Thomas Hobbes D.D. Theology Orthodoxy An PDF

Thomas Hobbes, D.D.

: Theology, Orthodoxy, and History*

Jonathan Sheehan
University of California, Berkeley
Philosophy is incompatible with revelation: philosophy must try to

refute revelation, and if not revelation, at any rate theology must try to
refute philosophy. (Leo Strauss, 1948)1
Theology and intellectual history can make difficult bedfellows. Medieval histo-
rians have learned to get along with their theologically invested subjects, given
how much energy was then aimed at things religious. For Europeanists who focus
on the age of Descartes and after, however, when philosophy begins to seem
unburdened of obvious theological debt, disciplinary instincts can foster a pow-
erful urge to leave theology to others. Those others tend to be church historians, or
specialized historians of theology with ties to seminaries and divinity schools.
Insofar as modern intellectual history takes an interest in both Athens and
Jerusalem, it is usually with an eye to their conflicts, the efforts of philosophers
to emancipate themselves from the shackles of the church. The Enlightenment
confrontations with the clergy, nineteenth-century philosophical atheism, the
Darwinist revolt against natural theology: these are just a few of the dramas
whose historiography has taken up what Strauss described as modern philoso-
phy’s effort to refute revelation.
At least this used to be the case. But in recent years, things have changed. The
past two decades have seen it declared in many quarters that “religion is back.”
This so-called return of religion, in both our political and our scholarly worlds,
has become widely accepted as a matter of fact. Historians, sociologists, political
theorists, literary critics—all view religion as a subject of pressing import.2
* I would like to express my gratitude to Kinch Hoekstra, Victoria Kahn, Thomas
Laqueur, Ethan Shagan, and the anonymous readers of the journal for their generous and
critical comments on this article.
1
Leo Strauss, “Reason and Revelation” [1948], in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the
Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge, 2006), 141.
2
See, e.g., Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory, eds., Seeing Things
Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Notre Dame, IN, 2009). A very
partial list of recent relevant monographs in intellectual history would include: Tomoko
Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was
Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, 2005); Samuel Moyn, Origins of the
The Journal of Modern History 88 (June 2016): 249–274
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250 Sheehan
This “return of religion” has a material component. Foundations such as Lilly,

Luce, Pew, Ford, Templeton, and others have channeled money toward matters
theological in recent years.3 But it has a political urgency as well: the apparent
return of religion to public life across the world after 1989 has made it clear that
religious motivations are, at the very least, nontrivial factors in modern politics.
For intellectual historians and other human scientists concerned with long-term
social and intellectual transformation, however, the stakes are higher than simply
staying abreast of contemporary events. The return of religion challenges the
practices of what we understand as the secular human sciences, intellectual his-
tory among them.
There are weak and strong versions of the challenge. The weak version locates
the problem, and the solution, within what we might call normal science. If we are
now experiencing a religious resurgence in the West and elsewhere, then we made
some basic errors in our collective embrace of modernization as a template of
historical change. If what we are experiencing is not a religious resurgence,
however—if religion was present all along in some fashion or another and we
overlooked it—then we are guilty of different errors, not least projection and
wishful thinking. Both of these issues are important, yet neither is unprecedented
in the human and social sciences. Consider how political and economic models
had to be rearranged after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the impossible not
only happened but also, in retrospect, seemed altogether inevitable.4 Models work
wonderfully until they don’t, and then it is the job of scholars either to refine the
old model or to build new and better ones. This process is not a liability in the
human and social sciences. It is how these sciences work—by dynamic adjust-
ment of claims to create a better fit with the world we observe.
The strong challenge, however, does not let the secular human sciences off so
easily. It insists not just that the models are wrong but also that this wrongness is
foundational to the disciplines themselves. Insofar as these sciences are secular,
their palette of explanations is restricted to things recognized as having a secular
reality. By definition, then, the “religious” cannot be given an existential weight
of its own and must be converted into other factors (economic, ideological,
political, and so on). Religious motivation, imagination, and ideation are rendered
Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, NY, 2005); Thomas
Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford,
2006); Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between
the World Wars (Princeton, NJ, 2008); Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not
Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA, 2010).
3
In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that my own Berkeley Center for the
Study of Religion recently received $1 million for a three-year project on “Public
Theology.”
4
For an anthropology of this shift, see Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until
It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ, 2006).

Thomas Hobbes, D.D. 251
invisible. In a sense, then, religion cannot even be a proper object of knowledge

for these sciences.5
Nor does the strong challenge stop there. This exclusion of religion, it con-
tinues, is not an accidental by-product of secular disciplinary formation. It is
constitutive. The badge of objective inquiry conceals domination in the name of
liberal freedom. Scholars like Talal Asad, Gauri Viswanathan, and others argue
that it is no accident that the rise of secularism as a norm (circa the late nineteenth
century) corresponded so closely with the rise of Europe’s liberal imperial
mission.6 Just when Europe began to control the larger world, the most important
social fact of that larger world, religion, came to stand precisely for what had to be
excluded from the polity. In this view, the secular sciences looks suspiciously
isomorphic with those other tools of discipline and domination that Europe
deployed in its imperial conquests: scientific racism, economic modernization,
and national development, among others.
And there is one last twist of the knife to come. For this whole business of the
secular, some critics insist, is itself a covert Christian project. Insofar as “Chris-
tianity invented the distinction between religious and secular,” writes Gil Anidjar,
it “made religion the problem—rather than itself.”7 At best, secularism is Chris-
tianity in sheep’s clothing; at worst, it is a cat’s-paw. It distracts us from the real
problems—racism, imperialism, economic inequality—and provides these with
the political and cultural space they need to continue their work. All of the anx-
iety (or excitement) about the future of a secular culture and politics thus boils
down to a severe case of false consciousness. Christianity’s proxy, secularism, so
dominates the world in which we live that merely to ask the question—religious
or secular?—is already to play the game that Christianity invented.
This article does not propose to resolve these challenges, whatever that would
mean. Rather, it attempts to address some of the issues they raise in a more
oblique manner. Let us take it as given that the terms in which the secular human
sciences have approached religion have often been inadequate. Let us take it as
given, moreover, that mere surprise that religion does in fact make a difference—
and much recent literature has been written in just this tone of surprise—cannot
sustain creative scholarship for long. The question is what to do now.
5
This is the implication in John Coffey and Alister Chapman, “Introduction: Intellec-
tual History and the Return of Religion,” in Chapman et al., eds., Seeing Things, 11–12.
6
See, inter alia, Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and
Belief (Princeton, NJ, 1998); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam,
Modernity (Stanford, CA, 2003), esp. chaps. 3 and 4; Partha Chatterjee, “Fasting for Bin
Laden: The Politics of Secularization in Contemporary India,” in Powers of the Secular
Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, ed. David Scott and Charles Hirschkind
(Stanford, CA, 2006).
7
Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Autumn 2006): 62.

252 Sheehan
For the intellectual historian of Europe, addressing this question asks us to

think harder about theology, the ideational and conceptual domain ostensibly
particular to religion, and especially to Christianity. It seems to me that both the
religious turn and the critique of secularism that has accompanied it invite us to
reconsider what theology might be, and how (or whether) we know it when we
see it.
To give these baggy issues a shape, I will put them in a form of a pointed
question: was Thomas Hobbes—the most scandalous political philosopher of the
seventeenth century and possibly of the entire early modern period—a theolo-
gian? I approach this question historiographically, because in the past century it
has become possible to think of Hobbes as not just a Christian, but an orthodox
one as well. Hobbesian philosophy actually is theology, in this view, and, for
some, an orthodox theology at that. Tracing the emergence of this possibility
nicely illuminates some of the challenges that theology can pose to a secular
intellectual history. I also approach the question more interpretively and consider
how Hobbes’s own work, and specifically his Leviathan, might offer direction to
intellectual historians looking for new ways to think about theology.
Was Hobbes a Theologian? Credulity, Suspicion,

and the History of a Question
On the face of it, the question is perverse. Hobbes had no clerical position and no
institutional connection to the university faculties of divinity charged with teach-
ing and scholarship on matters theological. Beyond those mundane (but not, as
we will see, irrelevant) factors, however, there are three other reasons why a
positive answer seems improbable.
First, there is the status of Hobbes’s beliefs. Rumors of his atheism quickly
circulated after the 1651 publication of the Leviathan, and they have not stopped
circulating to this day. Hobbes famously attacked these rumors: “Do you think I
can be an atheist and not know it? Or knowing it, durst have offered my atheism
to the press?”8 Good question, but if it was disingenuous, we should certainly ask:
can we imagine an atheist theologian?
Here is a second reason, more relevant to the intellectual historian. Hobbes was
committed to mechanist metaphysics. Sensation is matter and motion; imagina-
tion is the action of these motions inside the human mind; reason is calculation
upon motions; desires are self-generated motions of the mind; the will is the last
desire in deliberation: he lays out all of these propositions in the first sections of
the Leviathan. Politically speaking, this metaphysics was a grand clearing ges-
ture. Early modern legal and political theorists from Catholic neo-Thomists to
Protestant natural law theorists had made nature into a rich site of moral and
8
Hobbes, quoted in Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), 40.

divine instruction. Right political community therefore is a consequence of

natural man’s own impulses. “Amongst the Things peculiar to Man, is his De-
sire of Society,” Hugo Grotius insisted, the desire to live “peaceably, and in a
Community regulated according to the best of his Understanding.”9 In Hobbes,
the mechanics of motion and matter envisioned a nature with minimal religious,
legal, and ethical characteristics and a humanity constrained (naturally speaking)
by nothing but its desires and the limits of the physical world. Can we imagine a
mechanist theologian?
And then there is a third reason. Hobbes’s cleared ground allowed him to found
a state-theory based on just two political actors: the people and the sovereign
commonwealth. Between them, they build the “Artificial Animal” that Hobbes
called the Leviathan, needing no input from either nature or God’s hand.10 This
bilateral relationship replaced what was, in the Anglican tradition, a triangular
one. “There is not any man of the Church of England, but the same man is also a
member of the Commonwealth, nor any man a member of the Commonwealth
which is not also of the Church of England,” the late-sixteenth-century theolo-
gian Richard Hooker wrote. As “in a figure triangular,” the people stand in dual
relations with both church and state.11 By contrast, Hobbes integrated the church
into the state structure, not just institutionally (the sovereign becomes the
“Supreme Pastor,” as he put it) but also politically (ecclesiastical authority
depends wholly on the authority of the commonwealth).12 Can we imagine a
theologian who abolishes the church?
So there are three reasons why Hobbes seems singularly unqualified for the
title of “theologian.” Neither Hobbes’s beliefs, nor his metaphysics, nor his
ecclesiology seem compatible with Christian teaching. If this is so, it seems
unremarkable to say that he was no theologian at all.
How then shall we approach Hobbes’s Leviathan, the bulk of whose books
address topics including divine omnipotence, the nature of scripture and proph-
ecy, the office of Christ, the structure of the Trinity, and the history of creeds?
When Hobbes engages matters traditionally in the theologian’s bailiwick, is he a
theologian? We could answer affirmatively, but this historicist nominalism (if it
quacks like a duck, it is a duck) seems unsatisfying, because then any treatment of
these topics—however intent on pursuing analytical goals antithetical or indif-
ferent to Christianity—would qualify as theology. Moreover, in this view, we
9
Hugo Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck (Indianapolis, 2005), 79,
81.
10
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford, 2012), 2:16. Quotations
from the Latin edition follow the Malcolm translation.
11
Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. Arthur Stephen
McGrade (Oxford, 2013), 3:190. Book 8, here quoted, was published in 1648, shortly
before the Leviathan.
12
Hobbes, Leviathan, 3:922.

254 Sheehan
would have to ignore the function of those topics inside the work, their relation-
ship to the author’s conceptual ambitions, and so forth. Given that, another way
practically suggests itself. Since Hobbes is admittedly antagonistic toward many
conventional Christian teachings, we might content ourselves by saying that
Hobbes takes up these teachings only to erode their significance. We might see
Hobbes not as constructive but as critical, in other words, and so line him up not
with theology but with anti-theology.
If we do this, we will stand in a long historiographical tradition. Indeed,
between the seventeenth and the early twentieth centuries (as far as I have been
able to find) there is complete consensus on the anti-Christian disposition of
Hobbes’s thought. Immediately after the publication of the Leviathan, as Samuel
Mintz noted in 1962, the response was visceral. Important critics like Seth Ward,
Alexander Ross, Matthew Hale, and others were “numb with horror and indig-
nation” (in Ward’s words) at the impiety of Hobbes’s philosophical project.13
Even those who read Hobbes carefully—the political theorist Samuel Pufendorf,
for example—were cautious about the association, and hardly ready to avow
themselves openly as Hobbists.14 This seems to have been true for a long time.
The late Enlightenment recuperation of heretics like Spinoza disregarded
Hobbes. It is difficult to imagine, for example, that the classical German poet
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing—posthumously charged with admiring Spinoza—
would find in Hobbes an inspiration for anything besides Ward’s horror. When
Hegel lectured on the history of modern philosophy in the first decades of the
nineteenth century, Hobbes made virtually no appearance at all.15 Twenty years
later, Friedrich Schelling erased him altogether from his History of Modern Phi-
losophy (ca. 1835). Spinoza, not Hobbes, was the philosopher of choice for the
German romantics and idealists, the thinker in whose “abyss” everyone who
hopes to “progress to the true . . . in philosophy” must lose himself.16 In the
1860s, there was an inversion of sorts, not of the premise of impiety, but of its
virtues. Thus Friedrich Albrecht Lange, in his History of Materialism (1865),
agreed with the assessment of Hobbes’s impiety—his “uncommon hatred of the-
ology,” this “mischief-making abomination”—but thought this was a good idea,
all things considered.17
13
Samuel Mintz, The Hunting of the Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the
Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, 1962), 55.
14
For Pufendorf and Hobbes, see Quentin Skinner, “The Ideological Context of
Hobbes’s Political Thought,” Historical Journal 9, no. 3 (1966): 291.
15
There are three passing mentions of Hobbes recorded in the index of Hegel’s
Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson
(Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1996).
16
F. W. J. von Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie
(Cambridge, 1994), 66.
17
Frederick Albert Lange, The History of Materialism (London, 1925), 1:279.

On the other side of the channel, Hobbes kept his dubious reputation, even as he
was integrated into a philosophical tradition. In his 1831 introduction to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica (7th ed.), for example, the Scottish Tory Sir James
Mackintosh offered a ringing denouncement of Hobbes’s character (haughty,
peevish, misanthropic) and his philosophy (shallow and pernicious). Atheism
was not just the consequence of Hobbes’s materialism but also an active political
good for Hobbes: “the most effectual instrument of preventing rebellion.”18
Hobbes found a fierce defender in James Mill—economist, political theorist, and
long-time utilitarian—but not against the atheism charge. Rather, at issue was
whether the naturalist ethics found in Hobbes qualifies as an ethics at all. To
“insinuate that Hobbes’s system is an immoral system” was taken by Mill as
intended, as an attack on the possibility of a moral theory built on no more than
desire and interest.19 Insofar as Hobbes was recuperated in the nineteenth century,
in fact, it seems to have largely been by utilitarians like Mill.20 When the young
John Dewey wrote about Hobbes in 1918, it was with special reference to Jeremy
Bentham. As far as religion goes, he remarked, Hobbes “is theological in motive
and context in the sense that he is deliberately anti-theological.”21
Shortly afterward, however, and for the first time that I have been able to
discover, the idea of a Christian Hobbes became thinkable. Phyllis Doyle, a
scholar at Bedford College (later Royal Holloway), published what seemed a
thorough revision of the Hobbes picture. Strong contextualism was the best
method for understanding Hobbes, in her view; he was a writer who was “per-
fectly orthodox” for the early seventeenth century, whose thought “closely fol-
low[ed] prevailing theological concepts,” and whose reputation suffered only
because the civil war made it unnecessary “to lay the foundations of a secure
state upon the basis of a degenerate human nature.”22
This early brief for Hobbesian orthodoxy did not resonate widely, but the
impulse to baptize Hobbes became more common. Twenty years later, in an
article in Philosophy, the Edinburgh philosopher A. E. Taylor laid out what would
later be known as the Taylor-Warrender thesis, which insisted that the Hobbesian
18
Sir James Mackintosh, “Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy,” in The
Miscellaneous Works of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh (Philadelphia, 1848),
114.
19
James Mill, A Fragment on Mackintosh (London, 1835), 50. On Mill as a recuperator
of Hobbes, see George Lewes, The Biographical History of Philosophy, from Its Origin in
Greece Down to the Present Day (New York, 1857), 495.
20
See Mintz, Hunting, 155.
21
John Dewey, “The Motivation of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” Studies in the
History of Philosophy 1 (1918): 91. On Bentham, see p. 114.
22
Phyllis Doyle, “The Contemporary Background of Hobbes’ ‘State of Nature,’”
Economica 21 (December 1927): 355; Doyle went on to write A History of Political
Thought (New York, [1933]).

256 Sheehan
system required theism.23 The nuances of this thesis, and the storm of responses
that played out in philosophical circles in the 1950s and ’60s, are not important
here.24 The bottom line is, however. As Taylor put it, speaking about moral and
political obligation in the state of nature: “I can only make Hobbes’s statements
consistent with one another by supposing that he meant quite seriously what he
so often says, that the ‘natural law’ is the command of God, and to be obeyed
because it is God’s command.”25
This sentence makes two claims worth highlighting. First, it makes a substan-
tive claim that there is an essential theological core to Hobbes’s moral and
political theory, without which the theory would be inconsistent and hollow.
Second, it makes an interpretive claim that this counterintuitive argument should
have been obvious, since seeing it only required taking “seriously” what Hobbes
himself said about matters divine. These two claims are entwined. To assess the
content correctly requires an appropriate interpretive approach, what I will call the
“hermeneutics of credulity.” We must believe that Hobbes meant what he said—
and, as importantly, believed in what he said—to see the theological at work
in him.
The bond between content and interpretation became manifestly clear in the
first grand manifesto for the Christian Hobbes, F. C. Hood’s Divine Politics of
Thomas Hobbes (1964). It opened with a plea to take Hobbes’s theology seriously.
“Hobbes’s attitude to Theology suggests, not insincerity, but sincerity,” Hood
argues, and with this a new Hobbes emerges.26 This Hobbes was quite simply a
Christian theologian, one for whom “scripture was the only source of . . . moral
conviction.”27 Not only is divine law the source of moral obligation, but in addition
even the artificial animal of the state is ultimately held together by theological
sinews. The authority of the sovereign, Hood’s new interpretive stance allowed
him to discover, is not dependent on contract, but rather on divine authority.
Indeed, in Hobbes, “all real authority is derived immediately from God.”28
One might wonder, as Quentin Skinner did in a 1966 article, how “every
contemporary [of Hobbes]—every follower, opponent, sympathizer—all equally
missed the point of his political doctrine . . . in exactly the same way.”29 Hobbes
23
A. E. Taylor, “The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes,” Philosophy 13 (October 1938):
406–24; later Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of
Obligation (Oxford, 1957).
24
For a summary and a rejoinder, see Brian Barry, “Warrender and His Critics,”
Philosophy 43 (April 1968): 117–37.
25
Taylor, “Ethical Doctrine,” 418. First italics mine.
26
F. C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes: An Interpretation of the
“Leviathan” (Oxford, 1964), 2–3.
27
Ibid., 4.
28
Ibid., 138.
29
Skinner, “Ideological Context,” 314. See also his earlier review of Hood and Mintz:
“Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan,’ ” Historical Journal 7, no. 2 (1964): 321–33.

certainly would have saved himself a lot of grief if he had just been clear that he
was deriving all authority from God, after all. Yet it is true, as Hood points out,
that Hobbes often professes concern that his political theory must fall within
Christian teaching. Perhaps (we can imagine Hood replying to Skinner) Hobbes’s
readers got him wrong for three centuries because they approached him in the
same, wrong way. Perhaps, in other words, their vision was clouded by their
refusal to believe, clouded by a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that cannot help
treating Hobbes’s faith as a cynical mask.
Another reviewer of Hood thought this was just right. The notorious jurist and
state theorist Carl Schmitt opened his 1965 article “The Reformation Perfected”
with an appreciation of this hermeneutical revision. Because Hood “restrains
himself only to what Hobbes himself said . . . [and] does not want to under-
stand the author better than he understood himself,” he is able, in Schmitt’s view,
to put aside the preconception that Hobbes was a “pioneer of secularization.”30
Instead, Hood allows us to recognize that “Thomas Hobbes’ theory of state is a
piece of his political theology” and reveals a Hobbes long shrouded by liberal
prejudices.31
At this point, the stakes of our opening question—is Hobbes a theologian?—
grew dramatically higher. When A. E. Taylor wrote about Hobbes’s ethical theory
in the 1930s, he was grappling with an internal issue in the Hobbes scholarship,
namely, the extent to which naturalist political theory can advance a notion of
moral obligation beyond the strictures of sovereign command.32 This was im-
portant, but it did not raise sweeping issues of religion and secular society. With
his usual bombast, Schmitt changed this. The Schmitt of the 1930s followed the
young Leo Strauss and discovered in Hobbes an origin of that most hated modern
phenomenon, the “modern ‘neutral’ state” (perfected, as it happens, by a “liberal
Jew” named Spinoza).33 But in the 1960s, Schmitt detected in Hobbes not an
architect of liberal governance, but a weapon for destroying it: “At first glance it
seems like Hobbes stands at the vanguard of this secularization, or more exactly,
neutralization process . . . [but] with him, the religious unity and particularity of
the various Christian churches remains protected, because they are sustained by
the sovereign decision of the Christian sovereign.”34 Hobbes thus stands as the
30
Carl Schmitt, “Die vollendete Reformation: Bemerkungen und Hinweise zu neuen
Leviathan-Interpretationen,” Der Staat 4 (1965): 51, 52.
31
Ibid., 51.
32
For excellent contemporaneous rehearsal of the problem, see Michael Oakeshott,
Rationalism in Politics (London, 1962), 273ff.
33
Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, trans. George
Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Chicago, 2008), 56 –57. For the exchange between Schmitt
and the other Jew, Strauss, see Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden
Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago, 1995).
34
Schmitt, “Die vollendete Reformation,” 62.

258 Sheehan
great political thinker against the liberal tradition, the early modern who saw
liberalism for what it was, in all its weakness and inhumanity. In fact, in a curious
inversion, it turns out that real mask that Hobbes wore was not that of a pious
man, but rather that of a scientific thinker. Yes, he used “modern-scientific”
arguments, but only because, in the heat of “theological controversy, any other
possibility of an illuminating argument had been lost.”35
The stakes remain inflated. Although the literature on Hobbes and religion has
exploded in recent decades, unearthing Hobbes’s theology still frequently serves
less to correct historical error than to indict the whole institution of secular
learning.36 Thus A. P. Martinich recently discovered that the Hobbes whom we
see as secular was actually a “more . . . insightful” reader of Scripture than his
contemporaries and, in theological fundamentals, “an orthodox Calvinist.”37 The
reason we have not realized this, he insisted, was not the lack of philosophical
sophistication, but its excess: “Most Hobbes scholars are secularists” and as such
have “bowdlerized” his philosophy to match their prejudices.38 Among the
offenders, Martinich singled out the philosopher Edwin Curley, and the two men
pursued a fierce feud about Hobbes’s Christian credentials that extended roughly
from 1996 to 2002. The feud had many aspects, but the most intractable one was
hermeneutical. Should we believe Hobbes when he says he believes, or not? 39
Was Hobbes a suspicious writer, so that we are warranted to read him suspi-
ciously? Or was he credulous, believing that others would believe him, so that we
should likewise believe in his belief? 40 Our inability to do the latter—to believe in
his belief—is, for Martinich, the log in the eye of modern secular scholarship.
Why such “disproportionate” interest in “Hobbes’s inner beliefs?” George
Wright has asked. Who cares whether Hobbes was an atheist, since this would
35
Ibid., 64.
36
For a small sample of the recent literature, see J. G. A. Pocock, “Time, History, and
Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays
on Political Thought and History (New York, 1971), 148–201; Jeffrey Collins, The Al-
legiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005); George Wright, “The 1668 Appendix and
Hobbes’s Theological Project,” in Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed.
Patricia Springborg (Cambridge, 2007), 392– 409, and, most recently, the journal forum
“Hobbes and Theology,” in Hobbes Studies 26, no. 1 (2013).
37
Martinich, “On the Proper Interpretation of Hobbes’s Philosophy,” Journal of the
History of Ideas 34, no. 2 (April 1996): 274, 278.
38
A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of “Leviathan”: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and
Politics (Cambridge, 1992), 14.
39
On the debate and the question of sincerity, see George Wright, “Curley and Martin
in Dubious Battle,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 40, no. 4 (October 2002): 461–76.
40
See, e.g., Edwin Curley, “‘I Durst Not Write So Boldly’ or, How to Read Hobbes’
Theological-Political Treatise,” in Hobbes e Spinoza: Scienza e politica, ed. Daniela
Bostrenghi (Naples, 1992), or, more recently, “Calvin and Hobbes, or, Hobbes as an
Orthodox Christian,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 34, no. 2 (April 1996),
esp. 262– 63; Martinich, “On the Proper Interpretation of Hobbes’s Philosophy,” 277.

“necessarily affect neither the utility of the theological elements in his thought nor
their possible coherence with its other parts”? 41 Though I am sympathetic to the
reaction, it misses the animating point. In question in these discussions is not
merely the empirical issue of Hobbes’s convictions but also the entire approach
that human scientists have to theological questions. Our failure to appreciate
Hobbes’s theology is not accidental, Hood, Schmitt, Martinich, and others ar-
gue, but symptomatic of an ideological commitment to the impossibility of a
theological element in our secular pantheon. In consequence we either ignore the
theological altogether or write it off as an ironical mask, or as a substitute for other
concerns.42 The history of modern autonomy from the theological—a history that,
not accidentally, features Hobbes as a crucial player—stands, in other words, on
feet of clay. To break this idol, we must commit to the reality of belief and “take
theology seriously” in our understanding of our own intellectual heritage.
Theology and the Polemics of Belief

Given the agendas Hobbes has come to serve, the early modern intellectual
historian might be of use. The early modern period has often served as a proving
ground in battles about modern secularity. When Hans Blumenberg wanted to
defend the “legitimacy of the modern age” against Carl Schmitt, he returned to the
early modern period.43 And when the political theorist Michael Gillespie recently
attacked this legitimacy, he too returned to the early modern period. The early
modern period, he argues, effectively transformed a “‘nihilistic’ crisis” in late
medieval theology—the rise of what is known as “nominalism”—into modern
currency, converting “disputable theological assertions” into “unquestionable
scientific or moral givens.” 44 To make this argument, Gillespie commits himself
to a strong vision of what theology is—a set of identifiable propositions—and
what its discovery might entail for particular thinkers and their legacies. Thus it
was Hobbes’s “belief in the Calvinistic notion of predestination, which was the
basis of his mechanistic notion of causality.” Having discovered this core content
of theological “beliefs,” Gillespie can then argue that “secularism” is “merely one
of [the] extreme forms” of Protestantism.45
41
Wright, “Curley and Martin in Dubious Battle,” 476.
42
For a powerful version of this argument, see Brad Gregory, “The Other Confessional
History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion,” History and Theory 45, no. 4
(December 2006): 132–49.
43
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966; Cambridge, MA,
1983).
44
Michael Allan Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago, 2008), 14,
273.
45
Ibid., 13, 273, 216, 227.

260 Sheehan
It is, however, worth asking the question: how do we reliably identify theol-
ogy? Do we know it, like obscenity, when we see it? Can we prove that it was
really “a belief in predestination” that grounded Hobbes’s mechanism over, say, a
Stoic commitment to determinate causality? And, just as importantly, what are we
committing ourselves to when we view theology through the lens of belief?
To consider this further, let us look a bit more closely at theology as it emerged
out of the early modern period. Traditionally, as it developed as a university
discipline in the later middle ages, theology was linked not with belief, but with
truth.46 The “axiom that grace did not abolish nature, but completed it” kept
philosophical and theological pursuits in close contact.47 Both disciplines were
essentially truth-seeking, different in method but similar in their orientation. This
perceived similarity persisted into the early modern period, even as Renaissance
humanists made claims for the autonomy of the liberal arts, or as Reformers
insisted on the radical difference between the conditions of nature and grace. Only
in the later seventeenth century would this similarity find a vigorous and sustained
challenge.
Hobbes offered a version of this challenge (see below), but the one most
familiar to us now came from his rough contemporary, Spinoza. His 1670
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus sheds important light on our concerns about using
a secular human science—history—to talk about things ostensibly transcendent.
The Tractatus was divided into two parts, the first on Old Testament hermeneu-
tics and the second on political theory. The bridge between them was Spinoza’s
famous redefinition of the relationship between theology and philosophy.
Because revelation is heterogeneous and suitable only to local circumstances,
Spinoza argued, it speaks within the circumscribed area of faith alone. Even more
specifically, it can speak only about the ethical disposition (rather than the truth
claims) of believers. For Scripture contains nothing universal, nothing of philos-
ophy: its aim “is simply to teach obedience.”48 What then of theology? It, wrote
Spinoza, is definitively excluded from the realm of truth. The “domain of
theology is piety and obedience,” and it “leaves it to reason to decide exactly
how [its] dogmas might be understood in respect of truth.”49 Insofar as a statement
is scientific, then, it cannot be theological, and vice versa. Philosophy cannot
apply in matters of faith. To imagine that it could would imply, Spinoza
46
On the history of the discipline, see G. R. Evans, Old Arts and New Theology: The
Beginnings of Theology as an Academic Discipline (Oxford, 1980); Jaroslav Pelikan, The
Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300) (Chicago, 1978); and J. de Ghellinck, Le
mouvement théologique du XIIe siècle, 2nd ed. (Bruges, 1948).
47
Pelikan, Growth of Medieval Theology, 285.
48
Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis,
2001), 159.
49
Ibid., 169.

commented innocently, that theology “has no brilliance unless it is illuminated by

the natural light of reason.”50 For its own good, then, theology must not speak of
truth at all.
Theology has fallen in Spinoza’s eyes, then, from the queen of the sciences to
the queen of the nonsciences, the queen of just that place where truth comes to a
halt and faith begins. Historically, defending truth—and defending the right to
make claims about truth—was the job of polemical theology, which protected the
faith against the heretic and the infidel. Spinoza knew this. His new vision of
theology was explicitly a therapy against theological polemic, for the performance
of public theology in the name of truth.51 Spinoza’s redefinition was, however,
itself a work of polemic. No claim was more common and less believed in the
early modern religious controversies than “I have a truth that will end polemics, as
long as you believe it.” If only everyone would agree, there would not be “so much
quarrelling and such bitter feuding,” as Spinoza put it, bidding here for the last
move in the polemical exchange.52 But that is the game of polemics, namely, the
effort to make the last move, the one that wraps up the argument with an appeal to
common sense, common history, common sentiment, and so on.
In the end, Spinoza won this fight, and we can see this in our own approaches to
theology, even those of people eager to defend it. For those who “take religion
seriously,” theology still entails a story of belief, of faith, an account of the things
that fall outside the orbit of the sciences. Take, for example, the early modern
historian Brad Gregory. Gregory has written extensively against the “secular bias”
in the historical disciplines, yet he promotes a curiously Spinozist project when he
insists that to understand early modern Christians, we must protect the reality of
their “belief ” from the reductionist urges of anthropologists, sociologists, and so
on.53 This is the hermeneutics of credulity at its starkest. Belief, for him, exists in a
state of nonconvertability: it is a sine qua non of Christian action and thus cannot
be made evidence of other truths. As a researcher, to be true to religion is to take
seriously the faith claim as an autonomous one. We must believe that Christians
believed.
Here the early moderns have something to teach us. As Gregory well knows,
belief was never immune to challenge in that period. The genre of the anti-
martyrology—one that grew up in dialogue with the stories of Christian martyrs
in books like John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563, 1st ed.)—constantly
challenged belief, for example, not just in its particulars, but in toto, in its very
status as belief. “Few actions speak more dramatically than a willingness to die
for one’s beliefs,” Gregory writes, and so we must not “disput[e] their
50
Ibid., 171.
51
See, e.g., ibid., 158.
52
Ibid., 86.
53
Gregory, “The Other Confessional History.”

262 Sheehan
sincerity.”54 And yet for the anti-martyrology, the sincere belief of the false
martyr was not belief at all, but delusion. You may believe that you believe, the
argument would go, but in fact you are filled with “fancies, censures, and
opinions,” as the English Jesuit Robert Parsons argued in 1603.55 Indeed, the
negation of Christian martyrdom involved endless demystification of belief as
fantasy. Belief entailed, for early modern Christians, far more than sincerity. It
was objective, requiring the reception of God’s truth into the soul and mind of the
believer. “Indeed the impious do not believe,” Philip Melanchthon wrote in
1521, but rather “they are beholden to cold opinion, to which adheres nothing
of the depths [ profunditas] of the heart.”56 Belief was not merely belief in
something. It was an embodied state of truth impressed from without by God.
As such, it could be, and was, challenged all the time.
Early moderns did not grant anything like a privileged position to belief, in
other words. In the early modern world of polemical theology—one where truth
was actually on the line—belief never got a free pass. The hermeneutics of
suspicion were alive and well in early modern religious conflicts, when oppo-
nents’ “beliefs” were demystified as claims, as not a real state of being at all.
What was claimed as a pious self-sacrifice was constantly revealed as either self-
murder or as the predictable result of stubborn and zealous attachment to mere
opinion.
There is an interesting lesson for us here. These early modern hermeneutics of
suspicion seem to have taught us to say “a plague on both your houses.” The
secular historian might argue, echoing Spinoza, that it is not our job to adjudicate
who really believes and who does not. And yet the very object that we are
investigating—theology or, more generally, religion—has become so tied to the
idea of belief that we commit ourselves to inferences about it all the time. We
grant belief a crucial existential status, yet one that places it beyond the reach of
our own analytical enterprise. As a result, we give the belief claim even more
credence than the early moderns did!
Take, for example, the claim made by some modern scholars that Hobbes’s
belief in a Christian God kept him from atheism. The early moderns would have
disagreed, since atheism was not, or not solely, an issue of believing in God. The
Devil believes in God, after all. Atheism instead entailed a host of factors. Here,
for example, is one definition of atheism in a seventeenth-century catechism.
Atheists believe:
54
Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge, MA, 2001), 15.
55
Parsons, quoted in ibid., 335.
56
Philip Melanchthon, Loci Theologici (1521), in Corpus reformatorum (Braun-
schweig, 1854), 21:172. See also the article “Glaube IV,” in the Theologische Realenzyk-
lopädie (Berlin, 1976–).

1. That there was a time when men wandered like beasts.

2. After wandering they came into society.
3. They ordained Lawes unto themselves to preserve their estate.
4. Those Laws were not able to bridle them.
5. By that means they invented that there was an ἔκδικον [sic] ὂμμα, a just
eye to see them even in secret, so that by this invention they might be afraid
to doe evill.57
Now by this standard, there is no doubt that Hobbes, who subscribed to all five
of these tenets, was an atheist. We need not apply this standard to Hobbes, but
it is useful to recall that atheism was a far more plural concept in the early
modern period than it became after the Spinozist division. Among his con-
temporaries, a host of atheisms were ascribed to Hobbes, hinging on such
various things as the consequences of his materialism, the rhetorical ingenu-
ity of his writing, his Epicurean skepticism about providence, his critique
of natural religion, his theory of political obligation, and more.58 Belief in
God was only one of these, and for this reason, as Richard Tuck has noticed,
Hobbes’s former friend Henry Hammond could call Hobbes, with only some
irony, a “Christian atheist.”59 That is to say, even if he believed in—that is,
cognitively assented to, or was simply convinced of the truth of—some (or
perhaps even all!) Christian teachings, he could nonetheless stand in the camp
of the atheists.
Our solicitude for belief invites us into even more fraught territory, moreover,
when it invites (or even requires) us to develop normative standards for what a
specifically Christian belief might be. When this happens, we become unwitting
stewards of what Christians at various times have called orthodoxy. Note that the
first effort to Christianize Hobbes (see Doyle, above) tried to map him onto a
standard of Protestant orthodoxy. In more recent times, Hobbes was moved into a
specifically Calvinist orthodox camp by scholars like Gillespie and Martinich,
57
Lancelot Andrewes [?], A Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine (London, 1641), 34 (the
original lacks the Greek breathing marks). This is a complex text whose authorship is hazy,
since it was compiled by an anonymous editor ostensibly from lectures given ca. 1585 by
Andrewes; see Nicholas Tyacke, “Lancelot Andrewes and the Myth of Anglicanism,” in
Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660, ed. Peter Lake and
Michael Questier (Woodbridge, 2000), 9.
58
For a full exploration of all the ways in which Hobbes was construed as an atheist,
see Jeffrey R. Collins, “Thomas Hobbes, ‘Father of Atheists,’ ” in Atheism and Deism
Revalued: Religious Identities in Britain, 1650–1800, ed. Wayne Hutson et al. (Surrey,
2014), 25–44.
59
Richard Tuck, “The ‘Christian Atheism’ of Thomas Hobbes,” in Atheism from the
Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter and David Wooton (Oxford, 1992),
111.

264 Sheehan
who defined the term orthodoxy, “as Hobbes did, to mean adherence to the
propositions expressed by the authoritative Christian creeds of the first four
church councils.”60 Creeds, however, were historically not about the individual
“state of believing,” as Jaroslav Pelikan points out, but always involved collective
acts of public confession. Adherence to right doctrine was simply not enough. So,
for example, “although the demons do believe, and believe ‘correctly,’ that is to
say, accurately, and could therefore ironically be called ‘orthodox’ in their
doctrine, they are not saved by that faith.”61 So when we use a creedal standard,
and mean by it a belief in a set of propositions, we misunderstand the function of
a creed in Christianity. And when we apply the standard, we commit ourselves
to a normative vision of the Christian tradition against which to judge the or-
thodoxy of Hobbes.
Even the most nuanced contextualist approaches to Hobbes—those that seek to
rise above contemporary theological or philosophical frays and calmly assess
Hobbes’s arguments in their historical setting—easily get themselves tangled in
this orthodoxy question. The historian Jeffrey Collins insists in a recent exchange
with Martinich, for example, that we must “adjudicate . . . historically, not theo-
logically,” whether or not “Hobbes was a Christian of defensible orthodoxy.” The
problem, however, is that orthodoxy is a theological category, not a historical one.
So when he then stipulates that “by the phrase ‘seventeenth-century orthodox
Christian’ I mean a thinker who accepted the divinity of Christ, the creeds of the
early church, and some historically recognizable version of Trinitarian doctrine,”
he effectively takes sides in the violent conflicts about the nature of orthodoxy
that so fractured early modern Christian communities.62 Defining orthodoxy
down—that is, coming up with some minimal criteria presumably shared by all
the “orthodox”—does not help at all, since what we might see as details were
what divided Christians most sharply. In short, once orthodoxy enters our ana-
lytical vocabulary, it becomes nearly impossible not to separate the sheep from
the goats in our efforts to determine the bona fides of our historical actors.63
60
Martinich, Two Gods, 2.
61
Jaroslav Pelikan, Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confes-
sions of Faith in the Christian Tradition (New Haven, CT, 2003), 35, 49.
62
Jeffrey R. Collins, “Interpreting Thomas Hobbes in Competing Contexts,” Journal
of the History of Ideas 70, no. 1 (January 2009): 176. Or, again: “leaving aside his potential
theism, it proves virtually impossible to read Hobbes as the orthodox, Trinitarian Christian
he claimed to be. Christian theology is, of course, dependent on revealed knowledge
embodied in divine scripture and historic miracles,” in his The Allegiance of Thomas
Hobbes (Oxford, 2005), 28.
63
For an initial foray into the issue of orthodoxy, see J. G. A. Pocock, “Within the
Margins: The Definitions of Orthodoxy,” in Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing
and Cultural Response, 1660–1750, ed. Roger Lund (Cambridge, 1995). See also Markus
Friedrich, “Orthodoxy and Variation: The Role of Adiaphorism in Early Modern Protes-
tantism,” in Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Early Modern German Culture: Order and
Creativity, 1500–1750, ed. Randolph C. Head and Daniel Christensen (Leiden, 2007).

This is not a trivial issue. Stories of theological persistence, and their critical
value in an account of modern secular false consciousness, depend on exactly
these acts of sorting. It would be simply uninteresting for critics like Martinich
and Gillespie to discover that Hobbes’s philosophical work offered some ideas
about God. Rather, the debunking project wants to discover that the Leviathan
offers a theology that is “essentially Protestant, largely Calvinist, and with a few
exceptions compatible with Anglicanism.”64 The qualifiers are crucial, for they
allow Gillespie to push Hobbes into a box marked “orthodoxy,” and then chain
him to a longer history of theological commitments that he argues underwrites
the entire modern project. But they also lure him into some terrible argumen-
tative contortions, as when he insists that Hobbes’s “doctrine of the material-
ity of God may not have been as radical as it first appeared” since it is “very
much like the traditional belief in an incorporeal God.”65 This is, to put it mildly,
perplexing.
Taking Religion Lightly: Hobbes and Heterodoxy

“Taking religion seriously” may be the wrong approach, I suggest, for it offers
the tantalizing vision of a theological secret buried in the heart of modernity. It
entices us to act the inquisitors on our subjects, as a means of purging our sins, not
theirs. Hobbes can help us to take religion more lightly. Early moderns like him
were more practiced at thinking about theology than we are, and so they offer
resources for rethinking our own approach to matters theological. To explore this,
I will focus our attention on Hobbes’s English (and later Latin) Leviathan and
look at a place where Hobbes himself thinks about the subject raised above—
namely, martyrs—to see what kind of interpretive possibilities we may discover.
Martyrs appear in a few places in the 1651 Leviathan, a book written in the heat
of England’s civil wars, when the relations between faith and death were intimate.
They show up most explicitly in its mammoth chapter on ecclesiastical power
(§42), which tackles a problem vexing for any early modern theorist of state: what
to do with the “infidel king,” the king who “forbid[s] us to beleeve in Christ,” and
whose law is therefore liable to disobedience by the pure of heart?66 This ques-
tion was at the heart of early modern resistance theories, which were developed in
all the European religious confessions in the heat of sixteenth-century violence.
It was also at the heart of England’s civil disorders, in Hobbes’s view, which
proceeded from the presumption that “whatsoever a man does against his
Conscience is Sinne,” and therefore must be refused.67 As someone concerned
64
Gillespie, Theological Origins, 247.
65
Ibid., 249.
66
67
Ibid., 2:502.

266 Sheehan
above all for the state’s monopoly over legal and political authority, Hobbes thus
wanted to convert the pure of heart into criminals by severing their connections to
any law beyond that of the state.
Martyrs posed a challenge to this effort, because it was as martyrs that, from the
dawn of the church, Christians had historically suffered the punishments of infidel
governments and refused their secular authority. This ancient tradition was up-
dated in the early modern wars of religion, where dying for the truth was ennobled
in religious communities across Europe. Hobbes was therefore pushing back
against a long Christian narrative that linked suffering and political resistance.
To make his argument, Hobbes turned to the Bible. There was once, he
recounted, a Syrian general named Naaman, who suffered from leprosy. His king
sent him to Israel in search of a cure. There the prophet Elisha directed him to
bathe in the river Jordan, and his “flesh was restored like that of a young boy.” In
awe, the grateful Naaman confessed that “I know that there is no God in all the
earth but in Israel.” But now Naaman had a problem, for he had to return home to
a land of idols and sacrifices. His solution was simple. He promised Elisha that he
would “not offer burnt offering or sacrifice to any god but the Lord.” But, he
suggested, “when my master goes into the house of Rimmon to worship there . . .
and I bow myself in the house of Rimmon, the Lord pardon your servant in this
matter.” As a man with a master, Naaman conformed to his infidel king, even
though Rimmon was anathema to the God of Israel. The prophet agreed to the
deal. “Go in peace,” Elisha said (2 Kings 5.15–19).
Like others in the period, Hobbes took this story as a primer on religion and
politics. “Whatsoever a Subject, as Naaman was, is compelled to in obedience of
his Soveraign, and doth it not in order to his own mind, but in order to the laws of
his country,” Hobbes wrote, “the action is not his, but his Soveraigns.” Anyone
who would think otherwise “authorizeth all private men, to disobey their Princes,
in maintenance of their Religion, true, or false.”68 This interpretation was in line
with contemporary discussions about conformity and the nature of the church.69
To those who argued that the visible church must be symmetrical with the
invisible church—usually Protestant separatists—Naaman showed that there may
68
Ibid., 3:784. For a short discussion of Hobbes on Naaman, see George Kateb,
“Hobbes and the Irrationality of Politics,” Political Theory 17, no. 3 (August 1989):
369–70.
69
Hobbes’s predecessor in sovereignty talk, Jean Bodin, uses it in just this way in book 4
of the Six Books of the Commonwealth (see, e.g., the Richard Knolles ed. [London, 1606],
539). But he was not the only one; see, e.g., Richard Alison, A Plaine Confutation of
a Treatise of Brownisme (London, 1590), 102, or Francis Bunny, A Survey of the Pope’s
Supremacie (London, 1595), 7. For an effort to rebut the conformist moral of the story, see
also Peter Martyr Vermigli, A Treatise of the Cohabitation of the Faithfull with the
Unfaithfull (London, 1555), 32.

well be those blessed by God who yet worship in the idolatrous house of Rimmon
(or Rome, even).
In his turn to Naaman, Hobbes was no innovator. More innovative was his next
step. If conformity is no sin, he asked, “what then shall we say of all those Martyrs
we read of in the History of Church, that they have needlessely cast away their
lives?”70 This is a typical Hobbesian move. The question itself was one that we
can imagine those separatists asking, a regular move in theological polemics. And
his first answers seem like good Augustinian ones. Just as Augustine insisted that
the cause, not the punishment, makes the martyr, so too did Hobbes argue for a
difference between those who “have received a Calling to preach” and those who
“had no such Calling.” Only the first, “if they have been put to death, for bearing
witnesse to this point, that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, were true Martyrs.”
Then came Hobbes’s twist, one that would have given most of his readers pause:
“A Martyr is, (to give the true definition of the word) a Witnesse of the Resur-
rection of Jesus the Messiah; which none can be but those that conversed with
him on earth, and saw him after he was risen . . . and consequently must be one of
his originall Disciples; . . . they that were not so, can Witnesse no more, but that
their antecessors said it . . . and are but second Martyrs, or Martyrs of Christs
Witnesse. . . .”71 If good testimony can only come from an eyewitness, then all
those “second Martyrs”—meaning all Christian martyrs after about 100 CE—
were merely circumstantial martyrs, motivated less by the truths of things seen
than by opinions about things unseen. In this moment, Hobbes pruned the
Christian tree of thousands of its sacred dead. This may be a “Protestant” move,
but it was one that would have appealed to few Christians committed to the
authority of the early church (meaning nearly all Christians in Hobbes’s England).
Moreover, Hobbes then recast this problematic in political terms. It is not “the
death of the witnesse, but the testimony itself that makes the Martyr.”72 Playing
on the Latin testis for martyr, in Hobbes’s reading, this meant that only those
authorized to testify count. That is to say, merely believing in something (how-
ever true) is not enough to warrant the moment of self-legislating authority that
characterizes the martyr. Belief is certainly not the embodied state of truth that
Melanchthon imagined. As an involuntary act of the mind, it is not subject to
deliberation or reason or choice.73 When speaking about the scriptures, for
example, Hobbes declares that we cannot know that they are authoritative. We
are simply convinced that they are so. Since “some are moved to beleeve for one,
and others for other reasons, there can be rendred no one generall answer for them
70
71
Ibid., 3:786–88.
72
Ibid., 3:788.
73
See, e.g., ibid., 2:100–102; thanks to Kinch Hoekstra for comments on this point.

268 Sheehan
all,” and therefore their authority, such as it is, has only to do with their legal status
in a commonwealth.74 Belief is doubtless important for Christians. To be a
Christian is to believe that Jesus is the Christ, for example: “he that beleeveth it
not, is no Christian,” and so it is the “Office of Christs Minister in this world . . . to
make men Beleeve.”75 The “means of making them believe” is not by ratiocina-
tion, however; rather it “is according to the way of Nature, that is to say, from
their Teachers . . . those that are by the Law allowed and appointed to Teach us.”76
Insofar as there is a relationship between belief and authority, it runs from au-
thority to belief, and not the other way around.
If belief offers nothing by way of authority, then martyrdom is not about be-
lief at all. It is about action: the act of testimony and the act of repudiation of au-
thority in the name of Christ. As far as action goes, however, only those with
“a warrant to preach Christ come in the flesh; that is to say, none, but such as are
sent to the conversion of Infidels,” can be said to be a true martyr.77 And where
could this authoritative warrant come from? Not from the church, since the church
has no command authority over its congregation. Its powers of teaching and
exhortation never have the force of law. Only the civil sovereign, Hobbes made
clear, has the power to turn these teachings into laws; only he has the power to
issue that warrant for martyrdom.78 In the absence of such a warrant, all teach-
ing is merely private, and when it conflicts with the warrants of the state, it must
either submit or be subject to the legal charge of heresy.79
In these moments, we see how sensitive Hobbes was to the belief claim. He
was never willing to give belief a pass, or allow it to stand unchallenged as a
legitimate rationale for action in the world. We may or may not want to accept the
Hobbesian gambit that belief be constrained to the foro interno rather than be
allowed to have corporeal expression. Minimally, however, we can recognize
with Hobbes that there is a specific history of “belief-politics” that is still at work
today. To say “I believe” or to say that “they believed” is not an innocent report of
a state of being, but a claim on authority with a specific history and politics.
Returning to the theology discussion, Hobbes also has much to say. In the
aftermath of Leviathan, Hobbes struggled with the theological question. His 1655
De corpore argued that the “subject of Philosophy,” and by this he meant both
natural and civil philosophy, “excludes Theology, I mean, the doctrine of God,
eternal, ingenerable, incomprehensible.” Philosophy discovers “the properties of
bodies from their generation, or their generation from their properties,” but there
74
Ibid., 3:604.
75
Ibid., 3:804, 782.
76
Ibid., 3:936.
77
Ibid., 3:788.
78
See, e.g., ibid., 3:852, 866, 920.
79
Ibid., 3:920.

are no such bodies, nor “any generation to be conceived” in the subject of

theology.80 Seven years later, after the Restoration, his apology for the Leviathan
to King Charles II took a somewhat different approach, insisting that “religion is
not philosophy, but law,” and therefore that anything in the book which is “of
theology, contrary to the general current of divines, is not put there as my opin-
ion, but propounded with submission to those that have the power ecclesiasti-
cal.”81 When the Latin edition of the Leviathan was published in 1668—a mo-
ment when Hobbes felt himself in hot water with the House of Commons—he
amended his dedicatory letter to declare that he had taken “care not to write any-
thing against the public doctrine of our Church (for it is permissible to disagree
with individuals).”82
Given these post-facto convolutions, we should pay attention to the explicit
status of theology in Leviathan. Doubtless Hobbes had deep scorn for the
admixture of philosophy and doctrine already in development in the days of the
Jewish synagogue, when scholars “turned the Doctrine of their Law into a
Phantastical kind of Philosophy.”83 The “Aristotelity” of the medieval universities
only made this worse, as “Vain Philosophy” was “brought into Religion by the
Doctors of Schoole-Divinity,” leading to such fantastic notions as incorporeal
bodies, ghosts, spirits, and more.84 Hobbes objected to the monstrous form of
school-divinity but was even more alarmed by its urge to self-legislate, to crown
itself with the authority of law. Consistently through the third section of Levia-
than, Hobbes insisted that “due calling and election to the charge of Teaching”
was required for doctors of the Church.85 Insofar as the content of this teaching is
public—that is, insofar as it is authorized for any community—decision-rights
over it are “inseparably annexed . . . to the Soveraign Power Civil.”86 The civil
power judges “what Doctrines are fit for Peace,” and while private citizens might
well have their own doctrinal convictions, these cannot rise to the level of public
teaching without civil permission.87
As public practice, then, theology must conform to what Kinch Hoekstra has
called Hobbes’s “doctrine of doctrines,” namely, that doctrine (philosophical or
80
Hobbes, De corpore, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William
Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1839), 1:10. For a compelling argument that Hobbes did
not see philosophy as a truth-seeking activity either, see Kinch Hoekstra, “The End of
Philosophy (The Case of Hobbes),” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (2006):
25–62.
81
Hobbes, Seven Philosophical Problems . . . with an Apology for Himself and His
Writings, in English Works, 7:5.
82
83
Ibid., 3:1060.
84
Ibid., 3:1074, 1098.
85
Ibid., 3:834.
86
Ibid., 3:850.
87
Ibid.

270 Sheehan
theological) must be pursued less with an eye to truth than “in the light of human
benefit,” and ultimately in the light of civil peace.88 It is a “practical science for the
needed order of peace,” as Giovanni Fiaschi has aptly written, where the end of
theology is civil virtue rather than dogmatic truth.89 In the conclusion to the 1651
English Leviathan, Hobbes reflected on his more curious doctrinal teachings and
pled for patience with the “new Doctrines, which, it may be, in a State where the
contrary were already fully determined, were a fault for a Subject without leave to
divulge, as being a usurpation of the place of a Teacher.” But in the absence of
such a state, at a moment when “men call not onely for Peace, but also for Truth,”
Hobbes felt free to offer “such Doctrines as I think True, and that manifestly tend
to Peace . . . New Wine, to bee put into New Cask.”90 In the 1668 Latin edition of
Leviathan, Hobbes elaborated his theological project in an added Appendix:
[In 1641] the King was also forced, in order to placate Parliament, to remove the bishops
from all extraordinary ecclesiastical government. When this was done, there no longer
remained any power in England to try heresies; all kinds of sects appeared, of people
writing and publishing whatever theology anyone wanted. The author of the book
[Hobbes] . . . was then living in Paris, making use of the ordinary right to write freely.
And he did indeed champion with distinction the rights of the King in both temporal and
spiritual matters. But when he tried to do this on the basis of the Holy Scriptures, he fell
into unheard-of doctrines, which have been charged with heresy and atheism by very many
theologians.91
Absent a controlling authority, Hobbes found himself entitled to teach publicly

those “unheard doctrines” without legal violation. When the body that regulates
public teaching, the state through its bishops, no longer does so, then theologies
proliferate. Any statement whatsoever, in fact, can be said to be “theological” by
mere assertion, no matter what its content might be in relation to previously
authoritative doctrinal statements. As much as any other work in this moment,
Hobbes’s Leviathan thus stands as a work of theology, a public teaching of
doctrines however peculiar they might be.
Moreover, Hobbes was not content merely to affirm his right in 1651 to
practice theology. He also insisted that theology has only a contingent relation-
ship to orthodoxy. His “extreme subordination of orthodoxy to power,” as Jeffrey
Collins puts it, delinked orthodoxy from any timeless creedal standards, and even
88
Kinch Hoekstra, “The De facto Turn in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” in Leviathan
after 350 Years, ed. Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau (Oxford, 2004), 72; Hoekstra, “The End
of Philosophy (The Case of Hobbes),” 27, 31.
89
Giovanni Fiaschi, “The Power of Words: Political and Theological Science in
Thomas Hobbes,” Hobbes Studies 26, no. 1 (2013): 51.
90
91
Hobbes, “Appendix,” Leviathan, 3:1226.

from any consensus view of historical Christianity.92 Put differently, seen as a

collection of doctrinal statements, Christian theology is fundamentally heterodox.
It is made of different doxa, doxa that can veer from any given doctrinal center.
It is this sensibility that informs his discussion of heresy, not least in the long
section added to the 1668 Latin Leviathan (§46) where Hobbes addressed the
practice of theology in the early Church and discovered there an amalgamation of
Greek philosophy and Christian doctrine. This blend generated new doctrines and
sects, forcing the Church to accept some (those that would become “orthodox”)
and reject some (now called “heresies”).93 Later, in his appendix to the 1668
edition, Hobbes became even more explicit, setting his “unusual” doctrines into
dialogue with a larger Christian archive including creedal documents, scripture,
and the Church fathers. In doing so, he built a plausible set of precedents for what,
by virtually any contemporary standards, counted as highly heterodox claims.
Here is a list of those unusual doctrines, with the supports Hobbes offered for
them: (1) that God has a body (Tertullian); (2) to argue that God does not have a
body is atheistic (John of Damascus); (3) that religion comes from fear (Eccle-
siastes); (4) that the Kingdom of God will be on earth (Revelation); (5) that
sinners will not suffer eternally (Revelation). And there were others as well,
including a return to Naaman the Syrian as proof text for Hobbes’s trimming of
the martyrological tree.
Hobbes teaches that, absent controlling authority, the Christian archive is
heterodox, that it is not one tradition or one theology or one orthodoxy. Its
pluralism goes back to the very dawn of its formation, built on layers of texts,
authorities, traditions, and claims. There is, as Hobbes wrote about his own
book, “nothing contrary to the Faith of our Church, though there are several
[doctrines] which go beyond (superantia) the teachings of private theolo-
gians.”94 As Hobbes understands it, however, the “Faith of our Church” was
one hardly circumscribed—at least at the moment when the Leviathan was
published—by orthodoxy. Rather, it was ill-formed, internally argumentative,
variable, and agonistic.
92
Jeffrey Collins, “Thomas Hobbes, Heresy, and the Theological Project of Levia-
than,” Hobbes Studies 26, no. 1 (2013): 13.
93
Hobbes, Leviathan, 3:1063. For Hobbes on heresy, see, inter alia, Cees Leijenhorst,
“Hobbes, Heresy, and Corporal Deity,” in Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and
Religion, ed. John Brooke and Ian Maclean (Oxford, 2005), 193–222; Patricia Springborg,
“Hobbes, Heresy, and the Historia Ecclesiastica,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55, no. 4
(October 1994): 553–71; J. A. I. Champion, “An Historical Narration Concerning Here-
sie: Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Barlow, and the Restoration Debate over ‘Heresy,’ ” in
Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, ed. David Loewenstein
and John Marshall (Cambridge, 2006), 221–53.
94
Hobbes, “Appendix,” Leviathan, 3:1242.

272 Sheehan
So is Hobbes a theologian? We might be in a better position now to think about

our opening question. Let us imagine with Hobbes that, absent institutions that
guarantee certain statements as authoritative and orthodox, anyone can be a
theologian. In fact, in a certain sense, everyone is a theologian—heterodox, per-
haps, or even “heretical,” once external and political guarantees of right teaching
disappear. In that case, what I called in the opening of this essay the “perversities”
of Thomas Hobbes, D.D.—an atheist theologian, a mechanist theologian, an anti-
ecclesiastical theologian—are suddenly no longer perverse at all. Instead, they are
possibilities of thought unregulated by authority. They are only perverse in a
world where a normative standard of orthodoxy can successfully be applied.
Leviathan was not written in such a world, and this invited Hobbes to practice
a theology that was simultaneously mechanist and pious, anti-ecclesiastical and
pro-establishment, atheist and Christian. We do not live in such a world either. In
our world, the state takes little interest in regulating the unruly and messy Chris-
tian archive. Instead, the great dispensations in Europe and the United States over
the past 200 years have almost entirely ceded this authority to the Christian
churches. So when we look at the “history of theology” after 1800, its object of
study is (again by and large) pretty much that collection of statements that a given
faith community determines as orthodox for itself. It is no surprise, then, that the
history of theology has often been written by members of those faith communities,
for whom there is a real incentive to make the gap between the messy Christian
archive, and what they legislate for themselves as orthodoxy, as invisible as
possible.
Intellectual historians should be well positioned to expose this gap, since we
are disciplinarily committed to the idea that concepts change over time, history is
contingent, traditions are plural, and so on. What is startling is how difficult these
commitments seem to practice when it comes to theology, as the Hobbes literature
shows. Conventional assertions of Christian norms (“he really was a Christian”)
and conventional critiques of these norms (“he really was an atheist”) quickly
resurface even in very sophisticated readers.
Much of this difficulty, I suspect, itself grows out of our historical commitment
to secular neutrality. On the one hand, we are concerned to protect the secularity
of the human sciences by ensuring that they remain free of theology. As an os-
tensible forefather of these sciences, Hobbes has to be declared clean of theolog-
ical commitment too. To do that, we have to determine what counts as properly
theological and what does not. And once we do that, we have already begun to
constitute theology as a scene not of polemics, controversy, and heteronomy, but
of coherence and authority.
On the other hand, we are concerned to protect the autonomy of religion by
letting it determine its own contents, ideational and otherwise. “Every church is
orthodox to itself,” as John Locke wrote in 1689, and so we should treat these

churches with equal indifference to their truth claims.95 However laudably in-
tended, this norm of indifference gives orthodoxy the appearance of neutrality, as
simply that which any given church takes as true. When we do this, orthodoxy
gets differentiated laterally—there are as many orthodoxies as churches—and
every church is presumed to have a truth it calls its own. And once we do this, we
grant orthodoxy stability, stipulating silently that this truth is a coherent or
systematic one, at least in the eyes of the Church. Moreover, we thereby inoculate
orthodoxy against scrutiny, lest by holding the “truth” of orthodoxy up to analysis
we improperly participate in theological polemic ourselves. In the final analysis,
whether we are defending secular neutrality or protecting the autonomy of
religion, we can easily find ourselves in the peculiar position of defending rather
than unsettling the status of theology.
What if, in other words, the worry about the secularity of the human sciences
and the effort to remain indifferent to the truth claims of religion is to take the-
ology and orthodoxy too seriously? What if, every time we accuse each other (or
our secular forefathers) of “being theological,” and every time we defend against
this charge, we confirm the special place of theology in the modern human sci-
ences, a place that Spinoza could hardly have foretold? To open theology up—
to make it less orthodox in our scholarship—seems to me a key project of in-
tellectual history at this particular juncture, when an older secular dispensation is
crumbling and new intellectual formations are not yet on the horizon.
Conclusion
In his first thesis on the philosophy of history, the German writer Walter Benjamin
recalled the Turk, the chess-playing machine whose genius was in fact the little
hunchbacked gnome crouched inside. In the world of philosophy, he wryly
commented in 1940, the Turk (that is, historical materialism) “can easily be a
match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today . . . is wizened
and has to keep out of sight.”96 For such a small figure, so restricted in its field of
application, this gnome of theology manages to cast a disproportionately long
shadow. Or rather, it is because it is wizened and has to keep out of sight that it can
serve as the deus in machina, a cunning manipulator invisible to proper scrutiny.
In the modern period, I would venture to argue, theology has assumed this curious
status. Hidden inside the world of private conscience, presumed opaque to the
resources of the human sciences (and, in fact, antithetical to them), it takes on the
95
John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven, CT,
2003), 225.
96
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), 253.

274 Sheehan
power of the secret agent of things. It is constantly revealed lurking as the real
agenda behind diverse intellectual, social, political, and cultural projects. As such,
it becomes immensely powerful, since it is protected against direct examination
and engagement. Theology is not an agent, however, but a set of claims that
appear in time and under specific mediated circumstances. To recover the fullness
of theological practice—its inner heterodoxies, its polemic clashes, its public
confrontations, and irremediable historicity—seems a valuable project, not just in
the interests of better historical understanding but also an effort to come to terms
with our own practices in the secular human sciences.


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Thomas Hobbes, D.D.

: Theology, Orthodoxy, and History*

Philosophy is incompatible with revelation: philosophy must try to

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This “return of religion” has a material component. Foundations such as Lilly,

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invisible. In a sense, then, religion cannot even be a proper object of knowledge

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For the intellectual historian of Europe, addressing this question asks us to

Was Hobbes a Theologian? Credulity, Suspicion,

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divine instruction. Right political community therefore is a consequence of

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Theology and the Polemics of Belief

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commented innocently, that theology “has no brilliance unless it is illuminated by

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1. That there was a time when men wandered like beasts.

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Taking Religion Lightly: Hobbes and Heterodoxy

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are no such bodies, nor “any generation to be conceived” in the subject of

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Absent a controlling authority, Hobbes found himself entitled to teach publicly

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from any consensus view of historical Christianity.92 Put differently, seen as a

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So is Hobbes a theologian? We might be in a better position now to think about

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