In the later years of his life, Thomas Hobbes developed an intense interest in the history of Christian heresy, an interest which informed half a dozen of his manuscripts and publications. These heresy writings have typically been studied within the context of Restoration church politics. This article offers a broader account of the significance of these writings. It reads them as extensions of Hobbes’s longstanding project of theological reform. Hobbes’s heresy writings were not merely intended to defend him from prosecution under English law. They also constituted an audacious and risky reassertion of the assault on Trinitarian orthodoxy that Hobbes had supposedly retracted in the Latin translation of Leviathan. The article concludes by considering what this interpretation might tell us about Hobbes’s vacillating commitment to religious toleration.
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Samuel Mintz, ‘Hobbes on the Law of Heresy: A New Manuscript,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 29 (1968), 409-14; though Robert Willman, ‘Hobbes on the Law of Heresy,’ Journal of the History Of Ideas 31 (1970), 607-13.
Accounts include: Philip Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Lord Arlington,’ History of Political Thought 24 (1993), 501-41; Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke on Toleration,’ in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed. Mary Dietz (Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1990), 153-71; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572-1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 335-44; James Axtell, ‘The Mechanics of Opposition: Restoration Cambridge v. Daniell Scargill,’ Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 38 (1965), 102-11; John Parkin, ‘Hobbism in the Later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker,’ The Historical Journal 42 (1999), 85-108; Justin Champion, ‘An Historical Narration Concerning Heresie: Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Barlow and the Restoration debate over ‘heresy”, in Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, eds. David Lowenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006), 221-253; Martyn Thompson, ‘Hobbes on Heresy,’ in Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration, ed. John Christian Laursen (New York, 2002), 77-100.
Robert Payne to Hobbes, 1649, in Jeffrey Collins, ‘Christian Ecclesiology and the Composition of Leviathan’, Historical Journal 43 (2000), 217-31; Hobbes, Leviathan, XLVII, 1114.
Ann Hughes, Gangrena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
John Coffey, ‘A ticklish business: defining heresy and orthodoxy in the Puritan Revolution,’ in Heresy, Literature, and Politics, eds. Marshall and Lowenstein, 108-136.
N.H. Keeble, ‘ ‘Take Heed of being too forward in imposinge on others’: orthodoxy and heresy in the Baxterian Tradition,’ in Heresy, Literature, and Politics, eds. Lowenstein and Marshall, 285.
Nigel Smith, ‘ ‘And if God was one of us’: Paul Best, John Biddle, and anti-Trinitarian heresy in seventeenth-century England,’ in Heresy, Literature, and Politics, eds. Lowenstein and Marshall, 160-78.
Henry Stubbe to Hobbes, 14 Feb. 1657, Correspondence, 449.
Cees Leijenhorst, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Corporeal Deity,’ in Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion, eds. John Hedley Brooke and Ian Maclean (Oxford, 2005), 193-222.
Leijenhorst, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Corporeal Deity,’ in Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion, 193-222; David Johnston, ‘Hobbes’s Mortalism,’ History of Political Thought 10 (1989), 647-63.
Jonathan Edwards, ‘Calvin and Hobbes: Trinity, Authority, and Community,’ Philosophy and Rhetoric, 42 (2009), 115-129.
Mintz, ‘Hobbes on Heresy,’ 414; Heresy was considered a common law offense by such masters as Coke and Hale. See Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae (2 vols., London, 1736), cited in Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Lord Arlington,’ 522. Cromartie, introduction to Hobbes, Dialogue… of the Common Laws, lxv-lxii.
Hobbes, Historical Narration, 5; Conal Condren, ‘Curtailing the Office of Priest: two Seventeenth Century Views of the Causes and Functions of Heresy,’ in Heresy in Transition, 115-123.
Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 377-81; Springborg, “Introduction”, 228-35; also Matheron, ‘Hobbes, la Trinité, et les caprices de la representation’.
Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 342. For a rejoinder, see Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Lord Arlington,’ 519-29. More sympathetic to Tuck is Edwin Curley, ‘Hobbes and the Cause of Religion Toleration,’ in Cambridge Companion to Leviathan, 309-27. But Curley (326-7) conflates toleration with anti-clericalism, which has the effect of veiling the coercive features of Hobbes’s ecclesiology.
Perez Zagorin, Hobbes and the Law of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 122.
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In the later years of his life, Thomas Hobbes developed an intense interest in the history of Christian heresy, an interest which informed half a dozen of his manuscripts and publications. These heresy writings have typically been studied within the context of Restoration church politics. This article offers a broader account of the significance of these writings. It reads them as extensions of Hobbes’s longstanding project of theological reform. Hobbes’s heresy writings were not merely intended to defend him from prosecution under English law. They also constituted an audacious and risky reassertion of the assault on Trinitarian orthodoxy that Hobbes had supposedly retracted in the Latin translation of Leviathan. The article concludes by considering what this interpretation might tell us about Hobbes’s vacillating commitment to religious toleration.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 981 | 158 | 15 |
Full Text Views | 251 | 6 | 3 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 194 | 17 | 6 |