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

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 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 evidence 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 absolutism in the first half of the book. The aim of the second half of the book is to confirm that the arguments in the first half are not incompatible with Christian scripture. While Hobbes no doubt sought this conformation, it seems strange to conclude—as some analytic interpreters do—that we can treat the scriptural arguments in the work as a sideshow to the philosophical main attraction (Gauthier 1969, 178–79; Kavka 1986, 362–63; Rawls 2007, 25–29). ³ This interpretation is deeply at odds with Hobbes’s own statement about his motives, which foreground the religious aims of the work.

Interpreters with the second attitude have tended to argue that Hobbes’s religious and scriptural arguments are mere cover for his purported atheism. On this view, Hobbes’s atheism can be inferred from a close reading of his philosophical and theological arguments (Curley 1992; Strauss 1952; Strauss 1988, 170–96). Recognizing that these beliefs were likely to open him to persecution, Hobbes used the scriptural arguments in the second half of Leviathan as a rhetorical shield.

Charges of atheism were a serious matter in the seventeenth century, and many thinkers went to great lengths to conceal their true views. But it is not clear that Hobbes was one of these thinkers. If he were, he would have remained silent on controversial issues or stuck to very conventional arguments. He did neither. He publicly defended highly inflammatory views on the most fraught debates of the day—on the fate of the soul, the nature of hell, and the kingdom of God (Lloyd 1992; Mintz 1962). He knew these arguments were “most [likely to] offend,” but made them anyway to refute those who would “impugne the Civill Power” (L dedication, 4–6). So, if Hobbes’s scriptural arguments were strategic, it seems unlikely that the aim of the strategy was to protect their author from charges of atheism.

The second consequence of failing to take Hobbes’s stated intentions of “absolving the divine laws” seriously is that we will miss important features of his rhetorical strategy. Two of the striking things about Hobbes’s religious and scriptural arguments are, first, just how many of them there are and, second, how independent they are from one another. His contemporaries saw in the second half of Leviathan a “farrago,” a “rhapsody,” a “wild” plurality of arguments that they thought lacked coherence (as quoted in Parkin 2018, 188–89). Hobbes’s contemporary critics were uncharitable, but they were also on to something. As we will see, Hobbes does proliferate religious and scriptural arguments. What rhetorical purpose might such proliferation serve?

Scholarship on Hobbes and rhetoric has been dominated by Quentin Skinner’s formidable Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996). The conception of rhetoric that Skinner attributes to Hobbes’s early humanist and later political work is broadly Ciceronian. On this view, rhetoric is a pursuit aimed presenting “the truth with eloquence” and a necessary skill for the virtuous citizen (Skinner 1996, 2, see also 67–74). However, other interpreters have argued that Hobbes had an Aristotelian conception of rhetoric that emphasized persuasion and victory far more than civic morality (e.g., Raylor 2018). This interpretation might initially seem rather strange, given Hobbes’s dogged criticism of Aristotle’s moral and political philosophy. Yet while he thought Aristotle “the worst polititian and ethick,” Hobbes admired the Rhetoric (Aubrey 1898, 357).

Fortunately, we need not settle the debate about the classical sources of Hobbes’s conception of rhetoric here. He tells us himself how he understands rhetoric, or “eloquence.” It is “nothing else but the power of winning belief of what we say” (EL 27, 14, 171). Its end “is not truth (except by chance) but victory” (DCv 10.11, 123; see also L 10, 135; L 25, 400; Hobbes 1986, 40). ⁴ As we shall see, Hobbes’s “wild” proliferation of scriptural arguments was aimed at securing the most important victory of all: peace.

This article aims to take seriously the possibility that Hobbes’s proliferation of religious and scriptural arguments was part of a strategic effort to “absolve the divine laws” of the charge that they justify rebellion. My argument builds on previous work, including my own, that describes Hobbes’s general tendency to proliferate claims but that does not offer detailed analysis of Leviathan’s religious arguments (Hoekstra 2006; McQueen 2020a; McQueen 2020b). ⁵ In making my case, I will also consider two other explanations for Hobbes’s proliferation of religious and scriptural arguments from Sharon Lloyd (1992) and Jon Parkin (2018).

The argument proceeds in three steps. First, I show that God’s laws were being invoked by Parliamentarian preachers to justify, and even to demand, rebellion against King Charles I. These justifications would have worried Hobbes. In Elements of Law (1640) and De Cive (1642/7) he begins to develop a complex strategy of response that he would deploy more fully in Leviathan (1651). It is a strategy aimed at getting diverse groups of Christians who share little common ground to accept sovereign authority.

Second, I argue that this strategy comes into its own in Leviathan, where Hobbes uses a forensic, or judicial, rhetorical strategy to “absolve the divine laws.” For Hobbes, God’s laws ought not to be condemned on this charge. And “not to condemn, is to absolve” (L 16, 250). If Hobbes can introduce reasonable doubt that God’s laws justify rebellion, he will have saved them from condemnation and secured their absolution. But getting God’s laws off the hook required the rhetorical strategy not of a contemporary analytic philosopher, nor even of a preacher, but of a judicial advocate. I will argue that some of the core scriptural claims in the second half Leviathan amount to a convergent argument. This set-piece of judicial rhetoric relies on using multiple independent claims in the hope that one’s audience finds at least one of them persuasive.

In previous work, I have hypothesized that Hobbes uses a convergent strategy in his political works (McQueen 2020b). This article takes this hypothesis in a more definite direction by marshalling clear evidence that Hobbes does indeed use a convergent strategy in Leviathan’s religious and scriptural arguments. He uses this strategy to absolve God’s laws and disarm a series of powerful challenges to sovereign power that were emerging amid the violent religious pluralism of the English Civil War.

Third, I will suggest that this was a risky strategy for Hobbes. His critics leapt not only on the controversial substance of his religious claims, but also on the structure of his convergent argument. The article concludes by pointing to the broader implications of these findings for how political theorists read both Hobbes’s work and early modern political thought more generally.

God’s Laws and Divided Allegiance

What were the “terrible crimes attributed to the commands of God”? We cannot know for sure. But we can surely guess. For six years, Parliament had been stirred by regular Fast Day sermons (Hill 1994; Trevor-Roper 1964). In an infamous 1642 sermon, Stephen Marshall channeled the retributive hopes of Psalm 137, casting King Charles I and his supporters as Babylon and urging Parliamentarian listeners to be unflinching in their violence against Royalist enemies. While they may be inclined to think it barbarous, they must be willing to take babies “upon the speares point, to take them by the heeles and beat out their braines against the walles” (Marshall 1641[2], 11–12).

After the king’s northern army had been destroyed at Marston Moor in July 1644, Edmund Staunton took Psalm 106 as his text and urged the House of Lords to follow Phinehas and to execute swift judgment: “Could I lift up my voyce as a trumpet, had I the shrill cry of an angell, which might be heard from East, to West, from North to South, in all corners of the Kingdome, my note should be, execution of judgement, execution of judgement, execution of judgement, that is Gods way to pacifie Gods wrath” (Staunton 1645, 29–30).

Within a few weeks of the king’s surrender to the Scots in May 1646, Richard Heyrick called upon Isaiah 60:14 to describe the fruits of this judgment: “The sons of them that afflicted thee shall come bending Unto thee, and all they that despised thee shall bow down themselves at the soales of thy feet . . . God will make the sons of Princes bow down unto you, the greatest that have afflicted you and despised you, shall lie at your feet” (Heyrick 1646, 31).

Sermons like these were printed and distributed at the behest of Parliament. Together, they and many others like them offered scriptural justification for bloody rebellion and resolute retribution. These, one may assume, were some of the crimes of which Hobbes sought to absolve God’s laws. And, given the value Hobbes placed on sovereign order and civil peace, he would have thought them serious crimes indeed.

For Hobbes, such sermons raised a classic problem of divided allegiance. When the commands of my sovereign conflict with those of God, whose commands should I obey? It is difficult to overestimate the severity of this problem for political order and civil peace. In order to see why, think about the relative seriousness of the threats that the two relevant parties can make. God wields the threat of eternal damnation, while our sovereign can only threaten us with mortal death. When the dictates of preachers threatening eternal damnation conflict with those of the sovereign, who can only threaten death, the prudent believer may well choose death and salvation over life and damnation. For, as Hobbes puts it, “no one can serve two masters, and the one to whom we believe that obedience is due, under fear of damnation, is no less a Master than the one to whom obedience is due through fear of temporal death, but rather more” (DCv 6.11, 80; see also EL 26.10, 162). When subjects are convinced that God’s laws demand rebellion against the civil sovereign, the threat of worldly sanctions may be insufficient to secure obedience. In such cases, the commonwealth risks being thrown back into anarchy.

How might subjects come to be convinced that God’s laws demand rebellion? Hobbes thinks there are two routes to this conviction. First, a priest or other ecclesiastical authority might demand actions that are at odds with the requirements of political obedience. Why might subjects take such demands as authoritative expressions of God’s will? One reason is that priests or other representatives of the church claim an authority and jurisdiction that is either independent of or superior to that of the sovereign.

This is a species of the problem of divided authority. Hobbes had already offered a secular philosophical argument explaining why only a unified, unconditional, and unlimited authority can provide a stable solution to the problems of the state of nature. He also offers an independent scriptural argument for the same conclusion. He gives an account of sacred history that aims to undermine the claim that bishops, priests, and other ecclesiastical authorities are Christ’s earthly magistrates. This claim is central to the problem of divided allegiance. If our priests are, as they themselves so often suggested in the seventeenth century, Christ’s magistrates on earth, then we must obey them.

To resist this conclusion, Hobbes draws closely on scripture to argue that the authority that Christ gave to those under him was importantly limited. He takes as given a claim often made by seventeenth-century ecclesiastical authorities—that they were apostolic successors and therefore had all the rightful powers that Christ had granted to his apostles. Hobbes then argues that because Christ did not wield civil authority, he could not grant this authority to others. Like Christ himself, the apostles only held powers of teaching and persuasion. Even if contemporary priests and ecclesiastical authorities are apostolic successors, their authority is similarly limited. Priests and other ecclesiastical authorities may inform the sovereign on questions of scriptural interpretation concerning the “mysteries of faith” and the sovereign may be obligated “as a Christian” to accept their interpretation (DCv 17.28, 233). However, the sovereign is not ultimately subject to their authority. Rather, their interpretive authority derives from his civil authority (DCv 17.27, 232). In all areas of sacred authority, sovereigns are the immediate rulers “of the church under Christ, and all others but subordinate to them” (EL 26.10, 162; see also DCv 17.27, 232–33).

The second way in which a subject might become convinced that God’s laws demand rebellion is that her own conscience, informed by her private interpretation of scripture, seems to prescribe actions that are at odds with the requirements of political obedience. Hobbes had already made a philosophical argument aimed at diminishing the claims of conscience. Conscience, he had argued, is a species of private judgment. As such, it reflects an individual’s own view about something “they know, or think they know . . . to be true” (El 6.8, 42). An individual may simply be mistaken in her conclusion. But mistakes breed disagreement. To the extent that the demands of her conscience put her at odds with other individuals, abiding by these demands may lead to conflict and war. For this reason, individuals wanting to escape the state of nature must alienate their private judgment and private conscience to the public judgment and public conscience of the sovereign state.

In his scriptural argument, Hobbes offers a new and independent response to the claims of conscience. He tells us that he aims to “take away this scruple of conscience concerning obedience to human laws” (EL 25.3, 142). He does this by combining two strategies. First, he uses an argument by attrition, which wears down the claims of conscience until virtually none remain. Second, he embraces a “theology of reduction,” or a doctrinal minimalism, which attempts to limit the number of fundamental Christian doctrines (Bejan 2017, 92; Guggisberg 1983). While these strategies opened Hobbes to angry criticism, they were familiar ones in post-Reformation hermeneutics and early tolerationist arguments (e.g., Svensson 2014).

Hobbes starts by arguing that civil laws are intended to oblige only in outward action, not in inward conscience. If civil laws were intended to oblige in conscience, they would be unenforceable because “no man (but God alone) knoweth the heart or conscience of a man” (EL 25.3, 142). Unable to open windows to the soul, the sovereign must focus on policing words and deeds. There are therefore far fewer conflicts between conscience and civil obedience than one might initially suppose.

Of course, it is still possible that one’s sovereign might command one to violate a requirement of salvation through word or deed. Hobbes acknowledges that Christians are forbidden from such violations. But, here again, the problem is less severe than it initially seems. The requirements of salvation are, in fact, quite minimal. As a matter of faith, Christians need only believe that Jesus is the Christ. As a matter of obedience, they need only obey God’s laws, which are identical to the laws of nature (EL 25.10, 151). Since obedience to the laws of nature requires obedience to the will of the sovereign, obedience to God’s law requires obedience to civil laws. The requirements of faith felicitously coincide with the requirements of obedience.

Let us take stock. To confront the problem of divided allegiance, Hobbes makes two arguments in his early political works. While I present the claims in a specific order, I do not think that Hobbes intended one to have priority over the other. First, he argues on the basis of sacred history that the sovereign is the ultimate civil and religious authority. So, there is no conflict between obligations to one’s priest and obligations to one’s civil sovereign. The latter will always trump the former. Let us call this the sovereign control claim. Second, he argues that the requirements of faith are minimal and that they coincide with the requirements of obedience. So, there is no conflict between obligations to one’s conscience and obligations to one’s civil sovereign. Let us call this the coincidence claim.

These two claims stand in an interesting structural relationship to one another. They overdetermine the conclusion. If one argument succeeds in persuading Hobbes’s audience, there is no need for the other one. For example, if one is persuaded on scriptural grounds that the civil sovereign wields not only ultimate secular political authority, but also ultimate sacred authority, the problem of divided allegiance does not arise. God’s laws do not demand rebellion.

The fact that Hobbes offers the coincidence claim suggests that he anticipates there will be some who are not persuaded by the sovereign control claim. Those who do not accept the sovereign control claim may still find themselves wondering to whom they should obey. For these readers, Hobbes offers his second argument: even if the sovereign does not possess ultimate sacred jurisdiction, the requirements of faith coincide with the requirements of obedience.

What might have led Hobbes to think that the sovereign control claim could fail to persuade? After a tentative and rough start to the Reformation in England in the sixteenth century, the Elizabethan settlement had restored royal supremacy over the church and uniformity in practices of worship. The Elizabethan Church demanded only “passive acceptance and outward conformity,” rather than active profession and inward conversion, on the part of subjects (Lockyer 2005, 189). This settlement was, in many ways, an attempt to respond to the potentially destabilizing fact of increasing religious pluralism in England. However, it met with resistance almost immediately. Radical Protestants and puritans thought that the settlement did not go far enough. They thought that the Church of England had preserved too much of the ceremony and ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

This resistance was reasonably well-contained under Elizabeth and her successor, James I. However, it erupted into a more serious challenge under Charles I. The Church of England under Archbishop Laud was widely seen by its opponents to be backsliding toward Catholicism. Charles I, as head of the Church of England and a king with a Catholic wife, was also increasingly cast as “popish” (Lake 1989). In such circumstances, the Elizabethan settlement and the Erastian arguments supporting it became intolerable for many. It is reasonable to think that Hobbes would have been attentive to these developments and might have concluded that there would have been many who would reject the sovereign control claim and that they would do so specifically on the grounds of conscience. The coincidence claim is there to persuade them that, even if the sovereign does not have ultimate jurisdiction over religious and ecclesiastical matters, the requirements of faith coincide with the requirements of civil obedience. ⁶

A Forensic Strategy

Hobbes continues to develop this argumentative strategy in Leviathan. He does so in two ways. First, he expands some of the arguments behind the sovereign control claim and the coincidence claim. For instance, in defending the sovereign control claim, Hobbes not only relies on familiar arguments about the limits of priestly and ecclesiastical authority, but also on a largely new and sustained attack on religious “enthusiasts” and self-proclaimed prophets (Malcolm 2012, 41–42). He is especially worried about those who, claiming direct revelatory knowledge from God, urge their audiences to resist the civil sovereign (L 32, 580–84; L 36, 658–80). In addition, he greatly expands his treatment of Moses, casting him as the paradigmatic biblical exemplar of a Leviathan sovereign who possessed both civil and religious authority (L 40, 738–48; see also McQueen 2018a). Hobbes deepens the coincidence claim in the entirely new arguments of Part IV of Leviathan, which deal with several “errors” of scriptural interpretation on questions like demonology, practices of worship, and idolatry—questions that were at the heart of the problem of divided allegiance in England and abroad (Baumgold 2017, xi; Malcolm 2012, 15).

Second, and more importantly for our purposes, Hobbes adds another claim to his religious argument. Considered together, I will suggest, these three core claims of Leviathan amount to a convergent argument. This forensic strategy responded to growing religious pluralism and division in England.

Hobbes’s new claim centers on the question of divine sanctions. He offers an unorthodox and mortalist account of hell that denies that it is a condition of everlasting suffering for the damned. This argument is entirely new to Leviathan (Malcolm 2012, 15, 41). In contrast to the first two arguments, it seems aimed at generating some reasonable doubt about whether any subject has sufficient reason to act on God’s laws against those of their state. ⁷

Hobbes sows this doubt by questioning whether the divine sanction of hell is that much worse than death at the hands of one’s sovereign. According to Hobbes, we will all die a corporeal death. Upon Christ’s return to earth, our bodies will be resurrected, and we will be judged. The righteous “shall have their bodies suddenly changed, and made spirituall, and Immortall” (L 44, 990). However, the sinners will not be subjected to eternal torments. Their punishment will simply be to undergo a second death. Hobbes cites those passages of the Bible that refer to unquenchable fire, weeping, and gnashing of teeth, but concludes that the pain mentioned there is metaphorical. It is a metaphor for “a grief, and discontent of mind, from the sight of that Eternall felicity in others, which they themselves through their own incredulity, and disobedience have lost.” Upon witnessing the felicity of the elect, each wicked man will suffer a second death “after which hee shall die no more” (L 38, 716–18). It is inconceivable, Hobbes adds later, that a merciful God “should punish mens transgressions without any end of time, and with all the extremity of torture, that men can imagine, and more” (L 44, 990).

This still leaves Hobbes with the challenge of dealing with those parts of the Bible that suggest that the fires and torments of hell are everlasting. He responds that they are endless because there will be a perpetual supply of the damned. He makes the unorthodox argument that the damned will continue to propagate after the resurrection—presumably they have some time to kill while waiting in line for the final judgment—and that the children that result from these encounters will likewise be damned (L 44, 992–94). In short, biblical references to everlasting torments are not meant to suggest that these torments are everlasting for any one person, but rather that the ranks of the damned will be continuously renewed.

This is undoubtedly a scripturally questionable line of argument. There is also an air of desperation about it. In making the argument, Hobbes seems to be allowing for the possibility that God’s laws may demand political disobedience. He attacks the claim that the threat of hell offers sufficient reason to act in accordance with the divine laws in such cases. Even worse, he has given up some powerful rhetorical and political ammunition. The sovereign control and coincidence claims are both bolstered by the threat of eternal damnation. If failing to acknowledge that one’s sovereign has ultimate jurisdiction over religious and ecclesiastical matters or that the requirements of peace coincide with the requirements of obedience condemns one to an eternity of torment, one has even stronger reasons to act in accordance with them. In abandoning the orthodox account of hell, Hobbes has given up a lot of the motivational power that Christianity can offer in the service of civil obedience. ⁸

However, even if we set such questions aside, the best that can be said for this line of argument is that, if successful, Hobbes has only leveled the playing field between prophets and preachers on the one hand and the civil sovereign on the other. Both are now only capable of threatening death in exchange for disobedience. On the best reading of the argument, then, Hobbes is back in a position that he has consistently tried to avoid—one in which the godly and the sovereign can make equally threatening claims upon us. ⁹ I would suggest that his reason for persisting in such a dubious line of argument is not primarily because he thinks it is true or scripturally sound. It is rather because of the importance of the polemical intervention that the argument makes possible.

The argument seems targeted at those who may be unwilling to accept either the sovereign control claim or the coincidence claim. ¹⁰ After all, those worried that obedience to their civil sovereign may condemn their souls to an eternity of torment have obviously found the sovereign control and the coincidence claims unpersuasive. If those claims had persuaded, the threat of hell would hardly cast such a long and troubling shadow. I have mentioned some reasons why the sovereign control claim might have been unacceptable to many in the seventeenth century.

Why might Hobbes have had reason to think that the coincidence claim might be unpersuasive? By the mid-1640s, religious dissent had become rampant in England (Hill 1984, 151–83). The breakdown of censorship in the early 1640s had allowed these dissenting voices to reach a full-throated clamor, while a program of Parliamentary Fast Sermons lent them new legitimacy (Hill 1994; Trevor-Roper 1964). There is little doubt that these raucous voices contributed to the outbreak of civil war. England was full of nonconformists, religious enthusiasts, and self-proclaimed prophets, all of whom had wildly different understandings of the requirements of faith and the political demands of those requirements. Against this backdrop, arguments for civil peace that “sought to restore order by maintaining that the intense doctrinal differences separating Christian believers from one another were of no real consequence must have been very weak indeed” (Johnston 1989, 658). The coincidence claim was one such argument, and Hobbes had good reason to doubt its persuasive power.

Let us take stock once again. Hobbes has now presented us with three claims:

Each of these claims assumes that there are some who do not accept the previous claim(s). In this way, the structure of Hobbes’s scriptural argument is a convergent argument. It overdetermines the conclusion by offering multiple independent claims. For presentational purposes, I have imposed an order on the claims. But they are not so ordered in the text, and I am not convinced that Hobbes intended any claim to have priority. If one argument fails to persuade, readers can move on to either of the other two.

Convergent arguments are common in judicial and forensic argument, where they are used to show that, regardless of the view one reaches about the relevant facts or the interpretation of the relevant rule, one must accept the advocate’s conclusion. Perhaps the most familiar species of convergent argument is the argument in the alternative. The well-known Texan criminal defense attorney Richard “Racehorse” Haynes offers what is now taken to be a classic example of the technique: “Say you sue me because you say my dog bit you. . . . Well, now this is my defense: My dog doesn’t bite. And second, in the alternative, my dog was tied up that night. And third, I don’t believe you really got bit. . . . [And finally] I don’t have a dog” (as quoted in Nissen 1978, 35).

In Haynes’s example, the first three claims are compatible with one another. It can at once be true that “my dog doesn’t bite,” that it “was tied up that night,” and that you didn’t really get bitten. However, the fourth claim contradicts the first and the second. It cannot at once be true that my dog doesn’t bite or that it was tied up that night and that I don’t have a dog. Hobbes’s convergent argument does not contain incompatible claims. All three claims can be true at once. ¹¹ However, the fact that Hobbes offers each subsequent claim suggests that he thinks there will be those who do not accept the previous claim(s). In this respect, it looks much like Haynes’s first three claims.

I have already given some suggestive evidence that Hobbes might have been using a convergent argument. First, we know that Hobbes conceived of his purpose in writing Leviathan as one of absolving God’s laws of the charge that they justified or even demanded rebellion. This framing of his purpose certainly points to a forensic strategy of some sort. Second, we have seen that there were some crucial developments in England’s religious and political landscape leading up to the civil war that might have led Hobbes to conclude that he would need to adopt a multipronged strategy of scriptural argument. Third, we have seen that there is a way of conceiving of the overall structure of his religious and scriptural arguments that is consistent with a convergent argument.

To this, we can add some external (or contextual) evidence and some internal (or textual) evidence. Contextually, we know from biographical materials and secondary historical work that Hobbes had a Tudor humanist education that would have included intense study of the classical rhetorical tradition (Skinner 1996). The Roman rhetorician Quintilian, who would have figured in this curriculum, notes that there are circumstances when one might want proliferate arguments, particularly in a judicial context. Some arguments “are weak and trivial when they stand alone, but . . . have great force when produced in a body. We must, therefore, concentrate such arguments and our tactics should be those of a charge in mass.” While these tactics should be used sparingly and “only under extreme necessity,” they are particularly useful when dealing with diverse audiences because “different arguments move different people” (Quintilian 1921, IV.v.7–8, 14, 141, 145). ¹²

Aristotle, whose Rhetoric Hobbes admired, also conceived of rhetoric as a response to the challenges of a diverse audience. Athenian juries and assemblies were, after all, comprised of men with varying backgrounds, abilities, and prejudices (Ober 1989, 127–55). Seeing the “available means of persuasion” in “each [particular] case” could well have entailed making multiple arguments (Aristotle 2007, 1356a, 37).

Thomas Wilson, the author of the Art of Rhetoric, one of the most important Tudor texts on rhetoric, made the point explicitly. When dealing with diverse audiences with different beliefs and prejudices, we will need to adapt our arguments to “make our sayings appear likely, and probable” by framing “our invention according as we shall think them most willing to allow it, that have the hearing of it” (Wilson 1994, 140). In ordering our arguments, we may want to barrage our audience with multiple independent claims to overdetermine our conclusions: “We must heap matter and find out arguments . . . making first the strongest reasons that we can, and next after, gathering all probable causes together, that being in one heap, they may seem strong, and of greater weight” (Wilson 1994, 144). Together, these statements suggest a concern with the selection and arrangement of claims that underpins a convergent argument. ¹³

A final piece of contextual evidence concerns the overt use of a forensic strategy by another seventeenth-century English political thinker dealing with religious and scriptural arguments. John Locke uses this strategy in his First Treatise of Government. There, he argues against Robert Filmer’s claims that God had given Adam an absolute right to rule and dominion over the world, that Adam had passed these rights to his descendants, and that at least some contemporary rulers were the legitimate heirs of these rights over particular territories. Locke responds by proliferating claims. The structure of his argument becomes clear in his summary at the beginning of the Second Treatise. Putting the matter almost as a defense lawyer might, Locke writes:

That Adam had not . . . any such authority over his children, or dominion over the world, as is pretended: That [even] if he had, his heirs, yet, had no right to it: That [even] if his heirs had, there being no law of nature nor positive law of God that determines which is the right heir in all cases that may arise, the right of succession, and consequently of bearing rule, could not have been certainly determined: That if even that had been determined, yet the knowledge of which is the eldest line of Adam’s posterity, being so long since utterly lost . . . there remains not to one above another, the least pretence to be the eldest house, and to have the right of inheritance (Locke 1960, §1, 267, emphasis mine). ¹⁴

As with Hobbes’s argument, each of these claims assumes that there are some who might not accept the previous claim(s). Locke’s conclusion that contemporary civil sovereigns do not have God-given absolute rights over their subjects is overdetermined. If one argument fails to persuade, Locke can produce another. The forensic strategy, then, is not peculiar to Hobbes. A generation later, Locke would use it for his own ends.

Textually, there are other places in Leviathan where Hobbes seems to use such a strategy quite overtly. Consider the way in which he casts the relationship between the two parts of Leviathan. Toward the end of the first half of the book, he tells us that he has offered an argument for absolute sovereignty using principles of reason. However, he acknowledges that there are some who may be unwilling to accept this argument (even if he thinks the reasons for such unwillingness are likely bad ones). “But,” he writes, “supposing that these of mine are not such Principles of Reason; yet I am sure they are principles from Authority of Scripture; as I shall make it appear, when I shall come to speak of the Kingdome of God, (administered by Moses,) over the Jewes, his peculiar people by Covenant” (L 30, 522). So, there are a series of secular philosophical claims that ground the case for absolute sovereignty. But, even if these claims are false, then there is also a freestanding scriptural argument that Hobbes is “sure” is true. The relationship between the two halves of the book is itself framed as a convergent argument.

A Risky Strategy

What should we make of Hobbes’s forensic strategy? The benefits of Hobbes using it are clear. A convergent argument seems well suited to circumstances of religious pluralism in which Hobbes cannot be sure that any single claim will be accepted by his entire audience. Given how far he hoped the doctrines in Leviathan would reach, he could not even be sure who his audience would be. The aftermath of the Reformation and the growing religious pluralism of the mid-seventeenth century suggest that this uncertainty would have been more than warranted. A convergent argument allows Hobbes to meet believers where they stand—to engage them on their own terms with the arguments that they are most likely to find persuasive, without deep and potentially destabilizing enquiries into whether the foundations of these arguments are true.

At this point, it may seem like Hobbes is engaged in something like a liberal pluralist project. Sharon Lloyd takes this possibility seriously, arguing that Hobbes sought to redescribe the commitments of Christianity in terms that believers can accept and by showing that these commitments demand obedience. This solution required Hobbes to meet believers where they stand and to persuade them not only that they have temporal interests in obeying the sovereign but also that their transcendent interests in salvation require obedience as well. In short, Hobbes aims, in a proto-Rawlsian fashion, to build an overlapping consensus on his principle that subjects must obey the sovereign whenever doing so is not “repugnant to the Lawes of God” (L 31, 554) and on the conclusion that obedience is never repugnant to God. Building an overlapping consensus requires, as Lloyd notes, a great deal of common ground—“common criteria for evidence and argument” and a number of shared interests and beliefs” (Lloyd 1992, 315).

While I agree with Lloyd that Hobbes’s proliferation of arguments is a principled strategy that starts by meeting believers where they stand, I do not think he thought that the cacophony of religious voices in mid-seventeenth-century Britain shared the common ground necessary for an overlapping consensus. He certainly did not think that Catholics who held that the church was the ultimate source of infallible scriptural interpretation could be part of an overlapping consensus. Nor did he think that Protestants who believed that individual believers had authoritative access to the truth of scripture could be included (L 43, 934). Perhaps he thought that these views could be redescribed to form the basis of an overlapping consensus. But if that was the case, why did Hobbes so often refer to them with such deep scorn and mocking ridicule (Sommerville 1993, 735)?

If Hobbes were aiming at an overlapping consensus, we might expect that at least some of his contemporary readers would have discerned this. Instead, as we have seen, these readers saw a wild plurality of arguments. Jon Parkin offers a more historically sensitive interpretation of Hobbes’s aims that takes these reactions seriously. He argues that, at the time he wrote Leviathan, Britain’s religious future remained unsettled. Hobbes proliferated arguments to provide multiple alternative religious possibilities that would be conducive to peace, yet familiar and credible to diverse audiences. Whatever religious settlement was coming, Hobbes wanted to ensure that it would be stable (Parkin 2018, 193).

The interpretation I have offered is consistent with Parkin’s and, like his, takes the responses of Hobbes’s contemporaries as important evidence of Hobbes’s strategy. However, my forensic interpretation focuses more closely on the dangers Hobbes saw in Britain’s present, rather than the possibilities he saw in its future. I am also more focused on the structure of Hobbes’s argument—on how the individual claims relate to one another.

This is important because the structure of Hobbes’s forensic argument was risky. Scholars are accustomed to thinking about the risks that Hobbes ran because of the content of his scriptural arguments. We have seen, for instance, that he made heterodox arguments about hell. These attracted shocked criticism and forced Hobbes to make strategic retractions in the Latin Leviathan. ¹⁵ The fact that some of his scriptural arguments drew criticisms could not have come as a surprise to Hobbes. As I noted at the outset, he expected this reaction and reassured readers that his motivations were those of an obedient subject.

We are less accustomed to thinking about the risks that Hobbes ran in the structure of his scriptural arguments. As a general matter, one risk of a convergent argument is that any single claim within it may appear weaker merely because of the presence of the other claims. The presentation of a convergent argument can give the impression that no single claim is sufficiently persuasive on its own. However, more seriously for Hobbes, the mere willingness to make a convergent argument can signal a certain indifference to the truth that elicits suspicion and potentially undermines the argument. This is especially true of convergent arguments with inconsistent claims, or arguments in the alternative. Imagine how you might react as a judge or a juror when presented with an argument that contains both of the following claims: “my dog was tied up that night” and “I don’t have a dog.” You would probably be suspicious of an advocate who was willing to use both arguments.

Yet a similar suspicion might also attend convergent arguments with consistent claims. Hobbes’s convergent argument is an argument of this sort. The sovereign control, coincidence, and tolerable-hell claims can all be true at once, just as “my dog doesn’t bite,” “my dog was tied up that night,” and “I don’t believe you really got bit” can all be true at once. Yet the fact that an advocate makes each sequential claim suggests that he thinks there are those who may not accept the previous ones. He commits to the truth of the conclusion (“I am not liable for the injury you may have suffered”) while abstaining from pronouncing on which claim most accurately captures the facts of the case. As a judge or a juror in a dog biting case, you might still be suspicious of an advocate who argues in this way. “Well, which is it?” you might reasonably ask.

Now imagine that you are not assessing claims about biting dogs but about whether you can be both a good Christian and a good subject. The fate of your soul hangs in the balance. Hobbes commits to the truth of his conclusion (Christians owe absolute obedience to their secular sovereign) while abstaining on pronouncing whether the sovereign control, coincidence, or tolerable-hell claim best reflects the facts of the matter. How comfortable would you be with an advocate of God’s laws who abstained from pronouncing what he thought were the true facts of the matter? In the seventeenth century, the answer for many was: profoundly uncomfortable.

That Hobbes had such an attitude was a common enough refrain in contemporary accusations of his atheism. Royalist cleric Henry Hammond called Leviathan a “farrago of all the maddest divinity that was ever read” (Hammond 1850, 294–95). Bishop Bramhall puts this critique in its sharpest terms in The Catching of Leviathan, where he connects Hobbes’s tendency to “heap” or proliferate arguments to a lack of concern about scriptural truth. Hobbes’s works, complains Bramhall, “are a heap of misshapen errors, and absurd paradoxes, vented with the confidence of a juggler, the brags of a mountebank, and the authority of some Pythagoras” (Bramhall 1844, 547). The final chapter of Bramhall’s attack enumerates several apparent contradictions in Hobbes’s philosophical, political, religious arguments.

In some cases, Bramhall identifies genuine tensions in Hobbes’s account. Many of these tensions take a familiar paradoxical form (Parkin 2016; see also Springborg 2009). Hobbes gives something to common opinion with one hand, before taking it away with the other (Parkin 2007, 195). For instance, as Bramhall points out, Hobbes affirms the common view that scripture sets limits on the laws that a sovereign may make. Yet within a few lines, he undermines the common view entirely by reminding the reader that “sovereigns in their own dominions are the sole legislators” and wield sole interpretive authority over the meaning of scripture (L 33, 586). For Bramhall, this ultimately commits Hobbes to the position that “the determinations of Scripture . . . do bind the hands of kings, when they themselves please to be bound; no longer” (Bramhall 1844, 591). Bramhall is right. This is precisely the position to which Hobbes commits himself.

However, some of the arguments that Bramhall identifies are instances of convergent arguments. Take, for example, Bramhall’s frustration at Hobbes’s reassuring affirmation that, on the one hand, natural laws are God’s laws but that, on the other, they are not laws at all (Bramhall 1844, 577–78). Hobbes contends that the laws of nature are rules that, if followed by everyone, conduce to peace. These “laws,” he explains, are prudential dictates of right reason. In this sense, they are not properly called laws because they are not “the word of him, that by right hath command over others.” Whether or not they are dictates of right reason (and Hobbes certainly thinks they are), they are commands of God. If we understand them in this way, “then are they properly called Lawes” (L15, 242). However one chooses to understand them and whether or not they are properly called “laws,” their content remains the same. ¹⁶

For Bramhall, Hobbes’s proliferation of multiple lines of argument was a maddening means of protection against criticism. “What should a man say to this man?” asks Bramhall in frustration. “How shall one know, when he is in earnest, and when he is in jest? He setteth down his opinion just as gipsies tell fortunes, both ways; that if the one miss, the other may be sure to hit; that when they are accused of falsehood by one, they may appeal to another;—‘but what did I write’ in such a place” (Bramhall 1844, 592). For Bramhall, this proliferation of arguments is the tactic of the charlatan—the “mountebank,” the “gipsie.” But we can affirm Bramhall’s observations about both the structure of Leviathan’s arguments and its author’s flexibility on questions of scriptural truth without accepting his assumption about Hobbes’s motivation.

Hobbes’s flexibility may well have been less self-serving and more principled than Bramhall allows. If Hobbes were genuinely concerned, as Bramhall seemed to think he was, with avoiding accusations of falsity, Hobbes would have entirely avoided making many of the scriptural and philosophical arguments in Leviathan. So, what principles might have been at stake for Hobbes? He held that the aim of philosophy is human benefit. He is particularly concerned with the benefits of order and peace, on which most other moral and political goods depend. The practice of philosophy for Hobbes, then, is as much peace seeking as it is truth seeking (L 46, 1052; R&C, 1140–41). Ideally, the pursuit of truth and the demands of peace are consistent (L 18, 272). However, Hobbes allows for the possibility that they may not be. For instance, he argues that those who publicly assert truths contrary to established religion or secular state doctrines may “be silenced . . . by the Laws Civill: For disobedience may lawfully be punished in them, that against the Laws teach even true Philosophy” (L 46, 1102; see also Hoekstra 2006, 40).

Hobbes’s willingness to offer a convergent argument is consistent with this irenic reading of his aims. However, he also recognized the risks of being overly strategic in the claims that one makes, even in the service of peace. Individuals who think that they have been deceived may subsequently be suspicious of beneficial and true doctrines. Furthermore, those defending claims they think are true are likely to do so “more vigorously and forcefully” than they would if they suspected these claims might be false (DCv 13.9, 147). Given the persuasive challenges of a convergent argument on questions as consequential as ultimate salvation, one might have reason to wonder whether those subject to it would be convinced of its truth and whether those promulgating it could do so with sufficient force and vigor.

So, Hobbes faced a tradeoff. To absolve God’s laws of the charge that they justify rebellion, he embraces a forensic strategy suited to navigating the circumstances of religious pluralism. Yet this very same strategy risks casting Hobbes as an advocate unconcerned with scriptural truth and making his irenic defense of God’s laws unconvincing. That Hobbes chose to assume these risks accounts for at least some of the uproar that his scriptural arguments generated among his contemporaries.

Hobbes might have thought that some of these risks would be minimized if Leviathan were used, as he hoped it would be, to educate those training for the priesthood at Oxford and Cambridge. In the book, they would find a range of arguments that they might “sprinkle” upon their flocks “from the Pulpit” (L R&C, 1140). If their parishioners were hungry for civil order, priests could preach the sovereign control claim. If the bonds of obedience were beginning to loosen under the pull of conscience, they could resort to the coincidence claim. If the religious rabble-rousers were threatening that civil obedience led straight to hell, priests could reach for the argument of last resort—the tolerable-hell claim. As Don Herzog notes, “students in the Hobbesian university will need to be armed: it’s a rough political world, where justifications for disobedience are a dime a dozen, and they can never afford to be silent if one is offered” (Herzog 1989, 109). If Hobbes’s goal was to create a rhetorical arsenal for the priesthood, his proliferation of claims might have been an asset (or even a necessity) rather than a liability.

Conclusion

I have argued that Hobbes uses a forensic strategy in Leviathan to “absolve the divine laws” of the charge that they justify rebellion. If I am right about this, then we should see Hobbes as an “irenic instrumentalist,” willing to throw arguments uneasily together and to reinterpret and even distort the meaning of scripture for the principled end of securing peace. We should see him as a “strategic political theorist” (Nili 2021).

Recognizing that Hobbes was engaged in a forensic strategy of proliferating arguments raises important questions about how we ought to read him today. When we read political thinkers, we often read for argument. When we read in this way, we also tend to assume that there is one central argument and that our job is to identify it, understand it, and evaluate it. When we encounter multiple arguments for a single conclusion, our tendency is often to focus on the strongest one. Perhaps we do this for reasons of interpretive charity—out of some sense that we owe it to the texts and their authors to reconstruct their arguments in what strike us today as their strongest and most plausible versions (Rawls, as quoted in Freeman 2007, xiii). Perhaps we do it because their strongest arguments are often the ones that are most normatively, rhetorically, or aesthetically interesting to us. Perhaps we do it because the way we were taught to write as political theorists and political philosophers was to offer our best argument for a conclusion, rather than all our arguments.

Like many early modern thinkers, Hobbes did not have this luxury. He was writing for a diverse audience about contentious questions in an unstable political context. He was trying to convince his countrymen that God’s laws did not demand rebellion after all. He was hoping to give priests the ammunition they would need to disarm the various justifications for disobedience lobbed at them by their parishioners. If these are one’s tasks, then a single argument—no matter how strong it might seem in the halls of Oxford or the salons of Paris—is not enough. Reading Hobbes demands that we be attentive to these facts. Focusing only on what strike us today as his strongest arguments amounts to performing a clean-up operation on the text. The result might be something that looks more familiar to us. But this familiarity comes at the cost of seeing what Hobbes was doing—building a rhetorical arsenal to absolve God’s laws in the cause of worldly peace.

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