1.
F.C. Hood sticks to what Hobbes himself has said. He has no intention of understanding Hobbes better than he understood himself. Accordingly, his Leviathan interpretation is derived from a fastidious adherence to the text itself rather than from the vast, ever expanding body of literature on Hobbes. Proceeding in this manner, he analyzes and compares the often dissimilar formulations found in Elements (1640), de Cive (1642 and 1646), and in the English and Latin editions of Leviathan (1651 and 1668).
The question introduced by Howard Warrender in his 1957 book The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. His Theory of Obligation, which concerns the purview and (secondarily) the grounds of political obligation, is taken up by Hood, albeit in another direction. The citizen’s duty to obey the laws of the sovereign does not have its ultimate ground in any contract of subjection [Unterwerfungsvertrag], in some authorization which the subjects of the state have granted the sovereign, in the renunciation of the right to resist, nor even simply in the irresistibility of the state’s coercive power. According to Hobbes, the real ground for obedience––and what makes it binding for conscience––is found in commandments taken from natural law. Yet these commandments are considered binding not merely by virtue of being dictates of reason, but in being considered coextensive with God’s command or as words of Holy Scripture.
Hobbes’ political doctrine is part of his political theology. The sense and purpose of his thinking is to achieve peace, or, put concretely: to put an end to the confessional civil war and bring about the secular, earthly peace of a Christian community [Gemeinwesen]. He is hardly concerned with non-Christian communities or with the duty of obedience towards any non-Christian sovereign. It is no mere accident that Hobbes’ sovereign is a Christian: throughout the Reformation, e.g. in Melanchthon or Erastus, the sovereign is assumed to be Christian. Hobbes is—as J.J. Rousseau (Social Contract IV, 8) says with a certain emphasis—“un auteur chrétien.”1 Hobbes often and emphatically acknowledged that Jesus is the Christ. For him, such a statement is much more than a mere subjective confession, it is an axiom of the same system of conceptual thought which determines his political theology. Hood takes this statement seriously, both as a personal confession at the level of a subjective remark, and in terms of its objective content at the level of Hobbes’ political doctrine. Hood dismisses any misgivings about this assertion which arise from the biographical research done by John Aubrey by calling Aubrey a “babbler.” What makes Hood’s approach so radical is that it jettisons all the countless conjectures and insinuations which have turned Hobbes into a pioneer of secularization, a champion of anti-clericalism, and even a covert atheist.
His book provides a reliable foundation for all further interpretations of Leviathan. Due to the fact that the method of strictly limiting himself to Hobbes’ text is so practical and convincing, and because Hood has applied it so deftly to key concepts––obligation, sovereignty, authority––the reader becomes eager to see other of Hobbes’ essential concepts analyzed and clarified in this way. From my perspective, what is missing is an examination of the concept of the enemy, which could be decisive for elucidating what Hobbes understood as atheism. The atheist is defined as an enemy of God and treated accordingly: ut hostis ab hoste; hoc est jure belli (de Cive II 14 § 19). It is also natural to ask what the political traitor or rebel actually does when he dares to declare war on the sovereign, that is, when he openly positions himself as an enemy and risks a leap back into the state of nature. Every Hobbes enthusiast would be keen to see this topic treated in the style of Hood’s analyses.
The totalitarianism of the 20th century has led to some hasty appropriations of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, especially by those who seek to turn it into a manifesto of this very totalitarianism. In comparison, Hood’s strict adherence to the authentic text is sobering and often feels like a relief. Of course, we must go further than that. It goes without saying that we must first clarify what Hobbes actually said. But then we must ask what he really meant. This question is unanswerable without taking certain historical considerations into account. Neither the meaning of the questions Hobbes asked himself nor the meaning of his answers can be understood without first reflecting on the history of philosophy. This is all the more true for any interpretation that intends to remain strictly immanent to the work and system. For example, an examination of how the concepts of natural and artificial relate to each other in Hobbes is indispensable. Hood seems to assume that any obligation to obey requires—on top of being binding for people’s conscience—an additional supplement from natural law, since the sovereign is an artificial person. In reality, it is likely that a commitment created by way of human word and language—being necessarily artificial—may be the stronger and deeper bond for Hobbes, since it does not depend on any support from nature (which is of course, for him, problematic). However, this matter cannot be resolved without some remarks on the philosophy of language and the concept of nature which are implicit in Hobbes’ doctrine of obligation.
Above all, the reader of Hood’s book is left with a strong desire to learn more about what Hobbes actually meant with the title “Leviathan.” For millennia, the Leviathan has been one of the most compelling images of political theology and theological politics. There was a time when I was of the opinion that the title had a mere literary significance for Hobbes, perhaps in the vein of an intentionally ironic Baroque or Mannerist style. John Bowle (Hobbes and His Critics) and Samuel I. Mintz (The Hunting of Leviathan) have related how Hobbes’ contemporary English critics, such as Bishop Bramhall, Alexander Ross, and others, used the matter as an opportunity to jokingly conjure images such as the “capture of the great whale,” which is pierced through the mouth or head with a hook, or alluded to the Kabbalistic expectation of the thousand-year feast, where the righteous gather to consume the flesh of the slain animal. Despite all the jokes, the mythical power of the name always prevails anew. Yet Hobbes knew all too well what words and names mean. For a nominalist like himself, the whole world of human perception and thought is not given, but created by fiat through words and language. In an important essay “Thomas Hobbes’ Doctrine of Meaning and Truth,” Dorothea Krook has shown that this pertains to the Scotist-Occamist line of his thought.
Did Hobbes know what he was doing when he chose such an eye-catching, intimidating image to sheathe his structure of thought? A wise, sober, cautious man like him would surely have calculated the effect this must have on his readers familiar with the Bible. Wasn’t it sheer madness to jeopardize the good impression of a peace-making political philosophy with such an allegorical draping? Didn’t such cryptic chimeras risk destroying the grand pedagogical plan of civic education? To be sure, the uncanny Leviathan plays into suspicions that the book harbors potentially subversive intentions.
New and further questions arise as soon as one begins to center the Leviathan in considering Hobbes’ Leviathan. In the entire Jewish and Christian tradition preceding Hobbes, the two great animals, Leviathan and Behemoth, are distinguished only by land and sea, that is, by the elements of earth and water, but not by good and evil or God and devil. In fact, many Christian theologians in the Middle Ages forgot the opposition between land and sea with regard to the two animals and the names Leviathan and Behemoth were used haphazardly. Did Hobbes know what he was doing when he suddenly created an enormous opposition between Leviathan and Behemoth and elevated the former to a symbol of peace and order, even to a mortal god, while making the Behemoth a sign of the worst of all evils, a symbol of confessional civil war? And why should the sea monster, the Leviathan, be the symbol of good, and the land animal, the Behemoth, be the symbol of evil? Insofar as the previous European tradition made a conscious distinction between the two, the Behemoth remained terrestrial in accordance with the unequivocal teaching of the Bible, which assigns the earth to humans, while the sea is hostile and dangerous to man. Hobbes only mentioned the image of the Behemoth as a symbol in passing, while his Leviathan appears in four guises: as a mortal god, a great man, a great animal, and a perfect machine. These distinctions are not applicable to the Behemoth. As far as I can tell, Hobbes scholarship has failed to delve further into the question of the symbolism of the Leviathan. Only John Laird mentions obvious inconsistencies and notes that the title “Behemoth against Leviathan,” suggested by Hobbes himself, would have merely meant the superiority of a land monster over a sea monster, whereas one would assume that the Long Parliament would be portrayed as a detestable beast, while Hobbes’ artificial great man would be portrayed as a benevolent giant.2 Laird also reminds us that in the book of Job 40:19, the Behemoth is called “the beginning of God’s ways.” In my book The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (1938), I made a preliminary attempt to outline a historical sketch of the political symbolism of the Leviathan. I will point out a significant gap in this sketch at the end (in section 3).
2.
Almost simultaneously with Hood’s interpretation of Leviathan, the first part of a book by one of Karl Barth’s students, Dietrich Braun, was published. The title of the book is The Mortal God, or Leviathan against Behemoth [Der sterbliche Gott, oder Leviathan gegen Behemoth]. The very title of the book contains the names of the symbols Hobbes used. The first part, published in 1964, has the subtitle Considerations on the Place, Meaning, and Function of the Doctrine of the Kingship of Christ in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan [Erwägungen zu Ort, Bedeutung und Funktion der Lehre von der Königsherrschaft Christi in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan], emphasizing the theological focal point. Hobbes did not expect the Kingdom of Christ on Earth until the end of time. The declarants and fighters of the English Civil War which Hobbes had in mind considered themselves citizens of this Kingdom of Christ. For them, this kingdom had already dawned and, as it turned out, was even a political entity capable of civil war. According to Braun, the Leviathan refers to the political entity constructed and named by Hobbes in its four guises: God, man, animal, and machine. The Behemoth refers to the English Presbyterians and Independents, whom Hobbes regards as assailants, disturbers of peace, and enemies. The name Behemoth is not explicitly applied to the other enemy, Roman Catholic Papism. The reformed theologian stands on the side of the Behemoth in seeking to expose the author of the Leviathan as a cynic.
To give a definitive assessment of Dietrich Braun’s work as a whole, we will have to wait for the promised second part of his study. In which direction he will continue the course set out in the first part, especially whether and to what extent he will probe deeper into the theological symbolism of Leviathan, is naturally up to the author to decide. The reader of Braun’s book bears witness to an exciting duel, but only once the book is complete can he answer the grand question of whether the Leviathan has been finally, truly, and definitively defeated, or whether the old man of Malmesbury will be able say to his present expositor something along the lines of what he said to his contemporary opponent, Bishop John Bramhall, in reference to his 1668 book The Catching of the Leviathan: “His Lordship has catched nothing.”
Braun’s presentation of his personal theological standpoint—namely the belief that the kingship of Christ on Earth has already begun—is methodically robust. He seeks to understand Hobbes better than he understood himself. With theological acumen and an impressive scientific arsenal, he comes to the conclusion that Hobbes is the cynical makeup artist of an anti-Christian state totalitarianism. He claims that the confession that Jesus is the Christ, and everything that sounds like Christianity and Christliness in Hobbes is smoke and mirrors: a heathen mythological mask donned for totalitarian ends. Hood points out that Hobbes was not anti-clerical. It should also be noted that the famous injunction silete theologi! [be silent, theologians!] issued to theologians in the age of confessional civil wars did not come from Hobbes, but from Albericus Gentilis, a jurist. Braun prefers to read the slogan as corroborating his image of Hobbes. For him, the cynicism of the Leviathan consists precisely in the fact that theologians, clerics, and preachers are not silenced but rather placed in the service of the state and tasked with anchoring the duty of obedience to state laws in the consciences of those subject to it.
In this, Braun sees the demonic nature of a comprehensive attempt to foist the pagan myth of a purely earthly order of peace onto the already begun Kingdom of Christ on Earth. By outwardly retaining Christian forms and formulas, the Leviathan is an effort to indirectly seize hold of the political potential inherent in the Christian faith. In other words, Hobbes wants to “constructively infiltrate.” In a surprising twist, Braun places Hobbes—the great advocate of direct power, the Promachos against the Roman doctrine of the potestas indirecta [indirect power] of the Church, the famous opponent of Cardinal Bellarmine—among those advocating for indirect power, since the full directness of political power can only be achieved through the indirect utilization of the forces of religious faith. This demon does not want to abolish God and Christ, theology and preaching, but rather to coordinate [gleichschalten] them.
All this is presented with compelling force and is already now, after this first part of Braun’s study, so irrevocably established that the anticipated second part will be able to provide new points of view and new material, but no new thesis on the interpretation of Leviathan which would change the current result. Our goal here is not to refute Braun. If everything Hobbes says is based on lies and deceit, then exposing him does not mean understanding him better than he understood himself, it simply involves exposing a cunning swindler. However, the young Reformist theologian’s interpretation of Leviathan cannot be dismissed with such a remittal; it contains too much important material and captivating argumentation. In our shared endeavor to do justice to Hobbes and to avoid false imputations, we must recall details of the controversial philosopher’s concrete historical context. Hobbes deals with questions of practical philosophy. Before denying him good faith, the other possibilities of examining his way of thinking should be tested, and if he was a “positivist,” then the meaningful possibilities of positivism should also be considered as they arise concretely in the context of a confessional civil war for a thinker of philosophia moralis, who, after a hundred years of conflict, sees only one goal before his eyes: peace, the end of the civil war, and the deum colere χατα τα νομμα (de Cive, III, 15, 19).
Hobbes has often been located in the history of thought as a Baroque philosopher. Rudolf Kassner identifies essential and typical Baroque elements in Hobbes’ conception of death as the immutable end of all earthly existence and his conception of rule as a facade of power. With Hobbes, much is concealed, much is veiled. I do not believe that he can be called a “homme au masque” to the extent Descartes could be, nor that his entire intellectual existence was only a larvatus prodeo. But today, he would certainly be classified as belonging to the period of Mannerism, as it is understood by art and literary historians to be a separate, independent epoch between the Renaissance and the Baroque periods (1550 to 1650). Political allegories and emblems, masks and costumes all belong to Mannerism. After considering the peculiarities of Mannerism, a symbol like that of the Leviathan, which appears in four forms and is seen as both a mortal god, a great human, a large animal, and a perfect machine, can now be considered in a novel light.
With its myriad symbolic and allegorical figures, the famous title page of Leviathan is a quintessential political allegory. A curtain in the middle at the bottom of the page indicates that much is said here, but also that some things are veiled. Two exceptionally relevant treatises by Roman Schnur must be mentioned in this context: The French Jurists in the Confessional Civil War of the 16th Century [Die französischen Juristen im konfessionellen Bürgerkrieg des 16. Jahrhunderts] (1962) and Individualism and Absolutism. On Political Theory before Thomas Hobbes [Individualismus und Absolutismus. Zur politischen Theorie vor Thomas Hobbes] (1963). The artistic and cultural-historical phenomenon of Mannerism is absolutely essential to any consideration of Hobbes’ use of masks, disguises, and irony. Disregarding this context would result in an interpretation which surreptitiously turns those very masks, disguises, and that irony into causes for moral outrage and criminal accusations. It is no trifle to want to understand a great thinker of such an era better than he understood himself.
Moreover, it is necessary to recall some of the authors and doctrines from the history of the church during the Reformation period, namely those whose construction of a relationship between the invisible Christian church and the visible secular authority is often so reminiscent of Hobbes that it is hardly possible to continue excluding him from the development of state-church relations [Staatskirchenrecht] under Protestantism or to isolate him as a monstrous singularity and an uncanny subject. In recent years, German-language canonical literature has once again mentioned authors such as Wolfgang Musculus (1497–1563) and Thomas Erastus (1500–1583). Musculus is cited in a contribution by the Bernese lecturer Richard Bäumlin to the Festschrift for Johannes Heckel (1959), while Erastus is mentioned in an essay by Johannes Heckel titled “Cura religionis, jus in sacra, jus circa sacra” (in the 1938 Festschrift for Ulrich Stutz) and in Ruth Wesel-Roth’s book, Thomas Erastus. A Contribution to the History of the Reformed Church and the Doctrine of State Sovereignty [Thomas Erastus: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der reformierten Kirche und zur Lehre von der Staatssouveränität].
One of Musculus’ theses is that God transferred the cura disponendae religionis and the potestas in religione to Moses and Joshua, granting them the capacity to act as secular authorities, not as sacerdotes. Instead of speaking of the cura, Musculus prefers to speak of the potestas of the secular authority, which is a potestas disponendi, instituendi, and moderandae religionis. The Loci communes of Musculus were first published in French in 1577 and should not be overlooked when interpreting Thomas Hobbes, even if he himself was not familiar with the book, since the ideas contained therein first reached the broader world through Erastus. Musculus taught the preachers that they owed their office to the authority established by God (and not by them) and that they belonged to the mass of subordinates like any other Christian. As Ruth Wesel-Roth remarks, this demonstrates that he has “thought through the legal leveling of all citizens to a degree that was only realized by the modern state of the 19th century.”3 Perhaps neither Musculus nor Erastus would have rejected Hobbes indignantly—as their Anglican contemporaries did—or classified him as an atheist or Manichaean, as Bishop Bramhall or Alexander Ross and other Anglicans did.4 The 17th century was indeed the century of athei detecti. Father Jean Hardouin even exposed Pascal and the most devout Jansenists as atheists in his “Athei detecti.” Skeptics, Enlightenment thinkers, and encyclopedists like Bayle, Voltaire, and Diderot had an easy hand dealt to them, and could easily appropriate Hobbes and “Hobbism” [sic] for themselves.
What concerns us here is the internal logic of the relationship between spiritual and secular power [Gewalt], and the difficulties required to maintain a balance between this dualism despite the changes in historical situations, which sometimes favor the spiritual power and other times the secular power. Within Protestantism, the difference between Lutheran and Anglican state-church relations [Staatskirchenrecht] and the Calvinist doctrine and practice becomes apparent. Indeed, this difference seems to be reflected in the differing interpretations of Leviathan made by F.C. Hood and Dietrich Braun. As a doctrine and a movement, Erastianism serves as both a model case and a test of sorts. For Erastus, it is downright absurd to imagine governmental [obrigkeitliche] power as anything other than an indivisible unity. Ernst Troeltsch calls Erastianism a “resistance on behalf of the political authority provoked by the pressure exercised by Calvinism.”5 Erastus’ “Explicatio gravissimae quaestionis,” published posthumously in England in 1589, does indeed deal with a gravissima quaestio: whether it is the church community or the secular authority which has the right to excommunicate members of the congregation, a question which raises issues of public defamation and social boycott. Erastus answers in favor of secular authority. As Johannes Heckel says, he is “equally enthusiastic about the uniqueness, unity, and universalism of state power.” A connoisseur like John Neville Figgis believes that Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is “true Erastianism in its most full-blown form.”6 Needless to say, the Erastians lack the systematic, scientific justifications and constructions typical of Hobbes. For Hobbes, the scientific approach provides convincing evidence that was hopelessly lost in the dispute among theologians.
“The political, as an independently evolving [eigenwüchsig] element of collective life [Gemeinleben], asserts its claim to power with strong overtones.” This is how Johannes Heckel formulated the matter with reference to Wolfgang Musculus.7 In the England of the 1534 Act of Supremacy of 1534 and the 1562 39 Articles of Religion, and in the Germany whose state-church relations were based on the principle cujus regio, ejus religio, the ground had been cleared for the theses of Leviathan. Troeltsch makes a similar remark about the lasting effects of Hobbes’ teachings: in contrast to the Calvinists, only Anglicans and Lutherans “have understood how to gather grapes from the thorns of Hobbism.”8 It would be worthwhile to treat this difference as an independent topic within political theology. In the tapered framework of our discussion, a reference to Pufendorff is sufficient to cover the 17th century. But even in the 19th and 20th centuries, in the work of the Lutheran Rudolph Sohm—the last German legal scholar of profound and universal impact—structural analogies to Hobbes can be found, even though he never quotes him and probably never read him. E.-W. Böckenförde has convincingly demonstrated that Sohm traces the political-social reality of his time—which he discerned quite perspicaciously—back to its principle, namely the opposition between the sovereign state and the civil-liberal economic society. “To trace this reality back to its principle,” Böckenförde continues, “however, meant, to reveal conceptually what Hobbes in his theory had already thought of as the model of the modern world.”9 In Sohm, one finds further parallels to Hobbes, the expounding of which would trespass the scope of our discussion. His 1898 essay, “The Social Tasks of the Modern State” [“Die sozialen Aufgaben des modernen Staates”] deserves mention here, since it develops an imperialistic program to resolve the social question and shows a latent, yet potent—albeit still unrecognized—connection with Friedrich Naumann and Max Weber.
Both the artistic and cultural-historical phenomenon of Mannerism and the occurrence of Erastianism within the history of the church can help to safeguard the interpretation of Leviathan from any mythical appropriations and to protect Hobbes from being precipitately criminalized. It would be unfounded to accuse Hobbes of totalitarianism, if only because doing so would necessarily involve disregarding an essential and (in the context of legal history) extremely effective element of his doctrine of the state or—an even greater injustice—portraying it as a sophisticated swindle. Hobbes is the intellectual father of modern legal positivism, the precursor to Jeremias Bentham and John Austin, the pioneer of the liberal legal state [Gesetzesstaat]. He was the first to develop a systematic clarification of the principle “nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege,” [“no crime, no punishment without law”] which is essential for liberal criminal law. More than a hundred years ago, John Austin had already protested angrily against the ignorance and impudence of certain French, German, and even English critics who wanted to turn Hobbes into an apologist for absolutism. Ferdinand Tönnies celebrates him as a founder of the modern constitutional state, and even claims that the chapter “Of the Duty of Them That Have Sovereign Power” in the Elements of Law, published in German in 1926 under the title Natural Law [Naturrecht], can truly be considered a “manifesto of the constitutional state.” That property is sacred only through the law, but not for the legislator, not only corresponds to the thought of Thomas Hobbes, it is also a precisely formulated, consistently legalistic view upheld by Gerhard Anschütz, the leading commentator on the Weimar Constitution. Hobbes is the founder of a doctrine that establishes a constitutive connection between the free individual and property, or what C.B. Macpherson vividly labels the doctrine of “possessive individualism.”10 It is this connection that makes a modern bourgeois market society possible in the first place. Among all those who were familiar with Hobbes’ work, the idea that he was the “ancestor of totalitarian state power” had long ceased to be a “common notion.” Bernard Willms rightly emphasized this point in his review of the book Sociology of Peace [Soziologie des Friedens] by Christian Graf von Krockow.11
Admittedly, from a psychological perspective it is perfectly understandable that the horrors of modern totalitarianism also breathed life into the chimera of the Leviathan and muddled all interpretations of Hobbes. But even when people’s lines of reasoning are undeniably impacted by the severity of such horror, the judgments made upon Hobbes branch off into opposing claims. It is by no means the case that the experiences from recent decades have deprived Hobbes his share of enthusiastic admirers. Quite the contrary. Under the impact of the German air raids on London in World War II, an exceptional English historian called R. G. Collingwood published an astonishing document of Hobbes scholarship. Collingwood has earned our gratitude and respect in approaching the interpretation of historical deeds and words as a philosopher of question-answer logic. He has written a peculiar book entitled The New Leviathan, which is intended as a successor to Hobbes’ Leviathan. For him, world history is a struggle of civilization against barbarism, whose last historical manifestation (after Saracens, Albigensians, and Turks) is the Germans. Hobbes is the creator of a classical science of politics. In accordance with the progress of modern knowledge, his work be carried onwards, something Collingwood attempts in his New Leviathan. Hobbes—“that most English of Englishmen”—remains the great teacher of civilization against barbarism. His lessons should apply to both political and social life (p. 266). The preface to New Leviathan is dated 16 January 1942. Collingwood emphasizes that his book, unlike Hegel’s, was written during the bombardment of London by the Germans, not during the cannonade of Jena. Hobbes’ Leviathan remains for him the greatest storehouse of political wisdom; only modern war has taught us to what extent “there is more in Hobbes than we thought.”
Nevertheless, the mythical chimera of the Leviathan has contributed to embroiling Hobbes’ name in a fanciful myth. There is no other explanation for why the strong sense of individualistic freedom, which is unmistakable in Hobbes, is simply ignored. In terms of the individual, he distinguishes between friend and foe. In the concrete situation of his time, he concludes that the churches and prophets posed a far greater threat to individual freedom than anything which could be feared from a secular state authority. I do not see how it could be possible to explain away this liberal aspect of his legalistic thinking as lies and deceit. Nobody has shown better than Hobbes how a thinking person preserves his inner freedom in the face of the terror of confessional civil wars. The fact that he was roundly reviled for doing so and vilified as an atheist, a Manichaean (Gnostic), a materialist, and an Epicurean (atomist), speaks for the independence of his thinking and the authenticity of his liberal sensibility.12
The most important question to be clarified for our context—namely, the intellectual locus of Hobbes—is his position in the process of so-called secularization, i.e., the progressive de-Christianization and de-divinization of public life. This process of gradual neutralizations ultimately led to the methodical atheism and the “value neutrality” of science and prompted the age of a scientific-technological-industrial civilization. Here, at their peak, these neutralizations turned into something completely different and unexpected, which could no longer be described by the notions of “neutrality” and “neutralization.” Hobbes takes a peculiar stance with regard to this process of neutralization, which culminates in an unfettered but by no means neutral technology. This fact seems to me even more essential than the historical details mentioned above, which were indicated by the keywords Baroque or Mannerism, Erastianism and law-state [gesetzes-staatlicher] liberalism (“possessive individualism”).
At first glance, Hobbes seems to be at the forefront of this process of secularization, or more precisely: neutralization. It appears that he wanted to justify both church and state scientifically, that is, mathematically-geometrically, and that he wanted to become the Galileo of political science. Thus, he figures at the origin of the whole process which has culminated in today’s scientific civilization. We will discuss the reality of this below (in section 3). However, with his statement “Jesus is the Christ,” Hobbes gives the reader of the 19th and 20th centuries the impression that he spearheads the neutralization of religious truths. By contenting himself to define Christianity with the statement “Jesus is the Christ,” he seems to bring Rome and Geneva, and all the many other Christian churches, denominations, and sects together in a common, neutral denominator: “Jesus Christ.” In reality, his statement is not meant in this way. For him, both the religious unity and the distinctiveness of the individual Christian churches are preserved due to the fact that they are borne by the sovereign decision of the Christian sovereign. This is a cujus regio, ejus religio, and precisely for this reason, not a neutralization, but rather the opposite, namely a dogmatic positivization [Positivierung] in the face of the peculiarities of the divergent opinions of the confessional opponent or neighbor.
The effective neutralization looks quite different. It did indeed find adequate and authentic expression in the confessional civil wars, albeit before Hobbes and not in England, but rather in the France of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres. An example of this neutralization can be found in Jean Bodin’s Heptaplomeres (around 1593), where Bodin gives an esoteric account of the famous parable of the deception involved in the three counterfeit rings.13 It is only with Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1779) that the parable becomes exoteric and common knowledge of the educated. In Lessing’s version, the parable ceases to be an intra-Christian affair; instead, Christianity is entirely neutralized—as one of several theistic religions—alongside the two other theistic book religions, Judaism and Islam, into a general faith in God. The statement “Jesus is the Christ” becomes interchangeable; now it can also read: “Allah is greater.” This can easily be taken further, first to the point of a general faith in God, then to a still more general mere faith. Only at this point does the vehicle of boundless coordination [Gleichschaltung] arise, which is infinitely more effective than Hobbes’ statement about Jesus the Christ.
The inner logic of such a process of neutralization is evident. With every step, it becomes all the more irresistible, until it reaches the seemingly absolute neutrality of unfettered technology. If one can already create three counterfeit rings which are so deceptively real that the genuine ring becomes unnecessary and disappears from circulation, then it is not at all clear why one should counterfeit only three rings instead of counterfeiting thirty or three hundred rings and putting them into circulation. In this context, the only content left for different denominations is a small heap of axiology. Whatever one may accuse the ill-reputed Thomas Hobbes of in this context—cunning or cynicism, devilish irony or diabolical disguise—it did not occur to him to counterfeit the authentic ring. His claim that “Jesus is the Christ” strikes the core of the apostolic proclamation and fixes in place both the historical as well as the kerygmatic topic of the entire New Testament. Quis est mendax nisi is, qui negat quoniam Jesus est Christus? [Who is the liar? It is whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ] (1 John 2:22).
3.
Neither F. C. Hood nor Dietrich Braun pay attention to the essential context, to which Hans Barion, a Roman Catholic theologian and jurist of canon law, alerts us: namely “that Hobbes, with his mythical image of the Leviathan, only reverses the Societas Christiana doctrine of the hierocratic Middle Ages,” and that the question remains open “whether Hobbes actually wanted to oppose the hierocratic Corpus doctrine of his compatriot Johannes of Salisbury with a state counterpart.”14
For Barion, this question arises at the end of a longer discussion of an article by F. Kempf SJ entitled “Papal Power in the Medieval World” [“Die päpstliche Gewalt in der mittelalterlichen Welt”]. Kempf’s contribution deals with a 1955 book by Ullmann called The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, which sees the hierocratic-monistic claim (which abolishes the dualism of an independently secular power) as having been effective since the end of the Western Roman Empire, i.e. since the 5th century, and does not restrict its influence to the universal claims to power made in the High Middle Ages, famously recorded in the Unam Sanctam by Boniface VIII on 18 November 1302.
Any interpretation of Leviathan that seeks to do justice to the origin of Thomas Hobbes’ doctrine must keep in mind that Hobbes uses modern scientific arguments, but only because in disputing theological controversies, every other possibility of giving a convincing argumentation had been lost. Hobbes’ goal is not mathematics and geometry; he seeks the political unity of a Christian community [Gemeinwesen], the transparent construction of a conceptual system of “Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth ecclesiastical and civil.” His achievement within the history of ideas is not of a natural-scientific sort. He is neither a great mathematician, nor a physicist, nor a philosopher in the sense of providing a theory of these natural sciences. His scientific achievement belongs entirely to philosophia practica. He has recognized that every dispute between spiritual-ecclesiastical and secular-political authority becomes a political dispute the moment it escalates into a question of concrete self-assertion [Selbstbehauptung], such that it can no longer be decided by even the most sharp-witted distinctions between spiritual, secular, and mixed (res mixtae) powers, but only formally, i.e. by answering the formal question: Quis judicabit?
All distinctions pertaining to metaphysics, moral-theology, natural-law, and canonical-juridical law within the Roman Church had ultimately answered this question by stating that it is the spiritual power, as the higher power, that has the right to answer the Quis judicabit? In practical terms, the distinction between direct and indirect spiritual issues meant that the spiritual power [Gewalt] decided as soon as its existential interest in the concrete matter was strong enough. The epochal significance of Thomas Hobbes lies in having conceptually identified the purely political meaning of this spiritual claim to decision making. With unparalleled certainty, he posed the question formally and did not allow the simple Either-Or of the sovereign decision to be disputed away. He exposed all mixed or indirect powers as veils or mere postponements. In this way, he grasped the indirect claim to decision making and the monopoly on decision making contained therein, something which had not received conceptual clarity in the Middle Ages. Jean Bodin had only practically and juridically broken this enormous monopoly with his theory of sovereignty, while the Protestant churches and confessions either found merely provisional solutions or, if they had the political energy to do so, simply followed the Roman Church in its claim to possess the monopoly on decision making. The descriptions of this situation, which Rudolph Sohm has given in the third chapter of his Church Law [Kirchenrecht] under the heading “The Reformation,” retain their full historical truth, regardless of Sohm’s well-known thesis that the spiritual essence of the church excludes any ecclesiastical legal order. But their full light is only revealed by Hobbes’ Leviathan, namely through the relentless, repeatedly asked Quis judicabit, who decides?
This “Quis judicabit?” dominates the thought of Thomas Hobbes. Again and again, it emerges as the decisive feature, in dozens, if not hundreds of repetitions, be it openly in the form of a question about the ultimate deciding authority, or as the question: Quis interpretabitur? It is the question about the legally binding, i.e. unappealable and therefore infallible interpreting person or instance, not a question about substance. It is thus formal, not material. That being said, it is not scientific in the sense of mathematics or geometry, nor is it a functionalistic natural-scientific question. It remains thoroughly philosophical-practical, moral-juridical, and oriented towards the question of the ultimate sovereign person who decides. “For Subjection, Command, Right and Power are accidents not of Powers but of Persons.” (Leviathan, chapter 42)
With this specifically juridical personalism, Hobbes distinguishes himself from any natural-scientific scientism [naturwissenschaftlichen Scientismus] as well as from any mythical naturalism. This was already emphasized in my 1922 essay “Sociology of the Concept of Sovereignty and Political Theology”15 and in the book Political Theology. Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Yet the point must be repeated in the context of this discussion, since it is not possible to cut through the confusion of conflicting interpretations of Leviathan without keeping the core question in mind, which is a question of practical philosophy, and a legal question in specific. For Hobbes, philosophy is not a mere theory of mathematical or physical natural science. He is situated within the tradition of thought which has developed out of the Roman Church since the 11th century and which has been perfected partly in theological-metaphysical lines of thought, and partly in canonical-juridical lines of thought. Within Protestantism, and thereafter, in Anglicanism and in the Lutheran doctrine of authority, the intertwined distinctions between spiritual-secular, inner-outer, visible-invisible had been discussed for a hundred years until at last, Thomas Hobbes achieved the unmistakable statist antithesis to the Roman-Catholic ecclesiastical monopoly on decision making and thereby completed the Reformation. It appeared as the fruit—ripened by the fire of the confessional civil war—of an epoch still determined by the notion of the medieval jus reformandi while at the same time being already determined by the then nascent modern state’s claim to sovereignty. In other words, it is the fruit of a specifically theological-political age.16
Hobbes paves the way for modern natural law with his crucial distinctions between “Formal” and “Material.” Furthermore, what presents itself in Kant as an overcoming of pre-Kantian natural law, contains, as Karl-Heinz Ilting rightly says, “nothing that would have remained unknown to the author of Leviathan. Indeed, this fact reveals the profundity of his philosophy.”17 Hobbes is not a scientist [Scientist] in the modern sense of the word, and thus not a Saint-Simonist, an industrialist, nor a technocrat. Those who consider modern scientism to be the cause of modern totalitarianism and therefore accuse Hobbes of being the intellectual originator of the total state, do him an injustice. This is especially true for the book by J. Vialatoux, La Cité de Hobbes. Théorie de l’Etat Totalitaire. Essai sur la conception naturaliste de la civilisation (1935). Vialatoux sees in Hobbes an heir to the legists Philip the Fair and Louis of Bavaria, Nogaret and Occam. This nexus is well-known. Yet Vialatoux wields them polemically to argue that from a Roman Catholic standpoint, Hobbes is a totalitarian. This historical nexus does indeed exist, but it must not be simply used in a polemical or apologetical manner. Nor is it sufficient to create a historical register of this lineage and let a kaleidoscope of historical variations unfold. Of course, Hobbes wanted to oppose a “statist counterpart” to the hierocratic doctrine of corpus proper to Roman theology. But in this endeavor, he came up against the all-dominating question: Quis judicabit? This question must be recognized as an axis in Hobbes’ system of thought and concretely placed at the center of his practical philosophy.18 To do otherwise would be to transform his statements into answers to completely different questions than those he posed. This violates the principle of question-answer logic and succumbs to the irresistible suggestions propounded by Hobbes interpretations that take the strong myth of the Leviathan as their starting point.
Only in this way could Vialatoux make Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan out to be the origin of modern scientism, positivism, and naturalism, the ancestor of Emile Durkheim’s sociology and its attendant claim to possess a monopoly over a scientific approach [Wissenschaftlichkeit] which is now held responsible for totalitarianism. Vialatoux’s book was published in 1935. A few years later, Simone Weil identified the modern scientific approach as the cause of totalitarianism, albeit without returning to Hobbes, but simply from her intimate experiential knowledge of both modern science and totalitarianism. Recently, Jacques Mourgeon, despite rejecting charges of totalitarianism leveled at Hobbes, celebrated him as the first thinker of a science of politics, as the first scientific “politologist,” whose systematic rigor and deductive logic no longer qualify as theology or as philosophy, but rather as science [Wissenschaft] in the modern sense of the word.19
In reality, Hobbes is neither a scientist [Scientist] nor a technocrat. His thinking is fundamentally inadequate and even incommensurable to a scientifically and technologically advanced civilization, because Hobbes’ question Quis judicabit? does not concern the technical “lawfulness of states of affairs [Sachgesetzlichkeit]” at all. The self-consistent functionalism of these technical laws eliminates the notion of personal decision, and it does so “automatically,” by its own “logic,” without any decision of its own. To speak of “decisions” in this realm would be as absurd as pretending that the alternating red and green traffic light signals on today’s roads are a series of “administrative acts,” i.e., decisions, in order to construct them legally and fit them into the system of traditional administrative law – a move which is naively anthropomorphic, and hence entirely unscientific.
If this is already evident within the apolitical realm of traffic law, how much more so for the realm of the political! In scientific [wissenschaftlicher] civilization, one can speak, with Helmut Schelsky, of a “fictional decision-making activity of politicians” for whom the highly complex laws pertaining to certain states of affairs [Sachgesetzlichkeiten] dictate the solution to political tasks.20 Very well. These factual laws dictate solutions, i.e., answers. But they cannot ask a question on their own, least of all Thomas Hobbes’ question Quis judicabit? No matter how perfect a cybernetic apparatus may be, it is incapable of posing the question Quis judicabit? in the sense of Hobbes’ practical philosophy, independently of its own preconditions. In contrast to the apparatus that provides solutions and answers, the decisive question Quis judicabit? or Quis interpretabitur? leads to the question Quis interrogabit? That is the question of who poses the question and programs the apparatus, the latter being incapable of making decisions [Entscheidungsfremd] itself.
The questions to which Hobbes responds concern the concrete historical opposition between spiritual and secular power [Gewalt], and our remarks are intended to clarify Barion’s brief but comprehensive reference to Johannes of Salisbury. It is curious that F.C. Hood, in his careful use of Hobbes’ authentic text, did not make the concept of potestas indirecta into the subject of a separate discussion. Had he done so, he would have come across the ever-repeated Quis judicabit? Quis interpretabitur? The zeal, not to say the bitterness, with which Hobbes fights against this doctrine of potestas indirecta can be explained by the fact that, for him, it is the obfuscation and blurring of boundaries that prevents any dispute from ever coming to rest. Nobody who seeks to understand Hobbes as he understood himself can ignore this. Dietrich Braun, on the other hand, in the first part of his Leviathan book, pays too much attention to the fight against the Behemoth, which symbolizes the internal English-Evangelical civil war. Thus he neglects to include the front against the world enemy of England at that time, the Roman Church, within his symbolism. The reference to Johannes of Salisbury can help both Hood and Braun to correctly locate the authentic questions of Hobbes’ Leviathan.
First and foremost, Hobbes is concerned with the doctrine of potestas indirecta. Hobbes primarily opposes the version of this doctrine put forward by Cardinal Bellarmine at the time. However, the fact that this doctrine was already effective in the Middle Ages and had abolished the dualism of independent powers is evident in the fact that “indirect” became the dominant term in canon law. Here Barion quotes Vincentius Hispanus, who explains the formula “non intendimus judicare de feudo” (i.e., the Church does not judge feudal, secular matters, but only de peccato, those which pertain to sin) as follows: “Directe, set indirecte cognoscendo an peccet, et inducendo ad penitentiam.” Bellarmine does not disavow this High Middle Age conception of potestas indirecta, which questions the dualism.
The political theology of a monistic-hierocratic doctrine rests on the assumption that the sword of secular authority becomes superfluous when people submit to the divine truth of the Church.21 This assumption is essential to the political theory of Saresberiensis. He conceives the res publica as a unified corpus, whose soul is the priests, whose armed arms are made up by the soldiers, and whose feet are the peasants. This corpus is then opposed by another, a corpus unum of the wicked, quod ex patre diabolo est (Policraticus, Book 6, chap. 1). The corpus unum of the wicked is vividly described in accordance with the Leviathan-Behemoth image in the Book of Job, in which the Leviathan and Behemoth become indiscernible. It is the wicked who form this firmly-bound corpus; they aid one another “quia convenuerunt in unum adversus Dominum et adversus Christum ejus.”
This conspicuous invocation of the Leviathan image is found in one of the most magnificent documents of the struggle between spiritual-ecclesiastical and secular-political power and deserves more attention in the interpretation of Hobbes than it has thus far received. The fact that it is missing in my 1938 sketch of the history of the symbolism of the Leviathan (1938) is a gap that I cannot fill in retrospectively in any way that would do justice to the significance of such an invocation, but neither can I rest on my laurels.
The ancient political myth of the Leviathan is still strong enough today to distract the interpretation of Hobbes from its substantive subject matter and to transform Hobbes himself into a mythical figure. This mythicization reached its first acme in the mid-19th century by way of Auguste Comte, the founder of a religion of scientific positivism. Comte elevated the philosopher of Malmesbury to the church father of this new religion and inscribed his name in golden letters in the liturgical calendar of the scientific age. A second high point in the opposite direction emerged under the impact of modern totalitarianism. In this interpretation, Hobbes was held responsible for the horrors and atrocities of this totalitarianism. Whether it is possible today to return to the substantive questions of Hobbes interpretation will only become apparent in the course of further discussion. Perhaps F.C. Hood’s book is an encouraging symptom; perhaps the anticipated second part of Dietrich Braun’s book will also help us to bring the biblical image of the Leviathan into a proper relationship with its numerous political applications. For “only Hobbes’ Leviathan is the expression of the completed Reformation.”
Translated by Hunter Bolin