Jendrysik, “Land or Sea Beast”
MPSA 2004
4
knew full well, based on recent historical evidence, that the fear of death will not stop men from
acting out of strongly held beliefs, especially religious dogma.
16
Why did Hobbes expend so much energy on so many different targets? The answer lies in
the question of disorder. Each group described above played a critical role in the creation and
encouragement of political and religious strife. All of Hobbes’s targets presented and represented
beliefs about the nature and purpose of government that, for Hobbes, promoted divided religious
and political sovereignty and therefore civil war. Lloyd notes that competing power groups in
England (and one might add Britain as a whole) were attached to “inherently disruptive
doctrines” which are also “competing doctrines.”
17
For Hobbes, the beliefs of those groups
required examination and refutation.
18
Since for Hobbes religion is at its base solely about power, doctrines matter only so far as
they inspire political action. “Both Leviathan and Behemoth analyze specific religious
doctrines… by reference to the way they facilitate the power of priests and presbyters over
governments and subjects.”
19
This can be best seen in Hobbes’s attitude toward the Bible, that
key source of knowledge for seventeenth-century Englishmen. “In none of Hobbes’s works,
including Leviathan where scripture receives its most sustained attention, do we find an epistle
read in its entirety, a gospel faithfully reflected upon from beginning to end, a book perused for
meaning and guidance.”
20
But this is not such a damning indictment. Hobbes’s contemporaries
of all political stripes were quite willing to do the same.
21
As might be imagined, Hobbes takes a
dim view of others using the Bible to defend their private views. He states in Behemoth “After
the Bible was translated into English, every man, nay, every boy and wench, that could read
English, thought they spoke with God almighty and understood what he said.”
22
The History of Civil War in Leviathan
Throughout Leviathan Hobbes provides a number of causes for the “dissolution of
commonwealths.” These causes are both religious, or based in false beliefs about matters of
conscience, and political, or based in false beliefs about the proper organization of the state.
16
Lloyd, Ideals as Interests, 2 and 37. This point is also noted by Russell Hardin, “Hobbesian Political Order.”
Political Theory Vol. 19, no. 2 (May 1991): 156-180; and by Joshua Mitchell, Not by Reason Alone: Religion,
History, and Identity in Early Modern Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Chapter 2.
17
Lloyd, Ideals as Interests, 215.
18
Quinten Skinner famously claims that Hobbes was addressing the Engagement Controversy in Leviathan.
Certainly it is possible to derive the position that Hobbes is mainly addressing the Engagement from a reading of
Leviathan, especially in light of what Hobbes said in the last chapter (A Review, and Conclusion). There Hobbes
seems to counsel an acceptance of conquest as the basis of political obligation. While Hobbes is addressing the
Engagement Controversy, he is also involved in a larger project of curing disorder and reorganizing politics. This
project could not be realized merely by counseling acceptance of the de facto sovereignty of the Commonwealth. To
suggest acceptance would mean losing the opportunity to restructure both state and society (through the exercise of
sovereign power). The very scope of Leviathan suggests that Hobbes was not overly concerned with temporary
measures to secure order. His central concern remains the creation of “an immortal commonwealth” through the
development of a universal theory of politics.
19
George Kateb, “Hobbes and the Irrationality of Politics,” Political Theory Vol. 17, No. 3 (August 1989), 364.
20
James Farr, “Atomes of Scripture: Hobbes and the Politics of Biblical Interpretation” in Thomas Hobbes and
Political Theory, ed. Mary G. Dietz (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1990), 173.
21
For a useful discussion of the political role of the Bible in the English Revolution see Christopher Hill, The
English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (New York: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1993),
especially Chapter 1. Hill states that during the Civil War the Bible “came to be used as a rag-bag of quotations
which could justify whatever a given individual or group wanted to do” (188).
22
Behemoth, 21.
Convention