Justice failing, faith also failed.--Hobbes
I sometimes toy with the idea that Spinoza's genealogy of error (that is, the embrace of final causes) is the first attempt at genealogy in the modern age (leaving aside its pre-history in antiquity; recall and recall). But yesterday while teaching, I noticed that before Hobbes gets to the social contract in Leviathan, he offers a quite elaborate genealogy of the the main causes of the rise and falls of religion in Chapter 12 ("Of Religion").+ I had the uncanny experience of reading, as it were, an early draft of Hume's Natural History of Religion. Along the way Hobbes offers a (non-mono-)causal explanation of the diversity of religious expressions (ceremonies, beliefs, rituals, etc.).* It is no surprise that Hobbes echoes standard Epicurean focus on the role of fear, but the more important feature is Hobbes's emphasis on the role of ordinary cognitive mechanisms to generate religous practices. A striking feature of Hobbes's analysis is that he is sensitive to the fact that the religious practices can both enhance and corrupt these cognitive mechanisms and thereby generate more religious practices.
In particular, he focuses heavily on the obiquity and naturalness of causal reasoning in human nature strongly implying (while anticipating Kant) that we humans are natural metaphysicians (while not claiming that we're very good at it). It's this mechanism that generates monotheism and it may do so untouched by fear. ("from the desire men have to know the causes of natural bodies, and their several virtues and operations, than from the fear of what was to befall them in time to come.") Even if one suspects Hobbes of flattering his Christian readers, there is no denying that he treats the pursuit of natural theology as springing from noble seeds within human nature.
Of course, Hobbes is not merely interested in religion for its own sake. For, first, he gives examples that the very same mechanisms that generate religious practices also inform political practice (offering examples from classical Athens and Rome). Second, he emphasizes the political functions/roles of religion (for example, it can make us " more apt to obedience, laws, peace, charity, and civil society.")
While much of the tenor of Hobbes's geneology has an unmasking and deflationary character, it would be a mistake to see in Hobbes an anticipation of the New Atheists. I say this not because one ought to shy away from anachronism, nor from thinking that Hobbes is a sincere theist, but rather because he explicitly claims that religion "can never be...abolished out of human nature."
Given that Hobbes thinks religion is ineliminable, one may wonder what he proposes to do with religion and theology. A good chunk of Leviathan addresses that question. But chapter 12 does hint at a key and -- judging by Hobbes's reputation -- oft overlooked feature of his program. For, Hobbes closes his genealogical analysis of the fall of religions by calling attention to a common cause; once justice or virtue is absent among (i) a religion's leaders** and, to embrace some anachronism, (ii) the culture informed by this particular religion, it goes into decline. In the text Hobbes focuses on (i), but he also describes how corruption can trickle down. From this observation it is but a small step to thinking that religion should be evaluated from and reformed in light of a fully independent moral point of view (a line of thought more fully developed in Spinoza, Smith, and Kant).
Of course, what Hobbes means by 'justice' in direct context is obediance to the existing government. (He is describing the abolishment of "God's reign"!) In fact, what Hobbes means by "faith" is made explicit only two chapters later: "he that is to perform in time to come, being trusted, his performance is called keeping of promise, or faith." (Leviathan 14.) So, faith is not primarily some kind of (non-rational) belief; rather it means something closer to steadfastedness in one's commitments and, thus, echoes the biblical conception of truth (recall). In Hobbes, such faith just is "the mutual transferring of rights" and is, thus, fundamentally political (in the way the social contract is political). The significance of this is not just that religion is interpreted as a species of politics, but that the social contract is itself a religious practice (or ceremony), and the awe-inspiring artificial creature created thereby is itself religious in character. For Hobbes statecraft is a religious activity.
+ I thank my students for discussion.
* "And in these four things, opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seed of religion; which, by reason of the different fancies, judgements, and passions of several men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different that those which are used by one man are for the most part ridiculous to another. "
**One way this happens is by the introduction of philosophy into religion. So, while Hobbes thinks natural theology is inevitable, he thinks academic/scholastic philosophy corrupts this. To what degree Hobbes can draw a clear distinction between ordinary natural theology and academic natural theology is an open question.
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