Hobbes and the Priests

In their study of Hobbes and Boyle, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer show that Hobbes’s opposition to Boyle’s air pump was as political as scientific. Hobbes complained about the Catholic system because it introduced a double loyalty to church and state, and he was particularly vicious with the priests who oversaw the system. This was even built into the metaphysical system of medieval Christianity: “Hobbes proposed to discredit priestly absurdities and bad philosophy by telling an interest-story . . . . Priests and Scholastics had sought to prosper at the expense of peace and good order in the policy. Aristotelian doctrine of separated essences had historically been deployed in an illegitimate strategy of social control. It had been used to obtain for priests a share of that authority that belonged solely to the civil sovereign . . . .

“The Politics of Aristotle, Hobbes said, was ‘repugnant to government’: this “doctrine of separated essences, built on the vain philosophy of Aristotle, would fright [men] from obeying the laws of their country, with empty names; as men fright birds from the corn with an empty doublet, a hat, and a crooked stick.’ Priestcraft had made up a scarecrow of philosophy; it had traded upon man’s natural anxiety about the future and man’s natural tendency to construct causal explanation out of whatever resources were at hand. If there was no visible and known cause of events, then some invisible power or agent was widely supposed to be at work. Priestcraft had encouraged these natural dispositions, and it had used man’s ignorance, nervousness, and insecurity to buttress the independent moral and political authority of the Church. To this end, priests had propagated the bad philosophy of incorporeal substances and immaterial spirits.” Along these lines, ” Leviathan offered an elaborate analysis of the conceptual resources deployed in religious rituals,” which encouraged superstitious belief in spiritual powers detached from bodies.

The whole problem was a problem of “seeing double.” As Hobbes said, there is “no other government in this life, neither of state, nor religion, but temporal; nor teaching of any doctrine, lawful to any subject, which the governor both of the state, and of religion forbiddeth to be taught . . . And that governor must be one; or else there must needs follow faction and civil war in the commonwealth, between the Church and State, between spiritualists and temporalists; between the sword of justice, and the shield of faith.”

Hobbes’ monist ontology was thus politically charged: “This ‘seeing double’ could only be remedied by collapsing the hierarchical division between matter and spirit; and the triumph of the civil sovereign could be assured by collapsing that hierarchy in favour of matter.”

The clerical priesthood was only the first knowledge class, however. Hobbes was just as concerned with the possibility that science might insert a “double loyalty” into modern society. Boyle was able to win a consensus “within a secure social space for experimental practice.” But Hobbes saw this as another sacred zone reserved for scientific priests: “Hobbes assaulted the security of that space because it was yet one more case of divided power, of double vision in political allegiance.”