NB: As promised, this is the first part in a short series that will be summarizing and, at times, interacting with Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (Vintage, 2007).[1]
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
Lilla’s work is a walk through the history of political theology and philosophy in the West. It begins by exploring the centrality of political theology, especially Christian political theology, for approximately 1300 years following Christianity’s rise to political power during the reign of Constantine. Political theology, as defined by Lilla, is “discourse about political authority based on a revealed divine nexus.”[2] Lilla argues that, for the 1300 years following Constantine, political questions were approached by looking at the deity’s revelation at the divine nexus and interpreting that revelation in terms of political thought.
However, Thomas Hobbes’s work Leviathan (1651) changed everything. According to Lilla, Hobbes’s work brought on “The Great Separation” – his term describing the forced removal of political theology from political thought, as well as the title for his second chapter. Hobbes removed the divine nexus from conversation by claiming that humankind’s concept of God arises from people, particularly from their fear of a violent death.[3] Furthermore, he posited that both religious and political conflict arise from this same source within human nature. Therefore, in order to end the theological-political violence that Christian Europe had been so deeply involved in, especially after the Reformation, Hobbes offered a two-part plan to achieve peace.
Hobbes’s plan deeply reflects his philosophical anthropology – that religious and political violence both come from the fear within each human being. The first part of the plan is to restore peace by placing an absolute sovereign over a nation – an earthly God – whose subjects would fear him above all others. The second part of Hobbes’s plan was to reform philosophy and the sciences, particularly at the university level, leaving only the experimental natural sciences and Leviathan, which he saw as the first genuine work of political science, to remain.[4] Continue reading »
