Absolving God’s Laws: Thomas Hobbes’s Scriptural Strategies

• Author: Alison McQueen
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221092424
• Published date: 01 October 2022
• Date: 01 October 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221092424

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(5) 754 –779

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00905917221092424

journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx

Article

Absolving God's Laws:

Thomas Hobbes's

Scriptural Strategies

Alison McQueen1

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes tells us that he wrote Leviathan to “absolve the divine

laws” of the charge that they justify rebellion. This article interprets the

argumentative strategy of the second half of Leviathan in light of this intention.

Over the course of his three major political works, Hobbes develops a

convergent argument to absolve God’s laws. This strategy of judicial rhetoric

relies on using multiple independent claims in the hope that one’s audience

finds at least one of them persuasive. This was a risky strategy for Hobbes

that angered his critics. The strategy also reveals something about what sort

of philosopher Hobbes was and how we ought to approach his work.

Keywords

Hobbes, religion, scripture, Leviathan, rhetoric, strategy

Introduction

Thomas Hobbes tells us that political circumstances compelled him to write

Leviathan (1651). In the spring of 1646, he was living in a self-imposed exile

in Paris as the civil war raged on in Britain. As Charles I was surrendering to

1Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Alison McQueen, Stanford University, 616 Serra St, Encina Hall W, Rm 100, Stanford, CA

94305, USA.

Email: amcqueen@stanford.edu

1092424PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221092424Political TheoryMcQueen

research-article2022

McQueen 755

the Scots, Hobbes was immersed in work on De Corpore. His plan was that

this would be the first of three sections in his Elements of Philosophy. The

work was going slowly. Hobbes hoped to make substantial progress during a

visit to the south of France. But in July the young prince Charles and his

entourage arrived in Paris, and Hobbes was asked to serve as his mathematics

tutor. Hobbes’s pastoral productivity would have to be postponed.

But the prince’s tuition was not the only thing tearing Hobbes away from

his systematic philosophy. The young Charles and his men had brought fresh

news of Royalist defeats, which the king’s enemies were interpreting as evi-

dence of God’s support for the Parliamentarian cause. Hobbes tells us that he

“could not bear to hear such terrible crimes attributed to the commands of

God.” He set De Corpore aside and, determined to write something at once to

“absolve the divine laws,” he turned his attention to the work that would

become Leviathan (Hobbes 1839, xcii).1

The book is rarely interpreted (and even more rarely taught) in a way that

acknowledges these intentions.2 Failing to listen to Hobbes’s own reasons for

writing Leviathan has two dire interpretive consequences. First, it makes it

too easy to avoid the entire second half of Leviathan. This portion of the work

consists entirely of exegetical and theological claims supported by scriptural

interpretation. Many twentieth-century Hobbes scholars found some way to

dismiss the second half of Leviathan by claiming either that its arguments

“aren’t really there” or that Hobbes “didn’t really mean them” (Pocock 1970,

161–62).

Interpreters with the first attitude have tended to be analytic philosophers.

On their view, Hobbes’s religious arguments are there to reassure believers

who are attracted to the philosophical arguments for political obligation and

1. I adopt Quentin Skinner’s (1996, 330–31) translation here and in subsequent

quotations from this work.

2. Noel Malcolm (2012, 10–11) presents compelling evidence that Hobbes began

writing the book three years later, in 1649. However, even if Hobbes’s dating of

the composition is not accurate, there are reasons to think his account of his moti-

vations was, especially given how similar this account is to the one in the preface

to the second edition of De Cive (Hobbes 1998, 12–14). Subsequent citations

of Hobbes’s main political works, Elements of Law (EL), De Cive (DCv), and

Leviathan (L), will be in-text and take the following form: ([abbreviated work]

[chapter].[section, if applicable], [page]). The editions of Elements of Law, De

Cive, and Leviathan, respectively, used here are Hobbes (1998), Hobbes (2008),

and Hobbes (2012).