Theological Origins of Modernity

350 notes to pages 247–248
129. Leviathan, 347, 375.
130. See “On the Nicean Creed,” an appendix to the Latin edition of the Leviathan.
See also, Martinich, Two Gods, 2; and Eisenach, “Hobbes on Church, State, and
Religion,” 4:296.
131. Behemoth, 63.
132. Springborg, “Hobbes, Heresy, and the Historia Ecclesiastica,” Journal of the History
of Ideas 55, no. 4 (1994): 554, 566.
133. For Hobbes the most frequent pretext for sedition and civil war is contradiction
of laws and divine command. Th is was certainly true in England, where the pious
wrongly concluded that it is legitimate to kill another out of religious zeal.
Leviathan, 397, 493.
134. Hobbes, White’s De Mundo, 306; De corpore, EW 1:10.
135. Spragens, Th e Politics of Motion, 46. See also Eisenach, “Hobbes on Church, State,
and Religion,” 4:290.
136. Arrigo, “Hobbes and the Problem of God,” 172–75. See also Martinich, Hobbes, 214.
137. Th e question of the relationship of his theology and science has long been crucial
to the interpretation of Hobbes’ thought. We see this refl ected in the contrasting
interpretations of Hobbes by Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt. On their agreements
and disagreements, see inter alia Heinrich Meier’s Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss
und “Der Begriff des Politischens”: Zu einem Dialog unter Abwesenden (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 1988); also his Die Lehre Carl Schmitts; John McCormick’s “Fear, Technology,
and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of Hobbes in
Weimar and National Socialist Germany,” Political Th eory 22, no. 4 (Nov. 1994):
619–652; and Vatter, “Strauss and Schmitt.” Schmitt saw Hobbes as a Christian
thinker who was concerned not with philosophy or science but with political theology,
that is, with establishing a state that aimed not merely at maintaining or
improving life in this world but at realizing man’s eternal destiny. Schmitt argued
that Hobbes’ science and his political science in particular were in the service of
this theological vision. Such a Christian state, Schmitt believed, could only be
established and maintained in opposition to its theologically determined enemy.
Th is “enemy” in his view was the Antichrist that always hides behind a mask, in
this case the mask of the liberal state that claims to be theologically neutral and
concerned merely with the preservation and happiness of human beings in this
world. Th is state in Schmitt’s view merely concealed the identity of the real enemy
of Christianity, Judaism. For Schmitt it was not Hobbes but Spinoza, a Jew, who
was the true founder of this neutral liberalism and it was thus Judaism that ruined
the best chance modern European humanity had to ground itself politically in
Christianity.
In opposition to Schmitt’s anti-Semitic reading of the origins of liberalism
(which was also at the heart of his attachment to National Socialism), Strauss
tried to show that modern liberalism originated as the result of a turn away from
religion to a kind of practical reasoning supported by the new science. Th e forefather
of liberalism in his view was thus not Spinoza but Hobbes (and behind
him Machiavelli). (For a contemporary discussion of the relationship of Hobbes