Previous
Chapter 38
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Leviathan, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Nature, War, and Civil Society
Power, Common-wealths, and Monarchies
Religion
Fear
Reason, Fact, and Philosophy
Summary
Analysis
In Holy Scripture, the word “Church” means many things. It is sometimes a temple, or “Gods House,” in which any number of Christians gather to publicly perform holy rituals. In Corinthians 14:34, it reads: “Let your women keep silence in the Churches.” But, Hobbes says, this, too, is most certainly a metaphor. The temple in this case is not a building but a way to distinguish between true Christians and those who worship false gods. Church is sometimes meant as “Christs house” as well, and the Greeks called it the “Lords house.”
Just as Heaven and Hell are not literal places, Hobbes extends to this same argument to churches in general. In Hobbes’s view, a church is not only a physical structure in which people worship God; it is a metaphor used to describe those people who truly believe in the power of God. Hobbes’s interpretation opens up the accepted definition of “church” to include people as well as structures.
Themes
A “Church” is citizens assembled, and when that assembly is ordered by law by some authority, it is a “Lawfull Church.” In some Holy Scripture, Christ is the “Head of the Church.” Yet in some Holy Scripture, a person is a church, like in Matthew 18:17: “Tell it to the Church, and if hee neglect to hear the Church, let him be to thee as a Gentile, or Publican.” Hobbes defines a church as people gathered under the Christian faith and “united in the person of one Soveraign [Sovereign]; at whose command they ought to assemble, and without whose authority they ought not to assemble.”
Here, Hobbes makes the distinction that a church can only be considered lawful if its assembly is ordered by some authority, like the sovereign power of a common-wealth. In a Christian church, God, Christ, or some appointed person like Moses, is believed to be the sovereign power of the church, but Hobbes points out that the church exists as part of a greater common-wealth that itself has an earthly sovereign power.
Themes
In all common-wealths, any assembly that is not authorized by the “Civil Soveraign [Sovereign]” is unlawful. Thus, any unauthorized church assembled within in a common-wealth is “unlawfull Assembly.” Furthermore, there does not exist on Earth any “universall Church” to which every Christian is bound by covenant, as there is no common power that all common-wealths are subject to. Every citizen of a common-wealth is subject to the Sovereign Power of that common-wealth only and cannot be held by any other master. “Temporall and Spirituall Government,” Hobbes argues, “make men see double, and mistake their Lawfull Soveraign.” Simply put, there can be “no other Government in this life” but the sovereign power of a common-wealth.
There are many different types of Christians (like Catholics and Protestants) and not one of them is bound to any one sovereign power by covenant, other than the covenant that exists within their respective common-wealths. In other words, every Christian cannot be made a subject of a central power—the Catholic Pope, for example—as each Christian has already accepted the civil sovereign of their common-wealth as supreme power. As the Laws of Nature maintain that the civil sovereign must be obeyed, people cannot be expected to follow the command of two sovereigns: one “Temporall,” or earthly, and the other “Spirituall,” or godly. Therefore, Hobbes argues one’s earthly sovereign must be obeyed over God or God’s representative.
Themes
