Abstract

Hobbes's Leviathan cannot fully save men from the state of nature unless some sense of transcendence is taken into account as an antidote to the fear of death. To supply this transcendence Hobbes retains the Bible, from which he extracts an antidote for politically dangerous human anxieties in order to complete his plan for peace. Holding death at bay through political arrangements is not enough; human beings need a further sense of overcoming--a means of meeting death when it can no longer be thwarted--lest the finality of death be too overwhelming and they seek another foundation than the one based in natural reason which Hobbes has outlined in the explicitly political first half of Leviathan. Though the fear of violent death is the foundation of Hobbes's civil association, the general fact of death remains the threat to political peace and stability. For Hobbes, the fact of natural death is always breeding imaginations in the minds of human beings concerning the ends of their individual lives and creating a susceptibility in them to questions concerning whom they ought to obey. The politically subversive comforts human beings find in imaginings of the supernatural to which their fear of death leads them, are the little sins against the laws of natural reason that lead to anarchy. A religious, transcendent account of the world must be brought in to channel these imaginings if civil association is to be safe. The Bible is such an account, but it also represents a world that is not friendly to independent natural reason and, as such, poses a threat to peace. Hobbes's response to this threat is to reinterpret the Bible to take from it its capacity to divide human loyalties; he transforms it into the substantiation for a new theology that coverts the natural right of self-preservation into divine law. By this reinterpretation Hobbes reassures human beings across the entire range of their fears while instructing them that the divine will is that their loyalties must finally lie in this world