Glory in the Mortal God: The Union of Transcendent & Bodily Interests in Hobbes

• In Event: Bodies and the Body Politic in Modern Political Thought

Abstract

Fear of death is the passion associated with the most popular
understanding of a 17th-century philosopher who sought to address the
religious conflict sundering English society at the time (Strauss 1963; McNeilly
1968; Gauthier 1969; Kavka 1986; Herbert 1994; Ahrensdorf 2000; Robin 2004).
However, recent literature has shown the centrality of the passion for glory in
Hobbes’s account, which often overrides the fear of death and leads to
war (Slomp 1998; 2000; 2007; Abizadeh 2011, 2020). Glory in Hobbes has been
identified as being of two kinds: an exultation of mind, rooted in confidence
that is considered glorying and vainglory that is based on an overinflated
sense of our worth, not based in reality, leading people towards higher
vengeance (Skinner 2018). This desire for revenge, based on an illusory
conception of power, is the chief seed of violent conflict and threatens the
stability of the Commonwealth.

Did Hobbes seek to satisfy this dangerous passion that led to violent
religious and ideological conflict between different sects during the English
Civil War, the context in which Hobbes wrote his political texts? If unsatisfied,
the threat of this passion resurging disturbs the stability of the
Commonwealth, with the possibility of civil war looming large. So far, the
scholarly response to this problem has suggested that Hobbes’s reasonable
Commonwealth was based on suppressing dangerous passions by persuasion
(Johnston 1986, Bejan 2010, Ryan 2023) or excision (Springborg 2018). By
contrast, in this paper, I contend that Hobbes sought to create a politics that
satisfies the desire for glory and vainglory in an exultation of belonging to and
being the author of the ‘King of the Proud’ (L: xxviii: 27). Hobbes fulfilled this
passion of people through the satisfaction of pride in being the subjects of the
most glorious person on earth, equivalent to a mortal God. So, although
Hobbes viewed vainglory with suspicion as it leads to conflict, I argue that his
materialist understanding of passions makes him more amenable to choosing
a political system that best fulfils the passions men are prone to, such that they
are compatible with reason, to ensure its stability. Through this, he sought to
harness the dangerous passions of humans driven by transcendent interests
and offer a way to harmonize them with bodily interests. My interpretation of
Hobbes builds on the seminal work of Llyod (1992, 2009), who showed that
contrary to the standard interpretation that focuses on the importance of selfpreservation,
Hobbes was concerned with the transcendent interests of human beings. One such transcendent interest was vainglory in thesuperiority of religious beliefs of the sect that people adhered to, which ultimately rested on the superiority of their version of God. I will argue that
Hobbes sought to satisfy this transcendent interest through a similar version
of vainglorious satisfaction in belonging to one mortal God and hoped to solve
violent religious conflict. Making scripture compatible with an allegiance to
the mortal God was Hobbes’s way of achieving the union of transcendence and
bodily interests, as he sought to dismantle a distinction between the two by
reducing both to matter.

So, when the people in the chest of the sovereign look up to their mortal
God with their hats on (Bejan, 2023), I argue that it is a sign that they are
fulfilling their vainglory by revelling in the fact that they authorized this
magnificent, and insurmountable mortal God. I support my argument by
analyzing the frontispiece building on the pioneering work of Skinner (2018)
and the debates on Hobbesian subjects as authors of the sovereign. The
subjects enjoy a sense of belonging to something so powerful as being the
matter of glory/pride. Thus, Hobbes attained peace and vainglory
simultaneously by combining temporal and spiritual authority into one (the
frontispiece is a colossal representation of the two joined as one). A state of
anxiety wrestled subjects over believing in religion or temporal authority.
Hobbes sought to tap this turmoil and the vacillation between a vainglorious
desire for affirmation of one’s religious beliefs and the desire for authority
that leads people to religion in the first place—to join their solution in one
absolutist mortal God.

Through this reading, I argue against the tradition of understanding
Hobbes in terms of early modern political thought that secularized political
theology by impressing the claim that secularization does not capture the
importance Hobbes attached to fulfilling transcendent interests as essential to
a stable secularized polity.

Lastly, I will emphasize the contemporary value of this reading as it
helps us see how Hobbes can aid us in explaining why some contemporary
democracies (hitherto rooted in secularism) are thriving in stability through
the valorization of a strong leader, especially if that leader could fulfil
religious aspirations through the authority of the state.

Author

• Vertika Vertika, McGill University