Theological Origins of Modernity

216 chapter seven
edition to Machiavelli’s Discourses, that some scholars see, is thus mistaken.
Machiavelli uses Livy to promote Roman republicanism in a fashion
that goes back to Petrarch. Hobbes, by contrast, uses Th ucydides to
demonstrate the inevitable instability of republicanism. 24 At the very least
his interest in Th ucydides refl ects a more scientifi c approach to history,
less concerned with history as moral rhetoric (as Cicero imagined it) than
with history as an ineluctable chain of causes. Such a view of history puts
Hobbes not in the humanist camp but in the company of Luther, Calvin,
and Bacon.
Hobbes’ companion William suddenly died in 1628. Hobbes accepted
a position as a tutor for Gervase Clift on and accompanied him on a trip
to the continent in 1629–30. During this trip Hobbes glanced at a copy of
Euclid’s Elements in a gentleman’s library in Geneva, and, as Aubrey tells
us, was transfi xed by reading the 47th Proposition of book 1: “By God,
sayd he . . . this is impossible! So he reads the Demonstration of it, which
referred him back to such a Proposition; which proposition he read. Th at
referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps that at last
he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. Th is made him in love
with Geometry.” 25
Th is event is oft en taken to be the decisive moment in Hobbes’ turn away
from humanism to science. Th e development of Hobbes’ science, however,
depended not on a single event but on a series of factors. At its foundation,
was Hobbes’ belief in the Calvinist notion of predestination, which
was the basis of his mechanistic notion of causality. Of similar importance
was the impact of Bacon’s notion that science was practical rather than
theoretical. His “discovery” of Euclid provided Hobbes with the method
he needed to realize his science, but even with this method, his science
would have remained stillborn without two further insights that we will
discuss below. In part the notion that Hobbes abandoned humanism is
an illusion fostered by a misunderstanding of the nature of Hobbes’ humanism.
In contrast to earlier humanists he was more concerned with the
Greeks than the Romans and with history than with philosophy. He was
also more prone to see humans in a Calvinistic light as natural creatures
subject to God’s all-powerful will and less apt to see them humanistically
as quasi-divine beings freely choosing their own natures or even as artists
shaping their own characters. Hobbes’ humanism was thus much closer to
Calvinism and to modern natural science than the humanism from which
Descartes began.
Hobbes’ discovery of Euclid did change his approach, but it did not lead
him to reject humanism in favor of science. He seems rather to have pur-