Thomas Hobbes: the eternal law, the eternal word, and the eternity of the law of nature

ABSTRACT

The predication of the eternal law served as premise and and foundation for the existence of the law of nature in the classical/medieval intellectual inheritance of Thomas Hobbes and his contemporaries. Unlike them, he makes no mention of the eternal law in his early writings, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, and On the Citizen. His triple use of the expression eternal law of God in Leviathan is ambiguous and misleading. Instead , he is one of the first writers in English to assert the eternity of the law of nature. He does that by invoking a biblical-based expression, verbum aeternum. In On the Citizen, and its exegetical, theological identification with Christ, to establish that claim. In Leviathan he repeats his declaration that the law of nature is eternal nine times, spread across more than five Chapters and twelve hundred pages. Four of them are equivalently excised from the Latin Leviathan and the others remain brief assertions, unanalyzed and undefended, rendering their effect incidental and perfunctory. He also abandons the expression verbum aeternum (as well as eternal word, which he never uses).

KEYWORDS:

• Eternal
• infinite
• eternal law
• eternal word
• law of nature
• magisterial

Acknowledgement

The author thanks his daughter, Helen Quigley, for her research assistance during the writing of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic: Part I, Human Nature; Part II, De Corpore Politico; with Three Lives, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), xxxi; cited below as Elements.

2 The term eternal law does not occur in Elements or On the Citizen; it is incidental and perfunctory in Leviathan. It is consequently absent in almost all commentary on Hobbes’s works. Of the three critical works on Hobbes most likely to include discussions of the eternal law, the first mentions it once in connection with Aquinas (Perez Zagorin, Hobbes and the Law of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 8). The second, Hobbes and the Law, eds. David Dyzenhaus and Thomas Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), has one significant reference to it on page 42, quoted above. Kody W. Cooper’s, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018) does not refer to it. Some commentators, witness Norberto Bobbio above, express their awareness of Hobbes’s elimination of the eternal law without mentioning the term. The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Jurisprudence, eds. George Duke and Robert P. George (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) simply mentions the eternal law three times in passing. Here are eight other important books on Hobbes that do not mention the eternal law. David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); D.D. Raphael, Hobbes: Morals and Politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1977); Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Deborah Baumgold, Hobbes’s Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); S.A. Lloyd, Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Gordon Hull, Hobbes and the Making of Modern Political Thought (London: Continuum, 2011). The eternal law does not appear in either index of Noel Malcolm’s Clarendon edition of Leviathan.

3 Nathaniel Culverwell, for example, delivered a course of lectures to students in Emmanuel College, Cambridge on the light of nature in 1645–6, devoting a chapter to the eternal law, and quoting Cicero and Aquinas frequently. Cf. Nathaniel Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, eds. Robert A. Greene and Hugh MacCallum (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971). John Donne defined the law of nature as: ‘that light which God hath afforded us of his eternall law; and which is usually call’d recta ratio’. John Donne, Biathanatos ([London, 1646]; New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930), 39.

4 Marcus Tullius Cicero, De re publica, De legibus, trans. C.W. Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), vol. 1, chap. 6., sect. 18, 316–7.

5 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vols. 1–2, 91: 1 and 2; 93:3;94:2. See also Walter Raleigh, The History of the World (London, 1614), 273–4, who repeats Aquinas.

6 John Guy, ‘Thomas More and Christopher St German: The Battle of the Books’, in A. Fox and John Guy, Reassessing the Henrician Age (Oxford, 1986), 102.

7 Christopher St German, St. German’s Doctor and Student, eds. T.F.T. Plunkett and J.L. Barton (London: Selden Society, 1974), 13. Cf. also J.H. Burns, ‘St. German, Gerson, Aquinas and Ulpian’, History of Political Thought 4 (1983): 443–9. A copy of St German’s book was recorded by Hobbes in the list of books he compiled in the 1620s for the Hardwick Library of his employer, the Earl of Devonshire. Cf. James Jay Hamilton, ‘Hobbes’s Study and the Hardwick Library’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 16 (1978): 445–53.

8 St German, Doctor and Student, 9, 11. Robinson A. Grover argues that Hobbes ‘derived his concept of contract’ from Doctor and Student. Cf. his ‘The Legal Origins of Thomas Hobbes’s Doctrine of Contract’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 18, no. 2 (1980): 177–94.

9 Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Preface Books I to IV, ed. Georges Edelen (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977), 63. For comment on Hooker’s first and second eternal laws see The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993), vol. 6, part 1, 97–99. Was Hooker’s predication of a so called ‘second law eternall’, a phrase he never repeats, and one that is not found subsequently in seventeenth century English writing, the seed from which blossomed Hobbes’s (and others’) insistence that the law of nature was eternal? There is no evidence of Hooker’s influence on Hobbes, but it is unlikely that he had not read Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The Hardwick Hall book list (see note 7 above) also includes a copy of Hooker’s work.

10 Hobbes, Elements; page references are in parentheses in the text.

11 Ibid., 64–5.

12 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Page references are in the text in parentheses.

13 Ibid., 43, 58.

14 Ibid., 43.

15 Ibid., 54–5.

16 David Gauthier, ‘Hobbes: The Laws of Nature’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2001), 259.

17 Hobbes, On the Citizen, 58.

18 Ibid., 64.

19 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), vol. 2, 240. Cited below as Hobbes, Leviathan.

20 Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 76.

21 Hobbes, On the Citizen, 153.

22 Ibid., 156. Cf. Robert A. Greene, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Term Right Reason: Participation to Calculation’, Journal of the History of European Ideas 41, no. 8 (2015), 997–1028.

23 King James Bible (London, 1611), John, I, 1, 2. For the history of logos see the New Catholic Encyclopedia (Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of America, 2003) vol. 9, 758–64.

24 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. word # 11.5.

25 The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007), Proverbs 1:20: 68v, marginal annotation. See also, for example, the pseudonymous A. Ar, The Practice of Princes (London, 1636), 3: ‘WISDOM in the Proverbs which all Divines acknowledge to be the sonne of God, the eternal Word, by which the Father made the world, saith there, by me kinges raine, and Princes decree’.

26 Hobbes, On the Citizen, 58–9.

27 Stephen Gardiner, The Detection of the Deuyls Sophistrie (London, 1546). Cf. Early English Books Online (hereinafter EEBO), s.v. eternal word. The prevalence of this expression among writers of many religious affiliations from 1546 to 1700 is recorded in EEBO as 1884 examples of eternal word in 817 publications.

28 Jean Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion (London, 1561), 177.

29 Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French Academie (London, 1618), 379.

30 Peter Heylyn (1600–1662), in his History of the Sabbath (London, 1636), 90, is the first to use the expression ‘the eternall law of nature’ in an English publication, according to EEBO. By a singular coincidence, Hobbes, in a letter of April 16, 1636, replying to a Mr. Glen, mentions an interest in ‘those Books of the Sabbaoth’ recently published; he adds: ‘For every Man did hitherto believe that the Ten Commandments were the Moral, that is, an eternall law’. Electronic Enlightenment Project (Oxford: Oxford University, 2008–2017), 2008.

31 Samuel Rutherford (1600?–1661), professor of divinity at the University of St Andrews in 1639, and member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines in 1647, in his Lex, Rex: The Law and the Prince (London, 1644), 395, is the second writer in the records of EEBO to refer to ‘the Immutable and eternall law of Nature’. That same Assembly of Divines, in its Confession of Faith asserted in 1651, confirmed that ‘Thus Christ the Eternal Word was made flesh to his Disciples and dwelt among them’.

32 Hobbes, On the Citizen, 153.

33 Ibid., 171, 179.

34 Ibid., 178.

35 Thomas Hobbes, Critique du De Mundo de Thomas White, eds. Jean Jacquot and Harold Whitmore Jones (Paris: J. Vrin, 1973), 357.

36 Guy Holland, The Grand Prerogative of Human Nature (London, 1653), 119: ‘And now lately, one Mr Hobbes, in a prodigious volume of his, called by him prodigiously, Leviathan’.

37 Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 3, 698 (4), 700 (6), 702, 706 (2), 710, 778, 928, 938, 972 (3), 986, 988, 992 (2), 994(2), 1008, 127, 1160, 1162, 1164 (2). Numbers in parentheses are times of occurrence per page.

38 Thomas Hobbes, ‘Of Liberty and Necessity’, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. W. Molesworth (London, 1839–4), vol. 4, 271.

39 Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 2, 70.

40 Ibid., 72.

41 See EEBO, s.v. nunc-stans.

42 Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 2, 240.

43 Ibid., 432.

44 Ibid., 442.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., 448.

47 Ibid., 454.

48 Ibid., vol. 3, 922.

49 Ibid., 1036.

50 Ibid., 1204.

51 Ibid., 654–6.

52 Ibid., 655.

53 See note 27 above.

54 Hobbes, ‘Of Liberty and Necessity’, in English Works, vol. 4, 271. See also the results of an EEBO search: ‘“plain English”, as used by Thomas Hobbes’.

55 Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 3, 655.

56 See note 27 above.

57 Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 3, 655. The note reads: ‘This was not a term in English usage; Hobbes was probably thinking of the French phrase “le Verbe de Dieu” (which was used for Christ)’.

58 Noel Malcolm, ‘The Printing and Editing of Hobbes’s De Corpore: A Review of Karl Schumann’s Edition’, Revista di storia della filosofia 1 (2004): 329–57.

59 Thomas Hobbes, ‘Elements of Philosophy’, in English Works, vol. 1, 410.

60 Seth Ward, Vindiciae Academiarum (London, 1654), 6.

61 Hobbes, ‘Elements of Philosophy’, in English Works, vol. 1, 411–12.

62 Ibid., 412.

63 Ibid. Hobbes does not identify any specific biblical text, but cf. Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore, ed. Karl Schumann (Paris: Vrin, 1999), 282, where the editor refers the reader to Ecclesiastes 3:11. This verse may have been the text Hobbes had in mind, but Hobbes’s introduction of it and explanation of its meaning to his two adversaries, Professors Ward and Wallis, who were clergymen (Wallis was also awarded his D.D. degree, in 1654) as well as geometricians, is an example of his magisterial stance and rhetoric (see section below, ‘The Magisterial Hobbes’).

64 Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, in English Works, vol. 1, 413. Cf. Douglas C. Jesseph, Squaring the Circle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), and Siegmund Probst, ‘Infinity and Creation: The Origin of the Controversy between Thomas Hobbes and the Savilian Professors Seth Ward and John Wallis’, The British Journal for the History of Science 26, no. 3 (1993): 271–9.

65 Hobbes, ‘Elements of Philosophy’, in English Works, vol. 1, 413–14.

66 Ibid., 414.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid.

69 Seth Ward, Vindiciae Academiarum (London, 1654). This statement appears prominently on page 6 of John Wilkin’s Preface.

70 Oxford English Dictionary s.v. magisterial. EEBO lists the first occurrence of the word in 1613 in Thomas Middleton’s Papisto-mastix or the Protestant’s Religion Defended.

71 Cf. Jon Parkin, ‘Clarendon against Hobbes’, in Clarendon Reconsidered, ed. Philip Major (London: Routledge, 2018), 84.

72 Philip Major, ‘Introduction’, in Clarendon Reconsidered, 1.

73 Edward Hyde, ‘A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous Errors to Church and State in Mr. Hobbes’s Book, Entitled Leviathan’, in Early Responses to Hobbes, ed. G.A.G. Rogers, vol. XXX (London: Routledge, 1996), 63.

74 Ibid., 29, 190, 217.

75 Cf. Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 198, 201. Timothy Raylor has recently quoted, on page 2 of his new book, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2018), just one of Hyde’s four uses of the term magisterial to describe and satirise Hobbes’s style. He does not mention, however, Hyde’s other three uses of magisterial for the same purpose, nor its earlier and later similar uses by Wilkins and Dryden.

76 John Dryden, Sylvae; or, the Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies (London, 1683), 39.

77 Hobbes, Elements, 73. An anecdote illustrating Hobbes’s commitment to his role as teacher found in Walter Pope’s The Life of Seth lord Bishop of Salisbury (London, 1697), 118, is relegated to the work of Hobbes’s enemies and dismissed by Noel Malcolm in his entry on Hobbes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2010). Yet it has the ring of truth to it, in its emphasis on the importance to Hobbes of his self-proclaimed mandate as teacher. Hobbes is presented in that anecdote as one who, ‘if any one objected against his Dictates, he would leave the Company in a passion, saying, his business was to teach, not Dispute’. This anecdote is not unrelated to Hobbes’s alleged magisterial behaviour, described above.

78 Hobbes, On the Citizen, 156.

79 Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 2, 436.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid.

82 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. eternal.

83 Ibid. EEBO records the first English use of nunc-stans in Joseph Hall, The Works of Joseph Hall (London, 1625). The priority of place given to Hobbes by the OED’s quotation has resulted in the linking of Hobbes’s name to nunc-stans on the internet.