Glory and the Law in Hobbes

God, whom no law restrains, refers all to his glory.

De cive: iv.9

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls.

Attributed to Jonathan Swift, but also to Aristotle, Rousseau and Nietzsche

From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death,

Good Lord, deliver us.

From all sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion; from all false doctrine heresy, and schism; from hardness of heart and contempt of thy Word and Commandment,

Good Lord, deliver us.

Book of Common Prayer 1559, 1662

Wisdom, glory, grace, &c. are words frequent enough in every man’s mouth; but if a great many of those who use them, should be asked what they mean by them, they would be at a stand, and not know what to answer … 

John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III,10, 3

An important but often overlooked part of Hobbes’s Leviathan comes at the end. Concluding, he expresses his hopes for his book:

Therefore I think it may be profitably printed, and more profitably taught in the Universities, in case they also think so, to whom the judgment of the same belongeth. For seeing the Universities are the fountains of civil, and moral doctrine, from whence the preachers, and the gentry, drawing such water as they find, use to sprinkle the same (both from the pulpit, and in their conversation) upon the people, there ought certainly to be great care taken, to have it pure, both from the venom of heathen politicians, and from the incantation of deceiving spirits. And by that means the most men, knowing their duties, will be the less subject to serve the ambition of a few discontented persons, in their purposes against the state; and be the less grieved with the contributions necessary for their peace, and defense; and the governors themselves have the less cause, to maintain at the common charge any greater army, than is necessary to make good the public liberty, against the invasions and encroachments of foreign enemies. (Lev. Conclusion, 16) ¹

Education plays a central, if in this passage substantively undefined, role in Hobbes. If citizens were to “[know] their duties”, then they will be less likely to engage in acts detrimental to the stability and peace of the state. Indeed, he had already foreseen in Chapter One that he would have needed “to speak of their [universities’] office in a commonwealth” (Lev I.1.5). It is not unreasonable to take the entire text that comes between the opening and the conclusion of Leviathan as that which is to be taught. And that raises the question of who shall teach and of what constitutes successful teaching.

In Leviathan Chapter 30.3, “Of the OFFICE of the Sovereign Representative,” Hobbes makes it clear that the responsibility of “appointing teachers and examining what doctrines are conformable or contrary to the defense, peace, and good of the people” is one of the sovereign’s responsibilities. Again, in section 6, we learn that it is the sovereign’s advantage to do so as it is to “his benefit … and security against the danger that may arrive to himself in his natural person from rebellion.” Note that the teaching of these doctrines may protect the sovereign in his natural (i.e. flesh and blood) capacity not in his artificial (i.e. sovereign) capacity. (No doubt Hobbes has the unfortunate Charles I in mind). The mortal human need for self-preservation encourages the sovereign actually to teach that which is the basis of a model of political stability, i.e. to act as a sovereign. Thus, in presenting the doctrine that the sovereign is responsible for inculcating doctrine, he speaks in the sections that follow of what and how the people are to be “taught”. In fact (sec. 10), this teaching is even to take place amongst the people on the Sabbath, by persons appointed to instruct them (i.e. university trained divines, see sec. 14 on the uses of the Universities). Such instruction is the secular equivalent to and, it would appear, the equal of sermons on Scripture. ²

Hobbes’s concern with proper doctrinal education is a constant theme. In the Elements of Law, he writes: “There is no doubt, if the true doctrine concerning the law of nature, and the properties of a body politic, and the nature of law in general, were perspicuously set down, and taught in the Universities, but that young men, who come thither void of prejudice, and whose minds are yet as white paper, capable of any instruction, would more easily receive the same, and afterward teach it to the people, both in books and otherwise, than now they do the contrary” (EL II. 9.8). ³ The words in italics are of course mine – what they point out is that Hobbes does clearly think that human minds or understanding can be changed and is changed through experience (and that a correct education is the proper experience). ⁴

Quentin Skinner quotes these passages and refers to them as “an optimistic conclusion.” ⁵ Is this, however, in fact “an optimistic conclusion”? Perhaps only in contrast with the sterner measures that someone like Plato might endorse. Skinner is correct in cautioning us against dismissing this as merely utopian. However, the matter is more complex. While the adoption of Hobbes’s writings as school texts is what it would have taken to turn Hobbes’s methodological/doctrinal achievement into a concrete and actual victory, he was not alone in pursuing grand educational reform schemes, nor was he unconscious of competitors. The Hartlib circle was similarly submitting grandiose plans based in part on the didactic enthusiasms of Comenius. ⁶ William Davenant, Hobbes’s poet friend, would in 1654 (after he had been captured, incarcerated, then released and pardoned by English authorities) write A Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie. In it, he proposed a scheme of using public-funded theatrical performances (modeled on Italian comedy); bolstered by the spectacular effects Davenant had once used in court masques, they were to indoctrinate the common people in their duty to the state – at that time, Cromwell’s protectorate. Davenant’s proposition was in fact conveyed to Hartlib by Hobbes’s acquaintance and fellow mathematician, John Pell. ⁷ If Hobbes’s doctrine were to be taught in the schools, it would have to receive the sovereign stamp of approval. All other doctrines that might conflict with Hobbes’s (including those that threaten its basic presuppositions, such as Boylean plenism, i.e. anything that suggested the existence of vacuum [i.e. nothing], or of incorporeal substances) would have to count as “discourse which … represented not unto us our own conceptions,” (EL I.5) thus as seditious teachings to be outlawed.

If this is optimism, it is not the easy-going type that Skinner suggests. It suggests rather that the question of who would teach, and what would be taught (particularly in the wake of Bishop Laud’s chancellorship of Oxford and subsequent tenure as archbishop of Canterbury) was no small matter to Hobbes or to his contemporaries. Dictating the lessons to be drummed into the heads of English citizens was serious business. If his remarks on teaching reflect optimism, they do so in a way that tempers this sensibility with a gravely serious determination to rectify a desperate situation. Hobbes is confident (and always remained confident) that the strength and truth of his doctrine would insure that the commonwealth the people would form, once they conducted themselves in a manner obedient to his doctrine’s dictates, would stand as stable and peaceful as any commonwealth could. However, Hobbes’s certitude in this regard should not cloud our understanding of the distress and disgust that animated these efforts. He justified these drastic measures by emphasizing his view of the contemporary circumstances as absolutely miserable. Things were so far gone that there could be no question of halfway measures.

The difficulty with the substance of education in Hobbes therefore is that it must consist of “our own conceptions.” It appears from above that the criteria for what can correctly be taught are at least as stringent as the criteria for what language and translation for the Bible should be available. ⁸ We know that Hobbes thought that the laws of nature were written in everyone’s heart – but we also know that he knew that most are illiterate when it comes to reading themselves. ⁹ (The “Introduction” to Leviathan revolves around the imperative to “read thyself” – which is Hobbes’s rendering of gnosce teipsum). Hobbes seems to think that while the mind is “white paper” and thus a blank, the heart is the locus of the inscription of natural law (albeit law that is hard to read). The heart must be read to be assimilated – not so the mind which is apparently immediately available and dangerously motile and hence a particular source of political danger. The obvious question to ask is then “what is it that keeps us from knowing or acknowledging – from reading – these conceptions?” Reading, we know, was central to the enterprise of contemporary Protestantism. The Scriptures were now in the vernacular such that they could be read, without intermediary, directly engaged by each, man and woman alike ¹⁰ – to experience what Samuel Beckett was to refer to as “the power of the text to claw.” Yet, even with the text in front of, or rather inside, them, most did not or could not or would not read. On the importance of the relation of a reader to a text, Hobbes comes close to joining Tyndale but with less confidence in our access to our hearts – his worry was that the text as it was written in one’s heart was not available to be read or that we would resist reading it. And it is here, in relation to our problems with reading our hearts, that the complex question of the place of glory in Hobbes’s thought confronts us.

It is well known that in chapter thirteen of Leviathan that Hobbes identifies glory, along with competition and diffidence, as a “principal cause of quarrel” (Lev. 13.5). Glory, he goes on to say, has to do with actions or attitudes on the part of others in relation to oneself. Absent a “common power to keep them all in awe “(Lev. 13.8), it is a cause of war. Slomp has pointed out that Hobbes’s thought gives pride of place to relations between human beings. ¹¹ Thus, in The Elements of Law (1.9.1 – see .13), he writes: “Glory, or internal gloriation or triumph of the mind, is that passion which proceedeth from the imagination or conception of our own power, above the power of him that contendeth with us.” We find glory in or for ourselves when our sense of our own power finds that power to be superior to that power of others and that this leads us to demand recognition of our supposed superiority. Were there no one to compare ourselves to, there would be no possibility of glory.

This (human) understanding of glory, however, raises an important question. A danger from human glorying comes from the fact that humans are more or less equal to each other in ability and strength, such that no one has a decisive advantage. Suppose there were a being whose power was superior to all others. We do have two examples of such a power in Hobbes – God and the Sovereign. These are not, as it turns out, as different from each other as one might have thought, for God provides the model for earthly sovereignty. A perfect model (and as we shall see a non-relational one) of glory and government would be that of God as Sovereign. Such was true for the Hebrews before they instituted kings (Lev. xl.10–13) and as reality will only reoccur on earth when Christ comes back. Importantly, Hobbes’s vision of our situation when Christ returns is that of a civil kingdom. He writes:

In short, the kingdom of God is a civil kingdom; which consisted, first in the obligation of the people of Israel to those laws, which Moses should bring unto them from Mount Sinai; and which afterwards the high priest for the time being, should deliver to them from before the cherubims in the sanctum sanctorum; and which kingdom having been cast off, in the election of Saul, the prophets foretold, should be restored by Christ; and the restoration whereof we daily pray for, when we say in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Thy kingdom come’; and the right whereof we acknowledge, when we add, ‘For thine is the kingdom, the power, and glory, for ever and ever, Amen’; and the proclaiming whereof, was the preaching of the apostles; and to which men are prepared, by the teachers of the Gospel; to embrace which Gospel, (that is to say, to promise obedience to God’s government) is, to be in the kingdom of grace, because God hath gratis given to such the power to be the subjects (that is, children) of God hereafter, when Christ shall come in majesty to judge the world, and actually to govern his own people, which is called the kingdom of glory. If the kingdom of God (called also the kingdom of heaven, from the gloriousness, and admirable height of that throne) were not a kingdom which God by his lieutenants, or vicars, who deliver his commandments to the people, did exercise on earth; there would not have been so much contention, and war, about who it is, by whom God speaketh to us; neither would many priests have troubled themselves with spiritual jurisdiction, nor any king have denied it them. (Lev 3.35.15–19: my italics)

The passage clearly identifies “glory” as a central quality of the kingdom of God. Moreover, in the “kingdom of glory,” after, that is, Christ comes back – God/Christ will actually govern as sovereign, needing only His glory for effective governing. We have thus a model of a kingdom where the glory of the sovereign suffices for all order and stability. As we shall see shortly, the glory of God and Christ is not relational. As we are not, however, at the Second Coming, glory is, on the human level, understood only as relational. There are thus two understandings of glory in Hobbes: the one is human (as in chapter thirteen) and leads to war; the second is that of God/sovereign and is sufficient in itself to produce a good kingdom.

What is involved in the glory of God/Christ/Sovereign? Here one must consider what Hobbes says about sight. Sight and glory are closely related. Look at the detail of the frontispiece: we know that Hobbes had a hand in the drafting of this engraving; we know that he had the figures that make up the body of the Leviathan turned around such that they faced toward rather than away from the giant. ¹² These elements of the layout are important: (1) there is no space between the persons who make up the body of the Sovereign. (2) Importantly, there is no outline into which the people are set – they themselves form the body and do not simply fill it. ¹³ Additionally, (3) where legs are visible, as with those on the arm, the persons are clearly presented as if ascending toward the face. The movement of the whole is toward that face.

From whence derives the glory of the sovereign? Hobbes seeks to make the Leviathan – the sovereign – an object of sight such that what all see there will, in fact, be what could have been read in their own hearts. The sovereign is thus each of our selves joined as one being and constructed as an object of sight. You come out in the morning to pick up your milk and what you see is your Sovereign – it cannot be missed. And when we see the Leviathan on the horizon, we are in fact seeing ourselves as making the body of the Sovereign, much in the way that we might see ourselves present on stage in a theater – as a kind of chorus, one might say. ¹⁴

In a generally overlooked passage, Hobbes writes that “the greatest pressure [burden] of sovereign governors proceedeth not from any delight or profit they can expect in the damage of weakening of their subjects (in whose vigor consisteth their own strength and glory) … ” (Lev 18.20 – my italics). In order to provide for this vigor, a vigor that is to the Sovereign’s advantage, the sovereign is obliged during times of peace to take what measures are possible in order to be better able in times of emergency to “resist or take advantage” of enemies. Persons by themselves, writes Hobbes, magnify every small grievance from passion and self-love; they lack the telescoping vision that “moral and civil science” provides “to see afar off the miseries that hang over them” (ibid).

That the sovereign is seen is significant for our understanding of the role of glory. The glory of God is something that is always seen. When Christ is transfigured on Mount Tabor his glory shines forth as a blinding light: “He was transfigured before them; and his face did shine as the sun, and his garments became white as the light” (Matthew 17.2). What is important here is that one can do nothing before the glory of God but acknowledge it. There is no choice in the matter – it simply overwhelms. ¹⁵ Glory in this sense (of God, Christ, the Sovereign) is then something beheld and is an intransitive relation ¹⁶ : I mean by “intransitive” that while one beholds the glory of God, one is not seen by God. Similar thoughts hold true for more earthly examples: a Roman triumph, for instance, is the presentation and sanctification as hero of a great war victor for the acknowledgment of the crowd. The regalia (the gold-bordered toga picta) he wore identify him as nearly divine or nearly a king. ¹⁷ Likewise, the theatricality of the Sovereign as he towers over the landscape is central to his sovereignty. And like any actor on stage, he does not reciprocally see the audience. In a like manner, when one reads accounts of the theatricality of the self-presentation of the King in English Courts, ¹⁸ the glory of the king could not but produce awe. ¹⁹ See the attached portraits by Hans Holbein of Henry VIII (1536–1537) and Quentin Metsys of Elizabeth I (1583).

This is from the point of view of the sovereign. Yet we must also consider this issue of glory from the point of view of the spectator. I have said that the Sovereign/God is beheld by the spectators but does not behold them. Note that in the frontispiece the Hobbesian Sovereign is composed of distinct individuals – indeed insofar as one can distinguish their clothing it appears that they come from a range of social classes. The inhabitants who of course populate the rectilinear town below cannot but at all times see the composed sovereign on the horizon. What does it mean to say that we see ourselves as the Sovereign in the way we witness an actor on a theater stage? ²⁰ This is theater, and theater, Hobbes says, is when “People act and play their own parts,” Hobbes tells us in the “Answer to Sir William Davenant’s Preface before Gondibert.” ²¹ The important word is “own”: the actor playing Hamlet must play the part of Hamlet – as actor that is his own part. In this sense, the actor owns what makes him actor. With this notion of a voice in and of each and the general equality of the speakers, one might be tempted to think that Hobbes is here reactivating the classical notion of the agora. ²² Yet, this is wrong or rather misleading: the classical notion of the agora conceived of it as physical space. In the classical Greek democracies, the agora was that which defined them as different from those whom Herodotus called the “barbaric peoples” of the East. Such states as those were founded on invisibility, thus on secrecy or deceit. However, visibility, for Hobbes, is not simply an ethical requirement of transparency and truth. What he understood is that the idea of a person includes an aesthetic dimension: it must be manifested and perceived in gestures and symbols, perhaps even in ceremonies. Chapter sixteen of the Leviathan explicitly relates “person” to the mask (“persona”) that ancient actors wore. The requirement of visibility thus “puts up a front”; it exposes itself – and must risk itself – not only to public admiration but also to scrutiny, just as do performers on a stage.

In consequence, Hobbes’s conception of sovereignty involves a transformation of the conception of political space. ²³ As the Sovereign is in its glory exposed to view, it unifies those beholding it. Hobbes’s position here seems to be much like that of Augustine in De Doctrina Christiana. There Augustine imagines a group of individuals, forming the audience for a play: a particularly excellent actor is on stage; each audience member starts individually to applaud him or her; soon the whole audience is now applauding and each becomes conscious of his or her applause along with that of the others. They are knit together by – and only by – the common object of their affection or orientation. What makes them one is that each on his own acknowledges the excellence of what is before him or her. So also with Hobbes’s frontispiece.

Hobbes’s transformation of political space as one constituted by a change in orientation of each person toward a single object of reverence or affection was in great part – he found – historically necessary. In the seventeenth century, the legitimacy of the English state, with its origins in Norman Conquest, was denied by groups such as the Levelers and the Diggers on the grounds that conquest gave no right to govern. For such, history had settled anything. “We may have been conquered,” they said in effect, “but that means nothing for one day we will conquer the conquerors.” The English Revolution would give substance to the potential of this claim; it required a justification of governance on a basis other than that of conquest or inheritance – such a basis that had received its early modern formulation in Machiavelli. It fell to Hobbes in an anticipation to rouse thought from its historical slumber and found modern political philosophy by uniting contract with sovereignty. ²⁴ To the warring partners of the civil war, Hobbes said in effect that conquest or no conquest, no matter who the winners and losers of the historical war were, it mattered not, at least not for the long run. The state that was established by the contractual elaboration of sovereignty was, Hobbes argued, what each, whether in victory or in defeat, actually wanted. ²⁵

Hobbes deployed two central arguments to demonstrate his claim that the sovereign was, in the end, or rather at the beginning, us (more precisely: us beholding our cause-seeking selves). The first argument was a claim that he (Hobbes or someone like him) saw better than we did how it is with each of us. In the Elements of Law, Hobbes’s intention is explicitly “to put men in mind of what they know already, or may know by their own experience.” ²⁶ Note that the problem is to put in their mind what they know or should know. Yet this does not occur not in a vacuum – the mind is no longer a “blank slate.” In the Preface to De Cive, he sets down as a “principle known to all men and denied by none” that every man “will distrust and dread in each other.” He then goes on to ask what is one to make of those who would deny such a principle. As mentioned earlier, for Hobbes the political problem comes from the fact that humans refuse to acknowledge that which they can know. One needs dramatically to remind them therefore of the reality of their experience. Hence: “It may seem strange, to some man that has not well weighed these things, that nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade and destroy one another. And he may, therefore, not trusting to this inference made from the passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by experience.” ²⁷ And he proceeds to tell a little story, asking if one does not go armed when on travel, does not lock ones chests and so forth. “Look at your own life – don’t think about it outside of our actual practice,” seems to be Hobbes’s message. For Hobbes, human use will and can teach us the meaning; ²⁸ however, a sovereign must be constructed so as to embody this meaning so that we can see it.

We recall that the scripture from Job (41.34) that is set above everything in the frontispiece indicates that that the Leviathan is itself set above the “children of pride.” ²⁹ Pride is another word for “vain-glory” and the problem with vain-glory is that it leads us to be overly impressed by our own abilities, which in turn leads to conflict and war. From whence vain-glory? Vain-glory is the “imagination of actions done by ourselves, which never were done … and is exemplified in the fable by the fly sitting on the axletree, and saying to himself, “what a dust do I raise!” ³⁰

Vain-glory is what I referred to above as “human glory.” From whence this human glorying? It derives from the particular quality that distinguishes men from animals, namely curiosity, which Hobbes calls “the appetite of knowledge.” In the Elements of Law we find:

As in the discerning faculties, man leaveth all community with beasts at the faculty of imposing names; so also doth he surmount their nature at this passion of curiosity. For when a beast seeth anything new or strange to him, he considereth it so far only as to discern whether it be likely to serve his turn, or hurt him, and accordingly approacheth nearer it, or flieth from it; whereas man, who in most events remembereth in what manner they were caused and begun, looketh for the cause and beginning of everything that ariseth new unto him. And from this passion of admiration and curiosity, have arisen not only the invention of names, but also the supposition of such causes of all things as they thought might produce them. And from this beginning is derived all philosophy: as astronomy from the admiration of the course of heaven; natural philosophy from the strange effects of the elements and other bodies. And from the degrees of curiosity proceed also the degrees of knowledge amongst men; for to a man in the chase of riches or authority, (which in respect of knowledge are but sensuality) it is a diversion of little pleasure to consider, whether it be the motion of the sun or the earth that maketh the day, or to enter into other contemplation of any strange accident, than whether it conduce or not to the end he pursueth. Because curiosity is delight, therefore also all novelty is so, but especially that novelty from which a man conceiveth an opinion true or false of bettering his own estate. For in such case they stand affected with the hope that all gamesters have while the cards are shuffling. (EL I.8.16)

The same distinction of man from animal occurs in Leviathan 6.35: animals seek to know only that which affects them; humans, however, are curious: they want to know why and thus seek causes. Hobbes here revises the famous passages in Aristotle and Plato where wonder at what is, is said to be the origin of philosophy – now philosophy starts from an appetite to know why something happens – to know its cause. Hobbes here modifies a medieval argument (in which he may or may not believe) to the effect that such a desire and appetite lead man eventually to conceive of the Absolute, that is God: “Curiosity, or love of the knowledge of causes, draws a man from consideration of the effect, to seek the cause; and again, the cause of that cause; till of necessity he must come to this thought at last, that there is some cause, whereof there is no former cause, but is eternal; which is it men call God” (Lev 11.25). This, incidentally, allows Hobbes to distinguish monotheistic religions – which are based on curiosity – from the religions “of the Gentiles” which are, as with Epicurus, based on fear. ³¹ What is important, however, is that whether or not he believes the argument about God, he does hold that curiosity will or should lead us to behold the glory of God and thus of the Sovereign.

I must note here, that in one area, however, humans have in general not as of yet sought original causes and nature. It is in relation to the Commonwealth that curiosity has hitherto been precisely lacking: “The skill of making, and maintaining commonwealths, consisteth in certain rules, as doth arithmetic and geometry; not (as tennis-play) on practice only: which rules, neither poor men have the leisure, nor men that have had the leisure, have hitherto had the curiosity, or the method to find out” (Lev 20.19 – my italics). Clearly, though, Hobbes had this curiosity.

Glory then requires curiosity and curiosity leads man to judge matters as to whether or not they “better[eth] his own estate.” With God, the question of glory raised no problem. God is glory. We see God in his glory; he does not see such in us. Yet human beings are, as we noted in discussing chapter thirteen, susceptible to finding or wanting glory in or for themselves. What then happens to glory when we remain on the human level, before, that is, Christ shall return in His glory to judge the quick and the dead and rule over the earth? As noted, among humans, glory is one of the “three principal causes of quarrel” (Lev 13.6). Glory – on the human dimension – Hobbes continues, is the pursuit of “trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion … either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name” (Lev 13.7).

What to do about this human glorying? The remedy for the tendency to pursue glory is “awe,” failing which humans are in a state of war. The role of awe in relation to glory is important for the human commonwealth. ³² In his translation of The Peloponnesian War, Hobbes renders the following passage – θɛῶν δὲ ϕόβος ἢ ἀνθρώπων νόμος οὐδɛὶς ἀπɛῖργɛ – theon de phobos e anthropon nomos oudeai apeirge – as “neither fear of gods or law of man awed any man” – whereas a more standard translation of apeirge gives “restrained” or “deterred” for “awe.” ³³ The Greek literally means “prevent, hinder, ward off.” ³⁴ Awe for Hobbes is a form of restraint that follows from fear. Fear, however, comes from a refusal or inability or mistake when examining one’s own heart. Shortly after the discussion of curiosity and the search for causes, Hobbes notes that those who do not search for “the natural causes of things” often “feign to themselves several kinds of powers invisible and … stand in awe of their own imaginations” (Lev 11.26). This is to say that they imprison themselves in false ideas (like “birds in lime twigs” [Lev 4.12]”) out of a lack of curiosity, curiosity that would lead them to the glory of the Glorious (God/Sovereign).

Here Hobbes considers other alternatives. Ruling can be achieved by one in two manners. One is the manner by which God is “king of all the earth”: here he rules in his glory because of his (undoubted) power. (Human) kings of a people, on the other hand, rule not by glory but by covenant (Lev 12.22) (Hobbes’s model here is the move in I and II Samuel to I Kings). Covenants, however (as opposed to power), are notoriously unreliable. Covenants rest on upon “express … words of the future” – that is words “spoken with understanding of what they signify” (Lev 14.13).

Hobbes will spend a lot of time getting the meaning of words correct. Even correct words alone – here Hume will share a march with Hobbes – are, however, not sufficient to hold men to the performance of their covenants. So the problem is what might strengthen the holding to that performance. Hobbes sets out two possibilities. First is “a fear of the consequence of breaking their word”; the second is a “glory or pride in appearing not to need to break it.” (Here Hobbes opens a path to Nietzsche’s consideration of the person with the “right to make promises” – Genealogy of Morals, second essay.) Hobbes is quick to dismiss glory as politically inefficacious for human beings under present circumstances. It is “a generosity [meaning here ‘nobility’ as a quality of character] too rarely to be found to be presumed on, especially in the pursuers of wealth, command, or sensual pleasure (which are the greatest part of mankind)” (Lev 14.31 – see 15.10). One might note that a Sovereign would by definition not need to break his word as its word is actuality – he/she/it is/ has glory. Fear, on the other hand, can be taught and needs to be: Hobbes was nothing if not conscious that for a decade Englishmen had been fearlessly killing one another over the question of a mistake in grammar – as to whether or not the body of Christ was actually present in the Eucharist wafer. (See the discussion of bodies and accidents in Lev 5.10).

Glory is a natural attribute of God to which one can do nothing but acquiesce. On the human scale, particularly when people have not pursued origins and causes, glory is on the other hand what leads people to compare themselves one to the other. (No one after Lucifer seeks to compare him or herself to God). Glory is thus a dangerous trope – correct if corresponding to natural reality (but even then tenuous) and very apt to go wrong and lead to conflict. Much as Rousseau would later write in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, it is precisely this comparison that leads individuals to think of themselves as greater, as more worthy than others.

When one puts all this together, the following is derived. The Sovereign is composed of individuals who have sought and read (whether from their hearts – unlikely – or more likely from Hobbes’s book) the cause and nature of civil society. These individuals are each of us, or, more accurately, are that self which is our real or natural self but which we for a variety of reasons fail to read or resist reading properly. The individuals who make up the sovereign are in their collectivity glorious as an artificial being, a “mortal God”: each of us who beholds them (i.e. beholds our true selves) is, or should be, in awe of the glory that they/it manifest. As spectators, we thus stand in awe of our glorified self.

This is not without its dangers – and thus Hobbes finds the human desire for glory to be a major source of conflict. Such a desire is the result of mistake or inability of refusal to read the laws of nature that are in each of us (as he proclaims in the second appendix the Latin Leviathan) and is really vain-glory – a self-serving and self-protecting appreciation of one’s self in relation to another, resulting in the attribution of glory to oneself and the concomitant expectation that one should be admired or held in awe. If I am then not held to be glorious – after all, all persons for all practical purposes are equal for Hobbes – then I will be tempted to strike out to require that you hold me in awe and conflict starts. The only being who has actual glory is the being of the sovereign, of the selves that make up the sovereign, a being as Hobbes makes clear is like God, is in fact a mortal God. (And here we remember that Christ was a mortal God, hence that the Sovereign is in effect like Christ before He returns).

If, on the other hand, I were to think myself to be better than you, I would be mistaken – vain-glorious. Vain-glory has multiple sources. It can come from (1) a belief in the flattery of others (Lev 6.39); from (2) the “feigning or supposed of abilities in ourselves” (Lev 6.41; see 18.11–12; 27.13); it is (3) a form of pride or self-conceit (Lev 8.18); as a glory “to no end,” it is (4) a form of cruelty; and it makes one subject (5) to anger (which produces crime (Lev 27.17)). Vainglory may be found even in the Christian Church when certain early “pastors” tool a “pride” in their own “preeminence” and sought to cast others out of the Church (Lev 42.25).

Thus, a reading of one’s heart – or the reading about one’s heart in a book such as that of Thomas Hobbes – will draw the picture of one’s real self: the self that acknowledges the nineteen laws of nature set forth in chapters fourteen and fifteen. ³⁵ Such beings have understood the causes of a civil society – causes that are the same for each. As each of those selves knows and wants the same thing, they are bound together as a great artificial Being, a mortal God, the Leviathan. That Being has power over the men of pride – those who have not read or have refused to read for one vain-glorious reason or another. When such beings, however, sight the glorious Leviathan, they cannot do anything but acknowledge it as their own sovereign, or acknowledge their own sovereignty over themselves. They thus stand in awe of the sovereign, that is of awe of themselves properly educated – and awe of the glorious sovereign is that which overcomes the prideful human glorying that leads men to anger and conflict. ³⁶