Turning from the religious and spiritual ways of dealing with scepticism to a more mundane effort that was offered in the seventeenth century, I shall look at the political solution offered by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679).
Hobbes was born in 1588 on the day of the Spanish Armada sea battle. He went to Oxford and then became a tutor to the earl of Devonshire and stayed on as a functionary for the family. Hobbes spent many years in Paris—1629–31, 1634, 1637, and 1640–51—and spent a great deal of his time, when most of his books were written, as a central member in the circle of Mersenne and Gassendi. He also came to know Guy Patin, one of the libertins érudits, who became his personal physician later on. During this period in Paris, he learned much about the New Science and made a trip to visit Galileo. Back in England, he was involved with the moderate leadership of the Anglican Church. As political changes started occurring in the late 1630s, Hobbes, along with some of his aristocratic patrons, fled to France. The Puritan Revolution so frightened him that he remained in France until 1651. During this third Paris period, he wrote his major philosophical works. De Cive was the first to appear, in 1642, dedicated to the earl of Devonshire. This work was translated into French by Samuel Sorbière at the request of Mersenne and was published in 1646 with introductory letters both by Mersenne and Gassendi. No doubt due to his friendship with Mersenne and Gassendi, Hobbes was introduced into the early discussions of Descartes’ work. In 1641, when Mersenne compiled a set of objections by learned men to Descartes’ theory, Hobbes was one of the seven authors chosen, and he wrote a very fierce attack on Cartesian philosophy. Hobbes returned to England in the early 1650s and lived the rest of his long life there.
Hobbes is usually presented as an English philosopher following on after Francis Bacon. However, since he was developing his ideas and writing his first works in the sceptical and libertin world in Paris, it is not too presumptuous to assume that he was aware of the sceptical controversies going on and discussed them with the living figures in the sceptical movement. However, his correspondence shows little of this except for his letters to his translator, Samuel Sorbière. Sorbière, in fact, sent his unfinished translation of Sextus Empiricus to their mutual friend Jacques du Bosc.1 Sorbière was trying to complete a translation of Sextus in the 1630s. He became a disciple of Gassendi and the editor of Gassendi’s posthumous works. He was a more complete sceptic than Gassendi and even criticized him for not carrying his doubts further. In Hobbes’ writings, the term “sceptic” appears only a few times, and there are just a couple of references to Sextus Empiricus, and these references are in his controversial works against mathematicians. So Hobbes did not present himself as a discussant with Mersenne, Gassendi, La Mothe le Vayer, or others writing on sceptical themes.
Another figure who seems to have led Hobbes into different kinds of sceptical theorizing is Isaac La Peyrère, who was the secretary of the prince of Condé. Many of the scientific and philosophical meetings were held at the Hôtel Condé. La Peyrère was working on his biblical criticism and the theory that there were men before Adam. La Peyrère’s work contains many similarities to the biblical criticism presented by Hobbes in Leviathan and also contains a theory about man in the state of nature much like that offered by Hobbes.
Not too infrequently, either Hobbes has been labeled a “sceptic” by scholars or some aspect of his thought has been claimed to be a form of scepticism. For instance, Dorothea Krook, in her article “Thomas Hobbes’s Doctrine of Meaning and Truth,” began by asserting: “It is generally acknowledged that Hobbes’s radical scepticism is intimately connected with his nominalism.” A few lines later, she said: “The connection between Hobbes’s scepticism and nominalism is indeed sufficiently attested by the pervasive influence of his nominalism in his whole doctrine of commonwealth in Leviathan.” The article goes into great and careful detail about the character of his scepticism, including remarks like: “The peculiar interest of Hobbes’s scepticism for the philosophical reader is that it is the joint product of his radical nominalism, in logic, in epistemology and in metaphysics.”2
In Father Frederick Copleston’s discussion of Hobbes in his history of philosophy, he devoted three pages to the question of whether Hobbes was a sceptic. Copleston felt the answer was no. He pointed out that many commentators have spoken of Hobbes’ nominalistic scepticism. However, he contended, “if, therefore, we press the empiricist aspect of Hobbes’ philosophy, it is possible to argue that his nominalism is not necessarily infected with scepticism.” The furthest Father Copleston would go was to suggest that perhaps Hobbes was a sceptic nominalist. However, Copleston maintained that anyone who reads all of Hobbes’ philosophical writings is unlikely to consider that “sceptic” is the most appropriate label for his view.3
J. W. N. Watkins, in his book Hobbes’s System of Ideas, spoke of Hobbes’ ethical scepticism, as contrasted with his ethical authoritarianism. The ethical scepticism is shown to be a fairly basic part of Hobbes’ case. Watkins devoted a couple of pages to trying to show that ethical scepticism is not the proper result of finding out that there cannot be a proven or well-justified system of moral propositions.4 Hobbes is also sometimes called a religious sceptic, partly because of his view that Moses was not the author of the entire Pentateuch. (I will discuss this later on.) One could easily multiply the free and easy ways that Hobbes has been labeled a sceptic or has been saved from that label.
What I intend to do here is to try to delineate both historically and ideologically where Hobbes falls in the development of modern scepticism. Hobbes is historically very interesting. When Hobbes arrived in Paris in 1640, he stayed with a member of the Mersenne-Gassendi circle, Jacques du Bosc, who was a close friend of Samuel Sorbière.5 In the Mersenne-Gassendi circle were people far more sceptical, such as Patin, Naudé, La Mothe le Vayer, and Sorbière.6 The latter was at one time working on a French translation of Sextus Empiricus. After he became one of Gassendi’s chief disciples (who criticized Gassendi for not being sufficiently sceptical) he was given the task by Mersenne of preparing a French translation of Hobbes’ De Cive. Mersenne had told him that if he studied the work he would no longer be a complete sceptic.7 Sorbière translated De Cive, remained a sceptic, and stayed in close relations with Hobbes. When Sorbière visited England, one of the main purposes of the trip was to see Hobbes again.8
Hobbes was a member of this avant-garde group in Paris for many years, but very little has been done about examining Hobbes’ views in the context of Parisian philosophy of the time. Even the French Jesuit historian of philosophy Gaston Sortais, who dug up so much material on other members of this group, did not delve deeply into Hobbes in the French scene.9 The published manuscript of Hobbes’ first philosophical work, his answer to Thomas White, was written in Paris, where Hobbes knew White. The manuscript was found about fifty years ago in the Bibliothèque Nationale in some papers of Mersenne.10
Given all of this, Hobbes should fit into the world of sceptical and antisceptical developments. Richard Tuck has provided a new lead in showing that Hobbes was extending Grotius’ answer to Carneadean scepticism.11 Hugo Grotius had been a leader of the Dutch Arminians and had to flee his homeland after the Synod of Dort in 1619. The story is that he fled hidden in a trunk and went to Paris.12 There he became the Swedish ambassador to the French government—a post he held for many years. Hobbes lived very near him, and they seemed to have had a good deal of contact. Grotius was actively involved with the Mersenne circle. He wrote against Isaac La Peyrère’s pre-Adamism long before the book appeared.13 It may well be that Hobbes took the effect of modern scepticism, as Grotius did, as a way of wiping away the cobwebs of the period, and then offered a new science of man without much metaphysics, as part of what Tuck calls a “post-sceptical” endeavor.”14 In an article entitled “Hobbes and Descartes,” presented at the 1988 Hobbes conference at Oxford, Tuck showed that Hobbes’ presentation of his position developed out of the attempt to deal with Descartes’ answer to scepticism. Both Hobbes’ and Gassendi’s answers to Descartes are part of their efforts to present new views for the new science in terms of a “mitigated” or “post-” sceptical attitude, what Gassendi called a via media between scepticism and dogmatism.15 As Hobbes is being seen in the French context in which he worked out his general philosophy, he is emerging more obviously as one of the major thinkers wrestling with the sceptical crisis of the time.
As soon as Hobbes published De Cive and Leviathan, he was accused of being a sceptic. This accusation, which followed him to his grave, centered on contending that Hobbes doubted and undermined true claims of the Christian religion, rather than on contending that he was a sceptic about the possibility of human knowledge in general.16 Tuck has shown that Hobbes was also accused of being a moral sceptic who dismissed scepticism by adopting a scepticism about any objective justice or morality; and by advocating a kind of scepticism by making self-interest the sole basis of human conduct.17
If Hobbes was deeply involved with the French new scientists, the new philosophers and the new sceptics, did he imbibe any of their views? He was definitely influenced by the mechanistic outlook that pervaded the scientific works of Mersenne, Gassendi, Descartes, and others. Marshall Missner and Richard Tuck have indicated that certain texts of Hobbes about how we know about people, our motives, and those of others, suggest that Hobbes was dealing with issues in epistemological scepticism, albeit in a less obvious language and manner than Montaigne or Gassendi did.18 But if one compares how much scepticism is discussed by Mersenne, Gassendi, and Descartes with how much space is given over to it by Hobbes, the result is most striking. Mersenne wrote a thousand-page book, La verité des sciences contre les septiques ou pyrrhoniens, of which the first quarter is a running commentary on Sextus Empiricus’ ancient sceptical treatise Hypotyposes. Gassendi had written a sceptical attack on Aristotelianism, as well as the first part of his Syntagma Philosophicum, which discussed the sceptical challenge to other epistemologies. Descartes, of course, devoted a good deal of his Discourse on Method and his Meditations on First Philosophy to developing a complete scepticism and then overcoming it. Hobbes, we know, read Descartes’ Discourse and Meditations, since he was one of the first persons to write an answer to Descartes.
In light of the above, it is quite surprising that the index of the Molesworth edition of the English Works of Hobbes lists one entry under “sceptics” or “scepticism.” It refers to a passage in De Corpore where Hobbes briefly chided the sophists and the sceptics for the way they denied and opposed the truth.19 I have come across another reference to the sceptics in Hobbes’ Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematics. In this work, Hobbes twice cited points in Sextus Empiricus about mathematics. (And this seems to be the sole work in which Sextus is mentioned.) In discussing what he thought were inadequacies in Euclid’s definitions, Hobbes said that Sextus used some of these definitions “to the overthrow of that so much renowned evidence of geometry”!20 Later on, Hobbes pointed out that his mathematical opponent and Sextus had misunderstood Euclid’s first definition. Sextus had then argued that geometry is no science. Hobbes’ opponent by doing the same has “betrayed the most evident sciences to the sceptics.”21
These two references hardly make it seem that Hobbes cared very much about scepticism and sceptics. He lived in an intellectual society in which one of the greatest issues of the time was whether or not there was any way of overcoming the sceptical doubts about man’s ability to gain knowledge about the world. In contrast to the way the sceptical challenge dominated French intellectual life in the first half of the seventeenth century, the works Hobbes wrote while in Paris, the center of the sceptical ferment, reflect practically nothing of what was going on. Had Hobbes been a recluse who never talked to anyone in the city at the time, then the detachment in his writings from the vital issues of the time would be understandable. However, since we know that Hobbes was involved all of the time with the leading figures who were discussing scepticism, some explanation is needed to account for what Hobbes wrote in Paris. Perhaps if a detailed study were made of Hobbes’ actual relationships with the French and English intellectuals in Paris, we might see if there was something different about Hobbes’ reactions to the ideas being discussed around him from those of the others.22
Gianni Paganini has been examining a way in which sceptical materials appear in Hobbes, namely that he uses words, phrases, and ideas that appear in Montaigne and Francis Bacon. Therefore, a type of sceptical expression dating from the late sixteenth century appears in many places in Hobbes’ text.23
If Hobbes does not seem to have been part of the sceptical crisis going on around him, he was nonetheless accused of being a sceptic, though not in the sense of a Pyrrhonian sceptic or a follower of Montaigne. Rather Hobbes, as soon as he began to publish, was accused of being a sceptic about religious convictions. At the time that De Cive was published, Descartes charged that the work contained dangerous maxims.24 After Leviathan appeared, the charge of scepticism about religion became both more precise and more forceful. One specific item, which was brought up a great deal, was the claim made in part 3, chapter 33, concerning whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch. The chapter has an innocentenough-looking title, “Of the Number, Antiquity, Scope, Authority and Interpreters of the Books of Holy Scripture.” At the outset, Hobbes points out that it was of the greatest importance to know what God has said. The Canon of the Church of England tells us what books to accept as biblical. But
who were the original writers of the several Books of Holy Scripture, has not been made evident by any sufficient testimony of other history, which is the only proof of a matter of fact; nor can be, by any arguments of natural reason; for reason serves only to convince the truth, not of fact, but of consequence. The light, therefore, that must guide us in this question must be that which is held out unto us from the books themselves; and this light, though it shows us not the writer of every book, yet it is not unuseful to give us knowledge of the time, wherein they were written.25
When Hobbes took up the question of whether Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, he was posing a historical question that did not immediately lead to sceptical questions. For Hobbes, the question of whether the Bible contained the Word of God was settled by the Church of England, which had also settled which books are biblical.26 The question that had not been answered was a historical one—did Moses write all that is attributed to him, namely the first five books of the Old Testament? Hobbes argued that it is not enough to say that they were written by Moses because they are called the five books of Moses. He pointed out that the last chapter of Deuteronomy deals with the death of Moses. “It is therefore manifest, that those words were written after his interment.”27 Hobbes also pointed to other lines in Genesis and Numbers that appear to have been written after Moses. From this small entry into what is now called “biblical criticism,” Hobbes drew the conclusion that “though Moses did not compile these books entirely, and in the form we have them; yet he wrote all that which he is there said to have written.”28
In later times up to the present, Hobbes is usually listed in the histories of Bible scholarship as the first to publish a denial of the Mosaic authorship in 1651. This less-than-shattering claim about the Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Bible was enough to earn Hobbes a place in defenses of orthodoxy in the seventeenth century as a member of the unholy trinity of religious sceptics—Hobbes, Isaac La Peyrère, and Spinoza—who had struck at the very foundations of religious knowledge. Hobbes, whether intentionally or not (and, I for one, see no reason to doubt his claim that he accepted Christianity, as expressed by the Church of England), gave impetus to the powerful religious scepticism of the Bible critics. La Peyrère, Spinoza, and Richard Simon may have been more important and more sceptical. I suggest that Hobbes was seen as a religious sceptic because of what La Peyrère, Spinoza, and Richard Simon said in the decades afterward, rather than for what appears in his actual text. But even though La Peyrère, Spinoza, and Simon may have taken the critical giant steps, Hobbes had taken the first short step, by asserting that Moses did not write certain lines. He did not say they were inauthentic, or should be discarded. He just said they were not Mosaic. The attacks on Hobbes on this score, especially in England, reflected the influence of deism and Spinozism, as well as Hobbism, in the Restoration period. Hobbes to some extent became inseparable from Spinoza and the later Bible critics.29
Hobbes did not discover the verses about Moses’ death. Various explanations had been offered by Jewish and Christian exegetes. The modern form of the problem comes from the Jewish scholar Ibn Ezra (1092–1167), who distinguished the Mosaic and the non-Mosaic lines and suggested that there might be something special about the non-Mosaic ones.30 Very soon after Hobbes, the problem of the Mosaic authorship quickly became a central issue in biblical criticism, and the denial of the Mosaic authorship of every line of the Pentateuch became the opening wedge in developing a scepticism about Jewish or Christian revealed religion, with Samuel Fisher and La Peyrère (both of whom will be discussed in a later chapter) arguing that Moses could not be the author of the present mixed-up text. And it was the reading of Hobbes and La Peyrère by young Spinoza that transformed the historical, critical, and philological research into a scepticism about religion. Spinoza owned a copy of La Peyrère’s Prae-Adamitae, and apparently knew of its shocking theses by the time of his excommunication.31 And Spinoza read Hobbes before he formulated his views in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.32
At the end of the seventeenth century, the Catholic theologian Louis Ellies du Pin, who put together various encyclopedias about religion and theology, declared that “of all of the paradoxes which have been advanced in our century, there is none more bold, in my view, nor more dangerous than the opinion of those who have denied that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch.”33 Du Pin made clear that the whole relation of the supposedly revealed document, the Bible, to the truth becomes problematical, and a person can doubt the veracity of the Bible. Moses provided the critical link of man to God, since supposedly, God told him what is in the first five books. If the author is not Moses, then the Bible becomes questionable as a source of truth.
Hobbes may have been classed with the other radical Bible scholars by those engaged in the hunting of Leviathan.34 And for his views on the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, Hobbes may have been considered a religious sceptic. However, if one compares him with La Peyrère or Spinoza, Hobbes hardly deserves to be considered a menace to established religion. It is worth noting that a study of Hobbes by A. P. Martinich35 interprets Hobbes as being an orthodox Anglican in spite of his avant-garde views.
The basic issue involved in the importance of the Mosaic authorship is that it is through Moses’ role as author and his role as direct recipient of the Revelation that the truth of Judeo-Christianity is secured. Questioning the Mosaic authorship opens the door to a powerful scepticism about the truth of accepted religion. After such questioning had done its work throughout the second half of the seventeenth century and throughout the Enlightenment, one of the leading sceptics with regard to religious knowledge, Tom Paine, could look back and see the monumental effects of doubting the Mosaic authorship. “Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis, but an anonymous book of stories, fables and traditionary or invented absurdities or downright lies.”36 The importance of the Mosaic authorship was, perhaps, made still clearer by one of Paine’s opponents, the Jewish polemicist David Levi of London. In the second answer to Joseph Priestley, he asserted that “if a Jew once calls in question the authenticity of any part of the Pentateuch, by observing that one part is authentic, i.e., was delivered by God to Moses, and that another part is not authentic, he is no longer accounted a Jew, i.e., a true believer.” Every Jew, Levi insisted, is obliged, according to the thirteen principles of Maimonides, “to believe that the whole law of five books is from God” and that it was delivered by him to Moses. Christians, Levi claimed, should be under the same constraints as Jews about accepting the divine origin of Scripture, for “if any part is once proved spurious, a door will be opened for another and another without end.”37
The fantastic sceptical potential of the denial of the Mosaic authorship played a very important part in Western intellectual history. Of the four people who played the greatest roles in advancing the consideration of the denial of the Mosaic authorship in the seventeenth century—Hobbes, La Peyrère, Spinoza, and Richard Simon—I think one has to conclude either that Hobbes was the least sceptical and the most timid or that he was trivializing the sceptical implications of the matter. In La Peyrère’s Men before Adam the case for doubting the Mosaic authorship is made much greater than Hobbes’. It is so much greater, in fact, that Hobbes’ discussion of the issue looks like a truncated version of La Peyrère’s. La Peyrère denied that Moses was the author of any of the first five books of the Bible. He thereby opened the door to rewriting or reconstructing the document. Spinoza, following on La Peyrère’s work, denied the supernatural status of the Bible and portrayed it as a compendium of views of the early Hebrews. It thereby became essentially a secular document to be studied as part of the history of human stupidity. Father Richard Simon, who scandalized his fellow Catholics, insisted that he accepted many of the maxims of Spinoza but not their impious conclusions. Simon insisted, Spinoza and La Peyrère notwithstanding, that he believed that the Bible was an inspired document, whose content was revealed by God to man, or men. However, and unfortunately, no existent copy of the Bible is inspired. All are written by men, printed by men, read by men, in historical contexts. They have to be studied for what they are in the hopes of finding the real Bible behind or above, or under, all of the existent ones.
In light of what Hobbes’ three contemporary Bible critics set forth, the passage in Leviathan is very tepid. Hobbes went a few steps beyond what some of the earliest sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Bible scholars said about the problem of whether Moses could have written all of the Pentateuch. Hobbes accepted the negative evidence, that concerning the passage about Moses’ death and about events thereafter. Then Hobbes opted for a conciliatory position (even though his contemporaries may not have seen it as such). All passages that are attributed in Scripture to Moses were actually written by him. This would preserve part of the crucial revelatory link between God, Moses, and man. A most significant part of the text could still be regarded as God’s undoubted message to mankind. If one accepted Hobbes at his word, one might have to modify his claim in this chapter of Leviathan that he accepted the scriptural Canon of the Church of England. Hobbes’ Pentateuch would be a bit smaller than the Church of England’s text. But, again taking Hobbes at his word, there would be no question or doubt, no scepticism with regard to religious knowledge about the Hobbesian Mosaic Pentateuch. Hence Hobbes, on this score, was hardly the sceptic that La Peyrère, Spinoza, and Simon were. In spite of this, he obviously went too far in allowing any cuts in the text of the Pentateuch. His English clerical opponents went in for the hunting of Leviathan, and accused Hobbes of being an unbeliever, an atheist, a religious sceptic.38
Hobbes’ questioning by itself might not have been enough to launch the higher criticism of the Bible. Followed by braver figures, La Peyrère, Spinoza, and Simon, who could see much more drastic implications, Hobbes became the forerunner or the initiator of a key element involved in the development of religious scepticism, the question of the Mosaic authorship, the guarantee of the truth of the content of the Bible. Hobbes got blamed for the full-blown results of his successors. As Samuel Mintz has shown, Hobbes was often attacked, together with Spinoza, by thinkers in England and the Continent.39 The States General in Holland, which had banned La Peyrère’s Men before Adam in 1655, banned both Leviathan and Spinoza’s Tractatus in 1674.40
A significant effect within Hobbes’ philosophical system, involving his denial that Moses wrote some parts of the Pentateuch, was his conclusion that the full truth of the Revelation cannot be known with certainty. Different interpretations of the biblical texts have, and do, lead to disagreements and to disturbances in the civil order. Therefore, in order to maintain civil peace, it must be left to the civil magistrate to interpret Scripture. Here Hobbes appealed to a view that in another form appeared in De Cive, which is, I believe, his real contribution to modern scepticism.
Another way Hobbes was attacked as a religious sceptic was that both he and Spinoza sought to give a naturalistic psychological and political explanation of how religions develop. Hobbes, in Leviathan, had offered an account of how pagan religions developed.41 He specifically exempted revealed religions, Judaism and Christianity, from his investigation, as Machiavelli and Charron had done before him.42 Others of his time were vitally interested in explaining the development of polytheistic religions, ancient and modern. Perhaps the two most important such efforts, Gerard Vossius, On the Origins of Idolatry (1648), and Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), indicate what was at stake.43 Vossius offered the theory that all polytheistic religions were derivative from, and represented degenerative forms of, the basic revealed religion—Judeo-Christianity. The degenerations from true religion were due to all sorts of factors, including psychological, social, and political ones.44 By making a taxonomy of the kinds of polytheisms, one could trace back through them to the Mosaic Revelation and the prisca theology. Cudworth leaned heavily on Vossius’ account and differed in some details. Both of them, and then Isaac Newton as well, were incorporating all of the humanistic data and explorer information about polytheism into a “defense” of Judeo-Christianity, the original Revelation.45 In contrast, Hobbes was offering an account of pagan religions apart from any connection with biblical religion. He and Machiavelli stated what they were doing, so that it did not conflict with taking biblical religion as revealed. Spinoza, however, took over the psychological and political method of explaining religions and applied it to all cases, including Judaism and Christianity.
Cudworth, writing just after the appearance of Spinoza’s Tractatus in 1670, saw Hobbes and Spinoza jointly as posing a great sceptical danger to religion. Cudworth portrayed the Hobbes-Spinoza method of explaining religion as the most dangerous kind of atheism.46
It is interesting and curious that this aspect of Hobbes’ view seems to have been co-opted into the clandestine irreligious theory almost as soon as it appeared. In 1656, Henry Oldenburg reported from Oxford that “religion falls into contempt, the raillery of the profane grows sharper, and the hearts of those who fear God are crucified.” This Oldenburg told his correspondent Adam Boreel, the leader of the Dutch Collegiants.47 Then as examples Oldenburg described two problems that were recently mentioned. The first is the contention that “the whole of the story of Creation seems to have been composed in order to introduce the Sabbath, and that from motives of merely political prudence.” Moses, it is claimed, concocted the whole story on purpose and got people to worship the invisible deity. Moses supposedly “encouraged and excited his people to obey him” so that much booty could be collected in war.48 Christ, being more prudent than Moses, enticed his people by the hope of eternal life and happiness.”49 “But Mohammed, cunning in all things, enlisted all men with the good things of this world as well as of the next, and so became their master, and extended the limits of his empire much more widely than did any legislator before or after him.”50 Oldenburg was shocked by this political interpretation of the roles of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed and begged Boreel to write a refutation in order to save religion,51 which he did over the next five years. It was never published, but a copy exists in the Boyle papers at the Royal Society, and Henry More used another copy.52
Hobbes, of course, never discussed Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed in this way. The points mentioned in Oldenburg’s letter appear in the underground work Les Trois Imposteurs, ou L’Esprit de M. Spinosa, not published until 1719 but written some time earlier. There are many, many manuscripts of this work in libraries in Europe and North America, written probably from 1690 afterward by parties unknown.53 Every known manuscript uses material from Leviathan and from Spinoza’s Ethics.54 There were rumors that the work existed in the 1650s. Queen Christina of Sweden offered a large fortune for a copy, and that may actually have inspired someone to write it.55 Nobody knew what was in it besides the claim that Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed were impostors. The first indication of the contents appears in this letter of Oldenburg, and almost the same sentences appear in the later manuscripts. So some preliminary form of the counterclaim to the Judeo-Christianity-Islamic religions existed by 1656 and became known to Oldenburg at Oxford.
A curious fact that may have some relation to the above is that the radical Independent thinker, Henry Stubbe, was at Oxford at the time, translating Hobbes’ Leviathan. He was in correspondence with Hobbes, who was in London. It would be exciting to find a link between Stubbe’s activities and the ideas reported by Oldenburg. The study of Stubbe by James Jacob suggests that he was a very avantgarde thinker who hid his real views. So far, one can only speculate that Stubbe’s knowledge of Hobbes’ theory was somehow mixed with the three-impostor theory, either by Stubbe himself or by somebody he was in contact with at Oxford.56
Hobbes’ account of pagan religion, and Spinoza’s account of all religion, provided the framework for a complete denial of Judaism and Christianity and for a thoroughgoing religious scepticism. But there is nothing to indicate that Hobbes wanted his view about pagan religion to be used to construct a complete religious scepticism. Cudworth, who was an active intellectual from the 1640s onward, saw the Hobbes-Spinoza political interpretation as extremely dangerous. Cudworth conceded, possibly from his own experience with the Cromwell government and the Restoration one, that politicians “may sometimes abuse Religion and make it serve for the promotings of their own private Interests and Designs.”57 But no matter what politicians might do, “it is not conceivable, how Civil Sovreigns throughout the whole World, some of which are so distant, and have so little Correspondence with one another, should notwithstanding all so well agree in this One Cheating Mystery of Government, or Piece of State Coozenage.”58 In addition, how could these politicians take in all of mankind by inducing fear, awe, and dread “of a meer Counterfeit thing, and an Invisible Nothing” that has no basis in sense or reason?59 If religion is a fraud, is it not strange that in the whole history of the world, nobody should have “suggested or discovered this Cheat and Juggle of Politicians, and have Smelt out a Plot upon themselves in the Fiction of Religion to take away their Liberty and entrail them under Bondage”?60 All sorts of impostures have been uncovered. Atheists have been telling people for two thousand years “that Religion is nothing but a meer State Juggle, and Political Imposture,” but this has not convinced anyone.61 Cudworth then argued that religion is “deeply rooted in the Intellectual Nature of man.” Theistic religion is no fraud or imposture since all mankind agree in acknowledging a Supreme Deity, an eternal and necessary Being.
Rather than trying to exempt just Judaism and Christianity from the political explanation, Cudworth sought to show that theistic religion in general was what all people really believed, even avowed atheists. And, since according to Vossius and Cudworth, all theistic religion is derivative from the basic revealed religion, then the “true religion” revealed to Moses cannot be a political invention. Everyone knows the idea of God, of an absolutely perfect being. The atheists who deny theism have to have a meaningful idea of what they are denying. “Were there no God, the Idea of an Absolutely or Infinitely Perfect Being could never have been Made or Feigned neither by Politicians, nor by Poets, nor Philosophers.”62 Then Cudworth contended that nobody had any political interest in foisting Christianity on the world, and its supernatural status is shown by the prophecies in its Scriptures that have been and are being fulfilled. “And thus, do we see plainly, that the Scripture-Prophecies Evince a Deity; neither can these possibly be imputed by Atheists as another thing, to mens Fear and Fancy, nor yet to the Fiction of Politicians. They confirm Christianity also by the prediction of its reception.”63 So much for Cudworth’s answer.
Two of the central features of religious scepticism, the denial of the Mosaic authorship and the political and psychological explanation of religion, were firmly attributed to Hobbes by the latter part of the seventeenth century. As I have tried to show, he presented a quite modest version of each, easily compatible with the acceptance of Judaism or Christianity. And unless one reads between the lines, as Leo Strauss did, there seems no reason to suspect he held more sweeping views. The further development of these themes in La Peyrère, Spinoza, and Simon led opponents of theirs to see and interpret Hobbes as holding their views, and as being the founder or inspirer of the complete doubt or denial of the revealed knowledge claims of Judaism and Christianity. His political explanation of pagan religion was taken by opponents like Cudworth as applying to all religions, and as being indistinguishable from Spinoza’s naturalistic account in which all religions became man-made.
Hobbes may have held the views of his successors, but he did not say so. He lived long after the scandal caused by the appearance of La Peyrère’s Men before Adam with its picture of the state of nature before Adam, but Hobbes apparently did not adopt this view as an explanation of when chronologically men could have been in their natural state.64 He lived for several years after Spinoza’s views shocked thinkers in England and elsewhere (Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Bishop Edward Stillingfleet all wrote strong answers), and he did not embrace Spinoza as his successor. The youthful English deist Charles Blount tried to enlist Hobbes as an advocate of natural religion but apparently got no response.65 Blount also tried to enlist Hobbes, posthumously, as a follower of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus.66
Hobbes had ample opportunity to enter the growing discussion about the authenticity and accuracy of Scripture, and about whether Christianity is just a form of natural religion, but avoided comment. Some have seen hints here and there that he secretly sided with the avant-garde sceptics about traditional religions. But in the absence of more overt data, I think we have to leave him as holding slightly innovative views about the biblical text and the development of religions, views that were and are compatible with official versions of Christianity of established churches. In saying all of this, I am not saying Hobbes was a believer, rather that he could have been an honest adherent of the Church of England. He certainly lacks the believer’s fervor of his contemporary Pascal. But his concern with religion was great, considering how much of his text is devoted to it.
One can say that this is due to the political importance of religion in Hobbes’ time. The Thirty Years War, the Puritan Revolution, and the Restoration were the dominant events of Hobbes’ lifetime. His own career was the effect of these. And, like many other thoughtful people, he was seeking a resolution to the social strife caused by the religious wars and conflicts. And it is in Hobbes’ discussion of how this can be done that I think one finds signs of another kind of scepticism that has had far-reaching consequences in the last three centuries. Hobbes may have been a predecessor and possibly a friend (in the case of La Peyrère) of the religious sceptics, but he did not suggest at all the line they were to develop, that if it is doubtful that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, it is doubtful that the content of those books constitutes religious truth. Instead, Hobbes pointed to a radically different solution, that of a political rather than an epistemological criterion of truth.
John Watkins considered Hobbes to be an ethical sceptic because he held that there is no absolute or independent criterion of moral truth except in political terms.67 In De Cive, Hobbes had asserted, “Before there was any government, just and unjust had no being, then nature only being relative to some command, and every action in its own nature is indifferent, that it becomes just or unjust, proceeds from the right of the magistrate.”68 As Watkins pointed out, Hobbes explained that this is not due to the sovereign possessing some special or higher moral knowledge so that his laws are just. And the same is the case with regard to the interpretations of theology offered by the sovereign. The sovereign has no special superior religious knowledge, but his views are authoritative.69
In the areas of religion and morals, Hobbes had contended that there is no way people can decide between competing claims. There is no rational criterion of knowledge in these kinds of cases. However, it is necessary for social reasons that decisions be made about moral and religious conduct. The sovereign makes the decision, which is arbitrary from any evidential point of view, and the decision is accepted by everyone as if it were true.
The sceptical element here in both the moral and religious cases lies in Hobbes’ conviction that there is no rational means for deciding between either competing moral or competing religious claims. Hence Hobbes has denied that there is any rational criterion of knowledge in these areas. Since it is necessary for social reasons that moral and religious decisions be made, the sovereign makes the decision (arbitrarily from the point of view of rational evidence for the decision), and the decision is to be accepted by the populace as if it were true. Whether the sovereign decides that people should do one thing or should do the opposite, either decision would be equally just. This kind of ethical and theological scepticism derives from two elements of Hobbes’ thought. One is his nominalism, which several of the commentators identify with his scepticism or relate much more to fifteenth-century Ockhamites than to seventeenth-century scepticism. The theory that seems to emerge from his Elements of Law, De Corpore, De Cive, and Leviathan would restrict knowledge to names and make names arbitrary. Names become more than individuals’ private marks for elements in their experience by becoming part of a socially acceptable language. This much of the Hobbesian account, often repeated in his works, suggests that there is no other standard by which to judge names and propositions in which they occur. (Some commentators, to avoid endorsing the apparent results of this nominalistic theory, stress the instances where Hobbes appeared to point to some kind of self-evidence within the propositions whose truth was alleged to be beyond question, or to the logical relations of names as the standard of truth.)70
Without going into the lengthy discussions of reasoning as the relationship of names, and the intended significance of Hobbes’ claim that “true and false are attributes of speech, not of things,”71 I will turn to another aspect that leads to an overt scepticism. Hobbes had said that theological and religious propositions, which are the results of naming, can have social consequences. These consequences can be very severe, appearing in the form of social conflicts and contests of force on up to civil wars and international wars. What was happening in England and France, the wars between Protestant and Catholic countries, showed how great the social disturbance could be. And the consequences of moral disagreements are seen all the time in quarrels, crimes, and so on. The social disorder brought about by these disagreements in religion and morals is so divisive and so destructive of the public peace that there is an overriding practical reason why these disagreements have to be resolved, even if they cannot be resolved by means of evidence and reasoning. So it becomes a political problem to eliminate these conflicts. The sovereign decrees a solution. His solution is not based on knowledge of what is right and good. It is the solution that defines what is right and good.
If Hobbes had restricted the need for political solutions to moral and religious questions, this might have been acceptable, especially in view of the conflicts of his time. But Hobbes, at least clearly in one place, and by inference elsewhere, extended this to scientific and mathematical views, insofar as disagreements in these areas could also be disturbing to the public peace. Hobbes’ own cantankerous quarrels with mathematicians, with other philosophers and scientists, must have made him aware of what social disharmony could result from intellectual disagreements.72 There are plenty of stories about how obnoxious Hobbes was as an arguer. We know he spent years trying to convince mathematicians of his method for squaring the circle. Dr. Wallis’ remark that trying to explain mathematics to Hobbes was like trying to explain colors to a blind man, seems to reflect the extreme difficulties of dealing with Hobbes in intellectual society.73 Hobbes obviously knew that intellectual views could cause a social uproar. Samuel Mintz’s book ably documents that Hobbes had succeeded in accomplishing that.74 In De Cive there is a passage where Hobbes indicated that even purely intellectual disagreements can affect the public peace, and that political means had be used to eliminate these differences, means like those used to end religious and ethical disputes. This would seem to lead to a special kind of scepticism, a political scepticism, in which there are no intellectual standards of truth and falsity, only political ones. And these are to be evaluated on pragmatic standards—namely, do they work to preserve the civic order?
The passage in De Cive is part of a consideration by Hobbes of what happens if people disagree about definitions. The context indicates clearly that Hobbes was discussing all types of definitions, not just moral and religious ones. The text reads:
It is needful therefore, as oft as any controversy ariseth in these matters contrary to the public good and common peace, that there be somebody to judge of the reasoning, that is to say, whether that which is inferred, be rightly inferred or not; that so the controversy may be ended. But there are no rules given by Christ to this purpose, neither came he into the world to teach logic. It remains therefore that the judges of such controversies, be the same with those whom God by nature had instituted before, namely, those who in each city are constituted by the sovereign. Moreover, if a controversy be raised of the accurate and proper signification, that is the definition of those names or appellations which are commonly used; insomuch as it is needful for the peace of the city, or the distribution of right to be determined; the determination will belong to the city. For men, by reasoning, do search out such kind of definitions in their observation of diverse conceptions, for the signification whereof those appellations were used at diverse times and for diverse causes. But the decision of the question, whether a man do reason rightly, belongs to the city. For example, if a woman bring forth a child of unwonted shape, and the law forbid to kill a man; the question is whether the child be a man. It is demanded therefore, what a man is. No man doubts but the city shall judge it, and that without taking an account of Aristotle’s definition that man is a rational creature. And these things, namely, right, policy, and natural sciences, are subjects concerning which Christ denies that it belongs to his office to give any precepts, or teach any thing beside this only, that in all controversies about them, every single subject should obey the laws and determinations of his city.75
The quotation shows clearly that Hobbes was talking about scientific views as well as moral and religious ones. All were given their truth-values by the political authorities. Hobbes went on in De Cive to point out that observance of natural laws is one way people are led to salvation. Hobbes, echoing François Veron, said Christ did not come into the world to teach logic. We learn natural laws, science, and logic through natural reason. The human principles we adopt and the conclusions we draw from them are “subject to the censure of civil power.” Whatever is not revealed, moral and political principles “and the examination of doctrines and books in all manner of rational science depends upon the temporal right.” The very distinction between what is spiritual and what is temporal has to be made by the temporal authorities “because our Saviour hath not made that distinction.” The sovereign is thus “the supreme authority of judgment and determining all manner of controversies about temporal matters.”76
In a section a little later on, Hobbes pointed out that if people followed their own opinions, society would break up. There would be controversies that “should become innumerable and indeterminable.”77 Hobbes had begun his discussion dealing with religious controversies, and then moved on to include scientific views, logical and mathematical ones. In all these areas, the civil authority had to settle what is true or false.
Richard Peters put special stress on the passage I quoted at length above. After spelling out that would mean that scientific disputes involving questions of public importance would have to be settled by political authorities, Peters called this a “bizarre and authoritarian theory of truth.”78 He said that Hobbes usually presented it when he was trying to delimit the respective spheres of secular and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, or when he was concerned about the types of disputes that provoke civil unrest.
First, I should like to indicate that the theory seems to grow out of a fundamental kind of scepticism that arises for Hobbes in the very attempt to distinguish the secular from the religious. Not only have we found no indubitable criteria to employ to make the distinction, we also realize the tremendous price that has to be paid if we are unable to make such a distinction, the price of the disintegration of our civil units. Our inability to live with any satisfaction under such circumstances leads us back to the acceptance of a sovereign and the acceptance of his judgment. Thus we apparently would not be led to this bizarre and authoritarian theory of truth if there were not ample sceptical grounds for disputing any human conclusions, and if these disputes were not corrosive of the public order. On the first point, Hobbes (at least as he presented his view at the end of De Cive) saw that the sceptical attacks undermined any human being’s claim to know absolutely or definitely any truth claim. Every alleged claim could be disputed. This would lead to the world being a debating society, except for the fact that some of the issues in dispute have important consequences in the social world. But the latter can lead to the dissolution of society. Therefore, the civil authority has to step in and announce who is right.
This political theory of truth, based on a total scepticism about an individual’s ability to discover the truth, is a remarkable change in the pattern of sceptical thought in the seventeenth century. Various friends of Hobbes were sceptics and fideists. They doubted man’s ability to find truth, and therefore, by non sequitur, they accepted truth on faith from God or his Church. Hobbes, partly because of his analysis of what constitutes the Church, saw, at least in this chapter of De Cive, that fideism comes down to acceptance of a sovereign agency as the source of truth.
Father Mersenne, in a letter that is printed in the French edition of De Cive, told the translator, Samuel Sorbière, (who called himself, on the title page, one of Hobbes’ friends) that Hobbes’ noble philosophy is demonstrated as evidently as Euclid’s geometry. Therefore, Mersenne went on, Sorbière will give up his suspense of judgment and all of the bagatelles of the sceptics and become a dogmatist, whose foundations are unshakable.79 Neither Sorbière nor Mersenne seems to have commented on the scepticism that emerged at the end of the book.
Ezequiel de Olaso, in his excellent article “Thomas Hobbes y la recta razón,” pointed out that in the early discussion in De Cive about the law of nature, and in the discussion of naming in Leviathan, Hobbes was suggesting this bizarre and authoritarian theory of truth.80 In a note on “Right reason,” Hobbes first said that in the natural state of men, right reason is not an infallible faculty but is the act of reasoning of each individual, “the peculiar and true ratiocination of every man concerning those actions of his, which may either redound to the damage or benefit of his neighbors. I call it peculiar, because although in a civil government the reason of the supreme, that, the civil law, is to be received by each single subject for the right; yet being without this civil government, … no man can know right reason from false.”81 In the state of nature, each man’s reason is judged by itself, but without any objective standard. Because of the conflicts of each person’s reason, and actions based on it, a social arbiter has to be introduced to determine what is right reason in a civic context.
In organized society, Hobbes saw that basic disagreements and conflicts arose over defining what is secular and what is religious, and over what is good and right. Individual right reason is not adequate to settle the problems, since there is no indubitable or satisfactory criterion for determining whose right reason to accept. But, to prevent the social disintegration that would ensue, political authority has to determine what is true in religion and morals. The bizarre and authoritarian theory of truth spills over into scientific, mathematical, and logical questions as long as there are disagreements and social consequences of views in these areas.82
Karl Marx turned the issue around by contending that the intellectual activities going on at any time are a reflection of the economic-political determinating forces. There have been feudal idea-systems, there are capitalistic ones, and for Marx, there will be socialistic ones. Hence the political authorities will propound intellectual truths in all areas.83
Whether one accepts Marx’s claim, which I do not (perhaps a reflection of what authority decides my views), the social and political analysis of intellectual history has been illuminating, and perhaps most illuminating in the study of the history of science and the history of religion. The study of factors involved in the encouragement and endorsement of the “new science” of Hobbes’ time point to political activities that made the new science acceptable and even desirable. On the other hand, the political attempts to silence non-Aristotelian science, by church and state authorities in France, indicate that social-political factors, and not evidential ones, decided what was to be taught as true. On a grander scale, one can see the political factors involved in deciding what science should be taught, what should be financed, who should know how AIDS is contracted, and so on. The decision about which departments of universities should be closed down and which created also clearly involves some political-social factors. In the history of religion one can also see political forces guiding some religious developments and crushing others, for social reasons. In the United States, the state, through the courts, has to decide what is a religion, and for political reasons to prevent the promulgation of any religion in the schools. In England, with an established church, the political authority is involved in church decisions, and even in determining who runs the church.
One can accept the findings of the social-political historians, and yet ask, does this throw any light on whether Galileo’s or Luther’s views were true? Does the fact that political authorities for centuries encouraged Christian religious groups to convert the Jews show that Christianity is right and Judaism wrong? One can offer a Hobbesian account of the divisive implications of Galileo’s views, the social discord they produced, and justify what happened. Similarly, one can examine the social disruption caused by assertions and denials that the Messiah has come, and the reasons why a state might take action to stop the disruption. But one can still ask which views are true.
I think Hobbes, in the statement of his political scepticism, eroded the independent place for the so-called objective inquirer to stand. Since truth is a function of the relation of names, and naming is a social activity with potential for producing discord, the “truth”question easily moves from an epistemological to a political one, at least as soon as any social disruption occurs. The ivory-tower theorist, who tries to brush aside the fact that some people get upset by subatomic physics, space research, stem-cell research, interpretations of the books of Daniel and Revelation, and the movie The Last Temptation of Christ, is taking a social stance that can lead to dispute, rock-throwing, pamphleteering, annoying letters to the Times, or the New York Review of Books, and so quickly require a political decision—whether to protect the “pure” theorist, whether to declare him or her redundant, whether to inhibit her or his publications, and so on.
In Hobbes’ world, since resolving social strife is the standard, then all intellectual views become subject to the bizarre and authoritarian theory of truth, if they have any social reverberations. The analysis of Richard Tuck may lead to the same result. Self-preservation is basic, but can one tell what helps self-preservation? Since this leads to conflict and doubt, then the state has to decide.84
One should suspend judgment on all knowledge-claims of any import, until they have been vetted politically. This, I suggest, constitutes a radical kind of scepticism, much different from that of Hobbes’ French and English contemporaries. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition then, and the modern totalitarian states, have managed to create situations where intellectuals have adopted this kind of political scepticism. And, unfortunately, modern means of persuasion have enabled nasty states to force people to accept various views about science, politics, history, and also forced them to believe them.
Political scepticism is part of what we all confront in the modern world. Seeing how it arises out of Hobbes’ analysis, and out of the state’s power to control disruptive people, at least we can gain some insight into what we have to operate with. We may want to be free, independent thinkers, making our own intellectual decisions that we think are true. Since we do this in society, to what extent is our free independent thinking limited by social concerns, and to what extent do we have to accept various political definitions of truth? And even the answer may reflect the extent to which we have been conditioned socially and brainwashed politically. Hence, as Pilate asked: What is Truth?
Hobbes, who had apparently ignored the sceptical discussions of his French friends, opened the door to a new kind of scepticism. He might have been influenced by the Machiavellianism of Naudé’s Considerations politiques sur les coups d’etat.85 Hobbes, at least once, realized that the so-called faith would have to be acceptance of authority, and the only recognizable authority was a civil one. Then truth became political as the only means of settling arguments and preserving the peace. This bizarre theory is, of course, closer to the character of modern scepticism than the views of Hobbes’ friends and contemporaries. In Orwell’s 1984, a sad satire of twentieth-century societies, we become more aware of government-generated truth. One could speak at length on the new version of Descartes’ demonic scepticism developed by brainwashing, by propaganda, by classifying and falsifying records, and so on.86 Here I just want to mention a couple of points. In the twentieth century, world governments have taken the initiative and are now all entrenched in the business of declaring what is true, creating the evidence, and forcing people to accept it. Governments have also taken the initiative in declaring what is, and what is not, a threat to peace (draft card burning, speaking to foreigners, listening to Radio Free Europe, opposing government policy, not filling out the administration’s personnel efficiency card, etc.). The result is the totalitarian state with its helpless, sceptical citizens.
So Hobbes, although almost oblivious to his contemporary epistemological sceptics and far more cautious than his contemporary religious ones, did at one point lay the groundwork for a much more dangerous scepticism that makes the sovereign the political arbiter of truth. From arbiter to creator of truth, the modern state then develops its Orwellian character. With no means of delimiting its power to create truth, and to maintain the peace, the citizen becomes helpless. Hobbes with his great concern to preserve the possibility of civil life in an extremely chaotic age, could not foresee what this state, the preserver of peace, could become with sufficient technological advances.