of man’s felicity. The final contention of this dissertation is that the emphasis on fear in Hobbes’s thought has readily obscured more optimistic notes entailed by his historical, eschatological vision. I conclude by speculating that Hobbes set in motion a movement towards greater “Enlightenment,” and that this is best seen in his cooptation of Christian categories. In particular, Hobbes makes clear that the Kingdom of Grace enables a transformation via obedience that is in motion towards a Kingdom of Glory—progress that depends upon overcoming the irrationalities of the Kingdom of Darkness. Such a hope, however, entails the alignment of an interior assent and an exterior obedience—a congruence between the realm of reason and the potentialities of man. In this way, the worry that Hobbes espouses both a despotic impulse and a more liberal vision of progress is clarified. In the process Hobbes is made both more and less familiar to his long-time readers.