Defining Idolatry Down

In a 2006 article in Past & Present , Jonathan Sheehan examines controversies over idolatry in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Hobbes plays a crucial role in, as Sheehan thinks, radicalizing Calvin’s notion that the human mind is a “manufactory” of idolatry. Following Calvin’s lead, Calvinists “were not merely anxious about the effects of church images or stained glass, but about the very structures of human cognition and its ability to worship God. This was a key reason that the Jews became objects of so much interest: here were a people covenanted to Jehovah yet constitutionally unable to avoid idolatry. The Jews were given the rules for what George Lawson in 1659 called the ‘outward reverentiall acts’ but their inability to live up to these rules confirmed that only ‘the inward recognition of the Soul’ guaranteed genuine worship. If the sole criterion for an idolater was that he ‘dethroneth God in his imagination, and setteth up some other object in his place’, then virtually anyone was a suspect.”

Hobbes pushed this point until he obliterated any meaningful distinction between idolatry and true worship. In Sheehan’s summary of Hobbes:

“imagination [is] a ‘dream’ that prodded men into the ‘religion of the Gentiles’: it was the generall Religion of the Gentiles, to worship for Gods, those Apparences that remain in the Brain from the impression of externall Bodies upon the organs of their Senses, which are commonly called Ideas, Idols, Phantasmes, Conceits . . . And the worship of these with Divine Honour is that which in the Scripture is called Idolatry. Afflicted by the faculty of the imagination and thus subject to the ‘Phantasticall Inhabitants of the Brain’, human beings in ancient times set up their ideas as gods. And yet modern man is no less plagued by these fantasies, no less subject to everyday idolatry produced by the workings of the human brain. Idolatry is solely dependent on internally regulated worship, granted; but then the demons of paganism hover around all acts of devotion, no matter how sanitized of images.”

In short, the same dynamics that produced the crassest pagan idolatry were at work everywhere, and “Hobbes made no exception at all for the saints. If ‘there is no Idea, or conception of any thing we call Infinite’ and if God is infinite himself, than any idea or conception about God is, by definition, idolatry.” Thus, “correct worship — in Hobbes’s story — became an illusion, unattainable because of our own human nature.”

Many were troubled by the theory. Hobbes was not. On the contrary, for him “the disintegration of the orthopraxis ideal had happy consequences,” not least happy political consequences. He claimed that “worship is nothing more than ‘the sign of inward honour’ and a sign is only made honourable ‘by the consent of men’, that is, by the ‘lawful sovereign.’ ‘If it were commanded to worship God in an image, before those who account that honourable’, Hobbes insisted, ‘truly it is to be done.’”

Leviathan subsumes true worship. In Hobbes’s casuistry: “If a King compell a man to [false worship] by the terrour of Death, or other great corporall punishment, it is not Idolatry: For the Worship which the Soveraign commandeth to bee done unto himself by the terrour of his Laws, is not a sign that he that obeyeth him, does inwardly honour him as a God, but that he is desirous to save himselfe from death, or from a miserable life; and that which is not a sign of internall honour, is no Worship; and therefore no Idolatry.”

Another piece of evidence that issues concerning sacraments were not tangential but central to early modern political and cultural developments.