Patricia Springborg, Hobbes’s Epicurean Civil Religion 25.3.13 (8,678 words).
______________________________________________________________________________ HOBBES’S EPICUREAN CIVIL RELIGION Published in translation as“Hobbes’ theorie der Zivilreligion”, in Dirk Bantl, Rolf Geiger, Stephan Herzberg, eds, Philosophie, Politik und Religion: Klassische Modelle von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. The Hague: de Gruyter, 2013, pp. 117-132.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT I wish to thank Gianni Paganini and Edoardo Tortarolo, organizers of the Conference on “Pluralisme e religione civile”, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli, Italy, May 24-25, 2001, to which this essay was presented in an earlier form, and as editors of its proceedings, the volume of that title (2004b), in which a much longer version of this essay was published.
Patricia Springborg, D. Phil., Professor of Political Science School of Economics, Free University of Bolzano
Currently Guest Researcher Centre for British Studies Humboldt Universität zu Berlin Mohrenstr. 60, 10117 Berlin Mitte Germany
[email protected] https://www.gbz.hu-berlin.de/staff/visiting-researchers
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Patricia Springborg, Hobbes’s Epicurean Civil Religion 25.3.13 (8,678 words).
______________________________________________________________________________ HOBBES’S THEORY OF CIVIL RELIGION
1. Hobbes and Renaissance Antiquarianism Thomas Hobbes belongs, along with the great poets, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson (the latter an acquaintance), new scientists in the footsteps of Galileo Galilei, such as Frances Bacon (for whom he was an amanuensis) and the Cavendishes (his patrons), to the English reception of the Italian Renaissance, as it rippled outward, first to France, then to the Lowlands, and finally to the British Isles. Typical of Renaissance figures in the mould of Machiavelli, he subscribed, I maintain, to a theory of civil religion (Springborg 2004b), which he shared with the antiquarians, John Aubrey, and Herbert of Cherbury (with whom he was also acquainted), who revived the pagan notion of religion as a state cult. The self-conscious adoption of antique philosophical positions was a classical subterfuge for critics and sceptics and Hobbes, I believe (Springborg 2004a), was an Epicurean, but an Epicurean many times removed from the age of Epicurus. For, like most of us, he was primarily engaged by contemporary debates and, while positions in these debates were often flagged by the banners of the classical philosophical schools, the house of Epicurus, like that of Aristotle, had many mansions. The ebb and flow in the reception of Epicurean ideas sometimes produced a flood, as with the rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini of the writings of Lucretius in 1418, and at others reduced to a trickle. So the publication by Thomas Creech of his translation of Lucretius, in verse in 1682 marked a watershed in English intellectual history (Harrison 1933, 1934). The revival of ancient philosophical positions was a way of characterizing a certain set of doctrines or, as in Hobbes’s case, of characterizing a mind-set that was anti-doctrine. Epicureanism permitted one to be sceptical about the gods without being technically an atheist, and to hold to this profile and qualify for membership in coteries which identified themselves as Epicurean, Hobbes went to considerable lengths, as I have demonstrated elsewhere (Springborg 2004a). A theory of civil religion was one of the hallmarks of Epicureanism. But like us, seventeenth century philosophers commuted between discourses and, while venturing into 2
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______________________________________________________________________________ uncharted territory in the fields of natural philosophy, philology and rhetoric as New Scientists, they never entirely departed the realm of the much maligned Aristotle and the Scholastics. If Hobbes used the voices of antique philosophers as a cover for his own scepticism, there are good reasons seriously to consider his relation to the Epicurean school, if only to establish the possible boundaries of that scepticism. At least twelve sermons preached in Hobbes’s lifetime, or shortly thereafter, by prominent clergymen, convicted him of Epicureanism (Harrison 1933, 1934). While such a chorus might be dismissed with the observation that “Epicurean” was a smear equal to the charge of atheism, in fact, this is to underestimate the sophistication with which Epicureanism (and for that matter atheism) in the seventeenth century was understood. A second reason to take seriously the contemporary charge of Hobbes’s Epicureanism concerns his relation to Renaissance humanists who were known Epicureans, Lorenzo Valla, Jean Luis Vives and Pierre Gassendi, among the most important. The parallel between the shape of Hobbes’s corpus and that of Valla, notorious for his treatise on The (Supposed) Donation of Constantine, is striking. Valla’s De falso credita et ementita constantini donatione had become an ‘authentic bestseller of humanist Europe’, having been translated into English by William Marshall and published in 1534 on the initiative of Thomas Cromwell, principal secretary to Henry VIII, and Hobbes was clearly familiar with it (Paganini 1999, 520 n.9). Not only did Hobbes and Valla both produce translations of Thucydides and Homer, but both published works on the problem of the will, and Valla’s famous exegetical work, the Commentary on the New Testament, edited by Erasmus, is clearly imitated by Hobbes, who borrows some of his philological examples from Valla in the long chapters of Leviathan devoted to Biblical exegesis (Paganini 2003). To address Hobbes’s ecclesiology and theology in terms of a theory of civil religion helps to solve some puzzles about his religious doctrine that the preponderance of modern scholarship, which tends to treat his doctrine as some variant of Christian orthodoxy, cannot solve. It enables us to examine the fit between his physics and metaphysics, which commentators on his religious doctrines have tended to ignore. It helps explain his peculiar position on the relation between church and state, and an interest in pagan religions and their 3
Patricia Springborg, Hobbes’s Epicurean Civil Religion 25.3.13 (8,678 words).
______________________________________________________________________________ practices which Hobbes shares with his antiquarian friends, Aubrey and Herbert of Cherbury, for instance. And it takes better account of the reception of Hobbes’s religious doctrine, which was almost universally greeted as heterodox in his day. Modern commentators have rightly remarked on a change in tone between Hobbes’s treatment of religion in the English Leviathan and in his later works, the Latin Leviathan and his Historia ecclesiastica (Paganini 1999). Underlying Hobbes’s theory of civil religion, and more clearly exposed in the Historia ecclesiastica than in his prose treatises, are a set of scientific assumptions that place him in the Epicurean tradition (Pacchi 1975; Paganini 2004; Springborg 2004a), even if not always a strict Epicurean. It is not appropriate to detail here the parallels between Hobbes’s philosophia prima and Epicurean physics, except to say that there are indications of a modified Epicureanism in Hobbes’s texts that deal with cognition, species theory, primary and secondary properties of matter, and simulachra, or eidola, as the the efflux of matter. Hobbes shares the Epicurean view of limitless finite worlds coming and going despite the eternity of matter, which necessitates a distinction between form and substance. Like Epicurus, he conceives of all entities as corporeal, characterizing spiritual entities, including the gods, as “thin aerial bodies” (Lev., xii, 54/65. See Zarka 1992; Schuhmann 2004). Unlike Epicurus, however, Hobbes believes that the atomic structure of all physical things is infinitely divisible. And for him, like Descartes and Galileo, but unlike Epicurus, the atom was a scientifically analyzable construct, “postulated only as the hypothetical locus of motion .... not as a metaphysical ultimate” (Herbert 1987, 716-17). Important similarities between Hobbes and the Epicureans, ancient and early modern, nevertheless remain, first of all an ethical theory based on the validity of sensation and the push and pull of pleasure and pain. For Hobbes, like the Epicureans, appetition, voluptas, power, ambition are basic human drives, and virtue and vice are relative terms, applied on utilitarian grounds according to the criteria of the promotion of pleasure and the avoidance of pain (Lucretius 1975, xxxviii-xli). The Epicureans, like Hobbes, viewed religion and philosophy, as quintessentially human constructs, governed by the same constraints. If religion is the cry of an oppressed people fearing 4
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______________________________________________________________________________ death, philosophy is also a palliative, or pharmakon, a search for causes by humans fearing the unknown. Like Epicurus Hobbes believes the origins of religion in fear of death and fear of the unknown make humans vulnerable to priestcraft. Hobbes, even more sceptical than Lucretius, may, like him have seen Epicurus himself as a sort of prophet, a proselytizer and healer; a widespread view in the ancient world (Moreau 1968; Salem 1989). But if Epicurus’ system was internally consistent, but Lucretius’ less so, Hobbes’s adoption of Epicurean principles was hardly consistent with even the most minimal Anglican doctrine: subscription to the 39 articles of the Nicene Creed. For instance, the first principle of Epicurean physics, that “nothing is created out of nothing” (De re. nat., 1.150-151, 155-156, 159-214) and that “nothing is destroyed into nothing” (De re. nat., 1.215-264), is certainly not consistent with the first article of the Nicene Creed which commands us to believe that God made the earth out of nothing. Epicurus shared the belief of other ancient physicists in the conservation of matter, to which Hobbes also subscribed. And when, in the 1668 Appendix to the Latin Leviathan, the interlocutors come to discuss the proposition that God created both heaven and earth, they do so with obvious incredulity. 2. Hobbes, Scepticism and ‘Theological Lying’ A number of apparent anomalies in Hobbes’s theory arise from the conflict between his general commitment to an Epicurean theory of civil religion, and a specific commitment, which Epicureanism stipulates, to the state-sanctioned religion of his day. These anomalies have in some cases been pointed to in recent literature as instances of “theological lying” (Berman 1987, 62, 76; Berman 1992; Curley1996a, 1996b). But it is also possible to see them as systemic conflicts that are not within Hobbes’s power to resolve given the constraints he has set himself. This does not rule out Hobbes having drawn attention to these very paradoxes to cast doubt on Christian doctrine in general, and the 39 articles of the Anglican faith in particular. Edwin Curley, in his now celebrated piece that revisits the issue of Hobbes’s scepticism, detects a certain mocking deliberateness in Hobbes’s exposure of these paradoxes (Curley1996, 261-2). In the 1668 Appendix to the Latin Leviathan, for instance, Hobbes puts into the mouth of 5
Patricia Springborg, Hobbes’s Epicurean Civil Religion 25.3.13 (8,678 words).
______________________________________________________________________________ Interlocutor A the observation: “almost all those theologians who published explanations of the Nicene creed use definitions taken from the logic and metaphysics of Aristotle, when they ought to have proven the holy Trinity from Sacred Scripture alone”. But then Hobbes goes on to express incredulous amazement that “the Nicene Fathers, so many of whom were philosophers, did not bring into the creed those terms of art which they used in their explanations” (Curley1996, 261-2, citing Hobbes’s 1668 Preface to the Latin Leviathan, OL, III, 536). Having said this, Hobbes goes on to analyze a central paradox of the Nicene Creed, where clearly the interpolation of Greek philosophical concepts is precisely at issue. On the one hand, he points out, we have the “unbegotten” God the Father (Hobbes 1668, §8, 351). On the other we have God “the begotten not-in-time”, “one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God”; “The natural son of God, or Him begotten of God, from the beginning, that is, from everlasting” (Hobbes 1668, §9, 351). A and B try to resolve the paradox between them by construing the eternity of the “only begotten Son of God” in terms of John 1:1, the evangelist famous for his Greek concept of logos or the eternity of the Word (verbum). Interlocutor A ventures the interpretation of verbum as “the eternal decree of God for the establishment of the world and the redemption of man”, but interlocutor B cautions: “I do not know what the Fathers felt in this matter, but I doubt they thought that, lest they approach too near the doctrine of the Stoics, whose word hemarmene among the Greeks and fatum among the Latins means the same as eternal decree” (Hobbes 1668, §§18-26, 352-3). Once again we are left with serious doubts about the coherence of the Nicene Creed and Hobbes’s claim in the Latin Leviathan that it escaped contamination by Greek philosophy is clearly falsified (Hobbes, OL, vol. III, 536, cited by Curley 1996, 268). This is what David Berman refers to as “theological lying”, cases in which the author states an official position and then sets about to subvert it. But Hobbes saw “theological lying” differently, I believe, and rather as the difference between public conformity and private belief, which gave him the right of exit. The prevailing tone of incredulity and scepticism in both the Appendix to the Latin Leviathan and the Historia ecclesiastica may indicate that exit was the route he privately took. This was also a classic 6
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______________________________________________________________________________ Epicurean position, and Epicurus himself could both state doubt about the existence of the gods (Epicurus, Ep. ad Men. 83), and yet enjoin on his followers conformity to state-sanctioned religion: “Better to subscribe to the legends of the gods than to be a slave to the determinism of the physicists” (Epicurus, Ep. ad Men. 134). Lucretius, De re. nat., 6.75, although apparently more sceptical, was nevertheless willing to allow that it is right for men to approach the shrines of the gods with placid hearts, and “to receive with tranquil peace of spirit the images (simulachra) which are carried to men’s minds from their holy bodies”, as if condoning popular or state-sanctioned religion. So, in the Answer to Bramhall Hobbes (EW IV, 339), proclaimed: “But to obey is one thing, to believe is another”, going on to remark, “Laws only require obedience; belief requires teachers and arguments drawn either from reason, or from some thing already believed”. Again in his Answer to Bramhall he declared, “When the nature of a thing is incomprehensible, I can acquiesce in the Scripture: but when the signification of words is incomprehensible, I cannot acquiesce in the authority of a Schoolman” (EW IV, 314). Such inconsistencies in Hobbes, among a host of others, prompt Curley to raise the question: “But suppose Hobbes’s insistence on the sola Scriptura principle, combined with his repeated affirmations (of the manifestly false claim) that the Nicene Creed is untainted by Greek philosophy, is a way of calling our attention to the fact that the Creed itself fails the fundamental test of reformation theology” (Curley 1996, 269). It is quite possible, as Curley suggests, that Hobbes highlighted these incongruities to make officially prescribed religion the butt of ridicule as a way of demonstrating his own scepticism. “When someone says something manifestly false, we often take that as a sign of an ironic utterance” (Curley 1996, 268). But to avoid prejudging the issue by simply assuming that Hobbes finds these Christian doctrines ridiculous, we must take account of the specific arguments he defends in treatises like the Historical Narration Concerning Heresy which, on the face of it, certainly invite us to take him seriously. The most important example of the incompatibility of Hobbes’s theory of civil religion and the specific content of the state-sanctioned religion to which he is bound to adhere, concerns the Nicene Creed. Both the Historical Narration and the 1668 Appendix to the Latin Leviathan 7
Patricia Springborg, Hobbes’s Epicurean Civil Religion 25.3.13 (8,678 words).
______________________________________________________________________________ address the Nicene Creed specifically, item by item. As a catalogue of doctrines which, as a conforming Anglican, Hobbes must officially endorse, the first item requires us to believe that God made the world out of nothing. But this is a view hardly reconcilable with the Epicurean principle of the eternity of matter, to which we know Hobbes subscribes as set out successively in works from the early De Motu to De Corpore of 1655. The incredulous tone and barely credible manner in which this item is treated in the 1668 Appendix is a good indication that Hobbes is flagging an irreconcilable conflict. The Nicene Creed also required Hobbes to believe in a personal God, who was born, died and rose again. But his mechanistic, Epicurean, universe of matter-in-motion allows little room for a personal God. The Nicene Creed required belief in Heaven and Hell, but Epicureanism stipulated that the atoms of spirits and the gods lacked solidity and could not co-exist in a world of concrete atoms, either on earth, or in the stars, but inhabit an “interworld” (μετακόσμια), a finite world among an infinity of possible worlds (Moreau 1968, 290). How was such a view compatible with the Christian Heaven? To the extent that Hobbes admitted the Christian Hell it was only by analogy with the pagan Underworld. How were his mortalism and his refusal to admit of Heaven and Hell compatible with orthodox Christianity in any of its forms? And what of his steadfast refusal to admit philosophical criteria that would distinguish between Christianity, as true religion, and the religions of the pagan gods? The gods he saw, like the Epicureans, as personifications of unknown forces based on the experience of dreams, or tales that are told of spectres and ghosts, promoted by priests to enhance their power. The truth or falsity of claims about the nature of the gods is not open to rational demonstration, and religion (religio) makes no distinction between the worship of true or false gods. In the first place, philosophical enquiry, which might make such distinctions possible, is itself dependent on conditions that only the Commonwealth, in whose power it is to stipulate official belief, can provide. And in the second, if religion is a larger-than-life project of the self as a bid for immortality in the face of death, its content must conform to appropriate human aspirations: peace and social harmony. “Leasure is the mother of Philosophy; and Common-wealth, the mother of Peace and Leasure”, Hobbes 8
Patricia Springborg, Hobbes’s Epicurean Civil Religion 25.3.13 (8,678 words).
______________________________________________________________________________ claims in Leviathan, chapter 46, drawing no distinction between the efficacy of priests and magi of ancient cities and that of the true philosopher (Lev., xlvi, 368/459).The relevant distinction between “true” religion and superstition, it turns out, is ultimately political: a question of whether or not tales of the gods are state-sanctioned. Hobbes states this more than once, and in the 1668 Appendix to the Latin Leviathan he puts into the mouth of Interlocutor A a clear restatement (Hobbes [1668] 1991, 332-3): A. As … that author [Hobbes] states in the sixth chapter [of Leviathan] toward the end: “Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed [is] religion; not allowed, superstition. And when the power imagined is truly such as we imagine, true religion”. This appears to be the cynical restatement of the position for which Hobbes’s follower Daniel Scargill, in his own defense at his Cambridge trial, is notorious: that he could not be guilty of heresy because he only professed what the sovereign required him to believe (Scargill 1669; Aubrey [1669 & 1696] 1898, I, 360-1). However, given that Hobbes believes that divinity is ineffable, and all speculation about the nature of the gods a matter of opinion, the argument strictly speaking involved no denigration. All religion, because it involves faith and not knowledge, is opinion based on belief. Beliefs may be valid or invalid, legal or illegal. They are valid or invalid, he maintained, based on the usual criteria of conformity with experience and coherence; and they are legal or illegal depending on whether they are state-sanctioned or not. It is a position with which the Epicureans concurred. In Leviathan Hobbes seems to make a special case for the validity of Christian belief, based on witnesses, prophets and miracles and Scripture, only to proceed to undermine it; just as the credentials of God’s spokesmen, and even of Christ and the Holy Spirit, are no sooner asserted than Hobbes calls them into question. In the opening pages of Leviathan he had already set out to discredit spirits, prophets, and dreams, along Epicurean lines: “If this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civill Obedience” (Lev., i, 7-8/18-19), he declared. 9
Patricia Springborg, Hobbes’s Epicurean Civil Religion 25.3.13 (8,678 words).
______________________________________________________________________________ And in the closing pages of Leviathan Hobbes openly admitted that there is no place for witnesses in the determination of true or false doctrine: “For first, all Truth of Doctrine dependeth either upon Reason, or upon Scripture.... Secondly, the matters in question are not of Fact, but of Right, wherein there is no place for Witnesses” (Lev., R & C, 395/490). In the Historia ecclesiastica, Hobbes reviews the credentials of the entire line of prophets, beginning with Moses and ending with Christ and including the Paraclete, as witnesses to the word of God, their very diversity casting doubt on the validity of their claim. And later on in the poem (Hist. eccl., lines 757-62), he makes it clear that when Christian doctrine became an issue of public order, necessitating the convening of a general council, neither witnesses nor scripture were relevant issues, but rather order itself, and the right of the state to establish it on minimalist Christian doctrines. 3. “Good” and “Bad”, “Catholic” and “Heretic”, as Relative Terms When it comes to the legality of religious doctrine, which depends on conformity to state law, Hobbes makes no distinction between Christianity and paganism at all. Religion may be invalid but legal, as in the case of the pagan religions; or valid and illegal, as in the case of early Christianity. As he explicitly claims in the 1668 Appendix to the Latin Leviathan and at length in the Historia ecclesiastica, “orthodox” and “heterodox”, “catholic” and “heretic”, like “good” and “bad”, are relative terms. If “good” and “bad” refer to benefit and harm with respect to selfpreservation and well-being, orthodoxy and heterodoxy are parallel terms, determined with reference to the well-being of institutions rather than individuals, while “catholic” denominates winners, “heretic” losers. In the English Leviathan, chapter 46, Hobbes had already made the startling claim that true philosophy is no more duty-worthy than false if it undermines the state: “For disobedience may lawfully be punished in them, that against the Laws teach even true Philosophy” (Lev., xlvi, 380/474). “Is it because they tend to disorder in Government, as countenancing Rebellion or Sedition?”, he asks: “then let them be silenced, and the Teachers punished by vertue of his Power
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______________________________________________________________________________ to whom the care of the Publique quiet is committed; which is the authority Civill” (Lev., xlvi, 380/474). The overriding consideration is public peace, entrusted to the sovereign, and Hobbes is ruthlessly consistent in applying this principle set forth in Leviathan chapter. 39. A church, he says, is “A company of men professing Christian Religion, united in the person of one Soveraign; at whose command they ought to assemble, and without whose authority they ought not to assemble” (Lev., xlvi, 248/321). In this respect Hobbes accepts the classic post-Westphalian position on the relation between Church and State: cuius regio eius religio. It has important implications for the use of the terms orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and even for heresy. We should not be surprised to learn then that in the 1668 Latin Appendix to Leviathan, §132-3, 371, Hobbes puts forward the argument (in the persona of Interlocutor A) that strictly speaking the early Christians were an heretical sect; and that it was right that they should have been punished: “it seems to me that the Roman Church wrongly complains of the ancient persecutions of the pagan emperors. For the Christians of those times were sects, having the same relation to the religion established in the Roman empire as a heresy today has to the catholic church”. Interlocutor B agrees on the grounds that “it is altogether necessary that precaution be taken in kingdoms and commonwealths lest sedition and civil wars arise. And, since these very frequently arise out of doctrinal differences and battles of intellect, those must certainly be coerced by some punishment”. In §123 of the 1668 Appendix to the Latin Leviathan, Hobbes spells out his claim that “catholic” and “heretic” are relative terms, this time with respect to the early Church Councils (Hobbes 1668, §123, 369-70, 400 n.129): In these councils, the participants defined what one was to believe concerning the faith in any controverted area. That which was defined was called the catholic faith; what was condemned, heresy. For, with respect to the individual bishop or pastor, the council was the catholic church, that is, the whole or universal church. So also was their opinion the catholic opinion, while a specific teaching held by an individual pastor was heresy. And it is from this, as much as I have gleaned from the historical sources, that the name “Catholic Church” derives. And in every church, the words “catholic” and “heretic” are relative terms.
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______________________________________________________________________________ Two things are to be noted. First, Hobbes presents the early councils as democratic assemblies, anarchic, and strictly speaking illegal, because they were not convoked by the sovereign. Bearing in mind Hobbes’s proud admission that he had translated Thucydides because he was an antidemocrat, this is a serious criticism of three of the first four Church Councils to which he is bound by the 39 Articles of the Anglican Church to subscribe. Second, and as a consequence, only with the conversion of Constantine and the concentration of imperial and ecclesiastical power in the Christian emperor, were Church councils empowered to decide matters of Christian doctrine at all (Hobbes 1668, §123, 369). Because these essentially irresolvable matters were decided democratically, by majority opinion, “good” and “bad”, “catholic” and “heretic” could only be relative terms, “catholic” implying the majority opinion, “heretic” the minority opinion. The legality of such opinions awaited a sovereign, and the truth of them, since they concerned the ineffable, could not be decided at all. The church had no power to loose or bind until the Council of Nicaea convened by Constantine, Hobbes argues in §145 of the 1668 Appendix. And in §144 interlocutor A sums up the situation: “Now I understand what heresy is, namely, that it was first an opinion only of a sect, then an opinion of a Christian sect and thirdly an opinion of a Christian sect condemned by the catholic church” (Hobbes 1668, 374). Hobbes makes precisely the same argument for “good” and “bad”, “true” and “false”, “catholic” and “heretic”, in the Historia ecclesiastica, dating the terms , “catholic” and “heretic” to the preNiceaean, so-to-speak democratic and illegitimate, councils. Having described the wranglings between the “poor good-for-nothing, philosopher[s] in name only “, who have jumped on board the Church for a free ride, and the Fathers, who “were not philosophers; but each tries to make the truths of his own teacher true dogma” (Hist. eccl., lines 475-6, 499-500), Hobbes noted that the issue was settled by numbers and the vote: “And while one man condemned the doctrines of another, the names heretic and Catholic were born. /In fact, when a judgement of the Council ended the dispute, to win was Catholic , to lose was to be a heretic” (Hist. eccl., lines 511-14) 4. Conventionalism, Relativism and Epicurean Ethics.
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______________________________________________________________________________ Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future, made the following criticism of Hobbes’s doctrine of truth (Arendt 1968, 297, n.3): In Leviathan (chap. 46) Hobbes explains that ‘disobedience may lawfully be punished in them, that against the laws teach even true philosophy’. For is not ‘leisure the mother of philosophy; and Commonwealth the mother of peace and leisure’? And does it not follow that the Commonwealth will act in the interest of philosophy when it suppresses a truth which undermines peace? Hence the truth-teller, in order to cooperate in an enterprise which is so necessary for his own peace of body and soul, decides to write what he knows ‘to be false philosophy’. Of this Hobbes suspected Aristotle of all people, who according to him ‘writ it as a thing consonant to, and corroborative of [the Greek’s] religion; fearing the fate of Socrates’. It never occurred to Hobbes that the search for truth would be self-defeating if its conditions could be guaranteed only by deliberate falsehoods. Then, indeed, everybody may turn out to be a liar like Hobbes’ Aristotle. Unlike this figment of Hobbes’ logical fantasy, the real Aristotle was of course sensible enough to leave Athens when he came to fear the fate of Socrates; he was not wicked enough to write what he knew to be false, nor was he stupid enough to solve his problem of survival by destroying everything he stood for. But Arendt’s criticisms are based on an Aristotelian theory of truth that Hobbes does not share. Hobbes is an Epicurean and a sceptic as his account of civil religion clearly demonstrates. Epicurus and Democritus were in fact not alone in believing that the development of common speech was an analogue for the development of concepts of right and wrong, and that all were conventional. A Sophist view widespread among a fifth century thinkers, it was even voiced by Aristotle, who complained about it. Plato in Protagoras 327e to 328a, and Euripides in Suppliants 911-17, compared acquiring virtue with learning a language. This combined with the view put into the mouth of Protagoras in Thaeatetus 167c that “right and wrong ‘are’ for each city as they seem to be”, more of less summed up the position of the sophists, to which Epicurus came close (Cole 1990, 71). And of course in a radicalized form it was the argument of Thrasymachus in the Republic, who argued not only that morals and mores are the product of convention, but that they are shaped by the ruling class as the outcome of the struggle for power. Indeed it was against the Sophist position on the interlocking genealogy of language and morals that the dogmatists Plato and Aristotle, had directed all their efforts, but only to see its resurgence and ever-growing strength as a popular theory.
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______________________________________________________________________________ However, it is not entirely accurate to characterize the position of Democritus and the Epicureans as Sophist. Given that they assume as a first principle human conventions of good and evil, justice and injustice, to be conventional in a quite literal sense, as the product of pacts and agreements institutionalized by law, one cannot hold them to Platonist standards of objectivity, where justice conforms to a template of the human soul. In fr. B. 188, Democritus claimed “enjoyment and its opposite are the landmark (οΰρος), of what does or does not agree with us” (Vlastos 1945, 588). Thus Democritus and Epicurus, Lucretius, and I may add, later Epicureans, Valla, Vives, Gassendi, and almost certainly Hobbes, could quite consistently maintain that the right and the true represent “what agrees with us”, and evil and injustice the opposite. Thus these thinkers mounted a successful challenge to the famous maxim of Protagoras (Theaet. 167b, 591), “I call some things better than others, but none truer”. Moreover precisely because of the importance of “art”, and the notion that humans have responsibility for the social world they fabricate, Hobbes, like Vives, Valla and the ancient Democriteans and Epicureans, could speak in terms of “the good for man”, as something universal and not relative. And it is because promotion of the good, discovered by “art”, and understood as human betterment, is possible that teaching is so important. This was indeed a fundamental Democritean and Epicurean principle, which is why these teachers founded proselytizing sects. The function of teaching and the critical importance of true teachings is a clue to both how the progress of civilization was possible and the role civil religion plays in it. Wisdom is the farsightedness and capacity for analysis, without which fools learn “the hard way”. Their refusal to accept the constraints of necessity, and their self-defeating battle against the inevitable, old age and death, “bring them, like Oedipus, nearer the fateful end”: “the stupid, hating life, want to live for fear of Hades” (Vlastos 1946, 61, citing frs B. 203, B. 205 and B. 199). Thus the false consolations of religion represent a failure of analysis and a betrayal of wisdom. It is surprising but true that all these topoi make an appearance in Hobbes’s Historia Ecclesiastica. How precisely human beings fall prey to the blandishments of religion, religio, or superstition, Hobbes narrates in classically Epicurean terms: fear of death and the capacity of astrologers and 14
Patricia Springborg, Hobbes’s Epicurean Civil Religion 25.3.13 (8,678 words).
______________________________________________________________________________ soothsayers to prey on the fearful, which represent the origins of civil religion. This account belongs to an Epicurean anthropology which makes much of language as the product of “art” or “artifice” and the distinction between verbum and res, signifier and signified. The Epicurean notion of the conventionality of justice must be understood then in a very specific and literal sense, and should not be taken for cynicism or an unbridled relativism, views that have, perhaps unjustly, been taken to characterize the Sophist position. There is reason to believe that the apparent anomalies in Hobbes’s use of the term justice may be accounted for in terms of a Democritean argument along the following lines. Although just and unjust are conventional measures, and justice is commonly an epithet signifying approval, injustice disapproval, Hobbes might well concur that (fr. B. 188 ) “enjoyment and its opposite are the landmark (οΰρος), of what does or does not agree with us”. Religion, for Hobbes, lies in the interstices of these phenomenal and noumenal worlds, in that intermediate zone inhabited by the gods, the “interworld” or (μετακόσμια). He sees an analogue between the spectres and chimeras of religion and works of the imagination more generally. The intermundane world of the imagination is the storehouse of icons and emblems upon which the poet draws to enliven the facts and put flesh and blood on the bare bones of history. Imagination, or “Fancy”, has an epistemic function, as Hobbes made clear in Leviathan (Lev., 1, 3/14): “And this seeming, or fancy is that which men call Sense; and consisteth, as to the Eye, in a Light, or Colour figured; to the Eare, in a Sound; to the Nostrill in an Odour; to the Tongue and Palat, in a Savour; and to the rest of the body in Heat, Cold, Hardnesse, Softnesse, and such other qualities, as we discern by Feeling.” But imagination is also the wellspring of religious expression as a means to unite a people in the face of fear. “Fancy”, Hobbes tells us, informed by true philosophy, is precisely what separates “the ciuility of Europe, from the Barbarity of the American savages”, as the source of “those grateful similies, metaphors and other tropes, by which both poets and orators have it in their power to make things please or displease, and show well or ill to others, as they like themselves” (Hobbes 1651, Answer, 81). These are the very terms in which Hobbes leapt to the defense of Homer, accused by Davenant in lines 27-33 of his 15
Patricia Springborg, Hobbes’s Epicurean Civil Religion 25.3.13 (8,678 words).
______________________________________________________________________________ Preface to Gondibert of myth-making like a magus, when he should have been history-telling (Davenant [1651] 1971, 3-4). Hobbes’s position on Homer is characteristically complicated (EW X, viii-x). Like the Epicureans he saw him as a transmitter of foundation myths and popular legends about the gods which had a civic function, a function that Hobbes openly acknowledged, when he remarked: “But the subject of a Poem is the manners of men, not natural causes; manners presented, not dictated; and manners feigned (as the name of Poesy imports) not found in men” (Hobbes 1651, Answer, 73). Poetry is held account to different standards of truth from either philosophy or history. In this respect it has a great deal in common with religion. Hobbes, who in his Preface to Thucydides (EW VIII, v), has unusually high praise for Aristotle, invokes Aristotle's distinction between historian and poet -- historian as chronicler and teller of tales, and poet as magus or priest. It is perhaps just this sort of distinction that accounts for Hobbes’s willingness to tolerate the contradictions that arise between the principles of Epicurean science and the doctrines of received religion. They lie in different and incommensurable zones. It is clear then that for Hobbes the history of civil religion is much more than a catalogue of superstitions and that, indeed, empowerment of the sapiens or the vates, rooted in the endemic fear of death, like the power of the magus, or poet, is a power that Leviathan can turn to good use. No one in his time understood better than Hobbes the degree to which religion is a cultural expression and his account of religion in the Historia ecclesiastica is remarkably anthropological. But a Christianity that pretends to temporal as well as spiritual power not only thwarts the great Leviathan. As simply one among a succession of civil religions, it does so on false grounds.
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Patricia Springborg, Hobbes’s Epicurean Civil Religion 25.3.13 (8,678 words).
______________________________________________________________________________ BIBLIOGRAPHY Arendt, H. 1968: Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, enlarged edn, New York. Aubrey, J. [1669 & 1696] 1898: “Brief Lives”, chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey between the Years 1669 & 1696, ed. Andrew Clark. 2 vols, Oxford. Bailey, C. 1926: Epicurus, the Extant Remains, Oxford. Berman, D. 1987: “Deism, Immortality, and the Art of Theological Lying”, in J. Leo Lemay, ed., Deism, Masonry and the Enlightenment, Newark, 61-78. Berman, D. 1992: “Disclaimers as Offence Mechanisms in Charles Blount and John Toland”, in M. Hunter and D. Wootton, Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, Oxford, 255-72. Cole, T. 1990: Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology, Oxford. Davenant, W. [1651] 1971: “Preface” to Gondibert, in David F. Gladish, Sir William Davenant's Gondibert, Oxford. Epicurus. 1926: Letter to Menoeceus, (Ep. ad Men. ), trans. Cyril Bailey, in Epicurus, the Extant Remains, Oxford. Curley, E. 1996: “Calvin and Hobbes, or Hobbes as an Orthodox Christian”, Journal of the History of Philosophy 34, 257-71. Harrison, C. T. 1933: “Bacon, Hobbes, Boyle, and the Ancient Atomists”, in Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, 15, 191-218. Harrison, C. T. 1934: “The Ancient Atomists and English Literature of the Seventeenth Century”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 45, 1-79. Herbert, G. 1987: “Hobbes’s Phenomenology of Space”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 48, 71617. Hobbes, T. [1629] 1839-45: Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre Written by Thvcydides the Sonne of Olorvs Interpreted with Faith and Diligence Immediately out of the Greeke, in
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______________________________________________________________________________ The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth, London, 11 vols (referred to as EW), EW VIII. Hobbes, T. [1651]: “Answer” to Davenant's Preface to Gondibert, in William Davenant's Gondibert: an Heroick Poem. London, STC D325. Hobbes, T. [1651] 1991: Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, Cambridge (henceforth Lev., pagination are given for both Head/ and Tuck editions). Hobbes, T. [1668] 1991: Appendix to the Latin Leviathan, ed. George Wright, “The 1668 Appendix to Leviathan, Translated with Introduction and Notes”, Interpretation, 18, 3, 324-413. Hobbes, T. [1655] 1839-45: Answer to Bramhall, EW IV, 301-2. Hobbes, T. [1673] 1839-45: “Preface To the Reader” to The Iliads and Odysses of Homer, EW X, viii-x. Hobbes, T. [1688] 2008: Historia Ecclesiastica, including text, translation, introduction, commentary and notes edited by Patricia Springborg, Patricia Stablein and Paul Wilson. Paris. Lucretius, 1975: De Rerum Natura, tr. W. H. D. Rouse, commentary by M. F. Smith, London, Loeb edn. Moreau, J. 1968: “Epicure et la physique des dieux”, Revue des Études Anciennes 70, 286-94. Pacchi, A. 1975: “Hobbes e l’epicureismo”, Rivista Critica di Storia dell Filosophia 33, 54-71. Paganini, G. 1999: “Thomas Hobbes e Lorenzo Valla. Critica umansitica e filosofia moderna”, Rinascimento, Rivista dell’ Instituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento 2nd series 39, 515-68. Paganini, G. 2003:‘Hobbes, Valla and the Trinity’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 40, 2, 183-218. Paganini, G. 2004: “Hobbes, Gassendi and the Tradition of Political Epicureanism”, Hobbes Studies, vol 14, 2001, pp. 3-24; reprinted in Der Garten und die Moderne. Epikureische
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