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Thomas Hobbes and Cardinal Bellarmine: Leviathan and ‘the ghost of the Roman empire’

January 1995
History of Political Thought 16(4)

January 1995
16(4)

Authors:

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

As a representative of the papacy Bellarmine was an extremely moderate one. In fact Sixtus V in 1590 had the first volume of his Disputations placed on the Index because it contained so cautious a theory of papal power, denying the Pope a temporal hegemony. Bellarmine did not represent all that Hobbes required of him either. On the contrary, he proved the argument of those who championed the temporal powers of the Pope faulty. As a Jesuit he tended to maintain the relative autonomy of the state, denying the temporal powers ascribed by radical papalists and Augustinians.

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THOMAS HOBBES AND CARDINAL BELLARMINE:

LEVIATHAN AND ‘THE GHOST OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE’

Patricia Springborg*

‘The controversies betwixt Rome and the Reformation are long since beaten out

of the pit, by other combatants of their own brood’, Hobbes’s Epistle to the

Reader, prefacing Of Liberty and Necessity (EW, Vol. 4, p. 232).

Hobbes on Religion

The degree to which early modern theory of the state was focused by papalist

theory is still underestimated, despite the recent fine scholarship of Francis

Oakley and Johann Sommerville.1 Thomist and Jesuit theories of imperium

perplexed and provoked major political theorists from Filmer to Locke and a

host of lesser known thinkers including Henry Foulis and Mary Astell. There

were two reasons for this. The first and general reason is that scholastic theory

had syncretized the political philosophy of the greats from Aristotle through

Cicero to Augustine. There was not much in the way of antique sources that lay

untouched by it, and even the Protestant reformers shared more than they cared

to admit. If Platonism stood a little outside the tradition, this may have been the

reason why Renaissance mirrorists turned to it, producing predictably absolut-

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XVI. No. 4. Winter 1995

* I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the University of Canterbury, New Zealand,

where I began this work, and John Pocock, my supervisor there; to the Folger Institute of

the Folger Shakespeare Library and its staff, from whom I was the recipient of a grant-in-

aid; and to the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, to the John D. and Catherine T.

MacArthur Foundation and to the Brookings Institution where I have completed it. I am

especially grateful to Johann Sommerville and Francis Oakley for their comments.

1 Johann P. Sommerville’s perceptive treatment of Hobbes and Bellarmine in Thomas

Hobbes: Political Ideas in Context (London, 1992), pp. 113–19, complements his overview

of papalist theory and Anglican responses in his Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–40

(London, 1986), pp. 189–203. On the perceived convergence of presbyterianism and

popery on the power to depose kings, see Sommerville’s ‘From Suarez to Filmer: a

Reappraisal’, Historical Journal, 25 (1982), pp. 525–40; and J.P. Sommerville’s Introduc-

tion to his edition of Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha and Other Writings (Cambridge,

1991), esp. pp. xv, xxi–xxiv. On the medieval roots of consent theory see Francis Oakley,

‘Legitimation by Consent: the Question of the Medieval Roots’, Viator, 14 (1983),

pp. 303–35; and F. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenants, and Order (Ithaca, 1984),

esp. pp. 48–91.

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ist theory for upstart princes.2 But even they layered their étatist theories on the

bedrock of Aristotelianism as Kristeller and others have demonstrated.3

The second and specific reason is that deep background theoretical contexts

were revivified by the direct intervention of the papalists, Robert Bellarmine

and Francisco Suarez, in the debate over James I’s oath of allegiance as part of

a Counter-reformation strategy to reconvert England. This produced concerted

defensive action by James and his courtiers in the form of specific rebuttals to

the Jesuits and a general project of church-history writing, to which Thomas

Hobbes contributed.

Hobbes’s religious doctrines set an insoluble puzzle for us because of his

insistence on official conformity but private freedom of belief.4 As a strategy

this was not very sensible, putting him, like his follower Daniel Scargill, in the

position of never being believed.5 Apart from some ambiguous remarks

2 See Alison Brown, ‘Platonism in Fifteenth Century Florence and its Contribution to

Early Modern Political Thought’, Journal of Modern History, 58 (1986), pp. 383–413.

3 Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘Augustine and the Early Renaissance’, Review of Religion, 8

(1944), pp. 339–58; P.O. Kristeller, ‘The Scholastic Background of Marsilio Ficino’,

Traditio, 2 (1944), pp. 257–318; P.O. Kristeller, ‘Humanism and Scholasticism in the

Renaissance’, Byzantion, 17 (1944–5), pp. 346–74: all reprinted in P.O. Kristeller, Studies

in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome, 1969), pp. 355–72, 35–97 and 553–83.

4 Among the most famous and hard-hitting of the many tens of contemporary items on

Hobbes’s religious doctrines, still sunk in relative obscurity, see John Bramhall, Castiga-

tions of Mr. Hobbes his last animadversions, in the case concerning liberty and universal

necessity; With an appendix concerning the catching of LEVIATHAN, or the great whale

(London, 1658, STC B4215); and Alexander Ross, Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook

(London, 1653). For a review of the reception of Leviathan, see Samuel I. Mintz, The

Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral

Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, 1962). For accounts which take seriously

Hobbes’s overall religious project see: J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Time, History and Eschatology in

the Thought of Thomas Hobbes’, in Politics, Language and Time (London, 1973); Leopold

Damrosch, Jr., ‘Hobbes as Reformation Theologian: Implications of the Free-will Contro-

versy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 40 (1979), pp. 339–52; Gary Shapiro, ‘Reading and

Writing in the Text of Thomas Hobbes’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 18 (1980),

pp. 147–57; Peter T. Geach, ‘The Religion of Thomas Hobbes’, Religious Studies, 17

(1981), pp. 549–58; Joel Schwartz, ‘Hobbes and the Two Kingdoms of God’, Polity, 18,

no. 1 (1985), pp. 7–24; Benjamin Milner, ‘Hobbes on Religion’, Political Theory, 16, no. 3

(1988), pp. 400–25; Arrigo Pacchi, ‘Some Guidelines into Hobbes’s Theology’, Hobbes

Studies, 2 (1989), pp. 87–103; Joshua Mitchell, ‘Hobbes and the Equality of All under the

One’, Political Theory, 21, no. 1 (1993), pp. 78–100.

5 See ‘The Recantation of Daniel Scargill Publickly made before the University of

Cambridge in Great St. Maries, July 25. 1669’. Hobbes wrote his own observations on his

follower Scargill which have not survived, as John Aubrey notes in ‘Brief Lives’, chiefly of

Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey between the Years 1669 & 1696 (2 vols.,

Oxford, 1898), Vol. 1, pp. 360–1.

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Hobbes made about believing in witches,6 and an interest in the supernatural

that his letters disclose,7 we have White Kennett’s report to substantiate

Hobbes’s own observation that the root of religion is fear. Kennett, as a Whig,

does not give a very good account of Hobbes, characterizing him as ‘a great

Coward’ riddled with fear who yet supported absolute monarchy. This is the

same towering man who lived to the age of ninety and was referred to by

Charles II as a ‘beare to be bayted’,8 of whom Kennett relates that he ‘could not

endure to be left in an empty House’, not even the palatial houses of his patron,

the Earl of Devonshire, and that ‘whenever the Earl removed, he would go

along with him, even to his last Stage from Chatsworth to Hardwick, when in

a very weak Condition, he dar’d not be left behind, but made his way upon a

Feather Bed in a Coach, tho’ he survived the Journey but a few days’.9

That ecclesiology and the history of religion were central to Hobbes’s

concerns we know from his works and from the company he kept. Employed

by William Cavendish, later Earl of Devonshire, more or less continuously

from 1608, the year he graduated from Oxford, Hobbes moved in circles close

to James I and later Charles. Members of these overlapping circles promoted

the Stuart cause and the grander strategies of James which included union of

the English and Scottish realms and the pacification of Ireland. Like James they

emulated Henry IV of France, his programme of Christian unification and

moderation, and to this end aspired to rewriting the history not only of the realm

but also of its national church.10 While the national history project was stun-

ningly brought to completion by William Camden, Michael Drayton and John

Speed, not always to James’s satisfaction,11 Hobbes, who produced a

6 The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, recorded by Margaret, Duchess of

Newcastle, ed. C.H. Firth (London, 1886), p. 198, reports Hobbes admitt[ing] that ‘though

he could not rationally believe there were witches, yet he could not be fully satisfied to

believe there were none, by reason that they would themselves confess it, if strictly

examined’.

7 Hobbes’s close friend, the Catholic Kenelm Digby, reported to him in secrecy supernatu-

ral events at the Ursuline convent in Loudun possessed by ‘Devils’. See Thomas Hobbes,

The Correspondence, ed. Noel Malcolm (2 vols., Oxford, 1994), Vol. 1, pp. 42–9, Letter

25, January 1637, with an enclosure dated 27 January 1636.

8 Aubrey, Brief Lives, Vol. 1, p. 340.

9 White Kennett, Memoirs of the Family of Cavendish (London, 1708), p. 16.

10 See Kevin Sharpe’s magisterial account of the Cotton library as forum for the antiquar-

ian courtiers and their exchanges of materials, sometimes secret and sometimes seditious:

Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, 1586–1631, History and Politics in Early Modern England

(Oxford, 1979).

11 William Camden’s Latin chorography Britannia (1594) — English’d by Philémon

Holland in 1637; John Speed, History of Great Britain . . . (1611); Michael Drayton,

Poly-olbion (1612). The Latin text of Camden’s Annales (1615, trans. Darcie 1625), for

THOMAS HOBBES AND CARDINAL BELLARMINE 505

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continuous stream of works on religion, late in his life completed the church

history project with Historia Ecclesiastica, a 2242-line Latin poem. Mimicking

the titles of Eusebius and the Venerable Bede, but more closely resembling a

Lucianic burlesque or the satire of Donne, it might not have pleased James

either, had he lived to see it.

James’s supporters defended Huguenots while deploring Puritans. They

cultivated Princess Elizabeth and her husband Frederick, the Elector Palatine.

They were pro-Dutch and anti-Spanish, vehemently protesting the meddling of

Spanish (and Italian) Jesuits in British politics, Robert Bellarmine,12 Francisco

Suarez13 and their English follower, Robert Parsons.14 Attacking the power to

depose princes claimed by Jesuits for the papacy, they appeared in the event

more anti-Catholic than in fact they were. For instance Hobbes, who in 1636 is

recorded to have dined in the refectory of the Jesuits’ English College in Rome

with his patron the Earl of Devonshire,15 numbered among his close friends the

instance, was said to have been toned down at James’s request on events in Scotland

concerning Mary Queen of Scots.

12 Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), produced the definitive defence of papal power,

Disputationes de Controversiis Christianae Fidei adversus hujus temporis Haereticos

(3 vols., 1581, 1582, 1593), which called forth many Protestant rebuttals, including that of

Thomas Hobbes. In 1589 he was required by Sextus V to accompany a papal delegation to

France, following the murder of Henry III. Created a cardinal by Clement VIII in 1599, he

was, after 1605, retained by Pope Paul V to defend the Church in its battle with schismatic

civil powers in Venice, France and England. In the case of England his interventions were

signal, involving him in public criticism of James I for his severity on Catholics in the

aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, and a posthumous rebuttal of the work of William

Barclay denying the temporal power of the Pope, published in 1610 as De Potestate summi

Pontificis in rebus temporalibus

13 Francisco Suarez, S.J. (1548–1617), author of Defensio fidei catholicae et apostolicae

aduersus anglicanae sectae errores (Coimbra, 1613). Suarez asserted papal supremacy

against the divine right of kings and the oath of allegiance instituted by James I in 1606.

14 Robert Parsons (1546–1610), was an English Counter-Reformation Jesuit, who in 1580

was appointed by the Pope to campaign against Elizabeth and Protestantism. He made

many converts among the gentry, but when his fellow Jesuit, Campion, was taken and

executed, Parsons fled to Normandy where he printed several books in defence of the cause,

and then to Spain where he established the English colleges of Valladolid and St. Omer for

the training of English missionaries, and assisted the attempted invasion of England by

King Philip. Following the failure of this attempt he turned to preventing the succession of

King James I, in 1592 publishing anonymously his Elizabethae, Angliae Reginae Haeresin

Calvinianam Propvgnantis, Saevissimvm in Catholicism sui regni Edictum . . . under the

pseudonym of Andreas Philopater. In 1594 he published A Conference abovt the Next

Svccession to the Crowne of Ingland . . . , using for this publication the name of R. Doleman,

a secular priest who hated Parsons as much as Parsons hated him. The chief purpose of this

work was to support the title of the Infanta against that of King James, by arguing that the

authority of monarchs is derived from the people.

15 See Thomas Hobbes Correspondence, ed. Malcolm, Vol. 2, p. 805.

506 P. SPRINGBORG

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Catholic amateur scientist, astrologer and diplomat extraordinary, Sir Kenelm

Digby, who may personally have underwritten the publication of the Latin

De Cive.16 More seriously, Hobbes was an interlocutor with the Catholic priest

Thomas White, with whom his doctrines were bracketed by the committee of

the House of Commons charged with convicting them of heresy.17 The Earl of

Arlington, Charles’s Secretary of State who came to Hobbes’s aid in this

matter, and perhaps King Charles himself, were dissembling Catholics. In fact,

as the examples of Edward Howard, Hobbes’s correspondent,18 and John

Donne demonstrate,19 those who had most to hide protested the loudest. For

some of them enjoyed (or suffered) close Jesuit connections and their back-

grounds often included strong recusant elements.

The young John Donne for instance, known as an ‘ultramontane’, that

particular brand of pro-paplist, anti-Gallican Catholic generally most abhorred

by Hobbes, appears to have converted to the Church of England with reluc-

tance, under pressure from James, being immediately rewarded with a

chaplaincy to the king. Donne’s mother had been a relative of Thomas More,

two uncles were Jesuits and his brother Henry had died in prison as an

accomplice of William Harrington, a seminary priest. Donne’s education was

Romanist and he was known to have advised Thomas Morton, later Bishop of

Durham, author of the anti-Catholic Apologia Catholica of 1604. Morton’s

Catholic Appeal reveals unusual knowledge of current Jesuit thinking,

16 See the Introduction to Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, The Latin Version, and Thomas

Hobbes, De Cive, The English Version, critical editions by Howard Warrender (Oxford,

1983). Digby, whose father had been executed for his role in the Gunpowder Plot and who

was sent by the Court to lobby the Pope in 1639 to raise support for Charles among Scottish

Catholics, was in 1642 imprisoned at the instigation of Secretary Vane, who wrote that

Digby was making unseasonable proposals to Charles I. He was freed by the intervention

of Queen Anne of Austria, the French Queen Regent in 1643, but not before he was asked

to testify regarding Laud’s purported ambition to acquire a Cardinal’s hat, which he denied.

His property was confiscated and he removed to Paris. It was there among the exiles that

Hobbes undoubtedly got to know him well.

17 As recorded in the House of Commons Journal for 17 October 1666, demanding power

‘to receive information touching such books as tend to atheism, blasphemy and profane-

ness, or against the essence and attributes of God, and in particular the book published in

the name of one White and the book of Mr. Hobbs called ‘‘The Leviathan’’, and to report

the matter with their opinion to the House’. Hobbes had denied incorporeal substances,

White the natural immortality of the soul. See Thomas Hobbes, Thomas White’s ‘De

Mundo’ Examined, trans. Harold Whitmore Jones (Bradford, 1976).

18 See Thomas Hobbes Correspondence, ed. Malcolm, Vol. 2, pp. 704–5, Letter 184.

19 Hobbes was acquainted with John Donne, although how closely we do not know. At a

meeting of the Virginia Company in November 1622, attended by Hobbes in his capacity

as secretary to Cavendish, Donne preached a famous sermon. See Noel Malcolm’s fine

essay, ‘Hobbes, Sandys and the Virginia Company’, The Historical Journal, 24 (1981),

pp. 297–321, esp. pp. 298, 303.

THOMAS HOBBES AND CARDINAL BELLARMINE 507

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probably gained from Donne — for whose views we have evidence in Pseudo-

Martyr, his case against recusants, and Biathanatos. In 1614 Donne sent a copy

of Biathanatos to Edward Herbert, Lord Cherbury, Hobbes’s antiquarian ac-

quaintance; and in 1646 Donne’s son sent a copy of the first edition to William

Cavendish, the Earl of Newcastle, observing that the Earl had seen the book

years earlier in the library of Sir Gervase Clifton.20 Clifton had hired Hobbes

to tutor his son, and it was therefore likely that Hobbes had seen it too. Donne’s

satire of the Jesuits, Ignatius His Conclave, of 1610, pitted him with James I,

Thomas Morton and Lancelot Andrewes against Bellarmine, as part of a

government campaign to divide recusant Catholics.21 Written as a Menippean

satire after Seneca’s Pumpkinification of Claudius and Erasmus’ Julius Ex-

clusus, it undoubtedly appealed to Hobbes who was writing his own burlesque,

the Latin De Mirabilibus Pecci Carmen, from 1626 to 1627, heavily dependent

on Roman models.22

Hobbes’s humanism, to which this poem attests, placed him among courtiers

and antiquarians for whom arcana imperii or state secrets were stock in trade,

which in turn put him in the company of George Buchanan, Robert Parsons,

William Barclay and Robert Bellarmine, as Filmer astutely observed.23 As

amanuensis to Francis Bacon around 1623, Hobbes was a conduit for Bacon’s

views to Paolo Sarpi and the Venetians, who in 1606–7 had engaged in their

own controversy with Cardinal Bellarmine. More generally, Hobbes fell heir

to Bacon’s project to accomplish by means of natural philosophy, optics,

geometry, and eventually rhetoric and politics, the purification of Christianity

that internal reform had failed to provide. By this time Descartes, Mersenne and

the Royal Society had each in their different ways undertaken to rewrite the arts

and sciences, as a vindication of universal Christianity in schism since the

Reformation. The Christian reform of manners and mores was an important

plank in the Stuart programme; and so was pacification of the masses riven by

religious sectarianism to the point of civil war. There is little in Hobbes’s

agenda that departs from these humanist goals. At the end of his life, as at the

beginning, he is to be found translating a Greek epic historian and writing the

20 Thomas Hobbes Correspondence, ed. Malcolm, Vol. 2, p. 821.

21 See John Donne Selected Prose, ed. Helen Gardiner and Timothy Healy (Oxford, 1967),

pp. 59–65 and comments, p. 59, on which I rely.

22 Thomas Hobbes, De Mirabilibus Pecci: Being the Wonders of the Peak in Darbyshire,

in English and Latin; the Latin by Hobbes, the English by ‘a Person of Quality’ (London,

1678; Folger Library 159640). See Patricia Springborg, ‘Hobbes’s De Mirabilibus Pecci

Carmen, and Cavendisian Family Politics’ and ‘Hobbes, Jonson and Cotton, Poets of the

Peak’, unpublished essays.

23 Filmer, Patriarcha, ed. J. Sommerville, p. 3. See also Patricia Springborg and Patricia

Harris Stäblein, Hobbes’s Country House Poem: ‘De Mirabilibus Pecci Carmen’, transla-

tion and commentary (forthcoming).

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history of the church, in Latin, projected by James more than half a century

earlier to confound priestcraft and denaturalize heresy.

There are, however, important differences between Hobbes’s early and late

works. The political urgency of Leviathan bespeaks suspension of belief in the

power of humanists to discipline the court. Charles I’s unconstitutional fiscal

and ecclesiastical programme had opened the polity to fracture by parliamen-

tarians which allowed centrifugal forces and polarizations, like that between

papist and presbyterian, to play themselves out. Charles could be construed as

suffering the consequences of a doctrine that James had long predicted. If the

deposing powers of the papalists, defended by Spanish Jesuits as by Italian

canon lawyers, had brought the assassination of his hero, Henry IV of France,

his successor was to suffer the regicide James had long feared for himself.

Bellarmine’s24 personal intervention into English political discourse on the

subject of the oath of allegiance to James occasioned Hobbes’s extensive

treatment of his views.

If Hobbes’s religious project matured alongside his political, it ended as it

began, an extension of the great project of James I to reinvent the polity on

secure historiographic foundations. Hobbes’s particular contribution lay in

trying to form from Christianity a civic religion like that of the great empires

on which his Leviathan is modelled; an aspiration that also lay at the birth of

Anglicanism. We have hints enough in the sources Hobbes invokes in De

Mirabilibus Pecci Carmen for the provenance of his views: Virgil, fabricator

of foundation myths and servant of the empire; Horace, the anti-war poet who

moved from pastoral idyll to imperial eulogy as he came closer to Augustus;

the burlesquing Syrian Lucian, who catalogues the absurdities of the oriental

cults; and Lucan, the mordant poet of civil war. A sentimental attachment to

the ethic of primitive Christianity, expressed in the ‘Narration Concerning

Heresy’ and rexpressed in Leviathan, may come closest to religious conviction

on Hobbes’s part.25 For his purposes at least it would do, lending the virtues of

faith, hope and charity to an imperial project of Augustan peace.

24 See Sommerville, Politics and Ideology, pp. 197–9.

25 ‘Narration Concerning Heresy’, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir

William Molesworth (11 vols., London, 1839–45) (hereafter EW), Vol. 4, pp. 388–9.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 46, pp. 478–9. But in his long Latin poem, the Historia

Ecclesiastica, Hobbes ridicules the early Christians, an easy prey for the pagan philoso-

phers, who passed off on them their sophistical wares. See Thomas Hobbes, Historia

ecclesiastica carmine elegiaco concinnata, ed. with a preface by Thomas Rymer (London,

1688; STC H2237); English paraphrase, A True Ecclesiastical History From Moses to the

time of Martin Luther, in Verse (London, 1722; Folger Library B1244.H5.Cage), lines

1–30, 1688 edn., pp. 1–2, 1722 edn., pp. 1–3; lines 320–50, 1688 edn., p. 16, 1722 edn.,

pp. 23–4; and lines 385–460, 1688 edn., pp. 19–22, 1722 edn., pp. 28–33. A new transla-

tion is in preparation by Patricia Springborg and Patricia Harris Stäblein, Hobbes’s

‘Historia Ecclesiastica’: a Critical Edition (forthcoming, 1998).

THOMAS HOBBES AND CARDINAL BELLARMINE 509

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Hobbes’s attitude to the Roman Catholic Church was rather like St

Augustine’s attitude to the Roman Empire: it is the subject of mixed oppro-

brium and approbation, condemnation and emulation. To make a further

comparison, Hobbes’s question of the Roman Catholic Church was the same

as Polybius’ question of the Roman Empire: by what means did it acquire such

power, and how did it legitimize it?26 These were critical questions for early

modern mirrorists, as Machiavelli’s close attention to Polybius indicated. If the

Pope sat crowned on the gravestone of the Roman Empire, he represented one

in a long line of sovereigns with something to teach the new Prince. In

Hobbes’s case the lesson was more salient for the fact that the English Refor-

mation had put civic religion on the immediate agenda. But Catholicism

represented the great reversal of raison d’état: it constituted a state in the

service of religion rather than religion in the service of the state. It was the great

anti-Leviathan on which his writings turned.

Hobbes’s answer to the Polybian question concerning the foundations of

‘Romish’ power was, in short, ‘the doctrine of essences’. The sure footing on

which Catholicism had grounded its theocracy was, like the empires of the

Babylonians and pharaohs, a hegemonic metaphysics guarded by a priestly

caste. This is the burden, I believe, of Hobbes’s investigations of the ancient

oriental cults, and particularly the ancient Egyptians, on the subject of which

he shared similar views to those of his friends, the antiquarians John Selden and

Lord Herbert of Cherbury.27 If Hobbes set out to ground the early modern

nation state on the New Science this was religiously motivated as well, for the

New Science represented an anti-metaphysics. The one point at which all of

Hobbes’s writings coalesced was in rebutting the doctrine of essences. It was

this doctrine on which the central rituals of Catholicism — like the antique

religions, a religion of ritual rather than of texts — were based. The Mass,

Catholic Baptism and Confirmation, Extreme Unction — the sacraments cen-

tral to this religion of mysteries — were all informed by doctrines about the

meta- morphic nature of substances. The instability of matter, viewed under a

metamorphic aspect, had its analogue in the instability of opinion, the instabil-

ity of language, and the variety of modes of expression and communication,

including rhetoric.28 Until these were all regularized commonwealth and citi-

zens could not be.

26 See Frank Walbank, Polybius (Berkeley, 1972), pp. 179–82.

27 For Hobbes’s evinced extensive interest in pharaohs and fairies, ‘Gentilism’ and the

occult, see Patricia Springborg, ‘Hobbes’s Biblical Beasts: Leviathan and Behemoth’,

Political Theory, 23, 2 (1995), pp. 353–75; and Patricia Springborg, ‘Hobbes, Heresy and

the Historia Ecclesiastica’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (1994), pp. 553–71.

28 See Quentin Skinner’s recent fine essays ‘Thomas Hobbes: Rhetoric and the Construc-

tion of Morality’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 76 (1990), pp. 1–61; and his F.W.

Bateson Memorial Lecture, ‘Moral Ambiguity and the Renaissance Art of Eloquence’,

Essays in Criticism, 44 (1994), pp. 267–92.

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Hobbes’s project lay in providing stability to the world of language and

morals, while eschewing a metaphysics of certitude of the ‘doctrine of es-

sences’ type. To fix the meanings of everyday language so that the ears of

subjects were chained to the lips of the sovereign, to use the great metaphor

Hobbes invokes from Lucian’s Heracles, was a work of artifice.29 To create the

‘Artificiall Chains, called Civill Lawes’, the ligaments of ‘Artificiall Man,

which we call a Common-wealth’, was a scientific project.30 It required the

technical and unequivocal use of language and the elimination of freely-held

opinions.

But to base linguistic stability on a nominalist epistemology was quite an

achievement, if Hobbes could pull it off. The Catholic Church had the great

advantage of having quarried the rich realist seam of ancient philosophy on

which to found doctrinal certitude. Hobbes’s project, worthy of Hellenistic

scepticism and its early modern advocates in the new scientists, was at once to

admit ethical relativism and then, for reason-of-state purposes, to set out to

eliminate it.31 He founded his project on a set of central axioms. First, if the

meanings of words are decided by convention then it is up to authority to

stabilize them or there is no meaning. Second, nominalism and essentialism are

incompatible: a theory of essences cannot be derived from a convention-based

theory of language. Third, nominalism and ethical relativism give no sanction

to an independent church, or any set of doctrines derived independently of state

authority. What are the implications then for the Holy Book and the status of

Christ the Word Incarnate? Hobbes maintained that the Book is closed and the

life of Christ an unexamined life until a sovereign interpretor is sanctioned.

How did all of this sit with his recognition that the Church of England was

constitutionally established, and that Anglicanism subscribes to the thirty-nine

articles and the Nicene Creed?

Hobbes’s answers to these questions, which may be seen to drive his entire

philosophical project, are to be found in three areas. His philosophy of lan-

29 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth

Ecclesiastical and Civil, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), p. 147. See Quentin Skin-

ner, ‘Thomas Hobbes on the Proper Signification of Liberty’, Transactions of the Royal

Historical Society, 40 (1990), pp. 121–51, esp. p. 137.

30 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1991 edn., p. 147.

31 The link between Hobbes’s metaphysical worries about linguistic instability and the

capacity of the ‘new science’ to provide a ‘new realism’, based on an empirical and

materialist epistemology and ontology, is brilliantly made by Quentin Skinner in his,

‘Thomas Hobbes: Rhetoric and the Construction of Morality’, pp. 1–61; and Quentin

Skinner, ‘Scientia cililis in Classical Rhetoric and in the Early Hobbes’, Political Discourse

in Early Modern Europe, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1993),

pp. 67–93.

THOMAS HOBBES AND CARDINAL BELLARMINE 511

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guage, resurrecting medieval nominalism as it does, is the first.32 According to

this name fixing is a sovereign activity. The attributes of God and the realm of

the numinous are inaccessible to human reason. The best we can do is to honour

Him, and in the conduct of worship the sovereign is high priest. Hobbes’s

various attempts throughout his life to redefine the terms of orthodoxy and

heterodoxy and rewrite the history of heresy represent a second area.33 His

confrontations with the doctrines of his opponents represent the third. Of these,

the debate with Bramhall, Bishop of Derry, referred to by Cromwell as the

‘Irish Canterbury’ to class him with the High Church Laud;34 Hobbes’s re-

sponse to his friend the Catholic priest Thomas White’s De Mundo;35 and his

answers to Cardinal Bellarmine are the most extensive.

Hobbes’s theology shows that he had done his homework. Not only could he

apply humanist techniques of biblical criticism but his knowledge of ecclesiol-

ogy was extensive. His commentary on the Nicene Creed, his analysis of

liturgical practices and history of Church proclamations in the ‘Narration

Concerning Heresy’, the Historia Ecclesiastica and in the Latin Appendix to

Leviathan, testify to his theological competence.36 Hobbes’s prefatory remarks

to Bramhall on Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance speak of

his acquaintance with the writings of ‘the Schoolmen or metaphysicians’ about

whom he complained: ‘[their] writings have troubled my head more than they

should have done, if I had known that amongst so many senseless disputes,

there had been so few lucid intervals’.37 Bellarmine, to whom he addresses

32 See Dorothea Krook, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Doctrine of Meaning and Truth’, Philosophy,

31 (1956), pp. 3–22; Margreta de Grazia, ‘The Secularization of Language in the Seven-

teenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 41 (1980), pp. 319–20; and G.A. Padley,

‘The Seventeenth Century: Words versus Things’, in Grammatical Theory in Western

Europe 1500–1700: The Latin Tradition (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 111–53, esp. pp. 141 ff.

For a more detailed study of the relation between Hobbes’s epistemology and theology, see

Patricia Springborg, ‘Hobbes on Religion’, in the Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, ed.

Tom Sorrell (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 346–80.

33 Principally in the Historia Ecclesiastica; the ‘Narration Concerning Heresy’, in EW,

Vol. IV, pp. 388–9; the Dialogue of the Common Laws (written around 1666), about half

of which concerns the English law of heresy; and the 1668 Appendix to the Latin Leviathan.

34 George Wright, ‘Thomas Hobbes: 1668 Appendix to Leviathan’, Interpretation, 18

(1991), p. 339, n. 18.

35 See Hobbes, Thomas White’s ‘De Mundo’ Examined, trans. Jones.

36 On Hobbes’s use of humanist exegetical techniques see Henning Graf Reventlow, The

Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia,

1985), pp. 194–222, esp. pp. 212 ff.

37 EW, Vol. 5, p. 342, cited by Wright in his Introduction to the ‘1688 Appendix to

Leviathan’, p. 343.

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more attention than all the medievals put together, Hobbes bends to his

purposes.

Bellarmine, the Pope and ‘the Ghost of the Roman Empire’

Being a courtier’s client — a role barely credited to this insubordinate man —

placed Hobbes in the awkward position of attacking thinkers the general

contours of whose political theory he shared. The important distinction made

by Hobbes between authorization and consent is a legacy of scholastic theory

which sought to distinguish between God as the author of the power of office

and the right of the community to designate an incumbent. If the papalists

Bellarmine and Suarez took the more radical position that only a community

could authorize the transfer of power from a community to a ruler, Hobbes fell

back on the older scholastic position that vests power to authorize with the

author (in this case God), leaving only the designation of an incumbent to

popular choice. It was precisely this distinction that Hobbes’s finely crafted

theory of simultaneous authorization and consent in the moment of social

contract sought to preserve. Hobbes’s extension of contract theory to the

recesses of household and family is not necessarily inconsistent. Scholastic

theory held, correspondingly, that entry to the estate of marriage can only be

divinely authorized, as recognized in the marriage vows, but that the choice of

incumbents could be left to consent, as registered in the marriage contract.

Hobbes’s ‘sexual contract’38 may amount to no more than this, and if he

enlisted the Laws of Natural Reason as sanctions in place of Natural Law, his

contemporaries were not deceived.

Thomas Hobbes could never be accused of popular sovereignty for his theory

of social contract. But John Locke, who was more Aristotelian than Hobbes in

the power he credited to pre-political social institutions, gave an account of

right to resistance and the power of consent which stood him accused by those

writers who saw a convergence between Papist and proto-Whig theory. This

became a burning issue in the aftermath of regicide given the fears of Restora-

tion royalists that James II would suffer the fate of Charles I. The carefully

documented account by Henry Foulis of the convergence between papalist and

presbyterian theories of the right of resistance was only one of many that

elaborated arguments made by Filmer and responded to by Locke.39 Filmer had

denied Aristotle’s distinction between household and realm because it was used

38 Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge, 1988). On marriage and scholastic

theory see Margaret Sommerville’s magisterial Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in

Early-Modern Society (London, 1995).

39 See Henry Foulis, The History of the Wicked Plots and Conspiracies of Our Pretended

Saints (Oxford, 2nd edn., 1674 [Wing F1643]); and Henry Foulis, The History of the

Romish Treasons and Usurpations (London, 1681 [Wing F1641]). Mary Astell, who

THOMAS HOBBES AND CARDINAL BELLARMINE 513

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by papalists like Suarez to deny Royal patriarchalism;40 but Locke for just that

reason reinstated it. Filmer had accused Bellarmine of ‘mak[ing] God to be the

immediate author of a democratical estate’,41 an exaggeration with which

Hobbes, to put distance between himself and the Jesuits, would probably have

agreed. Filmer, as filtered through the Exclusion Crisis, was read as an oppo-

nent of popular sovereignty, with which scholasticism had infected Presby-

terianism and even main-line Protestants like Buchanan and Locke.

Bellarmine had made his name in the case of the Venetian interdict and

Hobbes’s arguments owe a surprising debt to the Venetians and to other

supporters of James, as Johann Sommerville has demonstrated.42 So for in-

stance, Pierre Du Moulin, in a work held in Hobbes’s patron’s library, declared

that ‘[t]he Papal monarchy was born from the ruins of the Roman Empire’,

creating an image of the papacy which Hobbes by superior phraseology made

his very own, as ‘the Ghost of the deceased Romane Empire, sitting crowned

upon the grave thereof’.43 On the immateriality of Bellarmine’s distinction

between direct and indirect powers, also the subject of comment by William

Barclay, Du Moulin had observed that in the deposition of a king it meant as

little as offering him death by the axe rather than by the sword. Hobbes simply

observed, ‘Power is as really divided, and as dangerously to all purposes, by

sharing with another an Indirect Power, as a Direct One’.44 Hobbes translates

Du Moulin’s metaphor for the irrelevance of such a hierarchy of powers. He

substitutes for Du Moulin’s Platonist argument that to rank the arts of cooking

lower than those of medecine does not entail the rule of doctors over cooks, the

structurally similar if more virile argument that although ‘the art of a Sadler’ is

subordinate to ‘the art of a Rider’, it does not follow that ‘every Sadler is bound

to obey every Rider’.45

The axiom on which Hobbes’s theory of ecclesiastical power is founded was

his chief point against the Church of Rome: that the Church does not constitute

the Kingdom of God. Ecclesiastical power is non-governmental: ‘There is

therefore no other government in this life, neither of State, nor Religion, but

accuses Locke and the Whigs of Papist-Presbyterian Resistance theory, draws heavily on

Foulis. See Mary Astell, An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War

in this Kingdom (London, 1704), pp. 24–8, citing Foulis, The History of Romish Treasons

(Bk. 2, ch. 3; 1681 edn., pp. 75 ff.).

40 Sommerville, Introduction to Patriarcha, pp. xx–xxi.

41 Filmer, Patriarcha, ed. Sommerville, pp. 5–6.

42 Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes, p. 115, from whom the following examples are taken.

43 Du Moulin, Monarchia temporali pontificis Romani (1614; STC 7335), p. 311; Hobbes,

Leviathan, Bk. 4, ch. 47; 1991 edn., p. 480.

44 Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 42; 1991 edn., p. 396.

45 Ibid., 1991 edn., pp. 396–7.

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Temporall.’46 Order is an outward thing and secular, and the church was

perversely secular if it claimed for order more that a functional value. Hobbes’s

argument against the secularity of the Church of Rome involved him in a

refutation of the scriptural defence it uses, the philosophical realism in terms

of which its theology is argued, and the Gentile customs and habits that it had

institutionalized. The Church of Rome had misinterpreted Scripture to find

there a mandate for the establishment of an ecclesiastical governmental system,

he maintained. It had been misled by the philosophical realism of the Greeks

into believing that hierarchy is symptomatic of some intrinsic order; and it had

been remiss in integrating profane institutions and customs into its tradition in

the name of historical continuity. These were chief among Hobbes’s charges

against the Church of Rome:

we cannot say, that therefore the Church enjoyeth (as the land of Goshen)

all the light . . . wee are therefore yet in the Dark. The Enemy has been

here in the Night of our naturall Ignorance, and sown the Tares of

Spirituall Errors; and that, First, by abusing, and putting out the light of

the Scriptures: For we erre, not knowing the Scriptures. Secondly, by

introducing the Daemonology of the Heathen Poets, that is to say, their

fabulous Doctrine concerning Daemons, which are but Idols, or Phan-

tasms of the braine . . . Thirdly, by mixing with the Scripture divers

reliques of the Religion, and much of the vain and erroneous Philosophy

of the Greeks, especially of Aristotle. Fourthly, by mingling with both

these false, or uncertain Traditions, and faigned, or uncertain History.47

To lay the charge that the Church of Rome misinterpreted Scripture, produc-

ing a defence of the Church as the Kingdom of God, Hobbes turned to the

arguments of Robert Bellarmine set out in the third part of Bellarmine’s

canonical defence of the Catholic Church against Protestantism, the Disputa-

tiones de Controversiis Christianae Fidei Adversus Huius Temporis

Haereticos (1581–92).48 Cardinal Bellarmine had, since the publication of his

46 Ibid., Bk. 3, ch. 39; 1991 edn., p. 322.

47 Ibid., Bk. 4, ch. 44; 1991 edn., pp. 417–18. Richard Tuck in a recent important essay on

‘The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes’, in Political Discourse in Early Modern Europe,

ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 133–4, suggests Denis

Petau (‘Petavius’), Theologicorum Deorum (Paris, 1644–), Prolegomena, Ch. 3, as a source

for this argument. Petau was admired by Grotius, Gassendi and Mersenne.

48 Hobbes’s references (Leviathan, Ch. 42; 1991 edn., pp. 378 ff.) are to the third part of

the Disputationes: Tertia Controversia Generalis de Summo Pontifice (Ingolstadt, 1590),

Vol. 1, coll. 582 ff. There are further references to Bellarmine’s Tertia Controversia (ibid.,

Vol. 1, col. 596) and to his Sexta Controversia (ibid., Vol. 1, coll. 1779–85) at Leviathan,

1991, edn., Ch. 42, p. 341 and Ch. 44, p. 434, respectively (see Richard Tuck, Leviathan,

1991 edn., p. xlix). See Robert Bellarmine, The Power of the Pope in Temporal Affairs A

Reply to William Barclay, trans. G.A. Moore (New York, 1930).

THOMAS HOBBES AND CARDINAL BELLARMINE 515

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Disputations, rapidly been taken for the voice of Rome on matters of doctrine,

and especially on the powers of the Pope. So, for instance, William Whitaker,

Master of St John’s College and Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, in

1588 produced his Disputation on Holy Scripture against the Papists, espe-

cially Bellarmine and Stapleton, taking Bellarmine as the papal spokesman

because ‘he handled these questions with accuracy and method’ and because

his arguments contained ‘the very marrow of popery’.49 At Oxford, Dr John

Reynolds, who later initiated the project of the Authorised Version, took a

temporary lectureship for ‘the confutation of Roman tenets’, giving a course of

two hundred and fifty lectures Adversos Pontificos Imprimis Bellarminium,

which ran over fifteen years. Beza and Laud also wrote against Bellarmine, who

personally engaged with James I in the controversy over the Oath of Alle-

giance, and whose De Potestate Summi Pontificis in Rebus Temporalibus

(1610), was written specifically against the teaching of William Barclay, a

Catholic whose work, written before, but published after the oath was drawn

up, appeared to recommend the taking of the oath.

As a representative of the papacy however, Bellarmine was an extremely

moderate one. In fact Sixtus V in 1590 had the first volume of his Disputations

placed on the Index because it contained so cautious a theory of papal power,

denying the Pope a temporal hegemony. Bellarmine did not represent all that

Hobbes required of him either. On the contrary, he proved the argument of

those who championed the temporal powers of the Pope faulty. As a Jesuit he

tended to maintain the relative autonomy of the state, denying the temporal

powers ascribed by radical papalists and Augustinians.50 Their argument was

generally framed as a syllogism: Christ, who possessed direct temporal power

as both God and man, exercised it on earth; the Pope is the vicar of Christ;

therefore the Pope possesses and may exercise direct temporal jurisdiction.

49 Cited in J. Broderick, Robert Bellarmine: Saint and Scholar (Westminster, Md., 1961),

pp. 67–8. As a sample of the voluminous literature in response to Bellarmine consulted, see

also, The Tocsin or Watch-Bell, sent to the King, Queen, Regent Princes of the Blood, to

all the Parlemants, Magistrates, Officers and Loyall Subjects of France. Against the Book

of the Pope’s Temporal Power not long sent forth by Cardinal Bellarmine, Jesuite (London,

1611); Edmund Dalton, Doubting’s Downfall, first proving the communitie of the Saints

assurance, secondly disproving Bellarmine’s and his Fellows false allegations and frivo-

lous exceptions against that Truth (London, 1624); J. Du Moulin, Accomplishment of the

Prophesies or the third Book in defense of the Catholic Faith contained in the book of the

high and mighty King James I by the grace of God King of Great Britain and Ireland,

against the allegations of R. Bellarmine Coeffeteau and other doctors of the Romish Church

(trans. London, 1613); and the influential Richard Baxter’s Answer to Dr. Owen’s Twelve

Arguments about Divine Worship detected: wherein is given Exact Parallel between the

Distinctions and Answers Bellarmine and other papists use Against Protestants and about

Worship: and Mr Baxter’s Distinctions and Answers to Dr. Owens Arguments (London,

1684).

50 Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, pp. 195–6.

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Bellarmine simply denied that Christ had exercised the temporal power, which

as God, it is true, he possessed. Moreover, he drew up and circulated a list of

patristic passages collected under the title De Regno Christi quale sit, to prove

to the Pope the orthodoxy of his position.

Hobbes’s view that the Kingdom of God is not of this world is a view to

which Bellarmine would also have subscribed, endorsing Hobbes’s argument

that Christ will resume his Kingdom only after the general Resurrection.51 It is

conceivable, given Hobbes’s restricted definition of the Kingdom of God as a

temporal regime of direct divine rule, that Bellarmine would have further

agreed that the Church is properly speaking only ‘an earnest’ of that Kingdom.

But Hobbes makes the distance between him and his opponents, Catholic and

Puritan, as wide as possible; first by defining the Kingdom of God territorially;

and then by accusing them of subscribing to such a definition; which was

simply untrue.

Even the Augustinian notion of Civitas Dei, that ‘the Church now on earth

is both the Kingdom of Christ, and the Kingdom of Heaven’,52 was not at odds

with a theory that the literal Kingdom of God was in suspension. The signifi-

cance of the threefold distinction made in medieval doctrine between the

Church militant, the Church suffering and the Church triumphant, was a

distinction between the work of earthly preparation and the reward of heavenly

inheritance. It is true that this doctrine set out the divisions of Christ’s Kingdom

according to location rather than to a time scale — the Church militant

composed of the faithful on earth, the Church suffering those in purgatory, and

the Church triumphant, those enjoying the beatific vision — lived in three

spheres simultaneously. According to Augustine’s doctrine, on which Protes-

tantism heavily leaned, the Second Coming was an event in the life of the

eternal Kingdom of God, already established at the Resurrection with the

founding of the Church militant.

But Hobbes too saw the Second Coming as an event in a continuum to which

the preparatory work of the Church belonged as ‘an earnest of the Kingdom of

God’, a ‘Kingdom of Grace’ constituted by the Godly who have already been

naturalized into the heavenly kingdom by Baptism. Moreover, the Catholic

Church made an even greater qualitative difference than Hobbes would allow

between the temporal life of a Christian in the Church and the life of a Soul in

heaven. Differences of detail aside, when the Roman Catholic Church claimed

to be the Kingdom of God it was, in Hobbesian terminology, claiming to be ‘an

earnest of that Kingdom’, if that meant a temporal kingdom of God’s elect.

Puritan sects which hoped for the imminent reign of the Saints on earth did see

their Churches as inaugurating a temporal kingdom, however. Perhaps for this

reason, Hobbes found Beza’s assertion on the Calvinist side, that the Kingdom

51 Hobbes, Leviathan, Bk. 3, ch. 41; 1991 edn., p. 335.

52 Augustine of Hippo, City of God, Bk. XVIII, ch. 2.

THOMAS HOBBES AND CARDINAL BELLARMINE 517

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of God began at the Resurrection, more of a worry. Hobbes admitted it was

difficult to prove scripturally that this kingdom had not begun with the Resur-

rection. Here he must be taking the kingdom of God as the term was usually

understood, since there was no question of the Kingdom of God of his restricted

definition having begun at the Resurrection: the elect were not to be seen living

the deathless life of angels yet.

The nuances of Bellarmine’s theory were not lost on Hobbes, any more than

they were on Sixtus V. Hobbes ignored the fact that Bellarmine, no more than

he, could tolerate the notion of the Pope as Christ’s lieutenant commanding a

temporal Empire, treating the doctrine of direct and indirect powers as a front

for papal imperialism. Moreover, he refused to consider seriously Bellarmine’s

answer to the question whether ecclesiastical government should be monarchy,

aristocracy or democracy, that it should be none of these but mixed. He ruled

the question out of order by referring to his own definition. The issue of

whether the Church’s power is properly that of a monarchy, aristocracy or

democracy, he settled by pointing out that the question does not apply since the

power of a pastor is not sovereign, but the power of a school master. To the

further question, where sovereignty does in fact reside, a theory of mixed

government is never the answer because sovereignty, by definition one and

indivisible, is vested in the person charged with commanding or legislating.

Having ruled the question out of order, Hobbes then assumed that Bellarmine

had answered it in favour of papal monarchy and not mixed government; or that

one amounted to the other. Hobbes explains at the end of the chapter on

Ecclesiastical Power that he would not have subjected Bellarmine’s arguments

to such scrutiny had they been ‘his, as a Private man, and not as the Champion

of the Papacy, against all other Christian Princes, and States’.53 Perhaps rightly.

Mixed government theory in the Church, promulgated by the Conciliarists, had

been as academic as it later was with Harrington, and never really practicable.

Moreover, if Bellarmine was not an overt supporter of Papal absolutism, as

Mariana and Spanish Jesuits were,54 he supported his case for a Papal constitu-

tional monarchy on the same traditional scriptural defence, long accepted as a

defence of the Papacy as an absolute monarchy.

The real problem for Hobbes, as it becomes apparent in the Fourth Book of

Leviathan, was a clash of jurisdictions between Pope and King which, accord-

ing to his theory and Bellarmine’s, should never occur. The Papacy was

anti-Leviathan to Hobbes, even if the Pope was not anti-Christ, as he insisted

53 Hobbes, Leviathan, Bk. 3, ch. 42; 1991 edn., p. 402.

54 Juan de Mariana (1536–1624), de Regi & Regis Institutione, Bk. I, ch. 6; Suarez,

Defensio fidei catholicae et apostolicae.

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he was not.55 To denaturalize his power he felt he must deprive the Pope of both

his temporal and spiritual authority; in challenging the scriptural defences

Bellarmine put up, he was launching a frontal attack on this authority.

Hobbes gives a reappraisal of the texts that Bellarmine used to produce

support for three arguments central to his case: that the foundation of the

Church is faith in Christ, and not papal monarchy; that the power of the Church

is properly a teaching power, and not the exercise of jurisdiction; and that the

jurisdiction the Pope has hitherto exercised was not given by God, but dele-

gated by the Emperors of Rome. When Bellarmine turned from arguing the

appropriate form of government for the Church according to reason, to justify-

ing the form of government established in the Church, he took the celebrated

text Matt. 16: 18, 19; ‘Thou art Peter, And upon this rock I will build my

Church’. Hobbes challenged Bellarmine’s interpretation, referring back to

verse 15 in which Christ asked of the apostle ‘Whom say yee that I am?’ to

which Peter in the name of all had replied ‘Thou art Christ, the Son of the

Living God’. The foundation of the Church is a belief in Christ, then, and not

the leadership of Peter, Hobbes maintained.56 The promise of Christ, ‘I will

give thee the Keyes of Heaven, &c.’, was made to all the apostles. They all had

the keys to the Kingdom in that they could all forgive and retain sins, although

Peter on this occasion was designated to represent them.57

The text on which Papal infallibility is based, recording Christ’s promise to

Peter that his faith will not fail and that his work is to strengthen faith in others,

Hobbes took as support for his assertion that the spreading of faith, and not the

extension of ecclesiastical government, was the proper work of the Church. The

text ‘Feed my sheep’, was not a command to legislate but to teach.58 Christ’s

assurance: ‘as my Father sent me, so I send you’, Hobbes took to be a

confirmation of this, and not a guarantee of papal authority. The command,

‘Obey your Leaders, and Submit your selves to them, for they watch for your

souls, as they that must give account’, was not a warrant for the commanding

powers of pastors.59 The distinction between teaching and governing lies

precisely in teaching being pastoral, not political, something that bishops

would do well to remember, who ‘deny to have received their authority from

55 In Leviathan, Bk. 3, ch. 42; 1991 edn., pp. 381 ff. Hobbes, addressing Bellarmine’s

Disputationes, claims: ‘In the third Book, he handleth the question whther the Pope be

Antichrist. For my part, I see no argument that proves he is so, in that sense the Scripture

useth the name: nor will I take any argument from the quality of Antichrist, to contradict

the Authority he exerciseth, or hath heretofore exercised in the Dominions of any other

Prince, or State.’

56 Ibid., 1991 edn., pp. 379–80.

57 Ibid., pp. 380–1.

58 John 21: 16, 17, cited in Hobbes, Leviathan, 1991 edn., pp. 384, 386.

59 Heb. 13: 17, cited in Hobbes, Leviathan, 1991 edn., p. 390.

THOMAS HOBBES AND CARDINAL BELLARMINE 519

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the Civill State; and sliely slip off the Collar of their Civill Subjection, contrary

to the unity and defence of the Commonwealth’.60 Christians should heed the

warning of St John to be critical of their pastors, and ‘[n]ot to beleeve every

Spirit, but to try Spirits whether they are of God, because many false Prophets

are gone out into the world’; another of Hobbes’s shots at the Bishops.61

Hobbes maintains that Bellarmine tried to press a central claim: ‘that our

Saviour Christ has committed Ecclesiasticall Jurisdiction immediately to none

but the Pope’;62 a claim that Hobbes categorically denied:

this whole Dispute, whether Christ left the Jurisdiction to the Pope onely,

or to other Bishops also, if considered out of those places where the Pope

has the Civill Soveraignty, is a contention de lana Caprina: For none of

them (where they are not Soveraigns) has any Jurisdiction at all.63

It was an argument that Bellarmine could have turned around, but did not, to

claim for the Pope temporal as well as ecclesiastical power. Popes and Bishops

do not have jurisdiction, Hobbes argued:

For Jurisdiction is the Power of hearing and determining Causes between

man and man; and can belong to none, but him that hath the Power to

prescribe the Rules of Right and Wrong; that is, to make Laws; and with

the Sword of Justice to compell men to obey his Decisions, pronounced

either by himself, or by the Judges he ordaineth thereunto; which none

can lawfully do, but the Civill Soveraign.64

So Leviathan of the frontispiece, wielding the crozier and the sword: if not

one, then not the other. This is what the marriage of the two heads of the eagle

really meant, as Rousseau, who realized that their separation opened the state

to civil war, percipiently observed: ‘the philosopher Hobbes alone has seen the

evil and how to remedy it, and has dared to propose the reunion of the two heads

of the eagle’.65 The Biblical texts Hobbes brought to bear to support this

60 Ibid., p. 374. The ‘Collar of their Civill Subjection’ may be an allusion to ‘the collar of

truth’ in ancient Egypt, of which Hobbes tells such a strange story in the Historia

Ecclesiastica (lines 240–80, 1688 edn., pp. 12–14; 1722 edn., pp. 17–19), taken from

Diodorus Siculus, Book 4, and repeated in Behemoth (EW, Vol. 6, pp. 278–9). But it might

also be the Roman iugum uxoris, the yoke (or collar) of political subjection to which the

Romans themselves were forced miserably to submit at the Caudian Forks. A nice Hobbe-

sian joke.

61 John, I Epist., chap. 4, ver. 1, cited by Hobbes, Leviathan, 1991 edn., p. 390.

62 Ibid., p. 391.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid., pp. 391–2.

65 J.-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Richard W. Crosby (Brunswick, Ohio, 1978),

Bk. 4, ch. 8, p. 96. For analysis of the frontispiece of the 1651 edition of Leviathan, see

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argument depended on making a necessary connection between Christ’s not

being a sovereign while on earth, and the Pope and Bishops therefore not being

entitled to a jurisdiction. Turning to the Old Testament, Hobbes held the fact

that Moses had the entire sovereignty ‘proveth that all Bishops receive Juris-

diction when they have it from their Civill Soveraigns’;66 an argument that,

once again, depends on indefensible extrapolation from the peculiar Kingdom

of God to the Kingdom of God in suspension. The force of this argument is

difficult to assess. Is it that jurisdiction, by definition or according to the natural

law, properly belongs to the sovereign, but that he can delegate it if he wishes?

If so, it is a curious argument that takes no account of traditional theories of the

inalienability of sovereignty, to which in other places Hobbes seems to sub-

scribe. If all jurisdiction, including ecclesiastical, is a necessary function of the

sovereign, and if Christ’s mission did not require the exercise of a jurisdiction,

on what grounds was the sovereign then permitted to delegate it?

III

The Doctrine of Essences and the Kingdom of Darkness

It would be a mistake to think that Hobbes’s account of Bellarmine’s scriptural

defence of papal power was made chiefly in the interests of Christian enlight-

enment. The Pope was significant to Hobbes as the keystone of a rival system

of authority, and it was with the Pope as ghostly Emperor of the Kingdom of

Darkness that he was most concerned. Bellarmine in the Power of the Pope had

argued that the Pope had supreme ecclesiastical authority directly by God-

given right, but supreme temporal power only indirectly. Hobbes made the

counter assertion that, insofar as the Pope has temporal power at all, he has it

de facto as a gift from the Roman Emperors, and not de jure divino; and insofar

as he has spiritual authority outside his lands, he has it on false pretences. ‘It is

notoriously known’, Hobbes said, that ‘the large Jurisdiction of the Pope was

given him by those that had it, that is, by the Emperours of Rome.’67

Bellarmine had declared that one power is subordinate to another, either by

virtue of having been derived from it or, alternatively, ‘because the purpose of

one is subject to and subordinate to the purpose of the other’.68 Of the alterna-

Keith Brown, ‘The Artist of the Leviathan Title Page’, British Library Journal, 4, no. 2

(1978), pp. 24–36; Arnold A. Rogow, Thomas Hobbes: Radical in the Service of Reaction

(New York 1986), pp. 156–60; A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan (Cambridge,

1992), pp. 362–5; and Patricia Springborg, ‘Hobbes’ Biblical Beasts, Leviathan and Behe-

moth’.

66 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1991 edn., p. 392.

67 Ibid., p. 393.

68 Robert Bellarmine, The Power of the Pope in Temporal Affairs, trans. C.A. Moore (New

York, 1930), p. 25.

THOMAS HOBBES AND CARDINAL BELLARMINE 521

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tives, Hobbes chose to argue that the spiritual power is subordinate to the

temporal by derivation, where Bellarmine argued that temporal power was

subordinate to the spiritual by function. Hobbes argued that the Pope had

authority in the gift of the Roman Emperor, whereas Bellarmine argued that he

had it from God by virtue of the priority of the spiritual order over the

temporal.69

In Augustinian fashion, Bellarmine distinguished the city of God, the

Church, from the city of man, the state. It was because the two orders were

distinguishable that there could, properly speaking, be no clash of temporal and

spiritual jurisdiction:

the ecclesiastical and political commonwealth could be called two and

one; since they are distinct and they can be found to be separated, yet

when they come together in the one body of the Church, in such a way

as one is subordinated to another that they are two parts, and one total.70

Hobbes attacked Bellarmine’s argument for being fallaciously analogical.

He denied that one could infer a subordination of powers from a subordination

of purposes, rejecting the whole edifice of Aristotelian distinctions between

final, efficient and formal causes, in terms of which the inference was made:

One Power may be subordinate to another, as the art of a Sadler, to the

art of a Rider. If then it bee granted, that the Civill Government be

ordained as a means to bring us to a Spirituall felicity; yet it does not

follow, that if a King have the Civill Power, and the Pope the Spirituall,

that therefore the King is bound to obey the Pope, more than every Sadler

is bound to obey every Rider.71

Hobbes’s insistence that subordination of purpose does not entail sub-

ordinate power, not only denied Bellarmine’s premise but cut across a whole

tradition of analogical argument since Plato, who argued in The Sophist and

The Statesman for the subordination of powers according to function. Philo-

sophical justification for analogical argument took the form of the doctrine of

essences, according to which even such abstract concepts as an art or power

were deemed to exist in pure form as subsistent entities in a divinely ordained

hierarchy. But refutation of the doctrine of essences was what Hobbes’s

nominalist philosophic system was geared to accomplish. Correspondingly,

Hobbes rejected the traditional view of society as a hierarchically ordered

totality composed of a series of competencies. According to the Church’s

official social doctrine, Christendom was a single organic entity administered

69 Ibid., p. 100.

70 Ibid., pp. 177–8.

71 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1991 edn., pp. 396–7.

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in separate temporal and spiritual jurisdictions, in which each citizen, like the

members of a human body, had a function and preordained status. Hobbes

denied the relevance of all these distinctions. He conceded Christendom had

once been united, although in the person of the Emperor not the Pope; but held

that since its dismemberment each nation state, separately, constituted an

autonomous body politic headed by the divinely ordained sovereign, God’s

lieutenant. His materialism could not easily accommodate collectivities, unless

reduced to the one-on-one agreements of the social contract. So the term ‘body

politic’ was really no more than a literary conceit,72 and Leviathan, the artificial

body politic of the Introduction, an automaton constructed of grinding wheels

and cogs, is a spoof on all organic theories of state. It is not altogether clear that

Hobbes gets away with this particular sleight of hand, however, and the whole

notion of Leviathan and Behemoth, their biblical referents and employment to

signify mighty collectivities, whether beastly or not, is an affront to iconoclastic

Protestantism and its literal reading of texts, as well as to his own materialist

epistemology.73

For Hobbes tries to have it both ways. The point of mystical body language,

in which Bellarmine’s argument is framed, was not an anatomical analogy but

the juristic fiction that society, so conceived, constituted a legal body which

must be regulated by authority. Just the use Hobbes made of it. Medieval

corporation theory, from which Hobbes’s theory of the body politic as a

corporation was derived,74 was assumed by Bellarmine. He asserted the right

of the Pope to wield temporal power in the case of a breakdown of authority in

civil war or schism, on corporation theory premises.

Ernst Kantorowicz, in his discussion of the development of medieval theo-

ries of the state, points out that the continuity of the realm had from medieval

times been preserved by the fiction that in a time of interregnum Christ steps

in as interrex.75 The fiction had in some cases been explicitly formulated: ‘In

the first year after the death of King Rudolf, while Christ rules hoping for a

72 See George Watson, ‘Hobbes and the Metaphysical Conceit’, Journal of the History of

Ideas, 16 (1955), p. 559.

73 See Springborg, ‘Hobbes’ Biblical Beasts’, for a discussion of the provocations Hob-

bes’s use of Leviathan, and the use of Behemoth he proposed to John Bramhall, pose for

Protestant Biblical commentary. The conflicts between Hobbes’s materialist epistemology

and orthodox theology are discussed in Patricia Springborg, ‘Leviathan and the Problem of

Ecclesiastical Authority’, Political Theory, 3, no. 3 (1975), pp. 289–303.

74 See Patricia Springborg, ‘Leviathan, the Christian Commonwealth Incorporated’, Poli-

tical Studies, 24, no. 2 (1976), pp. 171–83.

75 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology

(Princeton, 1957), pp. 334–6.

THOMAS HOBBES AND CARDINAL BELLARMINE 523

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King . . .’ ‘. . . while Christ rules expecting a King’.76 It was used by Pope John

VIII during the imperial vacancy following the death of Louis II and before the

coronation of Charles the Bald in 875; and as late as 1528 the formula had been

used in the Florentine republic. The role that such a concept suggested for the

Pope did not go unnoticed. Kantorowicz remarks that the theory ‘became

politically a threatening reality when the Pope began to claim for himself the

right of transcendental interrex and to assume as Vicarius Christi a position of

overlord over secular dominion in times of an interregnum’.77

As might be expected, this turn coincided with the period of growing papal

dominance in the struggle between Papacy and Empire. Innocent III laid claim

to imperial rights during a vacancy in the Empire, and Innocent IV generalized

the claim, declaring that not only the Empire, but other kingdoms as well,

returned to the true Lord on earth, the Vicar of Christ, on the death of a King.

Later the claim had been extended to allow the Pope to excommunicate

heretical Kings who endangered the unity of Christendom by the threat of

schism. It was a theory ‘the practice hereof hath been seen on divers occasions’,

Hobbes declared, whose views on excommunication are one of the more novel

aspects of Leviathan:78

as in the Deposing of Chilperique, King of France; in the Translation of

the Roman Empire to Charlemaine; in the Oppression of John King of

England; in Transferring the Kingdome of Navarre; and of late years, in

the League against Henry the Third of France, and in many more occur-

rences.79

Bellarmine’s doctrine of the perfecta communitas was even more problem-

atic because it was structurally so similar to the absolutist doctrine Hobbes

hoped to press on behalf of the king, with the important difference that the

papalist argument gave priority to the power of the community over its rulers.80

That the consent of a community validated the power of kings both were

agreed. That consent of itself could not empower the transfer of power from the

community to its representative, both were further agreed, for the power of the

community was not itself created by consent. The transfer of power from

people to kings was divinely authorized but transacted by right of designation

and consent. On the basic distinction between authorization and consent, for

which Hobbes is so famous, he falls back on earlier scholastic arguments.

76 Ibid., p. 335.

77 Ibid.

78 See Sommerville’s excellent discussion in Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Context,

pp. 127–33.

79 Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 42; 1991 edn., pp. 395–6.

80 See Sommerville, ‘From Suarez to Filmer’, p. 528.

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Where he differs from the Jesuits, and where Locke oddly restores the papalist

plank, is in denying a perfecta communitas, empowered to designate rulers and

change their designation, whose interests take logical priority over that of its

government. Hobbes substitutes for the perfect community the detested mob,

construing the state of nature as a state of war, to deny any political entity

residual rights that it might press against a sovereign. Hobbes’s chief objection

to papalist communitarianism represented by Bellarmine was that, not content

to create an autonomous spiritual commonwealth, it advanced claims to secular

power on behalf of its lords over the governors of the temporal commonwealth:

Every Common-wealth (because it is supposed to be perfect and sufficient

in it self,) may command any other Common-wealth, not subject to it,

and force it to change the administration of the Government; nay, depose

the Prince and set another in his room, if it cannot otherwise defend itselfe

against the injuries he goes about to doe them: much more may a Spirituall

Common-wealth command a Temporall one to change the administration

of their Government, and may depose Princes and institute others, when

they cannot otherwise defend the Spirituall Good.81

It is true that Suarez, Mariana and a long line of mainly Jesuit papal

apologists had specified conditions under which rebellion was permissible that

defined regicide as something else.82 By claiming so much, the papalists had

invited a declaration of war from the princes of the temporal kingdoms. For, as

Hobbes pointed out, if the Roman Church could wage war against nations to

defend its claims as a perfect community, nation states could certainly return

fire to protect the autonomy of their national communities. It would be a war

of God’s Lieutenants against the Prince of the Kingdom of Darkness.

How could the papacy ever prosecute such a war on all fronts? It did it by the

most economical of means, by a propaganda war, the medium being meta-

physics, the message the power of the dark, satanic kingdom; of ghosts and

ghouls, witches and fairies, in which the Papacy revelled:

Besides these sovereign powers, Divine and Humane, of which I have

hitherto discoursed there is mention in Scripture of another power,

namely . . . that of the Rulers of the Darknesse of this world . . . the

Kingdome of Satan; and . . . the principality of Beelzebub over Daemons,

that is to say, over Phantasmes that appear in the Air: for which cause

81 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1991 edn., p. 398, italicized in the original to indicate quotation.

82 Suarez asserted papal supremacy against the divine right of kings and the oath of

allegiance instituted by James I in 1606, defending Bellarmine (Defensio fidei catholicae

et apostolicae aduersus anglicanae sectae errores, Bk. 3, ch. 3, §3) and affirming ‘[t]hat if

a King of a Lawful Title and Possession govern tyrannously, then that the People, by their

Parliament, may depose him’ (ibid., Bk. 6, ch. 4, §15).

THOMAS HOBBES AND CARDINAL BELLARMINE 525

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Satan is also called . . . the Prince of the Power of the Air; and because

he ruleth in the darkness of this world . . . the Prince of this world: And

in consequence hereunto, they who are under his Dominion in opposition

to the faithful, (who are the Children of the Light), are called the Children

of Darknesse . . . For seeing Beelzebub is Prince of Phantasmes, Inhabi-

tants of his Dominion of Air and Darknesse, and these Daemons, Phan-

tasmes, or Spirits of Illusion, signify allegorically the same thing. This

considered, the Kingdome of Darknesse, as it is set forth in these and

other places of the Scripture, is nothing else but a Confederacy of

Deceivers, that to obtain dominion over men in this present world,

endeavour by dark and erroneous Doctrines, to extinguish them in the

light, both of nature, and of the gospel; and so to dis-prepare them for

the Kingdome of God to come.83

Allegory once again, but this time with feeling, as Hobbes employs apoca-

lyptic language to indict the Roman Church, arch-fiend of the Kingdom of

Darkness. No matter that the metaphysical basis for allegory was ruled out by

Hobbes’s nominalism, if not by Protestant demands for a literal interpretation

of the Bible. Hobbes does not hesitate to indulge in allegorical interpretation

himself, if his peculiar usage of the terms Leviathan and Behemoth is anything

to go by.84 Certainly Hobbes showed himself less than consistent on the matter,

reproving William Davenant who had rigorously condemned omens and alle-

gories in Homer, Virgil, Spenser and Tasso, on the basis of Hobbes’s own

metaphysics and epistemology.85 To state Hobbes’s position very briefly: he

asserted that medieval realists had erred by following Plato and Aristotle in

believing that for every noun, simple, collective or abstract, there must exist

some corresponding thing. Things do not come with names, Hobbes observed.

Names were no more than convenient symbols used by men to identify or refer

to conception of things. The name does not refer to the object of perception

directly, but to our own conception of it. But because the perceptions of sane

men concur, all things being equal, it is possible, by referring to the names

which identify things, to communicate. ‘The use of words is to register our-

selves, and make manifest to others the thoughts and conceptions of our minds’,

Hobbes asserted.86 The appropriateness of names, and the truth of assertions

made by calculating with names, persists as long as the things to which the

83 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1991 edn., p. 417.

84 Springborg, ‘Hobbes’ Biblical Beasts’.

85 See, ‘The Author’s Preface to his much honour’d Friend Mr Hobs’, by Sir William

D’Avenant, and Hobbes’s Answer, in Gondibert: an Heroick Poem (London, 1651; STC

D325).

86 Ibid., p. 441.

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names refer last, and in the relation that the assertions describe. This Hobbes

spelled out in his answers to Descartes:

The triangle in the mind comes from the triangle we have seen, or from

one imaginatively constructed out of triangles we have beheld. Now when

we have once called the thing (from which we think that the idea of the

triangle originates) by the name triangle, although the triangle itself

perished, yet the name remains . . . But the nature of the triangle will not

be of eternal duration, if it should chance that triangles perished . . .

whence it is evident that essence in so far as it is distinguished from

existence, is nothing else than a union of names by means the verb is.

And thus essence without existence is a fiction of our mind . . . 87

Medieval theorists had produced demonology where they believed they were

philosophizing and theologizing. This was due to their failure to see, in the first

place, that speculation on the nature of God and the Christian mysteries of faith

was inappropriate; and in the second, that in appropriately philosophical mat-

ters philosophical realism was an untenable position to hold. Consequently,

they had developed fantastic doctrines concerning the immortality of the soul,

the significance of the Lord’s Supper, the after-world, the properties of angels

and spirits, the nature of sacraments and what the terms holiness and sacredness

imply. These doctrines were not only false but seditious, Hobbes maintained,

justifing his refutation of them in a political treatise thus:

But to what purpose (may some man say) is such subtilty in a work of

this nature, where I pretend to nothing but what is necessary to the

doctrine of Government and Obedience? It is to this purpose, that men

may no longer suffer themselves to be abused, by them, that by this

doctrine of Separated Essences, built on the Vain Philosophy of Aristotle,

would fright them from Obeying the Laws of their Countrey with empty

names; as men fright Birds from the Corn with an empty doublet, a hat,

and a crooked stick. For it is upon this ground, that when a Man is dead

and buried, they say his Soule (that is his Life) can walk separated from

his Body, and is seen by night amongst the graves.88

Ghosts, Ghouls, Souls and Transubstantiation

The real butt of Hobbes’s argument was not ghosts and ghouls, or the omens

and portents of primitive religion, but the power of the Pope and the metaphysi-

87 Hobbes’s Objections to Descartes, published in The Philosophical Works of Descartes,

ed. Haldane (Cambridge, 1934), Vol. 2, pp. 60–78, §14.

88 Hobbes, Leviathan, Bk. 4, ch. 46; 1991 edn., p. 465.

THOMAS HOBBES AND CARDINAL BELLARMINE 527

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cal doctrine of essences, transubstantiation and the Mass, by which he propa-

gated it:

Upon the same ground they say, that the Figure, and Colour, and Tast of

a peece of Bread, has a being, there, where they say there is no Bread:

And upon the same ground they say, that Faith, and Wisdome, and other

Vertues are sometimes powred into a man, sometimes blown into him

from Heaven; as if the Vertuous and their Vertues could be asunder: and

a great many other things that serve to lessen the dependance of Subjects

on the Soveraign Power of their Countrey. For who will endeavour to

obey the Laws, if he expect Obedience to be Powred or Blown into him?

Or who will not obey a Priest, that can make God, rather than his

Soveraign, nay then God himselfe? Or who, that is in fear of Ghosts, will

not bear great respect to those who can make the Holy Water, that drives

them from him? And this shall suffice for an example of the Errors, which

are brought into the Church, from the Entities, and Essences of Aristotle:

which it may be he knew to be false Philosophy; but writ it as a thing

consonant to, and corroborative of their Religion; and fearing the fate of

Socrates.89

The calumny against Aristotle, that he complied with the necromancers for

fear of state retribution by the priests, was false, as Hobbes surely knew.

‘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’.90 It was smart of Hobbes to implicate Aristotle in the doctrine of

incorporeal substances, more famously Platonist; for if the Platonist doctrine

of the immortality of the soul informed the Lateran council decrees of 1512,

Aristotelian doctrines had informed the somewhat different conception of the

council of Vienne.91 In this symptomatic passage Hobbes attacked not only

central Catholic doctrines of transubstantiation and the immortality of the soul.

His reference to ‘Vertues . . . sometimes powred into a man, sometimes blown

into him from Heaven . . . that serve to lessen the dependance of Subjects on

the Soveraign Power of their Countrey’, was a direct assault on the Protestant

doctrine of Grace, equally implicated in the seditious dogma of incorporeal

substances.

Defining the attributes of God for the purposes of worship, an activity

distinguishable from philosophical speculation about his nature, was a sover-

89 Ibid.

90 See Hannah Arendt’s comment on this passage from Leviathan, in ‘Truth and Politics’,

in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York, 1968),

p. 297, n. 3, cited by Wright, ‘Thomas Hobbes: 1668 Appendix to Leviathan’, p. 343, n. 44.

91 Wright, ‘Thomas Hobbes: 1668 Appendix to Leviathan’, pp. 328–9.

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eign prerogative. This Hobbes as a Socinian, committed to the view that the

attributes of God were beyond the scope of human reason, may have truly

believed.92 In any case, it was his only way out of the dilemma posed by his

materialist philosophy and sensationalist psychology, on the one hand; and the

requirement of Anglicanism to subscribe to the Nicene Creed, whose items

included subscription to Christ’s nature as homoousian, or ‘one with the

Father’, the Ascension of Christ into heaven, and resurrection of humans from

the dead, on the other. Hobbes was quite precise: the King as state priest was

‘honouring’ God, not defining him:93

because words, (and consequently the attributes of God), have their

signification by agreement and constitution of men, those Attributes are

to be held significative of Honour that men intend shall be so; and

whatsoever may be done by the wills of particular men, where there is no

Law but Reason, may be done by the will of the Common-wealth, by

Lawes Civill. And because a Common-wealth hath no Will, nor makes

no Lawes, but those that are made by the Will of him, or them that have

the Soveraign Power; it followeth that those Attributes which the

Soveraign ordaineth, in the Worship of God, for signes of Honour, ought

to be taken and used to such, by private men in their publique Worship.

It was a prerogative usurped by the Church of Rome, doing religion a double

disservice in perpetuating heathen demonology, idol worship and strange

ceremonial practices. The Papists had been led into idolatry both by taking

fictions for things, according to the realist doctrine of universals, and by

integrating profane customs into its tradition. The political significance of this

profanity concerned Hobbes most. It was because the demonology of the

scholastics was used to bolster the Papal hierarchy that it was so dangerous.

The remark voiced by William Prynne concerning bishops, that ‘their Hier-

archy . . . not their Popery was the ground work of the treachery and enormities

. . . ’, might have been made by Hobbes.94

The problem of hierarchy had bedevilled politics for long enough. Marsilius

had argued that a hierarchy was justified on functional grounds only, as an

institutionalized chain of command. But the question was disputed long into

the seventeenth century. The merum imperium debate among civil lawyers

revolved on the question of whether subordinate magistrates had their powers

92 For Hobbes’s debt to Socinianism, for which Locke was unjustly more famous, see Peter

Geach, ‘The Religion of Thomas Hobbes’; and John Marshall, ‘The Ecclesiology of the

Latitude-men 1600–1689: Stillingfleet, Tillotson and ‘‘Hobbism’’’, Journal of Ecclesio-

logical History, 36 (1985), pp. 407–27.

93 Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 31; 1991 edn., p. 253.

94 Quoted by William M. Lamont, Marginal Prynne 1600–1669 (London, 1963), p. 78.

THOMAS HOBBES AND CARDINAL BELLARMINE 529

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by virtue of rank, or whether they had them in gift of the King as a property.95

It was essential to Bodinian and Hobbesian theories of sovereignty, that the

notion of intrinsic powers attaching to authorities by virtue of their position in

a hierarchy should be abolished.96 Hobbes, knowing that the structure of

authority set up by the Roman Church collided head on with national sover-

eignty in church and state, hoped to persuade his readers that the Papal edifice

was a gigantic and long-lasting hoax. It is for this reason that he makes so much

of the conceit that the Papacy is the ghost of the Roman Empire:

For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged

for Bishop Universall, by pretence of Succession to St. Peter, their whole

Hierarchy, or Kingdome of Darknesse, may be compared not unfitly to

the Kingdome of Fairies; that is, to the old wives’ Fables in England,

concerning Ghosts and Spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And

if a man consider the originall of this great Ecclesiasticall Dominion, he

will easily perceive that the Papacy is no other than the Ghost of the

deceased Romane Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: For

so did the Papacy start up on a Sudden out of the Ruines of that Heathen

Power.97

The notion would have had some appeal to those who took seriously the

suggestion that the Pope was anti-Christ, the whore of Babylon seated on the

seven hills mentioned in the book of Revelations.98 But this was a proposition

Hobbes himself denied. A proficient enough exegete, he knew that St John was

in fact referring to the declining Roman Empire and, only by an unwarrantable

allegorical extrapolation, could he be taken as prophesying the corruption and

demise of the papacy. Hardly more warrantable was Hobbes’s claim that the

Pope was a Fairy, King of Fairieland, although perhaps more credible in

popular culture inhabited by widespread belief in the supernatural in all its

forms. In Leviathan Chapter 2, Hobbes remarked of witches that their trade

‘was neerer to a new Religion, than to a Craft or Science’.99 The same Hobbes

who so roundly dispatched demonology in all its forms in the fourth part of

Leviathan, ‘Of the Kingdom of Darkness’, mocking at the kingdom of fairies

and goblins conjured up by those who subscribed to ‘incorporeal substances’,

could still be found reflecting on the existence of witches, suggesting that those

95 M.P. Gilmore, Argument from Roman Law in Political Thought 1200–1600 (Harvard,

1961).

96 See Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth Century Revolution in the

Methodology of Law and History (Columbia, 1963).

97 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1991 edn., p. 480.

98 C.H. McIlwain, The Political Works of James I (Cambridge, 1918), pp. xiv–v.

99 Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 2; 1991 edn., p. 18.

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who doubted their existence first ought to consult them!100 Hobbes is caught

once more on his own hook. His allegories and parables, satirical or not, are

incompatible with his materialist epistemology and metaphysics; and so are the

religious doctrines of the Nicene Creed that he professed. What were his

contemporaries to think of a man whose word could not be trusted, even by

himself?

Patricia Springborg THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION

100 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in

Sixteenth and Seventeeth Century England (London, 1971), pp. 518–19, citing The Life of

William Cavendish, by Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, ed. Firth, p. 198.

THOMAS HOBBES AND CARDINAL BELLARMINE 531

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Hobbes and the Papal Monarchy

Chapter

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Patricia Springborg

The papal monarchy is the subject of Thomas Hobbes's Historical Narration concerning Heresy , much of Behemoth , and his long Latin poem, the Historia Ecclesiastica . Hobbes's was not the only account in his day of the papal monarchy as a history of iniquity, or even as “the ghost of the Roman Empire.” The papal creation of a parallel system of offices in the late Roman and Holy Roman Empires is of immense institutional importance. Hobbes's analysis of the second papal strategy, the co-optation of Roman Law as canon law, is complicated. Hobbes's account of both the institutional and philosophical consequences of the papal monarchy is surprisingly congruent with some of the most authoritative modern accounts. The fourteenth-century hierocratic publicists belonged as much to the reception of Averroist Aristotelianism as their contemporary antagonists. None of the parties to the struggle between pope and emperor appears to have been immune to the Aristotelianism of the Arabic commentators.

Juan de Mariana and Early Modern Spanish Political Thought

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Rethinking the sexual contract: The case of Thomas Hobbes

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Apr 2023

Allan Gabriel Cardoso dos Santos

The idea that the Leviathan frontispiece offers a visual summary of the contents of the work is widespread. However, the analysis of the frontispiece often under-explores Leviathan's text or leaves certain iconographic elements aside. In discussions of the Scholastics ‘Dilemma’ emblem, for instance, the image is commonly reduced to a representation of ‘logic’ or ‘scholasticism’, leaving aside the intricate interrelationship between the objects present in the image and their connection with the content of the book. This paper argues that this image helps understanding Hobbes’ critique of Scholastic doctrines and their political effects in Leviathan. For Hobbes, these supposedly pure philosophical concepts either in logic (trident of the ‘Syllogism’) or metaphysics (‘Real/Intentional’ bident) hide a central part of Scholastic thought: a ‘seditious’ political conception claiming that the Pope has an indirect right to temporal power in affairs concerning spiritual matters theory (‘Spiritual/Temporal’ and ‘Direct/Indirect’ bidents). The Scholastic model made the common people believe that the Pope would have at least as much authority as the Sovereign. When faced with the choice between obeying either the Pope or their Civil Sovereign the subjects would find themselves in a dangerous ‘Dilemma’.

Bibliography

Article

Apr 2022

Ben Jones

Apocalypse, it seems, is everywhere. Preachers with vast followings proclaim the world's end. Apocalyptic fears grip even the non-religious amid climate change, pandemics, and threats of nuclear war. But as these ideas pervade popular discourse, grasping their logic remains elusive. Ben Jones argues that we can gain insight into apocalyptic thought through secular thinkers. He starts with a puzzle: Why would secular thinkers draw on Christian apocalyptic beliefs – often dismissed as bizarre –to interpret politics? The apocalyptic tradition proves appealing in part because it theorizes a special relation between crisis and utopia. Apocalyptic thought points to crisis as the vehicle to bring the impossible within reach, thus offering resources for navigating challenges in ideal theory, which tries to imagine the best and most just society. By examining apocalyptic thought's appeal and risks, this Open Access study arrives at new insights on the limits of ideal theory and utopian hope.

Hobbes in France, Gallican Histories, and Leviathan 's Supreme Pastor

Article

Apr 2022

Amy Chandran

Few of the recent treatments exploring Leviathan 's dramatic expansion of ecclesiological considerations have delved into the political circumstances that furnished Hobbes's immediate Parisian surroundings, as he penned the work during the 1640s. This paper examines French ecclesial debates that were triggered by the publication of a polemical collection of texts narrating the “rights and liberties of the Gallican church.” Many of the tracts included had been written during the accession crisis of the late sixteenth century, and advocated a sacralized view of kingship in order to exclude papal jurisdictional claims in France. This paper argues that innovations in Leviathan 's sacred history mirror tropes employed by Gallican writers, so that Hobbes can be seen as adopting a parallel strategy in establishing Leviathan 's Supreme Pastor. This explication suggests that Hobbes composed Leviathan to appropriate, rather than eliminate, claims associated with “spiritual” power for the civil sovereign, as critical to the exercise of sovereignty.

Hobbes, Rome's Enemy

Chapter

Dec 2021

Franck Lessay

The choice of Bellarmine as a target could be explained by the Cardinal's prominence among late Renaissance Catholic theologians. It had another advantage which was that the criticisms aimed at Bellarmine could apply to a wide range of the positions held by Anglicans. The heterodox theology defended by Thomas Hobbes had been condemned equally by Rome and Canterbury on several essential points, such as the corporeal nature of God and the soul, the mortality of the soul, the denial of Hell's eternal punishments, and the implicit rejection of the Trinity. The indirect power stigmatized by Hobbes was a central element in Bellarmine's conceptual arsenal. The critique of papalism connected Hobbes with a powerful anti-Roman current within the Catholic Church, which remained a central target of the pope's advocates for a long time.

Thomas Hobbes and the Christian Commonwealth

Chapter

Dec 2021

Jeffrey Collins

When Leviathan appeared as the third version of Thomas Hobbes' s civil science, it was notable in several respects: its rhetorical strategies, its political implications, and its appeal to an anglophone audience. There has been much scholarly attention paid to Hobbes's religious writing, but little specifically to his use of the phrase the “Christian Commonwealth.” Hobbes's first invocation of the notion of the Christian Commonwealth was found in his early Elements of Law . Hobbes's main concern was to secure the “obedience to public authority” of Christians living in Christian polities, and the “Christian Commonwealth” found in the Elements was primarily distinguished from non-Christian polities. The Christian Commonwealth of Leviathan was an absolute political entity achievable wherever a sovereign state espoused Hobbes's minimal theology. Bramhall's objection to Hobbes's pluralistic and minimal understanding of Christian polities, shorn of all clerical authority, would persist in high church and particularly Catholic ecclesiology.

Thomas Hobbes i teologia polityczna władzy suwerennej

Article

Sep 2021

Adam Wielomski

Tekst ten stanowi moją osobistą polemikę z tradycyjną interpretacją teorii politycznej Thomasa Hobbesa, zwykle uznawaną za ateistyczną i stanowiącą jedno ze źródeł filozofii oświecenia. W mojej ocenie Hobbes jest nieortodoksyjnym kalwinem, woluntarystą i fideistą religijnym, podczas gdy jego idea stanu natury i umowy społecznej stanowią wyłącznie teoretyczny model państwa. Jako fideista i woluntarysta kalwiński, Hobbes jest zwolennikiem gomaryzmu, czyli nieortodoksyjnie kalwińskiego uznania wolnej woli ludzkiej. Jego wizja suwerenności stanowi, że ludzka władza polityczna jest pochodna wobec wizji wszechmogącego Boga. Oto klasyczny przykład teologii politycznej sformułowanej przez Carla Schmitta w XX stuleciu. Główną teologiczno-polityczną analogią w dziele Hobbesa jest ta, że władza ludzka stanowi tylko refleks władzy Stwórcy. Dla tego kalwina władza Boska jest nieodparta, nieograniczona przez prawa natury. Teologiczno-politycznym refleksem nieodpartej władzy Boga jest równie nieodparta władza suwerena, która nie może być ograniczona przez konstytucję, prawa fundamentalne czy ustawy. Dla Hobbesa, wszelka władza ludzka jest jedynie refleksem Boskiej nieodpartej władzy. W wizji tego angielskiego filozofa mamy więc moc suwerena ustanowienia narodowego wyznania i podjęcia decyzji o kościele, dogmatach, rytach i liturgii, jego monopol na decyzje polityczne i administracyjne, negację konstytucjonalizmu, zakaz oporu i penalizację zbrodni ateizmu, stanowiącego negację nieodpartej władzy Boga, a w konsekwencji, tejże samej władzy króla, skoro suweren jest Imago Dei.

Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History

Book

Dec 1963

Julian H. Franklin

Argument from Roman Law in Political Thought, 1200-1600

Article

Jan 1942

The Political Works of James I

Article

Jan 1919

The social contract, book 1

Article

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Artist of the Leviathan Title Page

Jan 1978
Br Libr J
24-36

Keith Brown

Keith Brown, 'The Artist of the Leviathan Title Page', British Library Journal, 4, no. 2 (1978), pp. 24-36;

Radical in the Service of Reaction

Jan 1986
156-160

Arnold A Rogow
Thomas Hobbes

Arnold A. Rogow, Thomas Hobbes: Radical in the Service of Reaction (New York 1986), pp. 156-60;

The Two Gods of Leviathan (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 362-5; and Patricia Springborg, 'Hobbes' Biblical Beasts, Leviathan and Behemoth

A P Martinich

A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 362-5; and Patricia Springborg, 'Hobbes' Biblical Beasts, Leviathan and Behemoth'.

The Power of the Pope in Temporal Affairs, trans

Jan 1930
25

Robert Bellarmine

Robert Bellarmine, The Power of the Pope in Temporal Affairs, trans. C.A. Moore (New York, 1930), p. 25.

Thomas Hobbes and Cardinal Bellarmine: Leviathan and ‘the ghost of the Roman empire’

Abstract

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