Conspiracy : James Martel

6. How to Read Scripture

This argument becomes even more complicated when we consider that not only does Hobbes insist on private and individual acts of interpretation but also gives a great deal of attention to questions of how to interpret a text, including, presumably Leviathan itself. It is here that a more anti-authoritarian or conspiratorial streak becomes perhaps more evident or plausible. For, as I’ll argue further, the method of reading that Hobbes promotes suggests that not only is the sovereign only one reader among many but actually possibly the worst reader of them all.

Perhaps the easiest way to start to think about how Hobbes would have us read a text is to discuss how he would not have us read. The second half of Leviathan is primarily devoted to questions of reading Scripture. Part IV is dedicated to questions of misreading and misinterpretation, what he calls the “Kingdome of Darknesse.”²⁴ This kingdom is marked above all by an overly metaphorical bias, an overriding of the text with phantasms and speculations. Hobbes blames many thinkers for this kind of corruption: He speaks of the “vain and erroneous Philosophy of the Greeks, especially of Aristotle.” In his own time, he saw the Catholic Church as a key practitioner of this kind of misreading.

For Hobbes, this type of error has a name: the “Error of Separated Essences.”²⁵ A separated essence occurs when one allows a metaphorical reading of a word to stand in for and even replace what it originally stood for (thus becoming a “separated essence”). A key example of this error is the idea of the human soul. For Hobbes, the term “soul” originally was only meant as a representational stand in for a person. We still use this terminology, for example, when we say “there isn’t a soul in sight.” For Hobbes, this metaphor has achieved a ghostly life of its own becoming prior to and even eclipsing the body it was originally meant to stand in for:

And in particular, of the Essence of a Man, which (they say) is his Soule, they affirm it, to be All of it in his little Finger, and All of it in every other Part (how small soever) of his Body; and yet no more Soule in the Whole Body, than in any of those Parts . . . And yet all this is necessary to beleeve, to those that will believe the Existence of an Incorporeall Soule, Separated from the Body.²⁶

As a separated essence, the soul is said to outlive the body. It is therefore an idolatrous figure for Hobbes, replacing what it represents with itself.

For Hobbes, the prevalence of misreadings such as this was responsible for the mayhem of his own lifetime, in particular the English civil war. It was thus not the plurality of reading that bothered him (he defends widespread access to Scripture even after the war) but rather bad reading that is to blame for social disorder.²⁷

Thus, when Hobbes asks us to read Scripture, he asks that we do so in a way that avoids this danger of misreading. Thus, for example, rather than reading the notion of the “spirit of Moses” as a kind of ghost or force that compelled or caused obedience, Hobbes writes that,

[It] signifieth nothing but the Mind and Disposition to obey, and assist Moses in the administration of the Government. For if it were meant they had the substantial Spirit of God; that is, Divine nature, inspired into them, then they had it in no lesse manner than Christ himself, in whom onely the spirit of God dwelt bodily. It is meant therefore of the Gift and Grace of God, that guided them to co-operate with Moses; from whom their Spirit was derived.²⁸

Here, we see once again that there is no central truth that is being inserted into the minds of each of Moses’ followers (so that he “reads” for all of them). Instead we see merely an indication of a desire to follow Moses, a personal decision reached on the individual level that must not be interfered with.

As for the concept that Scripture is the literal “word of God,” Hobbes writes:

Considering these two significations of the WORD OF GOD, as it is taken in Scripture, it is manifest in this later sense (where it is taken for the Doctrine of the Christian Religion,) that the whole Scripture is the Word of God: but in the former sense [that is to say, the actual “words that God hath spoken”] not so.²⁹

For Hobbes, the Bible is of necessity an interpretive text, representing God’s words rather than constituting them. For this very reason, it is critical to avoid turning this text itself into a kind of absolute truth that might eclipse the larger truth that it stands in for (least the Bible itself becomes a “separated essence.”) This understanding of how to read correlates nicely with his understanding, expressed more generally in his work, of who should read (his claims about the sovereign having the final word notwithstanding). In both cases, a centralizing and controlling form of interpretation is challenged by a decentralized, anti authoritarian mode and manner of reading.

^{24. Hobbes, Leviathan, 4.44, 417-8.↩}

^{25. Hobbes, Leviathan, 4.46, 466.↩}

^{26. Hobbes, Leviathan, 4.46, 466.↩}

^{27. See Hobbes, Behemoth: The History of the causes of the civil wars of England, and of the counsels and artifices by which they were carried on from the year 1640 to the year 1660 (New York: Burt Franklin Press, 1963).↩}

^{28. Hobbes, Leviathan, 4.46, 466.↩}

^{29. Hobbes, Leviathan, 3.36, 288.↩}