Justified True Belief

(●) The English philosopher who argued that everything real is body in motion, that peace requires one absolute sovereign, and that the church has no authority the state has not given it. + Thomas Hobbes lived through a civil war in which Englishmen killed each other over how God should be worshipped and who had the right to say so, and he spent the rest of his life trying to build a political science that would make such a war impossible. The book he wrote to do it, Leviathan, is still the most famous work of political philosophy in the English language, and it is still the most disliked. He belongs on a Christian apologetics site for a reason that has nothing to do with whether he was an atheist, which is a question nobody has settled in three and a half centuries. He belongs here because he was among the first great modern critics of Christian belief to argue entirely from inside the vocabulary of faith. He did not say the Bible was false; he said the Bible is law when the sovereign makes it law. He did not say God is unreal; he said that whatever is real is body, and so God, if there is a God, must be a body of the finest kind. He did not deny the moral law; he said the moral law is a set of survival calculations that reason works out on its own. Every one of those moves left the words of Christian faith standing and emptied them from within, and the answers English thinkers wrote to him, from Bishop Bramhall to Joseph Butler, are the seedbed of a century of Christian moral philosophy. One fact about him is worth carrying away. He was born prematurely in the spring of 1588, and he wrote in old age that his mother, hearing the Spanish fleet was coming, was so frightened that she bore twins, himself and fear together. He then lived to ninety-one, longer than almost any philosopher of his age, and spent his eighties translating the whole of the Iliad and the Odyssey into English verse, because, he said, he had nothing else to do.

(●) 1588 AD: Born at Westport by Malmesbury in the year of the Armada, to a vicar who fled the parish after a brawl. + John Aubrey, who knew Hobbes for most of his life and wrote him down in the collection we call Brief Lives, was careful about the date because he wanted to cast the horoscope: 5 April 1588, Good Friday, in the morning, at Westport, the parish that runs up to the edge of Malmesbury in Wiltshire. He had the particulars from Hobbes himself, and for the hour all Hobbes could give him was somewhere between four and six, which Aubrey settled at five so that the chart would draw. His father was Thomas Hobbes the elder, vicar of Westport and Charlton, a man Aubrey describes as one of the ignorant clergy of the old sort, who could read the prayers and the homilies and not much else, and who liked cards. Another parson provoked him at his own church door, he struck the man, and he ran, disappearing somewhere beyond London and dying there. That left three children, and it was the vicar’s brother Francis, a prosperous glover of Malmesbury, who took the second son in hand and paid for his schooling. The boy was worth the money. He had Latin and Greek by fourteen, and Aubrey reports that before he went up to Oxford he turned Euripides’ Medea out of Greek into Latin iambics and presented it to his master. At Magdalen Hall he spent five years on the logic and physics then taught out of Aristotle, and he came away with a lifelong contempt for both. That contempt is the beginning of a long story. The schoolmen, as the medieval university theologians were called, had built their teaching on Aristotle and argued it out in set formal disputations, and the man who would spend his career attacking them had sat in their classroom first.

(●) 1608 AD: He left Oxford for the Cavendish household, and stayed with the family, on and off, for seventy years. + At twenty he was recommended to William Cavendish, Baron Cavendish of Hardwick and later the first Earl of Devonshire, as tutor and companion to his son, another William, who was about two years younger than Hobbes himself. It was not a grand appointment. Aubrey says the work ran at first to riding out hunting and hawking with his young lord and keeping his privy purse, which is to say carrying his spending money and accounting for it afterwards, and that by this way of life Hobbes had almost forgotten his Latin. It turned out, even so, to be the whole shape of his life. The younger William became the second Earl of Devonshire, and Hobbes stayed in the family’s service, tutoring, buying books, keeping accounts and riding on their business, through three generations and two houses, Chatsworth and Hardwick Hall. The work paid him in the two things a scholar wants: libraries and travel. He went abroad with his pupil from about 1610, through France and Italy, and made two more long journeys later, in 1629 with the son of Sir Gervase Clifton and in 1634 with the young third earl. For a while in the 1620s he did secretarial work for the aged Francis Bacon, walking with him at Gorhambury and taking down his thoughts as they came, and helping him turn several of the Essays into Latin. Aubrey says Bacon liked Hobbes’ taking of his thoughts better than any of the other gentlemen who attended him, because he understood what he wrote down. His first published book came out of the library rather than the study. In 1629 he brought out the first English translation of Thucydides made directly from the Greek, and the essay on the historian’s life that he set in front of it says what he had found there: Thucydides least of all liked the democracy, and kept noting how the demagogues crossed one another’s counsels to the damage of the public. More than forty years later, in his Latin verse life, Hobbes gave his own reason for the choice in a couplet: Thucydides showed him how foolish a democracy is, and how much wiser than a whole assembly one man can be. England had a Parliament quarrelling with a king, and Hobbes had already picked his side.

(●) c. 1630 AD: At about forty he opened Euclid in a gentleman’s library, and geometry gave him a method. + Aubrey tells the story as an accident, and it is the most quoted paragraph he ever wrote. Hobbes was forty years old before he looked at geometry. He was in a gentleman’s library, a copy of Euclid’s Elements was lying open at the forty-seventh proposition of the first book, which is the theorem about the square on the hypotenuse that most of us meet at school under Pythagoras’ name, and he read what it claimed. "By God," said he, "this is impossible!" So he read the demonstration, which sent him back to an earlier proposition; he read that one, which sent him back to another; and so on down the chain until he was, in Aubrey’s words, demonstratively convinced of that truth. It made him in love with geometry. Notice what he fell in love with. Not the shapes, but the chain. Geometry begins by defining its words so that nobody can slide, and then every step is forced. Nobody has ever fought a war over the properties of triangles. Hobbes concluded that philosophy had spent two thousand years arguing about justice, spirit, liberty and law without ever agreeing what the words meant, and that this, rather than wickedness, was why men could not agree. The other half of the method arrived on his third continental journey, from 1634 to 1636, when he fell in with the circle around Marin Mersenne, the Paris friar whose cell was the switchboard of European science, and, Aubrey says, visited Galileo in Florence, though Hobbes never mentions the meeting himself. What he took from that world was one idea: motion. Everything that happens, happens because something moved something else. Put the two halves together, exact definitions and universal motion, and you have the programme Hobbes worked at for the next forty years: a philosophy of body, then of man, then of the commonwealth, deduced in order like a geometry.

(●) 1640 AD: As England slid toward civil war he circulated a defence of undivided sovereignty, then fled to Paris for eleven years. + He had meant to write the philosophy of body first and work up to politics. The country would not wait. In the spring of 1640, with the Short Parliament dissolved after three weeks and the king’s authority visibly cracking, Hobbes put the third part of his system first and sent it round in manuscript: The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, arguing that sovereign power cannot be divided without dissolving the state. Copies went where such copies go, from one hand to another and into rooms he could not see into, and by November the Long Parliament had met and was impeaching the king’s ministers. A manuscript is not a printed book, and a bolder man might have argued that nobody could touch him for one. Hobbes did not wait to find out. He crossed to France before the year was out, and wrote afterwards that of all who fled he was the first. He was in Paris eleven years, and they were his best. Mersenne, who gathered objections from the best minds he could reach and sent them on for Descartes to answer, put Hobbes’ set into the printed Meditations in 1641, the third of six sets, and they are blunt. Descartes says a thinking thing may be immaterial. Hobbes answers that a thinking thing may just as well be a body, in the way that the thing which walks is a body. In 1642 he printed De Cive, the political section of his system, for a small circle of readers. From 1646 he taught mathematics to a homesick teenager who had escaped the war, Charles, Prince of Wales, the future Charles II, and the friendship formed over those lessons would one day be the only thing standing between Hobbes and a heresy charge.

(●) 1651 AD: Leviathan appeared, cost him the exiled royalists, and sent him home to make his peace with the Commonwealth. + The book announces itself before a word is read. The engraved title page shows a crowned giant rising behind the hills above a town and its fields, sword in one hand and a bishop’s crozier, the shepherd’s crook that stands for the church’s authority, in the other, and his whole body is made of hundreds of small human figures with their faces turned inward toward his. Over his head runs a line from the book of Job about the great sea beast: there is no power on earth to compare with him. That is the argument in a picture. The state is not a thing above the people; it is the people, formed into one body with one will, and there had better be nothing on earth beside it. Charles I had been executed two years earlier, and the exiled court in Paris read the new book with growing alarm. Its closing pages allow that when a sovereign can no longer protect his subjects, their duty to him ends and they may submit to whoever can, which to men living on borrowed money in a foreign city sounded like an argument for going home and swearing to Cromwell. The last quarter of the book, meanwhile, took the Roman church apart with a coldness that offended the queen’s Catholic circle: the papacy, Hobbes wrote, is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. He was warned away from the exiled court, and by the winter he was back in London, submitting to the Council of State, the committee that ran England now that there was no king, and living quietly. He had written the century’s greatest defence of obedience and had managed, in the same book, to make himself unwelcome to both sides of the war.

(●) 1666 AD: The king who had been his pupil put him back at court on a pension, and then the Commons sent Leviathan to the committee on a bill against atheism. + The Restoration had gone well for him at first. Charles II met his old tutor in the street, brought him to court, enjoyed his company and settled a pension of a hundred pounds a year on him. Then came 1665 and the plague, and 1666 and the fire, and the search for somebody whose sins had brought it on. On 17 October 1666 the House of Commons ordered its committee on a bill against atheism and profaneness to receive information about books tending that way, naming in particular the book of Mr Hobbes called Leviathan. He was seventy-eight, and he was frightened. He burned papers. Then he did the characteristic thing and went to the law: he read up the whole history of heresy in England to satisfy himself that the old courts which could have tried him had been abolished and never replaced, and he wrote the case out. Part of it went into the appendix he added to the Latin Leviathan, which he had to print in Amsterdam in 1668 because no English licenser, the official whose approval a book needed before it could lawfully be printed, would touch it; the rest became the short Historical Narration concerning Heresy, printed after his death. The bill died in Parliament and nothing was ever charged. But the king made the terms of survival plain, and Hobbes kept them: he never again published in England on religion or on human conduct. When he finished Behemoth, his history of the civil war, Charles refused it a licence, and it circulated in manuscript until a pirated edition appeared in the year Hobbes died.

(●) 1679 AD: He died at ninety-one at Hardwick Hall, speechless for his last week, after spending his eighties putting Homer into English verse. + In his mid-eighties he translated four books of the Odyssey, and then, finding an audience, went on and did both epics entire. Nobody has ever praised the verse. Hobbes did not either. In the preface he asked the question for the reader and answered it himself: why then did he write it? Because he had nothing else to do. Why publish it? Because he thought it might draw his enemies off his serious books and set them to mocking his rhymes instead. The end is recorded in detail because his amanuensis James Wheldon, the servant who wrote to his dictation and kept his papers, wrote it out for Aubrey six weeks afterwards. Hobbes fell ill in the middle of October 1679, at Chatsworth, with what Wheldon calls the strangury, a slow and painful stoppage of the water, which the physicians judged incurable by reason of his great age and natural decay. Around 20 November the earl was moving the household to Hardwick, and the old man would not be left behind, so they laid a feather bed in the coach and carried him warm the whole way, and he seemed no worse for it. Seven or eight days later his whole right side was taken with the dead palsy, the old name for a paralysis that does not lift, and he lost his speech. He lived a week more, sleeping well, taking almost nothing, trying now and then to say something and failing, and died on 4 December 1679 without fever. Wheldon thought he died of the fuel of life being spent rather than of the disease. They carried him a mile on men’s shoulders to the parish church at Ault Hucknall and buried him with the service of the Church of England, read by the parish minister. A story that first appears in print more than a century later gives his last words as a great leap in the dark, which makes a fine epitaph for a materialist and cannot be true as told: the man who was there says he had been speechless for a week.

What He Taught

(T1) Whatever exists is body, and thought itself is motion inside a moving body. + Open the back of a mechanical watch and you can see the whole of it: a coiled spring pushing, a train of wheels turning, hands moving because something behind them moved first. Hobbes opens Leviathan with exactly that picture and asks why a living body should be any different. What is the heart, he says, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels. This is materialism, the view that nothing exists except matter and its motions, and Hobbes held it more strictly than almost anyone before him. Having taken the position, he walks through the whole of the inner life with it, one item at a time. Sensation is motion in the eye and the nerves. Imagination is what he calls decaying sense, the same motion still running on after the object is gone, the way water keeps rolling after the wind has dropped. Deliberation is appetites and aversions taking their turns until one of them is left standing, and the will is simply the last appetite before you act. Even reasoning comes out as arithmetic: to reason is to add and subtract names, so that putting body and animated and rational together to make man, the example he works through in De Corpore, is the same operation as totting up a column of figures, and a bad argument is a wrong sum. The consequence he draws is the one that shocked his readers. If everything real is body, then the phrase "incorporeal substance," which theologians used for God, for angels and for the human soul, is not a mystery but a mistake, two words that cancel each other like "round quadrangle." Hobbes did not take this to atheism, and it is important to be exact about that: he said God exists and rules, and when Bishop Bramhall pressed him he answered that God is a corporeal spirit, and in his own words a most pure and most simple one. But a God who is a body is not the God of the creed, and no amount of good will closes that distance.

(Q) "The world (I mean not the earth only, that denominates the lovers of it worldly men, but the universe, that is, the whole mass of all things that are) is corporeal, that is to say, body... and that which is not body is no part of the universe." + Source: Hobbes, Leviathan, Part IV, chapter 46 (1651; spelling modernized). He is near the end of the book, in the chapter on what he calls darkness from vain philosophy, settling accounts with the schoolmen. He pauses first to ask his readers’ pardon for the technical stretch that follows, then states his position in a single sentence with nothing held back (T1).

(T2) Without a common power to keep men in awe, every man is at war with every man. + Hobbes knew this claim would sound like slander against the human race, so he offered his reader a test that costs nothing to run. When you take a journey you arm yourself and try to travel in company. When you go to sleep you lock your doors. When you are inside your own house, with the doors already locked, you lock your chests. And you do all this in a country that has laws, and constables, and courts to punish anyone who wrongs you. So what is your real opinion of your neighbours? He is not calling anyone wicked. He is pointing at the bolt on the door. The state of nature is his name for the thought experiment: not a claim about cavemen but a question about what people are like wherever no one is strong enough to enforce anything. Three things, he says, set men fighting. Competition, when two want what only one can have. Diffidence, his word for distrust, when I strike first because I expect you to. And glory, the quarrels over a word, a smile, a different opinion, any sign that I have been slighted. Where there is no common power over all of them, that is war, and war is not only battle but the whole stretch of time in which everyone knows a fight may start. Two things follow that a Christian reader should hold together. The first is that the diagnosis is not far from the one Scripture gives: left to ourselves we are not safe company, and the psalmist and Paul say so bluntly (Romans 3:10–18). The second is that Hobbes calls this nature where Scripture calls it fall, and that difference decides everything downstream. If it is nature, the only cure is a bigger stick. If it is a fall, there was something else to begin with and there may be something else again.

(Q) "In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain... no arts, no letters, no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." + Source: Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, chapter 13 (1651; spelling modernized). The most famous sentence in English political writing, and it is a list of absences. What he is describing is not savagery but the loss of everything that needs a settled future to be worth starting: farming, building, shipping, learning, keeping track of the years (T2).

(T3) The laws of nature are theorems of reason, and their sum is the golden rule turned around. + Ask an ordinary person why murder is wrong, and almost nobody answers that Parliament voted on it. A law of nature, in the older Christian tradition Hobbes inherited, is that instinct made precise: a moral rule built into the world by God and read off by conscience, so that murder is wrong whether or not the king has said so. Hobbes keeps the phrase and changes what is inside it. A law of nature, for him, is a rule that reason works out for a creature that wants to stay alive. He lists nineteen of them across two chapters. The first is to seek peace where it can be had, and to defend yourself where it cannot. The second is to be willing, when others are willing too, to lay down the right to everything and be content with as much liberty against other men as you would allow them against you. That second rule, he says outright, is the law of the gospel: whatever you would have others do to you, do to them. He gives it in its negative Latin form as well, and offers that version as the one test a plain man can apply without any philosophy at all, which is to do nothing to another that you would not have done to yourself. Reading those pages, a Christian is entitled to feel that Hobbes is closer to home than his reputation suggests. Then comes the sentence that pulls the floor out. These dictates, he says, are called laws only improperly. They are conclusions, theorems about what keeps you alive, and a theorem does not command anybody. A law, properly speaking, is the word of someone who has the right to command. And then, in the same breath, he allows that if these same theorems are considered as delivered in the word of God, who by right commands all things, then they are properly laws after all. That one clause is where three centuries of argument about Hobbes’ religion have been fought. His critics called it a formality he did not mean. It is also, plainly, there in his text, and he never took it out.

(Q) "These dictates of reason men use to call by the name of laws, but improperly: for they are but conclusions, or theorems concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves; whereas law, properly, is the word of him that by right hath command over others." + Source: Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, chapter 15 (1651; spelling modernized). The closing paragraph of his account of the laws of nature. The next sentence is the concession his defenders lean on: considered as delivered in the word of God, who by right commands all things, the same theorems are properly called laws (T3).

(T4) Peace is bought by handing every man’s right to one sovereign, and that sovereign is a mortal god. + Everyone agreeing that peace would be nice does not produce peace, because a promise nobody can enforce is only words. So Hobbes proposes something stranger than a promise. Every man says to every other man: I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or this assembly of men, on condition that you do the same. Notice who is party to that agreement. The covenant runs between the subjects, not between the subjects and the ruler, which means the ruler has promised nothing and can therefore break nothing. The multitude so united is a commonwealth, and the ruler, whom Hobbes calls the sovereign, holds all the power everybody has laid down and answers to nobody on earth for the use of it. From that one move the rest follows hard. Sovereignty cannot be divided, because if two bodies can each decide when the law binds, you have two sovereigns and a coming war; Hobbes thought the English had proved this by trying it. Justice begins with the sovereign, not before, since where there is no common power there is no law, and where there is no law nothing can be unjust. The sword and the crozier on that engraved title page are in the same pair of hands on purpose. Two limits are worth naming, because Hobbes is often reported as leaving none. A man cannot covenant away his own life, so if the officers come to kill him he may resist, though he cannot claim they wrong him. And the whole obligation lasts exactly as long as the protection does: a sovereign who cannot defend you has no further claim on you. Absolute, in Hobbes, does not mean sacred. It means undivided, and it is justified entirely by what it delivers, which is that you can sleep.

(Q) "This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and defence." + Source: Hobbes, Leviathan, Part II, chapter 17 (1651; spelling modernized). The sentence directly after he states the covenant of every man with every man. The apology in the parenthesis and the clause setting the mortal god under the immortal one are both doing work: Hobbes knew he was borrowing the language of worship for a human institution, and he wanted that on the record (T4).

(T5) A church is the commonwealth of Christians, and Scripture becomes law when the sovereign makes it law. + Readers who know Leviathan by its famous sentences are often startled to find that more than half the book is about the Bible. That is not padding. The war Hobbes had fled was fought by men who each held a text and a private certainty about what it meant, and he thought the sword and the interpretation had to end in the same hand or there would be no end to it. His argument runs through the word canon, which simply means a rule. A writing may be a rule in the way a tutor’s advice is a rule to a willing pupil, which binds nobody, or in the way a statute is a rule, which binds because someone with authority made it one. Scripture in the second sense, Hobbes says, is law where the sovereign has made it law, and the same holds for who may preach and what a public interpretation of a disputed passage will be. A church that can command, judge, absolve or condemn is therefore the same body as the commonwealth, looked at from a different side: called a civil state because its members are men, called a church because its members are Christians. He read the text closely, and sometimes against the grain. Genesis says that at Shechem "at that time the Canaanites were in the land" (Genesis 12:6), a remark that only makes sense from a writer looking back after they were gone, and Deuteronomy says of the grave of Moses that "no one knows the place of his burial to this day" (Deuteronomy 34:6). From that Hobbes drew a careful and limited conclusion. Moses wrote everything the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, attributes to him, and somebody later assembled the whole. It is a modest claim and he does not stretch it. What was new was the way he reached it, from the wording of the text itself, which made him one of the first Englishmen to argue the point that way. What he required for salvation was correspondingly small: faith that Jesus is the Christ, and obedience to the laws. He offers it as generosity, a creed short enough that no one need be killed over it. His contemporaries heard it as a creed short enough that a man could sign it and believe nothing, and that suspicion, more than any single sentence, is what they were answering for the next hundred years.

(Q) "A church, such a one as is capable to command, to judge, absolve, condemn, or do any other act, is the same thing with a civil commonwealth consisting of Christian men... Temporal and spiritual government are but two words brought into the world to make men see double, and mistake their lawful sovereign." + Source: Hobbes, Leviathan, Part III, chapter 39 (1651; spelling modernized). The chapter is a short one, on what the word church means in Scripture, and it ends by collapsing the distinction that had organised European politics since Gregory the Great. Seeing double is his diagnosis of the civil war: two authorities claiming the same subject, and the subject tearing in half between them (T5).

(Q) "Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed, RELIGION; not allowed, SUPERSTITION. And when the power imagined is truly such as we imagine, TRUE RELIGION." + Source: Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, chapter 6 (1651; spelling modernized). It comes in a plain list of definitions of the passions, filed between curiosity and panic terror, and the placement is the provocation: religion is entered as a species of fear. Read the third clause, though. He leaves the door open for the imagined power to be really there, which is more than his successors in this line of thought would leave open. It is the sentence his answerers reached for first.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His contemporaries answered him book by book, and a century of English moral philosophy grew out of the answering. + The first answer came before Leviathan did. In 1645, in the Marquess of Newcastle’s house in Paris, Hobbes argued about free will with John Bramhall, the exiled Bishop of Derry, and both men wrote their positions down. Years later a listener printed Hobbes’ side without permission, and the quarrel went public: Bramhall’s A Defence of True Liberty in 1655, Hobbes’ enormous Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance in 1656, and then Bramhall’s The Catching of Leviathan in 1658, which set out to show that no Christian could hold the doctrine of body and still hold the doctrine of God. Bramhall is the reason we know what Hobbes thought about God’s nature, because he would not let him leave it vague. Then the philosophers. Ralph Cudworth, one of the Cambridge Platonists, a group of divines who held that moral truth is something a mind discovers rather than something a will invents, spent decades on The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) and on a treatise published long after his death called A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, and his objection went to the root: if good and evil are made by a will, whether the sovereign’s or God’s, then they could have been made otherwise, and cruelty might have been a virtue. Morality, Cudworth answered, is as fixed as arithmetic. Richard Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae (1672) attacked from the other side, arguing that goodwill toward others is written into human nature as deeply as self-preservation is. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, who had known Hobbes in the exile and disliked what he read, wrote a whole survey of the errors of Leviathan in 1676. The most lasting answer came two generations on. Joseph Butler’s Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (1726) took up the Hobbesian claim that every motive reduces to self-love and made a distinction that has never gone away: my appetites aim at their own objects, at food or a friend’s good, not at my pleasure in getting them, so a man who cared only for his own happiness would not even be good at being selfish. Butler did to Hobbes what Hobbes did to the schoolmen, which is to say he took him seriously enough to answer him in his own terms. "Hobbism" had become the ordinary English word for the whole outlook, and it was an accusation worth denying for a hundred years.

(†) What survived the quarrel: a method, consent as the ground of authority, and a question about who wrote the Pentateuch. + Almost nobody accepted his conclusions, and almost everybody kept his method. After Hobbes, an argument in political philosophy was expected to start by defining its terms, state a view of what human beings are actually like, and derive the rest. It is the habit of the geometry book carried over into politics, and a writer who simply appealed to the way things had always been done now looked like an antique. Christian political thought took the same turn: the question stopped being where the crown sits in a divinely ordered hierarchy and became what could put a free person under an obligation to obey. That question is his real bequest, and it did not stay where he left it. John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) starts in the same place, with individuals who owe nobody anything by nature, and arrives at limited government, protected property and a right of resistance, which is very nearly the opposite of where Hobbes arrives. But they are arguing on ground Hobbes cleared. Christian writers on politics since have often granted his diagnosis, that people without an enforceable order treat each other badly, while refusing his cure, on the grounds that a power with no judge above it is exactly the danger Scripture keeps warning about. His close reading of the Pentateuch had a long life too. The arguments of Leviathan III.33, that certain remarks in Genesis, Numbers and Deuteronomy read like the words of a later hand, were taken up by Spinoza in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) and by the Catholic priest Richard Simon in his Critical History of the Old Testament (1678), and through them they stand near the head of the modern discussion of how the first five books reached their present form. Hobbes himself drew a limited conclusion, that Moses wrote what the text says he wrote and someone later compiled the whole, and it is worth noticing how limited it was, because he is often credited or blamed for a great deal more.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a God with a body, a right founded on power, a good with no standard, and a faith that may be denied aloud. + Hobbes insisted to the end that he was a member of the Church of England, and he was buried with its service. What he believed privately nobody can weigh. What he wrote is another matter, and on four points it will not fit inside Christian faith however generously it is read. - A God with a body. Since incorporeal substance is a contradiction in his system, God, if real, must be corporeal, and when Bramhall pressed him he said so in his answer to The Catching of Leviathan: he maintains God’s existence, and that he is "a most pure, and most simple corporeal spirit." Scripture puts it the other way round. "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:24). What is at stake is not a physics but a creator: a God made of the same stuff as the world is a very large item inside it, not the one who made it. - A right founded on power. Hobbes derives God’s right to rule "not from his creating them, as if he required obedience, as of gratitude for his benefits, but from his irresistible power," and on earth he lets the sovereign’s command decide what is just. Then there is no court above the throne. Scripture insists there is one: Nathan walks into David’s palace and says "You are the man!" (2 Samuel 12:7), and Peter tells the council in Jerusalem, "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). - A good with no standard. Whatever a man desires he calls good, Hobbes writes, "there being nothing simply and absolutely so." If that is right, then the prophets were not correcting anyone, only preferring differently. "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!" (Isaiah 5:20) is unintelligible unless there is a measure that a whole nation can be wrong about. - A faith that may be denied aloud. This is the hardest of the four. A Christian commanded by a lawful prince to deny Christ with his tongue may obey, Hobbes says, keeping the faith in his heart, because "profession with the tongue is but an external thing," no different from any other gesture of obedience. Christ says the opposite in as many words: "So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven" (Matthew 10:32–33). Hobbes was writing under a hundred years after English men and women had gone to the fire rather than say the sentence he is offering to let them say. The pattern is one Christians meet again in later centuries, and it is worth naming while it is small. Every word of the faith is left standing. God, law, church, Scripture, salvation: none of them is denied, and each is given a meaning that requires nothing of the sovereign and asks nothing of eternity. That is why Hobbes is worth more of a Christian reader’s attention than a plain unbeliever would be. He is an early and formidable demonstration that the vocabulary of Christian faith can be kept entire and turned into a description of power.