PrinceMyshkin
09-13-2007, 08:11 PM
“Throughout the Middle Ages Christians argued over [the application of theology].The City of Man was set against the City of God, public citizenship against private piety, the divine right of kings against the right of resistance, church authority against radical antinomianism, canon law against mystical insight...[B]y the 16th century, thanks to Martin Luther and John Calvin, there was no unified Christiandom... just a variety of churches and sects...In the Wars of Religion that followed, doctrinal differences fuelled political ambitions and vice versa, in a deadly, vicious cycle that lasted a century and a half. Christians addled by apocalyptic dreams hunted and killed Christians with a maniacal fury they had once reserved for Muslims, Jews and heretics...
The English Philosopher Thomas Hobbes tried to find a way out of this labyrinth. Traditionally, political theology had interpreted a set of revealed divine commands and applied them to social life. In his great treatise, ‘Leviathan’(1651). Hobbes simply ignored the substance of those commands and talked instead about how and why human beings believed God revealed them. He did the most revolutionary thing a thinker can ever do - he changed the subject, from God and his commands to man and his beliefs. If we do that, Hobbes reasoned, we can begin to understand why religious convictions so often lead to political conflicts and then perhaps find a way to contain the potential for violence.
The contemporary crisis in Western Christiandom created an audience for Hobbes and his ideas. In the midst of religious war, his view that the human mind was too weak and beset by passions to have any reliable knowledge of the divine seemed common-sensical. It also made sense to assume that when man speaks about God he is really referring to his own experience, which is all he knows. And what most characterizes his experience? According to Hobbes, fear/ Man’s natural state is to be overwhelmed with anxiety, ‘his heart all day long gnawed by fear of death, poverty or other calamity.’ He ‘has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep.’ It is no wonder that human beings fashion idols to protect themselves from what they most fear, attributing divine powers even, as Hobbes wrote, to ‘men, women, a bird, a crocodile, a calf, a dog, a snake, an onion, a leek.’ ”
Mark Lilla, “The Politics of God,” The New York Times Magazine, 19/08/07
The English Philosopher Thomas Hobbes tried to find a way out of this labyrinth. Traditionally, political theology had interpreted a set of revealed divine commands and applied them to social life. In his great treatise, ‘Leviathan’(1651). Hobbes simply ignored the substance of those commands and talked instead about how and why human beings believed God revealed them. He did the most revolutionary thing a thinker can ever do - he changed the subject, from God and his commands to man and his beliefs. If we do that, Hobbes reasoned, we can begin to understand why religious convictions so often lead to political conflicts and then perhaps find a way to contain the potential for violence.
The contemporary crisis in Western Christiandom created an audience for Hobbes and his ideas. In the midst of religious war, his view that the human mind was too weak and beset by passions to have any reliable knowledge of the divine seemed common-sensical. It also made sense to assume that when man speaks about God he is really referring to his own experience, which is all he knows. And what most characterizes his experience? According to Hobbes, fear/ Man’s natural state is to be overwhelmed with anxiety, ‘his heart all day long gnawed by fear of death, poverty or other calamity.’ He ‘has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep.’ It is no wonder that human beings fashion idols to protect themselves from what they most fear, attributing divine powers even, as Hobbes wrote, to ‘men, women, a bird, a crocodile, a calf, a dog, a snake, an onion, a leek.’ ”
Mark Lilla, “The Politics of God,” The New York Times Magazine, 19/08/07