reality of these beings, and indeed Hobbes has often been characterized as an idealist about space and time, a subjectivist about the causal connection, and an atheist about God. But such characterizations are problematic insomuch as space, time, causality, and God all play important roles in Hobbes’s decidedly realist program in natural philosophy. We can better appreciate the subtlety of Hobbes’s metaphysics and science by tracing its Stoic pedigree.
The brief first part of this chapter identifies three main sources of the Stoic elements in Hobbes’s philosophy: the early Christian-Stoic Tertullian, the modern “Neo-Stoic” school of Justus Lipsius, and the natural philosophers of the Cavendish Circle he frequented. The longer second part explores in detail the Stoic character of Hobbesian space, time, causality, and God, especially as these notions are employed in his natural philosophy. We shall see that Hobbes’s metaphysical views, though quite unorthodox in his day, served to buttress his overall materialist, empiricist, and mechanist program in natural philosophy.
2.1 Stoic Sources
A scholar of classical Greek language and literature throughout his life, Hobbes made translations of Thucydides in his thirties and Homer in his eighties (EW VIII; EW X). He mentions the “Stoa” as a major school of Athens in Leviathan XLVI (2012, 1056; 1651, 521) and endorses various insights of Cicero in Leviathan V (2012, 68; 1651, 31)1 though he demurs from the Stoic thesis that all crimes are equal in Leviathan XXVII (2012, 466; 1651, 231). The famous Stoic doctrine of fate (heimarmene) is referenced in the Latin edition of Leviathan (Leviathan, Appendix I; 2012, 1152; OL III. 517). Of course, Stoicism was widely popular in the intellectual culture of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe (see Barker and Goldstein 1984; Brooke 2012; Lagrée 1994; Long 2003).2 So whence the particular influence on Hobbes’s natural philosophy?
2.1.1 Tertullian
Perhaps the most direct Stoical impact on Hobbes was the second/third century Church Father Tertullian. A Roman Christian-Stoic, Tertullian insisted, like Hobbes, on the philosophical and Scriptural truth of materialism about God and finite souls. He endorsed the “probable opinion of the Stoics,” which he explicitly adapted from Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, that the soul is a corporeal “breath” or “spirit” that permeates the body. This is Hobbes’s understanding of Scripture as well in Leviathan XLIV (2012, 612, 974; 1651, 303, 481). Like modern materialists, Tertullian argues that dualism makes soul–body interaction problematic since “there is nothing in common between things corporeal and things incorporeal.”3 Hobbes repeatedly invokes the authority of Tertullian in works that develop and defend the corporeal God doctrine (to be discussed later) in the 1660s. The first instance is the 1662 Considerations Upon the Reputation of Thomas Hobbes, a late volley in the long battle with Oxford mathematician John Wallis. Against the charge that his materialism is “atheism by consequence,” Hobbes quotes verbatim from Tertullian’s De carne Christi: “whatever is anything is a body of its kind. Nothing is incorporeal but that which has no being” (EW IV.429; Tertullian, De carne Christi xi; 1885, 531). Hobbes cites the same passage in two 1660’s works that announce the corporeal God doctrine – the Latin Leviathan and the Answer to Bramhall – as well as in the 1680 Historical Narration Concerning Heresy (2012, 1228; OL III.561; EW IV.307, 383; EW IV.398). Although De carne Christi is thoroughly materialist, it does not pronounce directly on the corporeity of God. However, in the Latin Leviathan’s affirmation of that doctrine, Hobbes cites an additional Tertullian text, against the heretic Praxeas: “every substance is a body of its own kind” (2012, 1228; OL III.561). Hobbes slightly misquotes Tertullian, but he clearly has in mind the following passage, which explicitly asserts the corporeity of God: “Who will deny that God is body (deum corpus esse) although God is a spirit?” (Ad Praxeas vii, 1885, 602).4 There are other texts Hobbes might have encountered in his careful reading of Tertullian that reflect even more closely his own formulation of corporeal theism.5
2.1.2 Neo-Stoicism
The “Neo-Stoical” school, founded by the sixteenth-century Flemish scholar Justus Lipsius, was immensely influential in Hobbes’s day. Lipsius’ many expositions of Stoic ethics and politics, especially De constantia (1584), were widely read and discussed.6 He also composed several more rigorous summaries of Stoic metaphysics and natural philosophy such as Physiologiae Stoicorum (1604). Hobbes himself must have read Lipsius from a relatively young age since he quotes approvingly Lipsius’ “true and proper commendation” from De doctrina civili (1604) in the biographical introduction to Hobbes’s 1629 translation of Thucydides (EW VIII.32). It is possible that Hobbes also read the Physiologiae, whose first book comprises a detailed discussion of God’s relation to the world according to Stoic doctrine. Like Hobbes, Lipsius rejects the pantheistic tendencies in Stoicism: “The Stoics say that God is the world itself, when strictly speaking he is its soul” (1604 I, 8, 16; see also 1604 II, 4, 78). And he also rejects the full corporeality of God (1604 I, 9, 20; see also 1604 II, 4, 75–8). Nevertheless, Lipsius’ thorough scholarship would have provided abundant classical material to inspire and ground a modern materialist theology like Hobbes’s.
Another Stoic doctrine discussed in detail in Lipsius’ De constantia, namely fate, emerges early in one of Hobbes’s most famous controversies, the protracted argument about liberty with Bishop Bramhall. Bramhall draws on distinctions made by Lipsius in his critique of Hobbes’s views as Stoic or hyper-Stoic.7 As usual, Hobbes protests that he has not derived his position “from the authority of any sect, but from the nature of things themselves” (EW IV.260–1; see also EW V.244–5). Bramhall’s final word in the dispute, his 1658 “Castigations” of Hobbes, went unanswered. But the Castigations were published together with Bramhall’s “Catching of Leviathan.” He there again disparagingly saddles Hobbes with the epithet “Stoic”: “If he had not been a professed Christian, but a plain Stoic …” (1842–1844, IV.426).
2.1.3 The Cavendish Circle
Finally, there was fertile Stoic soil in Hobbes’s closest intellectual community, the so-called Cavendish Circle, which comprised the prominent Cavendish brothers, William and Charles, Margaret (wife of William), Walter Charleton, Kenelm Digby, and others. Lipsius’ thought was a major inspiration for the Circle. But the philosophy of Margaret Cavendish is especially pertinent in relation to Hobbes. Although she was explicitly opposed to Hobbes’s mechanistic version of materialism, Cavendish’s own thought was distinctly Stoic in ways similar to Hobbes’s. In order to account for the immense diversity and activity in nature she found it necessary to demarcate self-moving “animate” from inert “inanimate” matter.8 Like Hobbes’s corporeal God, (as we will see below) her animate matter was thoroughly intermixed with inanimate matter and like Hobbes she tries to explain “how so fine, subtle and pure a part as the animate matter is can work upon so gross a part as the inanimate” (2001, 158).
She declined to deify animate matter, though she does say it is “a kind of God or Gods to the dull part of matter” (Cavendish 2001, xxi).9 Hobbes and Cavendish are at bottom kindred Stoic spirits, though their systems diverge on the precise nature of material activity.
2.2 Stoic Roots
2.2.1 Space and Body
Hobbes and the Stoics agree that space and time are infinitely divided and extended, that space has the same dimensions as body, and that time has the successive being of motion. But these structural features are accepted by many philosophers, ancient and modern. I would like to focus on two more controversial ontological questions in Hobbes’s philosophy of space and time: the reality of space independently of body and the reality of time independently of mind. The similar way that Hobbes and the Stoics struggled to meet these philosophical challenges is testimony to the affinity of their systems and Hobbes’s deep Stoic debt.
For Hobbes, our concept of pure space