In On the Citizen, Hobbes describes two kinds of covenants. The first are covenants among human beings, most importantly sovereign-making covenants, which create human sovereigns. The second kind are the major biblical covenants, which have God as a party. Hobbes follows the traditional interpretation of biblical covenants, according to which God is a party to them with Abraham, the Israelites at Mt. Sinai, and all humanity. Ironically, his theory had the resources to give a single account of both kinds of covenants. He could have said that God accepted the transfer of rights from humans. So Hobbes treats the biblical covenants involving God and human beings differently from ordinary sovereign-making covenants. He does not say why or discuss any relationship that may exist between the two kinds. Another odd feature of Hobbes’s handling of biblical concepts is that while the covenant with Abraham is a new covenant, the ones with Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, and Jesus in some way renew Abraham’s. A significant common element between ordinary sovereign-making covenants and the central biblical ones is faith.

Hobbes represented himself in various places in Leviathan as a good English Protestant. There are numerous sentences in Leviathan about Christianity, which, if uttered by almost anyone else in seventeenth- century England, would be understood as expressions consonant with Calvinism or Lutheranism. All scholars would agree about that. What scholars disagree about is whether Hobbes's representation was serious or not, honest or not, sarcastic or not, intentionally subversive or not. Most scholars think that he was not being honest, and many of these think that he intended his perceptive readers to see that, in context, he intended to subvert Christianity in particular and revealed religion in general. The minority view, one that I have defended, is that he was serious and honest. This is not to say that he was not also ill-disposed towards various brands of Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism and Presbyterianism, and prone to sarcasm. He was. His views, in my opinion, were intended to justify a narrow space in the broad band of seventeenth-century English Christianity. Leaving aside his views about the Bible, his basic positions would have been perfectly respectable forty years earlier, during the reign of James I and VI: orthodox in doctrine, Calvinist in theology, episcopal in ecclesiology, non-puritan in liturgy, and monarchical in politics. By 'orthodox', I simply mean that he professed belief in the doctrines of the major early creeds and the Thirty-nine Articles.

A historically informed and philosophically sensitive reading of Leviathan presents a very different picture of Hobbes's philosophy from the standard one. I have been arguing that Hobbes's political philosophy cannot be separated from his philosophy of religion. His religious views were much more sophisticated than scholars have previously believed. In addition to arguing that he was not an atheist, I have shown that to say no more than that he was a theist or even a Christian is a misleading oversimplification. In order to understand how it is that Hobbes did not intend to subvert religion, it is necessary to appreciate the specific religious and political tradition that Hobbes was trying to uphold. The ordinary religious classifications used by philosophers to categorize seventeenth-century thinkers are not finegrained enough to represent Hobbes's views fairly. It is important to distinguish between at least three different aspects of religion: (1) doctrine, (2) church government, and (3) theology.

1. In doctrine, he was orthodox. He explicitly subscribes to the dogmatic pronouncements formulated in the Christian creeds of the first four ecumenical councils, as required by the terms of Queen Elizabeth's Act of Supremacy. It is always possible for someone to accuse him of heterodoxy, just as people accused Aquinas of it in the late thirteenth century. Hobbes and Aquinas are alike in that they both tried to reconcile orthodoxy with new philosophical or scientific theories.

In this chapter I shall explain how humans are able to transfer their right of nature to a separate person and thereby institute a commonwealth. In Leviathan, the institution of the commonwealth is supposed to depend upon an interplay between authorization and authority. I shall argue that Hobbes's idea of authorization is confused. Hobbes also claims that there are two ways in which a commonwealth can be instituted. The first way results in what he calls “sovereignty by institution.” The second way results in what he calls “sovereignty by acquisition.” I shall argue that Hobbes is correct to say that so far as sovereignty is concerned, the differences between them are insignificant. Finally, since the model for these sovereign-making covenants comes from the biblical idea of a covenant, I shall briefly discuss Hobbes's treatment of the covenants in which God figures.

SOVEREIGN-MAKING COVENANTS AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD BY NATURE

I have been arguing that sovereign-making covenants rest upon the power of God, because covenants need to be binding. They are binding only if the laws of nature are literally laws; and the laws of nature are literally laws only if God's power underwrites them. In addition to this chain of power reaching from the earthly sovereign up to the heavenly God, there is an analogy between the earthly sovereign and God. The earthly sovereign is sovereign only because he has over-whelming power to accompany his natural right to all things.

The most conspicuous evidence for the kind of interpretation I have developed in this book is the dramatic frontispiece to Leviathan, reproduced at the front of the present volume. Frontispieces were an important component of books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when society was still in transition to a print culture. They were intended to be studied at some length and not given a cursory perusal, and they amounted to something between an introduction to and summary of the entire book. The frontispiece to Leviathan is especially significant, since Hobbes probably designed it himself and included a hand-drawn copy of it in the manuscript copy of Leviathan that he presented to Charles II (Brown, 1978).

What first catches the eye on this engraving is the image at the top of the page of the sovereign, the mortal god who rules under the immortal God. His most prominent feature is his face. Scholars have argued whether this is a stylized representation of either Cromwell or Charles I. It has even been suggested that it is a composite of both. On this hypothesis, Hobbes must be imagined to have lacked the foresight to anticipate that Cromwell might recognize only Charles's features and Charles recognize only Cromwell's, or, perhaps worse, that they would recognize the duplicity of representing both. (See also Goldsmith, 1981, p. 237 n. 25.) Anyone tempted to think that both are represented should also try to imagine Hobbes instructing the artist about how to draw Leviathan.

Edwin Curley has presented the most sustained and wellwrought case that Hobbes was “rather likely … an atheist,” although Curley also says that “if someone were to insist that we'll never really know what Hobbes's religious beliefs were, I would cheerfully concede the point” (Curley, 1991, p. 57). He is motivated to explore the issue of Hobbes's alleged atheism because of an incident related in John Aubrey's biographical essay on Hobbes. Aubrey writes, “When Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus first came out [1670], Mr. Edmund Waller sent it to my lord of Devonshire and desired send him word what Hobes said of it. Mr. H. told his lordship: – Ne judicate ne judicemini [Judge not that ye be not judged, Matt. 7:1]. He told me he [Spinoza] had outthrown him [Hobbes] a bar's length, for he durst not write so boldly” (Aubrey, 1680, 1:357).

While admitting that “we cannot infer much from the reported remark,” Curley nonetheless asks “what he might have meant by it” (Curley, 1991, p. 10). I think this question is fruitless to ask. First, Hobbes's own remark is so cryptic and vague that we have no idea what specifically he was talking about. Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is quite large. Was Hobbes thinking of some specific passages or the entire work? If only some passages, which? Even if Hobbes was thinking of the entire work, notice that Hobbes would perhaps not be remarking on the content of the work but its style.

In this chapter I want to discuss religion rather generally. I shall first discuss the importance of the idea of God in seventeenth-century philosophy. Next I shall consider, in a preliminary way, the role that theological concepts play in the introduction to Leviathan and in the book's title. The last section of the chapter is about Hobbes's treatment of the concept of religion.

GOD IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

It was more difficult for a person to be an atheist in the seventeenth century than it is for someone today, simply because there are so many atheists now. It was even more difficult to be a theoretical atheist – that is, a thinker who could given an explanation for reality that did not include God as an essential part. For there were virtually no atheistic models of reality from which a philosopher might draw inspiration to construct his own. I am not denying the possibility of a seventeenth-century atheistic philosopher. I am saying that it is unlikely and that the burden of proof is on those who say that Hobbes was an atheist.

Many historians have shown how pervasive religion was in all areas of intellectual and practical life during the seventeenth century (e.g., Popkin, 1987b; Hill, 1986, vol. 2). It is not within the scope of this book to rehearse the evidence for that view in any detail. Rather, I shall mention some of the most superficial and obvious facts about seventeenthcentury philosophy, in order to jog the reader's memory, singling out the philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, and Leibniz.

In “The Context of Hobbes's Theory of Political Obligation,” Quentin Skinner argues for two theses. The first is that Hobbes had many followers in England, France, and Holland during the seventeenth century. I agree with this thesis. Skinner's efforts to set the historical record straight put Hobbes scholars greatly in his debt. His second thesis is twofold. One is that Hobbes believed that “the obligation to obey a given government derived not from any religious sanction, but merely from a self-interested calculation made by each individual citizen”; the second is that human nature is “basically anti-social” (Skinner, 1972, pp. 116, 118). I accept the second as a brief statement of Hobbes's view and shall not discuss it further. I shall discuss the first, for I think it is mistaken. I shall not rehearse the evidence I have presented in Chapters 3 through 6 for my own interpretation but only discuss the quality of the evidence that Skinner presents for his.

What is partially at stake in this matter is the proper method for determining an interpretation. In the Introduction and Chapter 2, I indicated that the basis for a good interpretation of what a speaker means is a function of what he intends to communicate, and that what he intends to communicate is constrained by what his words mean and the context within which he utters them. That is to say, a proper interpretation of what an author means must focus on the meaning of the words he uses and the context in which he uses them.