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Abstract
Almost all scholars of the Enlightenment consider Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke as the founding theorists of the “secular modern state.” In contrast to the widely held view of the modern state, I argue that far from being “secular” it was the product of the sacralization of politics, which resulted from the way these philosophers interpreted the Scriptures as part of their philosophical inquiries. The analysis of the “linguistic turn” in their biblical interpretations reveals how they tried to undermine the power of the Church to claim greater freedoms for the state. Their philosophical inquiries initiated the secularization of the Christian religion and the sacralization of politics as two correlative developments, rather than the secularization of the state per se, as is usually supposed. The philosophical arguments proposed by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke helped to resolve the religious battles of Europe’s many confessions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but are still pertinent to our current very different historical context.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on Contributor
Montserrat Herrero is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. She is the Principal Investigator in the Religion and Civil Society Project at the Institute of Culture and Society. Her publications include The Political Discourse of Carl Schmitt: A Mystic of Order (2015); La política revolucionaria de John Locke (2015); Ficciones políticas. El eco de Thomas Hobbes en el ocaso de la modernidad (2012).
Notes
1. Israel is a central proponent of this position, despite the fact that he does not consider Hobbes to belong to this tradition. See Israel, Radical Enlightenment. For reclaiming Hobbes as an Enlightened philosopher, see Noel, Aspects of Hobbes; and Sringborg, “Enlightenment of Thomas Hobbes,” 513–34. In my view, Hobbes belongs in what was once called the tradition of the modern, secular enlightened state. The term modern state refers to the state formed under absolute monarchs; it entered political philosophy following Hobbes’s theory of contractualism.
2. Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 25. The “enlightened Bible” in Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible, refers to the shift from the Bible as text to the Bible as a document.
3. Spinoza’s influence has been extensively studied, including, for example, Frampton, Spinoza and Historical Criticism; Preus, Spinoza and Biblical Authority; Force and Popkin, eds., Books of Nature and Scripture. The same cannot be said of Hobbes and Locke. Writings influenced by the Cambridge School consider the last part of Leviathan to be almost irrelevant. See Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in Hobbes; Visions of Politics, and Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Only few authors, with the exception of Nuovo in Christianity, Antiquity, and Enlightenment, for example, have recognized the constitutive role of the Scriptures in Locke’s whole philosophical and political system.
4. Reventlow in Authority of the Bible traces Biblical interpretation in England from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, paying particular attention to the period of English Deism. He argues that German thinkers were responsible for the new approach to biblical interpretation in the eighteenth century, but not before, with Hobbes and Locke its main precursors.
5. While there are several recent studies on the historical sources of the historical-critical method of Biblical interpretation, with some exceptions, the question of the political influences on this method has almost always been left untouched. Exceptions to this include Hahn and Wiker, Politicizing the Bible; and Reventlow, who in Authority of the Bible, 285, states: “[t]he whole of Locke’s scriptural exegesis is a further example of the way in which at this period exegesis is not done for its own sake but because of the normative validity of scripture for quite specific questions of political life or in the associated search for the foundations of social ethics which would serve as a criterion in current controversies over the form of state and society in England.”
6. For more on this discussion, see Baker, The Wars of Truth; and Reedy, The Bible and Reason; Morrow in “The Bible in Captivity,” 285–99, explains the transformation of the Sacred Scriptures into a commonplace book.
7. This is Noel’s view in “Hobbes and Spinoza,” 47. It is also Nadler’s position in Book Forged in Hell, 30–31. Mogens in “Jus Circa Sacra,” 41–64, argues that this is a controversial issue.
8. Klever, in “Locke’s Disguised Spinozism,” 61–82, sees “Spinoza as the real philosophical master of John Locke.”
9. See Nuovo, Christianity, Antiquity, and Enlightenment. Reventlow in Authority of the Bible, 244, hesitates to characterize Locke as a Socinian or Unitarian, seeing him as a Latitudinarian.
10. For a contextual study, see Aarsleff, Language in England. The following are also of special interest: Ott, Locke’s Philosophy of Language; Pettit, Made with Words. Commentaries on Spinoza’s philosophy of language include: Savan, “Spinoza and Language,” 212–25; Parkinson, “Language and Knowledge in Spinoza,” 15–40; Zac, “Spinoza et le language,” 45–66; Dascal, “Language and Cognition,” 103–45; Bove, “La théorie du langage,” 16–33. Only the studies related to Spinoza see the analysis of language as central to the reflection on Scripture.
11. De Grazia, “The Secularization of Language,” 319–29.
12. Lagrée, le débat religieux; James, Spinoza on Philosophy; and Zac, Philosophie, Théologie, Politique.
13. In the 1920s Schmitt emphasised this aspect of “the question of interpretation” in Hobbes’s work. Cf. John G. A. Pocock, Bernard Williams, Francis Campbell Hood, Pierre Manent and Klaus-Michael Kodalle. The primary example is Hood, Divine Politics, although it makes no special reference to Scriptural interpretation. Recent studies include Martel, “Strong Sovereign, Weak Messiah,” and Subverting the Leviathan; Elazar, “Hobbes Confronts Scripture,” 3–24; Nauta, “Hobbes on Religion,” 577–98; and Farr, “‘Atomes of Scripture’,” 172–96. In the case of Locke we see that the natural law is usually treated as central, whether it be a product of reason or theology; cf. the approaches of John Dunn and Jeremy Waldrom. On the interpretation of Scripture, see Nuovo, Christianity, Antiquity, and Enlightenment; and Sherlock, “The Theology of Toleration,” 19–49; Sandoz, “Civil Theology,” 2–36; Mitchell, “The Liberal Foundation,” 64–83.
14. Hobbes’s nominalism conceives of language as providing an uncertain path to knowledge. In De Homine, 3.70–80, optics is held to be the most important science for the interpretation of human knowledge. In English there is only a short version beginning in chapter 10: Man and Citizen, in which Hobbes claims that an idea could be very clear and at the same time completely false. Also see Hobbes, Leviathan, 1; and Hobbes, The Elements of Law, 3.8.§30, Hobbes writes that man cannot know if he is dreaming or not from the point of view of the knowledge he has. In Leviathan, 10, Hobbes states that to perceive does not mean to perceive something [external to the mind], but rather to perceive on the occasion of a sensation in the body. See also Hobbes, On the Body, 25.§7, where he explains that the composition of images is a “spiritual fiction”—called “mental discourse”—that shapes language. On Hobbes’s theory of language, see Bertman, “Hobbes on Language,” 536–50. For a summary of some of the studies on Hobbes and language, none of which discusses the relationship of the theory of language and Scriptural interpretation, see Pettit, Made with Words; and for my approach, see Herrero, Ficciones políticas, 11–30.
15. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, 5.2.§35.
16. Hobbes, Leviathan, 4.26–27. See also Hobbes, Man and Citizen, 10.2.38–39. In any case, language is a tool for communication, which is progressively invented within the narrow nucleus of a community.
17. Hobbes, Leviathan, 32, 247.
18. Ibid., 32, 251.
19. Ibid., 42, 342–43.
20. Ibid., 34, 260.
21. For a subversive approach, see Martel, Subverting the Leviathan, where the author advocates a new art of reading Hobbes by applying to his texts Hobbes’s own method of Scriptural interpretation. Martel’s original interpretation dismisses the privileged interpreter, which, in my view, is crucial for relating a reading of Scripture to Hobbes’s political intention of saving the Monarch. His interpretation turn Hobbes into a radical democrat. My interpretation, in Ficciones políticas, in contrast, follows the approaches of Carl Schmitt, Reinhard Koselleck, Alfred, E. Taylor, Howard Warrender, and Francis C. Hood.
22. Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation, 1.§52.
23. Ibid., 1.§38: Truth is not a greater or lesser adaequatio between intellect and reality; rather, it is an autonomous process set in motion by a first indubitable truth. 1.§36: Truth is an intrinsic characteristic of the idea that depends solely on the concordance of thought within itself. 1.§38: A satisfactory methodology must simply show the coherence of the mind with itself.
24. Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation, 1.§88.
25. As an example, see Savan, “Spinoza and Language,” 212–25.
26. As an example, see Zourabichvili, Spinoza.
27. Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method; and Curley, introduction to Spinoza’s Ethics, 9–35. See also Moreau, Spinoza. L’experience de l’etérnité.
28. As argued by Savan, in “Spinoza and Language,” 212–25; and by Preus, in Spinoza and Biblical Authority, 111–24. In “Spinoza’s Language,” 519–47, Laerke points out that most of Spinoza’s remarks on language are found in the Theological-Political Treatise.
29. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 7.§112.
30. Ibid., 6.§81.
31. Ibid., 2.§29.
32. Ibid., 12.§160.
33. Ibid., 7.§2. In Spinoza and Biblical Authority, 154–201, Preus defends Spinoza’s naturalized way of treating Scripture as the opposite of the rationalistic method defended by Meyer. He summarizes Spinoza’s method as follows, 209: “Spinoza historized the social order, using the Hebrew state as a sort of ideal type. ... (He) depersonalized nature and God. ... He identified ‘sacred history’ as the product of archaic human construction alone.” In contrast, Strauss’s esoteric reading in La critique, 11, points out that far from founding a science of the Bible without premises, Spinoza allowed many assumptions to creep into his exegesis: (1) The Bible is just a literary document, a self-referential text; (2) The Old and the New Testaments are equivalent; and (3) Only the statements that remain consistent throughout the Scriptures, and between which there are no contradictions, are true. For another perspective, see González, “Zero Degree of Interpretation?” 73-99.
34. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 14.§173.
35. Ibid., 14.§11.
36. Ibid., 14.§177.
37. Ibid., 15.§185. It is because of this kind of assertion that I do not think of Spinoza as creating a philosophical religion, as Fraenkel argues in Philosophical Religions.
38. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 16.§197.
39. Ibid., 12.§168.
40. Ibid., 4.§§66–68. He realizes that every truth is always historically “disturbed.”
41. Ibid., 5.§72. On this see also Letter 76.
42. Ibid., 5.§80. In “How to Study,” 170, Strauss claims that alongside this exoteric doctrine, the esoteric doctrine that philosophy and theology are mutually contradictory is also hidden.
43. For an account of the place of history in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, see Herrero, “Theology of History,” 99–122.
44. Spinoza takes from Hobbes this idea of the historical existence of the effective Kingdom of God. Brown, in “Philosophy and Prophecy,” 208, writes along the same lines.
45. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 17.§205.
46. Ibid., 17.§206.
47. See Bento, “Spinoza and the Hebrew State,” 237–65.
48. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 18.§225.
49. Ibid., 241. XIX [231]. See also Nadler, Book Forged in Hell, 202–3.
50. Locke’s philosophy of language is usually connected with his theory of knowledge. A good example is Ott, Walter R. Locke’s Philosophy of Language. However, in the literature there are only rare attempts to relate his philosophy of language to his scriptural interpretation and political philosophy. An exception is Dawson, “Locke on Language,” 397–425; and Dawson, Early-Modern Philosophy. Nonetheless, Dawson does not study the intricate relation between language, Scripture and tolerance, which is central to my argument.
51. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, 3.2.§1.
52. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, 2.8.§13. Even if in Locke’s empiricism the connection, through the senses, between the real world and our ideas is assured by a certain pre-established harmonization foreseen by God, this is not relevant in the case of names.
53. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, 4.18.§8. In this sense, it is also important to highlight 4.19.§4.
54. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, 3.9.§23.
55. Ibid., 3.2.§1.
56. Locke, Writings on Religion, 69–73.
57. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, 1.4.§12.
58. Ibid., 4.16.§10.
59. Locke, Writings on Religion, 72.
60. Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, 7.5.152. It is only at the end that he discusses how to read the Epistles. For a commentary, see Mitchell, “The Liberal Foundation.”
61. For a complete discussion of these works, see Nuovo’s Introduction to Locke, Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity, 19–73. See also Nuovo, Christianity, Antiquity, and Enlightenment, 12.
62. Ibid., 55. See also Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 464–70. According to Israel, Spinoza was not the only author who deeply influenced Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity; it was also influenced by the debate between Limborch and Orobio de Castro on the validity of Christian messianic doctrine.
63. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, 4.16.§13. As manifestations of this power, miracles serve as the credentials of divine messengers. Locke follows this argument in “A Discourse of Miracles,” in Writings on Religion.
64. Locke, “A Vindication,” 213. See also Nuovo, Christianity, Antiquity, and Enlightenment, 55.
65. Hobbes, Leviathan, 32.259.
66. Ibid., 42.344–45.
67. Ibid., 36.290.
68. Ibid., 32, 310–311 and 39.321–22.
69. Ibid., 33.268.
70. Ibid., 42.397.
71. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 7.§116. Once again, Spinoza does not base his interpretation on the New Testament, but only on the Old Testament.
72. Ibid., 19.§235: “We cannot doubt, therefore, that in our day sacred matters remain under the sole jurisdiction of sovereigns. … No one has the right and power, without their authority or consent, to administer sacred matters or choose ministers, or decide and establish the foundations and doctrines of a church, nor may they [without that consent] give judgments about morality and observance of piety, or excommunicate or receive anyone into the church, or care for the poor.”
And 16.§§199–200: “[T]he supreme right of deciding about religion belongs to the sovereign power, whatever judgment he may make, since it falls to him alone to preserve the rights of the state and to protect them both by divine and by natural law. All men are obliged to obey his decrees and commands about religion, on the basis of the pledge given to him, who God commands to keep scrupulously.” This very thesis is repeated several times: cf. ibid., 19.§228. In these texts Spinoza’s “theocratic democracy,” based on a supposed “philosophical” interpretation of the Scriptures, is well demonstrated. It is difficult to deduce, as Laerke does in “Jus Circa Sacra,” 51, that “in opposition to Hobbes, Spinoza refuses to identify the State-controlled theology of the Church with true or ‘universal’ religion.” Hobbes had already made the distinction between the exterior cult and the interior cult that remains free.
73. In this same vein, see Brown, “Philosophy and Prophecy,” 209: “Democracy is the most perfect form of theocracy, the only true theocracy.” Alexis-Baker, in “Spinoza’s Political Theology,” 426–44, Alexis-Baker argues that Spinoza was convinced that democracy requires the unity of politics and religion. In “Démocratie du commun et religion civile,” 169, Tosel discusses the notion of civil religion in Spinoza; and in Philosophical Religions, 213–75, Fraenkel points out that even Spinoza, the most critical of religion of the three, did not resolve the tension between his philosophical reinterpretation of Christianity and his critique of religion.
74. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, 1.4.§25.
75. In “The Theology of Toleration,” Sherlock argues that the purpose of Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity was not to offer a rational basis for religion, but to reinterpret it in such a way as to make it safe for liberal regimes.
76. Nuovo, Christianity, Antiquity, and Enlightenment, 98: “Locke’s place in the Enlightenment must be represented in the light of his Christian commitments.” For Israel in Radical Enlightenment, 265, the main difference between Locke’s and Spinoza’s approaches is that Locke’s toleration revolves primarily around freedom of worship and theological discussion, while Spinoza’s toleration is essentially philosophical, republican, and explicitly anti-theological. As a result he does not consider Locke a “radical.”
77. Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, 99.
78. Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, 138–39.
79. Ibid., 148.
80. Locke, Two Tracts on Government, 120, 170. On the absolutism of the Two Tracts, see Abrams, “Locke as a Conservative,” 3–107.
81. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, 105–6.
82. Ibid., 115.
83. Hence it is reasonable that Sandoz speaks of “civil theologies” in “Civil Theology,” in discussing this kind of relationship between religion and politics, which he applies mainly to Locke. As I have argued, it is pertinent to extend this characterization to Hobbes and Spinoza, even with the nuances I have already noted.
84. Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes, 8.367–68.
85. On this connection, and the attempt to sacralize the state by theological-political arguments,
see Herrero, Political Discourse. Juridical transferences between the Church and the State for the same period have been studied by historians such as Kantorowicz and Prodi, who both follow Schmitt’s thesis in Politische Theologie.