Christian Burlesque? Thomas Hobbes's Scriptural Strategies

March 12, 2021 3:00PM

Friday, March 12, 3-5pm EST: Alison McQueen (Stanford, Political Science)
"Christian Burlesque? Thomas Hobbes's Scriptural Strategies"

"Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) devotes more space to religion in Leviathan than he does in any of his previous political works. Many of his theological arguments and scriptural interpretations are entirely new to Leviathan. They were also controversial. Hobbes’s new arguments about the nature of hell, the Trinity, and the authorship of the Bible gave new fodder to his enemies and new fears to his friends. As the forces of orthodoxy gathered strength, Hobbes would be accused of heresy, largely on the basis of these new arguments. Yet none of these new arguments are philosophically necessary—they are neither necessitated by Hobbes’s materialism nor required to bolster his case for absolutism. So, why did Hobbes add this new material? Why did he risk so much to make these controversial new arguments?

We consider the changes he made to the religious arguments in Leviathan in light of changing patterns of public discourse in midseventeenth-century England. In order to do this, we use automated text analysis to identify broad themes in public discourse and to examine the prevalence of these themes over time. Our method allows to capture patterns at the same scale at which they would have been reported to Hobbes in Paris. We find that three of Hobbes’s most puzzling and controversial additions to Leviathan—his arguments about hell and the End of Days, his account of the Trinity, and his critical analysis of the authorship and dating of biblical books—track patterns of popular religious discourse in England."

Workshop in Social and Political Theory