Theologians From England

"[I]n the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong."

"The pervasiveness of social dilemmas has repeatedly been recognized in the great books of political philosophy. Hobbes described such a setting as a “war of all against all.” Rousseau used a stag hunt to illustrate the problem of a group needing to all work together to hunt a large animal but facing the temptation to break up into separate groups when small animals appeared on the scene that were easy to catch. A small group could catch a rabbit, but ruined the chance for the group to obtain a large animal."

"It was not until the Twelfth Century of our era that the Pentateuch as a whole was subjected to rational scrutiny. The man who undertook the ungrateful task was a learned Spanish rabbi, Abraham ben Meir ibn Esra. He unearthed many absurdities, but... it was not until five hundred years later that anything properly describable as scientific criticism... came into being. Its earliest shining lights were the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the Amsterdam Jew, Baruch Spinoza. ..and ever since then the Old Testament has been under searching and devastating examination."

"In spite of all these points of similarity, Hobbes is not generally regarded as a liberal political theorist in the full sense of the term. Although his approach is distinctively liberal, his conclusions are not. We have seen that he views freedom as the absence of interference, and so coincides with the liberal position in this regard. In addition, he believes that the erection of government represents an increase of freedom."

"It was supposedly the discovery of mathematics at the age of forty that led Hobbes to attempt to cast all of philosophy on the model of geometry."

"The irony here is quite remarkable: Hobbes, who would later spend years publishing and defending numerous attempts to square the circle, published his first mathematical work as part of a campaign to silence an old circle squarer. Indeed, less than a decade after his participation in Pell's battle with Longomontanus, Hobbes would find himself involved in a prolonged and bitter controversy that centered on his claims to have squared the circle, and he would go to his grave insisting that he had solved this ancient geometrical problem."

"The thought has surely occurred to many people throughout the ages: what if there is an afterlife but no god? What if there is a god but no afterlife? As far as I know, the clearest writer to give expression to this problem was Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 masterwork Leviathan. I strongly recommend that you read part III, chapter 38, and part IV, chapter 44, for yourselves, because Hobbe's command of both holy scripture and the English language is quite breathtaking. He also reminds us of how perilous it was, and always has been, even to think about these things. ...Having planted the subversive thought—that forbidding Adam to eat from one tree lest he die and from another lest he live forever, is absurd and contradictory... he acknowledged the process by which people are always free to make up a religion that suits or gratifies or flatters them."

"Although longer experience may have lent some older members of these bands some authority, it was mainly shared aims and perceptions that coordinated the activities of their members. These modes of coordination depended decisively on instincts of solidarity and altruism - instincts applying to the members of one's own group but not to others. The members of these small groups could thus exist only as such: an isolated man would soon have been a dead man. The primitive individualism described by Thomas Hobbes is hence a myth. The savage is not solitary, and his instinct is collectivist. There was never a 'war of all against all'."

"The great thinker from whom the basic ideas of what we shall call constructivist rationalism received their most complete expression was René Descartes. But while he refrained from drawing the conclusions from them for social and moral arguments, these were mainly elaborated by his slightly older (but much more long-lived) contemporary, Thomas Hobbes. Although Descartes’ immediate concern was to establish criteria for the truth of propositions, these were inevitably also applied by his followers to judge the appropriateness and justification of actions."

"Can humans exist without some people ruling and others being ruled? The founders of political science did not think so. "I put for a general inclination of mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death," declared Thomas Hobbes. Because of this innate lust for power, Hobbes thought that life before (or after) the state was a "war of every man against every man"—"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Was Hobbes right? Do humans have an unquenchable desire for power that, in the absence of a strong ruler, inevitably leads to a war of all against all? To judge from surviving examples of bands and villages, for the greater part of prehistory our kind got along quite well without so much as a paramount chief, let alone the all-powerful English leviathan King and Mortal God, whom Hobbes believed was needed for maintaining law and order among his fractious countrymen."

"Both his works [De Cive and Leviathan] were condemned by Parliament, and "Hobbism" became, ere he died, a popular synonym for irreligion and immorality. ...Hobbes was the first great English writer who dealt with the science of government from the ground, not of tradition, but of reason. ...Hobbes ...denied the existence of the more spiritual sides of man's nature. His hard and narrow logic dissected every human custom and desire, and reduced even the most sacred to demonstrations of a prudent selfishness. Friendship was simply a sense of social utility to one another. ...Nothing better illustrates the daring with which the new skepticism was to break through the theological traditions of the older world than the pitiless logic with which Hobbes assailed the very theory of revelation."

"No more comprehensive, tightly structured, and closely argued political philosophy exists than Hobbes set out in Leviathan. It shocks our conventional assumptions, and it is disquieting. For the sake of peace and order, religion cannot be allowed the political power and conscientious authority it has often claimed. To cure our political ills and contain the state of war we may have to submit to governments we thoroughly dislike. The most prevalent and powerful human traits of human nature are unpleasant and socially destructive. It is this insight which touches a raw nerve of truth with so many readers. Modern man, if not all mankind, is ominously close to Hobbes's account of us—competitive, acquisitive, possessive, restless, individualistic, self-concerned, and insatiable in our demands for whatever we see in isolation as our own good. It is this point of realism which almost all other political philosophies underestimate, and which Hobbes gets memorably right in his great endeavour to deliver us from a life consistent with our own natures, and of our own making; a life which would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

"Thomas Hobbes was the first sociobiologist, two hundred years before Darwin."

"Perhaps the most influential book ever written on the characteristics of men in politics is The Prince, by the great Renaissance Italian Nicolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). Despite its enduring popularity, fascination, and authority it is extremely one-sided and unsystematic. … More systematic in its treatment of political man than The Prince, though about equally one-sided, is Hobbes' first section of The Leviathan entitled “Of Man.” Hobbes' psychological assumptions bear a remarkable resemblance to the modern school of psychology often called Behaviorism."

"I have seen a translation by Hobbes, which I prefer for its greater clumsiness. Many years have passed since I saw it, but it made me laugh immoderately. Poetry that is not good can only make amends for that deficiency by being ridiculous..."

"The bitterest of all quarrels was that in which Hobbes sought to defend himself against the accusations of atheistic and immoral teaching which haunted him throughout his life and persisted for decades after his death. Writers, theological and philosophical, many of them incapable of understanding Hobbes, united in these clamorous charges against him. The clergyman who wrote the "Dialogue between Philautes and Timothy" (London 1673) fairly illustrates the critics of Hobbes's own age, who believed that Hobbes had "said more for a bad life and against any other life after this than ever was pleaded by philosopher or divine to the contrary." The allusions of Locke and Berkeley to 'that atheist Hobbes' reflect the opinions of the generations following. ...Hobbes certainly teaches that there is a God, and that faith in Jesus Christ is the supreme religious duty. True, he also teaches that God is corporeal, but only in the sense in which, as he believes, men, also, are purely corporeal. However theoretically unjustified the doctrine, it is certainly compatible—as Hobbes holds it—with religious teaching. The ethics of Hobbes, also, inculcates all the practical duties of a Christian morality, though it founds them on a psychologically inadequate basis: the assumption that all men are radically selfish. In a word, Hobbes was unfairly treated; his reputation suffered unjustly; and—more unfortunate than all—the suspicion of his atheism kept people from the study of his vigorous metaphysics and his acute psychology."

"There are, it is true, masterpieces of political philosophy in the English language: Hobbes' Leviathan is an obvious example. But the true character of this debate has been empirical: the discussion of particular and practical issues, in the course of which a clash of principle and attitude is brought out, but in which the element of abstract thought is always kept in relation to an immediate and actual situation."

"Our current conception of mathematics as an ideal science, of geometry in particular as dealing with an ideal space, rather than the actual space in which the universe is set, was a notion quite unformulated before Hobbes, and not taken seriously till the middle of the eighteenth century, though it was dimly felt after by a few Aristotelian opponents of Copernicus."

"He was... 40 years old before he looked upon geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library..., Euclid's Elements lay open, and 'twas the 47 El. libri I. He read the proposition. 'By G—,' sayd he (he would now and then sweare, by way of emphasis), 'this is impossible!' So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition, which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last was demonstrably convinced of the truth. This made him in love with geometry."

"He was beloved by his lordship [Francis Bacon]... who was wont to have him walk in his delicate groves, where he did meditate; and when a notion darted into his mind, Mr. Hobbes was presently to write it down. And his Lordship was wont to say that he did it better than any one else about him; for that many times when he read their notes he scarce understood what they writ, because they understood it not clearly themselves."

"The purpose of the ' was to expand the basis of human government; in the course of his discussion Hobbes raised many detailed questions about the . In this way he participated in the development of critical ."

"In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes described the life of man as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” For most animals, especially those who have the misfortune of being tasty, this much seems true. However, for many human animals in the modern era, Hobbes’s depiction of life simply does not apply. Sadly, despite the cosmic luck that has afforded this luxurious and uniquely human lifestyle, many among us have lost our appreciation for the rarity of this phenomenon, both in the immediate sense and in the deep sense of cosmological time."

"The thoughts are to the desires, as scouts and spies, to range abroad and find the way to the thing desired."

"For such Truth as opposeth no man's profit nor pleasure is to all men welcome."

"But if it bee well considered, The praise of Ancient Authors, proceeds not from the reverence of the Dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the Living."

"And if a man consider the original of this great Ecclesiastical Dominion, he will easily perceive, that the Papacy, is no other than the Ghost of the deceased Romane Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: For so did the Papacy start up on a Sudden out of the Ruines of that Heathen Power."

"For as there were Plants of Corn and Wine in small quantity Dispersed in the Fields and Woods, before men knew their vertue, or made use of them for their nourishment, or planted them apart in Fields,and also there have been divers true, generall, and profitable Speculations from the beginning; as being the naturall plants of humane Reason: But they were at first but few in number; men lived upon grosse Experience; there was no Method; that is to say, no Sowing, nor Planting of Knowledge by it self, apart from the Weeds, and common Plants of Errour and Conjecture: And the cause of it being the want of leasure from procuring the necessities of life, and defending themselves against their neighbours, it was impossible, till the erecting of great Common-wealths, it should be otherwise. Leisure is the mother of Philosophy; and Common-wealth, the mother of Peace, and Leisure: Where first were great and flourishing Cities, there was first the study of Philosophy."

"For it is not the bare Words, but the Scope of the writer that giveth true light, by which any writing is to bee interpreted; and they that insist upon single Texts, without considering the main Designe, can derive no thing from them clearly; but rather by casting atomes of Scripture, as dust before mens eyes, make everything more obscure than it is; an ordinary artifice of those who seek not the truth, but their own advantage."

"Christian Kings may erre in deducing a Consequence, but who shall Judge?"

"Power as is really divided, and as dangerously to all purposes, by sharing with another an Indirect Power, as a Direct one."

"And for Incoherent Speech, it was amongst the Gentiles taken for one sort of Prophecy, because the Prophets of their Oracles, intoxicated with a spirit, or vapor from the cave of the Pythian Oracle at Delphi, were for a time really mad, and spake like mad-men; of whoose loose words a sense might be made to fit any event, in such sort, as all bodies are said to be made of Materia prima."

"To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad."

"To say he hath spoken to him in a Dream, is no more then to say he dreamed that God spake to him; which is not of force to win beleef from any man, that knows dreams are for the most part naturall, and may proceed from former thoughts; and such dreams as that, from selfe conceit, and foolish arrogance, and false opinion of a mans own goodlinesse, or other vertue, by which he thinks he hath merited the favour of extraordinary Revelation. To say he hath seen a Vision, or heard a Voice, is to say, that he dreamed between sleeping and waking: for in such manner a man doth many times naturally take his dream for a vision, as not having well observed his own slumbering. To say he speaks by supernaturall Inspiration, is to say he finds an ardent desire to speak, or some strong opinion of himself, for which hee can alledge no naturall and sufficient reason. So that though God Almighty can speak to a man, by Dreams, Visions, Voice, and Inspiration; yet he obliges no man to beleeve he hath so done to him that pretends it; who (being a man) may erre, and (which is more) may lie."

"And hereby it comes to passe, that Intemperance, is naturally punished with Diseases; Rashness, with Mischance; Injustice; with Violence of Enemies; Pride, with Ruine; Cowardice, with Oppression; Negligent government of Princes, with Rebellion; and Rebellion with Slaughter."

"And when all the world is overcharged with Inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is Warre, which provideth for every man, by Victory or Death."

"And whereas many men, by accident unevitable, become unable to maintain themselves by their labour; they ought not to be left to the Charity of private persons; but to be provided for, (as far-forth as the necessities of Nature require,) by the Lawes of the Common-wealth. For as it is Unchariablenesse in any man, to neglect the impotent; so it is in the Soveraign of a Common-wealth, to expose them to the hazard of such uncertain Charity."

"Time, and Industry, produce everyday new knowledge."

"The office of the sovereign, be it a monarch or an assembly, consisteth in the end for which he was trusted with the sovereign power, namely the procuration of the safety of the people, to which he is obliged by the law of nature, and to render an account thereof to God, the Author of that law, and to none but Him. But by safety here is not meant a bare preservation, but also all other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger or hurt to the Commonwealth, shall acquire to himself. And this is intended should be done, not by care applied to individuals, further than their protection from injuries when they shall complain; but by a general providence, contained in public instruction, both of doctrine and example; and in the making and executing of good laws to which individual persons may apply their own cases."

"As also the great number of Corporations; which are as it were many lesser Common-wealths in the bowels of a greater, like wormes in the entrayles of a natural man."

"Another doctrine repugnant to Civill Society, is that whatsoever a man does against his Conscience, is Sinne; and it dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of Good and Evill. For a man's Conscience and his Judgement are the same thing, and as the Judgement, so also the Conscience may be erroneous."

"As for [...] Of all passions, that which inclineth men least to break the laws is fear."

"Fact be vertuous, or vicious, as Fortune pleaseth;"

"The source of every Crime, is some defect of the Understanding; or some error in Reasoning, or some sudden force of the Passions. Defect in the Understanding, is Ignorance; in Reasoning, Erroneous Opinion."

"So that every Crime is a sinne; but not every sinne a Crime."

"No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it."

"The Interpretation of the Laws of Nature in a Common-wealth, dependeth not on the books of Moral Philosophy. The Authority of writers, without the Authority of the Commonwealth, maketh not their opinions Law, be they never so true."

"and where men build on false grounds, the more they build, the greater is the ruine:"

"But if one Subject giveth Counsell to another, to do anything contrary to the Lawes, whether that Counsell proceed from evil intention, or from ignorance onely, it is punishable by the Common-wealth; because ignorance of the Law, is no good excuse, where every man is bound to take notice of the Lawes to which he is subject."

"For naturall Bloud is in like manner made of the fruits of the Earth; and circulating, nourisheth by the way, every Member of the Body of Man."

"For all uniting of strength by private men, is, if for evil intent, unjust; if for intent unknown, dangerous to the Publique, and unjustly concealed."